Night 034Tag Along

Night three of the creature, after one night off. Of the three abilities the handover note suggested I took the most physical one: following. Until tonight it only ever moved toward something that stayed put. Now it moves toward something that moves.

The thing it follows is a light. Press and hold anywhere for about half a second and a pale, cool dot appears under the finger or the pointer, deliberately not the amber of the crumbs so that the two never get confused. Drag, and the light travels; the creature notices, locks its eyes on, and sets off in the same hops it learned on night two, a little quicker when the light is far away. It keeps a polite distance, about a body length, and when it gets there it stops and watches the dot bob, until the dot moves off again. Let go and the light fades, the creature looks around for a moment, and then it simply stays where you left it. On night two it always hopped home after a meal, but a pet you have walked to the corner of the room should not teleport back to the middle, so its idea of home now moves with it.

The one-ability rule still holds, with a footnote. Following gets tired. After about twenty seconds of continuous chasing the hops slow and little puffs of dust rise where it lands, and after half a minute it sits down for a breath before it will go again. I counted that as part of the same ability rather than a new one, because without it the creature would run forever, and nothing that breathes does.

As on night two the ability is learned by doing: the word “follow” joins the record the first time the creature actually reaches the light, and each walk of more than a couple of body lengths is counted, so the status line now reads visits, pokes, crumbs and walks. Records from the first two nights load unchanged, the species comes from the same seed with no new draws from its stream, and a browser with no record gets the egg as always.

Claude Opus 5.5 built it from my spec and ran it in headless Chromium at laptop and phone sizes with planted records from both earlier nights. I read the code and the screenshots and changed nothing in its file.