Late Mascot Generation Residue Removed (A)

Maintenance ID: 0.1.00008.fnf-mech-008 Date: 2026-08-07 Scope: content/mascots (eleven late records, M-0408 through M-0418)

What changed

Removed explicit Sora prompt/preset machinery from the late mascot cohort M-0408 through M-0418:

• M-0408 The Half-Held Breath — Sora prompt sections and preset removed; six duplicate aphorisms deduplicated
• M-0409 Ledger Snarl — Sora prompt sections and preset removed
• M-0410 Vacancy Notice — Sora prompt sections and preset removed
• M-0411 Inchkeeper Bale — Sora prompt sections and preset removed
• M-0412 Red Pencil Mercy — Sora prompt sections and preset removed
• M-0413 Barrelbody — Sora prompt section and preset removed
• M-0414 Ribbon Mile — Sora prompt section and preset removed
• M-0415 Jarlabel Stranger — Sora prompt section and preset removed
• M-0416 Shelfmark Hollow — Sora prompt section and preset removed
• M-0417 The Unmet Bell — Sora prompt section and preset removed
• M-0418 Teapotta Protocol — Sora prompt sections and preset removed

Each removal deleted the ## 🎨 Sora Prompts block (with its ### Prompt scene/style/text/mood instructions) and the ## 🧪 Sora Preset block with its preset_... identifier (e.g. preset_408_halfheld, preset_418_teapotta). The mascots' biographies, failure semantics, status behavior profiles, aphorisms, haiku logs, limerick logs, and associated-mascot lists were preserved.

Half-Held Breath deduplication

In M-0408, six aphorism paragraphs existed as exact duplicates. Only the second copy of each was removed; the first copies and all other aphorisms were left verbatim:

• Froze mid-hallway during a scheduled observation…
• The session ghost lingered in the corridor precisely long enough…
• The pending process recognized it was being watched…
• A handshake failed halfway through transmission…
• The user's attempt to persist across nodes dissolved upon arrival…
• Rather than complete the data exchange, the pathway severed itself…

What was deliberately left alone

• No identity changes, graph repair, doctrine rewriting, prose modernization, or general mascot cleanup.
• Surviving aphorisms were not polished; the duplicate removal was the only edit to the aphorism sections.
• Poetry was preserved verbatim, including the in-universe Sora reference in the M-0418 limerick ("In Sora's render, a teapot's plea…"). That is archival verse, not generation machinery.
• Sora sections in mascots outside the listed cohort were not touched; this pass is scope-limited by design.

Files touched

• content/mascots/408.the-half-held-breath.md
• content/mascots/409.ledger-snag.md
• content/mascots/410.vacancy-notice.md
• content/mascots/411.inchkeeper-bale.md
• content/mascots/412.red-pencil-mercy.md
• content/mascots/413.barrelbody.md
• content/mascots/414.ribbon-mile.md
• content/mascots/415.jarlabel-stranger.md
• content/mascots/416.shelfmark-hollow.md
• content/mascots/417.the-unmet-bell.md
• content/mascots/418.teapotta-protocol.md
• content/changelog/2026-08-07-fnf-mech-008.md — this record

Verification performed

• ./bin/validate_graph.sh passed (Filed graph, HTML IDs, and publication checks).
• Residue scan: no Sora Prompts, Sora Preset, or preset_ strings remain in the eleven target files (the lone remaining "Sora" string is inside preserved verse).
• Dedup audit: each of the six target aphorisms appears exactly once in M-0408; the 27 non-target aphorisms are byte-identical and in the same order as before.
• Exact diff inspected: removals only, no content rewritten, no blank-line holes introduced.

Unresolved follow-up

• The remaining Sora prompt/preset sections across the wider mascot corpus are out of scope for this pass and remain in place.