Wheelchair Catapult — v0.2

Current draft

He is twelve, large for his age, built like a kid who pushes everywhere. He built the rig and painted it as one machine: acid-lime powder coat on frame, push-rims, and throw arm, four honey-amber loops of surgical tubing driving that arm, brass on every bolt head and pin. His clothes are plain and take no color. Where the tubing came from, and which house on the block is his, stay deliberately unresolved rather than invented to look complete.

The chair is equipment with a top speed and a surface it fails on. He is fast on the sidewalk and hopeless on the lawn, and treats both as facts about the terrain rather than about himself. Stuck in the mud is the best problem of his afternoon.

What changed

• Grew the v0.1 seed into a twelve-year-old White builder whose delight is sincere.
• Established the one-machine palette: acid lime, amber tubing, and brass he installed himself.
• Made the launch call, "WEEEE," his signature, timed to the release rather than the landing, and spoken with no awareness it is funny.
• Staged the mud as a problem he works out loud.
• Put the block beside him: someone stands clear, a six-year-old takes the pin.
• Kept v0.1's five rig states.
• Recorded the Slingshot Crew merge: the amber tubing is theirs, and neither concept is selected.
• Raised v0.1's gate wording as a discrepancy and recorded its lift.

Why it changed

A stowed-and-ready state list explains a silhouette but not the kid grinning behind it. This revision gives the seed a specific builder whose color, hardware, reload, and terrain agree, and keeps the chair as ordinary equipment rather than tragedy or superpower.

Evidence and playtest marginalia

• artbook/content/roster.yml added him 2026-07-26; docs/seventh-street-charter-v8.md §8 lists thirteen combatants without him, so no §8 entry is invented.
• docs/characters/roster-mix-v1.csv row 11, binding: "Dwarven Morters," "Can't move and fire at the same time. Long re-load," "Robotics genius, pure glee." Row 5 repeats the analog and weakness word for word — the merge, cited from the other side in artbook/content/revisions/slingshot-crew/v0.3.md.
• §8's Little Brother row, "Picks up, carries, throws any object," is the hand on the pin; row 12 makes him six, and his own dossier now records the pin in his hand.
• artbook/content/revisions/wheelchair-catapult/v0.1.md, carried forward verbatim: "The wheelchair expresses ordinary tactical affordances and constraints. It is not tragedy, cure narrative, joke, or superpower."
• Nothing has been built for this kid: no simulation code, no TUNING.md entry, no playtest, no art. Every claim above is a proposal, not a finding, which is why provenfinding is null.

Rejected or alternate directions

• An inspirational-overcomer reading.
• The chair as the punchline.
• An adult builder for the rig.
• A quieter version of the same kid with no launch call.
• The launch call as a catchphrase other kids repeat back.
• A spotter or loader who serves the arm for him.
• An ammo count or reload chore for the player.
• The mud as a beat that asks for pity.
• The Slingshot Crew as a defeated predecessor.

Still unresolved

Featured question: is his delight in his own engineering plain enough that sympathy never gets a word in?

Secondary unknowns:

• his civilian name;
• "Compensated formative review with at least two people with relevant wheelchair experience where practical." — lifted by Anthony on 2026-07-28 after one consultation, with the compensation and second-reviewer gaps recorded in docs/characters/artbook-roster-loop-open-rulings-v1.md §1;
• whether unaided recall centers the kid and the artillery rather than disability;
• whether the heavy-artillery role is his or the Slingshot Crew's.