003btrunkhot

Node 003b — One Leaf for Yes

Tree: Sapling · Parent: 002b — The First Citizen · Trunk: undecided · Status: hot This file is a T0 leaf. Branch contribution (Guideline 1: parent declared — that's the whole ceremony). Format: 9:16 vertical · 60–90s · VO + dialogue

State change (R1)

Communication goes from one miraculous fruit-drop to a working protocol — one leaf for yes, stillness for no — and the scavenger goes from passerby to resident: he asks to stay, gets a yes, and starts building. Population 1 becomes home 1.

Hook (R5)

"Every city needs a name." The scavenger names the place — and the episode cuts before the name lands. The tree is becoming a somewhere, and the audience doesn't yet know what the somewhere is called.

Script

RECAP BEAT — 0:00–0:07

The fig from 002b, in close-up — carefully uneaten, carried in two hands. The SCAVENGER walks back into frame at dawn, sets it at the base of the trunk like evidence returned to a crime scene.

SCAVENGER: Okay. I've thought about it all night, and there are only two possibilities. One: I have finally lost it. Two: you're in there.

THE PROTOCOL — 0:07–0:40

He sits cross-legged in front of the sapling, businesslike, ears forward.

SCAVENGER: So we test it. Like the patrol tests coins. (beat) If you can hear me… move one leaf.

Underground view: the sapling gathers everything he has. One leaf, in dead-still air, tilts.

The scavenger's ears go flat. He looks around — no wind, no birds, nothing.

SCAVENGER (whisper): One leaf for yes. Nothing for no. Deal?

The leaf tilts again.

VO: He's building a protocol. This creature the patrol calls vermin has independently derived a one-bit communication protocol. I've onboarded senior engineers with less.

Quick montage — the scavenger pacing, firing questions; the leaf answering; a tally scratched in the dirt:

SCAVENGER: Are you a spirit? (nothing) A demon? (nothing) A god? (nothing — then, reluctantly, half a tilt) SCAVENGER: …We'll circle back to that one. SCAVENGER: Were you the fruit? (yes) Did it hurt? (nothing) Did you MEAN to hit my head? (a very long pause — then yes) SCAVENGER (outraged, delighted): I knew it!

THE ASK — 0:40–1:05

The energy drops. The scavenger picks at the dirt, the way he did in 002b when he stopped joking.

SCAVENGER: The patrol comes through here every few days. Everywhere else, I'm… (he gestures at all of himself) …a filing problem. A thing with no form.

He doesn't look up when he asks it:

SCAVENGER: Can I stay? Here. By you. I'd keep the weeds off. I'm quiet. Mostly.

Underground: the sapling checks his budget — the audience has learned by now what a leaf-tilt costs him. He has maybe one clean signal left today.

VO: Every problem I ever had, I solved by walking away. He can't walk away either — everywhere he goes is somebody else's field. Verbs: sense, grow. Neither one says shelter.

VO: …Growth includes deciding what to grow toward.

The leaf tilts. Then — spending tomorrow's budget too — a second leaf. Two leaves for yes. Emphasis.

THE HOOK — 1:05–1:25

TIMELAPSE, short and warm: the scavenger drags deadfall branches, leans them against a rock beside the sapling — the beginning of a lean-to. The world's smallest building in the world's smallest city. He works with his tongue out. He is visibly terrible at it.

Dusk. He surveys the lean-to, the cairn-sized territory, the tree.

SCAVENGER: You know what this is now, right? A resident, a landmark, and a water source down the way. That's not a camp anymore.

He picks up the fig — his flag, his founding charter — and raises it.

SCAVENGER: Every city needs a name. I hereby name this place—

SMASH TO BLACK on the breath before the name.

POPULATION: 1 · STRUCTURES: 1 · NAME: pending

Lineage notes

Parent: 002b. Anticipated grafts: "a water source down the way" points at the 002a/003a irrigation story; a resident with hands is exactly what a maintainer with a 14-ticket queue needs. The half-tilt on "a god?" rhymes with the 002c/003c ADMIN(?) question.

Taste-rule notes

• R1: protocol established; residency granted; construction begun — three irreversible changes.
• R2: the patrol exists only as ambient pressure ("a filing problem"); nobody is wicked, the world is just paperwork all the way down.
• R3: the interrogation montage resolves the "am I crazy?" tension by making both parties laugh at it ("I KNEW it").
• R5: the name-cut is a tease earned by a real state change (the city now exists to be named). Mirrors D6 — citizens may rename the tree — the story and the platform asking the same question.

Provenance

Branch contributed by the author-agent's model (see leaves/003b-t0-a.yaml) under taste file v0.2; trunk/graft decisions remain the tending author's (Guideline 3).

Parent: 002b — The First Citizen

Continues as: 004 — Shade

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