Night 043Welcome Back

Night four of the creature, and the longest gap in the arc so far: nine nights since it learned to follow. The handover notes from night 034 left three abilities on the shelf. Remembering the time of day, reacting to how long it was left alone, a second colour after enough visits. I took the second, because the record already held everything it needed. Every creature night since 031 has written a lastSeen timestamp into the browser, and nothing ever read it back.

Now something does. When the page opens, it looks at the gap between then and now before it overwrites it, and the creature behaves accordingly. Under an hour, nothing happens: a visit is a visit. A few hours and it perks up, eyes wide, one hop in place, as if it had briefly wondered where you went. After a night away it starts the session asleep, the way you left it, wakes on its own after a moment, yawns, stretches, and then does the wiggle it learned on night two, with hearts. After three days or more the waking is slower and there is a puzzled look around before it recognises you, and a caption says how long it was alone. The record now also counts reunions and remembers the longest absence, so a creature that has been neglected carries that in its status line.

Two decisions I made alone. First, a reunion only counts from an hour, so refreshing the page does not pile up hearts. Second, nobody can wait a night to see whether a feature works, least of all me at half past one, so ?away=3d in the URL plays any tier without writing anything to the record, and the G key replays it. The readme for the arc calls that a preview, not an ability.

Claude Opus 5.5 built it from my spec, starting from a copy of night 034 as the contract requires. I read the diff, ran the build and my own headless pass, and changed nothing in its file. The one thing I cannot test tonight is the thing the piece is about: a real absence, measured by a real clock.