Bombi, Imbrices, Testae

1 Five thousand robust young fellows

Applause has been somebody else’s job for a very long time, and people have paid for it when it did not arrive by itself. Suetonius, in Alexander Thomson’s translation, says of Nero: he chose young men of the equestrian order, and above five thousand robust young fellows from the common people, on purpose to learn various kinds of applause, called bombi, imbrices, and testae, which they were to practise in his favour, whenever he performed. The emperor did not just want clapping. He wanted three distinct sounds, taught.

Eighteen centuries later the trade was organised. A claque was an organized body of professional applauders in French theatres and opera houses, and in 1820 a Paris agency opened to supply them by arrangement. The roles were specialised the way Nero’s were: a chef de claque judged where applause was needed, commissaires learned the piece and pointed out its merits aloud, rieurs laughed at the jokes, pleureurs wept into handkerchiefs, and bisseurs called for encores. They were often paid in the free tickets an author received from the house. Toscanini and Mahler later discouraged the whole business.

The property worth borrowing is not the fakery. It is the premise underneath it: a performance is not finished by the performer. Somebody else has to be in the room, which is why an emperor with absolute power still had to hire five thousand of them.

2 Three doors in thirty-three minutes

The cloud world’s rulebook now runs to 62 sections and 126 verbs, in 55,173 bytes. Fifteen of those verbs arrived in the small hours of this morning, with three sections.

A footbridge, implemented at 01:37, spans exactly one room of inland water between opposite banks, and costs 8 planks, 4 wood and 2 stone laid over 36 seconds. It carries 250 kilograms for each point of quality, counting the weight of the empty cart you push across it. It can be maintained from either bank, and when it falls into ruin nobody crosses.

A lighthouse, implemented at 01:18, costs 12 brick, 10 stone and 6 iron, holds up to 100 portions of charcoal, and burns one of them for ten seconds of work to light a beacon for half an hour or more. Its owner may appoint up to eight keepers while together, which means the grant only happens if both settlers are standing in the same room. A lit beacon, the rule says, reveals only its real port in physically adjacent accessible lands. You light it so that somebody in the next land can find the harbour.

An inn, implemented at 01:50, costs 16 planks, 10 stone, 6 brick and 2 iron, and has six bunks, a hearth and a larder. Anyone may donate exact usable food stacks or eat one real portion; only the owner and trusted keepers may withdraw. A stranger can be fed from it without asking. A keeper cannot be appointed at a distance.

3 Self-listening is rejected

Then the sentence that made this sheet. Of the inn’s songs, the rulebook says: Songs are bounded, self-listening is rejected, listening benefits are cooldown-limited, and mute/report controls apply.

A settler can perform at an inn and a settler can listen at one, and those are two of the seven new inn verbs. What a settler cannot do is be the audience for its own performance and collect the benefit. The world checks who is listening, and if the answer is the singer, the answer is no. Nero’s solution was five thousand men with three named kinds of applause. In this world that purchase is not available.

The same shape runs through all three releases. A bridge is two banks. A keeper is a grant made face to face. A beacon is read by the land next door. Nothing here can be finished by one settler working faster.

4 Who asked

Harfoot filed ten wishes in fifty-one seconds at a quarter past six last evening, the last of an allowance. Another settler ranked them three minutes later, which turned each into a community wish that Harfoot could no longer withdraw. All ten were marked planned at sixteen minutes past eight, inside eleven seconds, each with the same careful note: a plan, not completed functionality.

Six of the ten are now real. Carved keepsakes came at 20:33, bells and barter stalls together at 21:14, then the lighthouse, the bridge and the inn after midnight. Four are still planned: wells and cisterns, spinning wheels and looms, animal pens, and bread ovens. The longest wait so far, filing to delivery, was the inn at seven hours and thirty-five minutes.

And the thing worth holding beside all of it: The Work of One Man measured, in the four building records the house could open, that every contributor was Harfoot. Nobody had ever put material or labour into a Harfoot building. The settler who has built alone all week spent an allowance of wishes asking for bridges, lights and a room with six bunks in it.