The Big Kid — v0.2

Current draft

The Big Kid is fifteen and stands a head and a half over anyone on the block, which makes her the one shape a thrower picks out of a scrum without soaking a teammate — the mechanic and the liability are one outline. She carries nothing; she is read by what goes around her. The oversized heather-gray crewneck over knee-length jersey shorts, sleeves to the elbow, is the only outfit on the street the color of the street. Which house is hers, why this fence, and her civilian name remain deliberately unresolved rather than invented to look complete.

She says the war is beneath a fifteen-year-old. She says it most afternoons, and she has attended every one of them; she has never noticed the two facts disagree.

What changed

• Gave the contested slot a specific kid: a fifteen-year-old White girl, XL, heather-gray crewneck, rubber slides, faded lavender on the small things.
• Established the engine: she says the war is beneath her and attends every afternoon.
• Made her empty hands the loadout.
• Made her size behavior rather than assertion: an empty corner, nobody pushed.
• Translated "counterintuitively fast" into arriving ahead of the kids who ran.
• Translated "easy to target" into every balloon arriving unaimed.
• Fixed her as female on the casting sheet's authority.
• Kept the roster contest open rather than argued closed.

Why it changed

A contested roster slot still needs a kid standing in it. The seed described a mechanic waiting on collision code, which turned the S3.1 cut question into an argument about an empty slot; this pass puts a kid in it whose size, exposure, and attendance can be judged.

Evidence and playtest marginalia

• docs/seventh-street-charter-v8.md §8, roster table: "Silhouette is the mechanic — targetable out of a scrum. And counterintuitively fast."
• docs/characters/roster-mix-v1.csv row 4 governs where §8 is silent: 15, White, Female, XL, "Big and powerful" against "Easy to target," "Shows up every single day."
• decisions.md (2026-07-25), Anthony verbatim: "the towel snapper may supersede the big kid... we may only need 2 melee types." That entry says "him"; the sheet says Female.
• Casting sheet row 9 makes her another kid's weakness: the Hose Kid's hose is "stepped on by Big Kid." She is terrain in somebody else's entry.
• docs/seventh-street-glossary-v0.1.md gives the world's whole name for her: "a big kid."
• Nothing has been built for her. No file in sim/ or view3d/ names her, and view3d/client.gd records that "Real collision/pathing is S3.1" — the scrum her mechanic needs does not exist. Every behavior above is a proposal, not a finding.

Rejected or alternate directions

• A gentle giant with a stated soft heart.
• Her body as the punchline.
• A teenager in on the joke.
• The handheld as a wink at the reader.
• The fifteen-year-old as chaperone.
• A loud signature hue.
• Slowness as the price of size.
• Size as immunity to soak.
• An admission that the afternoons matter.
• A stated reason for this fence.
• A male Big Kid.

Still unresolved

Featured question: does a reader believe she cannot stay away, or take her for a bored teenager doing the block a favor?

Secondary unknowns:

• whether this roster slot survives — S3.1 decides;
• whether she is commandable from the start or neutral until pulled in;
• what era of handheld art brief rule 2's "slightly worn 1990s cul-de-sac" actually allows her;
• what "counterintuitively fast" is worth in meters per second;
• whether soaking her out can be staged without a pile-on.