The scout with three arms
written 2026-10-08The Sylvan Court are the second faction to get an army made for them. The generator drew a scout with a third arm that no front view shows, and a siege engine that rolls sideways. Both were caught by checks that refused to read the shape, not by anyone looking.
The Sylvan Court are the grown faction: bark for armor, leaves for cloth, branches for crowns. Their scout, warden, bough ancient and hero are new standing figures, their hawk is new and flies, and their siege engine is new and has no skeleton at all. Their stagrider was built in an earlier chapter.
Across the army, 6 models were ordered and 8 were generated, because 2 came back wrong in ways this chapter is about. Whether anyone can tell this army from the others is still a question for the owner, with all eight factions in front of him. It has not been asked.
Anything set like 0.0665 was measured by a machine and generated into this page from the committed results. Everything else was written by a person.
The arm in the back
The first scout looked right. The picture the generator drew of him shows a lean figure in a three-pronged hood, arms out, a quiver on his back, and so did the model, from the front, and from a three-quarter angle. From the side there was a long thin limb with a bracer and a hand, sticking straight out of his shoulder and behind him: 397 points of the model lie out in it, reaching 44 percent of his height past his legs.
Nothing the generator is asked to check could see it. Every check looks at the model from in front, or measures a box around it, or counts its parts, and a limb pointing at the camera is invisible to all of them. The picture it drew first had two arms. The third existed only in the step that turns a picture into a solid.
The refusal
It was caught by the step that fits a model to a skeleton, which started by refusing him. To turn a figure to face the right way that step finds the line his arms lie along, and it requires the upper body to be clearly longer along that line than it is deep. His was 1.2 times longer than it was deep, where a figure standing with its arms out is several times, and the step stopped with a message saying the cast was not in the pose.
The message was wrong about the pose and right about the figure. The easy repair was to measure the arms some other way, and one was written: find the two hands, take the line between them. It would have fitted him at once, and the third arm would have been given a skeleton and animated.
It was thrown away. A second check, much later and by accident, read one of the arms a fifth of the figure's height away from its bone on the forced fit, which is the same fact seen a different way. The refusal had been correct, and the stricter rule it protects is the only reason a limb nobody could see was found before anyone watched it walk. He was cast again with one added sentence, exactly two arms and two legs.
A catapult that would not point
The siege engine is the one unit without a skeleton: a grown cart, a living fork for a frame, a bough for an arm and a basket woven from root. Its first cast was a tree on two wheels with its basket and its thorny weight hanging in the air, attached to nothing, and an arm that swung out to the side. It was nearly as wide as it was long, only 1.2 times as long as wide, and the test for which way an engine faces cannot answer for a shape like that. It was cast again as a long, low cart.
The second was a good cart, a bed of logs on four wheels with a bough lying along it and a broom of thorns at one end, and it came back long the other way: 1.8 times longer from side to side than from front to back, with the thorns at the end that should have been behind it. The board draws every unit turned to face where it is going, and for an engine the rule is that it is long front to back with the heavy end behind.
A unit that is bound to a skeleton has the step that fits it, and that step fixes its facing. A prop has no such step, so it got one declared quarter turn, 90 degrees, written beside the job with the measurement that asked for it, applied once and baked in. After it the engine is 1.8 times longer in the direction it travels, with its heavy end behind: 3553 points in the heavy tenth of it against 696 in the light one.
The fourth upright bird
The hawk is the second flyer, and the generator drew it upright with its wings raised, as it has drawn all 4 winged creatures it has ever been asked for. This time nothing had to be learned: the step that bends the skeleton to the model and carries the model into the skeleton's own pose fitted it the first time. It reads as a hawk, leaning into its flight with its legs trailing, a crest of antlers on its head.
It is not clean. Counting each vertex for whichever bone pulls hardest, 0 of its 8985 vertices belong to a tail bone: the fan of tail feathers is attached to the legs, and swings with them. That is shipped as it is. The test that checks each limb's vertices sit on its bone is held slightly looser for a flyer than for a standing figure, and a second test turns the hawk a quarter turn and requires that check to fail.