The five calls, and the real dreams

Order of play

Four of the five calls are settled. The one left blocks a single episode. The v4 no-cost window closes around 13 October.

Settled 1 · Cara’s Eircode

The script gives Cara the 999 game but never the words, so the drama writes in a fictional Eircode. It appears twice, in Episode 8 (segment 029, the game) and Episode 9A (segment 055, the call), and it must not be a real address.

The first draft used Y35 F2K7. You checked it on 2 October and it resolved to a real house in Clonard Great, Wexford, so it is gone. The scripts, the series sheet and the repo now carry Y35 XK2P, which was searched on finder.eircode.ie the same day and returned “No search results have been found.” The routing key stays Y35, so the geography is still Wexford.

Settled 2 · The announcer

The plan’s cast had no continuity announcer, but the comic has a title strip on every ident, a divider after Chapter Eight, and a plain line where 10B’s card should be. Somebody has to say those words: fifteen short lines across the series, never more than ten words each.

Your call, 2 October: a separate v4 voice, Irish, neutral; a proper continuity voice, the kind that used to sit between programmes, distinct from Larry so the ident sounds like the station and not like him. Three library voices read the Episode 1 title strip on Eleven v4 (Darren, John, Brendan) and you picked Darren: calm, grounded, middle-aged, cinematic warmth without performance.

Blocks Episode 13 3 · The sign-off voice

Episode 13 is your page: the afterword, word for word, and then one drawn page with one line. It is written for you to read, with Ed as the fallback the plan named. No series sound touches it: no test tone, no ghost double, no music. A plain room and a plain voice.

How to decide

1. Read Episode 13 aloud once, on your own, start to finish. It is about two and a half minutes.
2. If you got through it, it is yours. If a line stopped you, that is useful too: tell me which, and we talk about whether Ed reads it or you read it later.

If you read it yourself

• Your own room, its own air. Do not try to match the drama’s spaces; the point is that this page is not inside the drama.
• A quiet hour, the phone on a book thirty centimetres away or any microphone you have. Read it twice through without stopping; we take the better one. No retakes of single sentences; the joins are audible and the page is meant to be whole.
• Send the file as recorded. The production session will do the rest.

Settled 4 · Scenes without Larry

The script stays close to Larry, and the book’s rule is that he narrates. The one scene he is absent from, Eily finding the notebook in Chapter Three, is done as sound only: her steps, the pages, and her whispering his block capitals, which are the page’s own lettering. He narrates nothing he does not know.

Your approval of Episode 3 settled this, and the later episodes already follow it (Cara’s phone calls in 9A, for instance, are heard from the yard, not narrated). Nothing to do. If you want a different rule, say so before 9A records, because that is the next place it matters.

Settled 5 · Release order against the comic

Two comic chapters are drawn. Thirteen audio episodes are written and will be recorded inside a fortnight. The treatment’s buffer rule, three instalments banked before Chapter One drops, was written for the comic.

Your call, 2 October: audio first. The drama goes out as its own edition, chapter by chapter, ahead of the comic; the comic follows at its own pace as the illustrated edition. The audio does one thing the comic cannot, the signal literally arriving early, and a finished recording does not sit in a drawer while the afterword’s “still true” gets older.

The real dreams, and the stand-ins

Six places in the script were marked by you in July as inventions waiting for the real thing. Each sits in a single segment of a single episode, so swapping one is a one-segment edit and a short re-record. Nothing else moves. You do not need to write them in script shape; a few plain sentences are enough, and I do the rest.

The Ballagh trailer light (Episode 4, segment 038)

This is the one that matters most, because it is the book’s thesis in miniature: the once the gift changed anything, it changed you, not the thing. It stands in for a memory that is Helen’s, not yours: the day you were about to be annoyed at something small and laughed instead, because the dream of that exact minute flooded back. Ask her. What was the small thing, where were you, and what did you say afterwards. Four details are plenty.

The four Static tiles (Episode 5, segments 006 to 028)

Chalk snapping; a yellow lorry; two pints on a sill; a wet rope. Each is a dream fragment of a few words, then the banal moment it cashed, stamped with year and place. If you have four of your own small ones, however trivial, they are better than mine; trivial is the point. If you have two, we swap two.

The strimmer and the horseshoe gate (Episode 5, segments 033 to 049)

The one time young Larry tried to walk to a dream and made a fool of himself. If you ever acted early on a fragment, that story replaces it whole. If you never did, the strimmer stays; it is doing its job.

Mr Nolan the wasp (Episode 7, segment 020)

Cara’s breakfast dream. Any real child’s dream from the family, reported in the child’s own words, is worth more than an invented one. One sentence.

Ned and his log splitter (Episode 3, segments 041 to 052)

Rehearsal one. It only needs swapping if a real neighbour’s sprung black thing once made you flinch; otherwise Ned stays. The crush gate and the loft ladder are not flagged and stay as they are.

The scrapyard (Episode 10B, segments 021 to 030)

Channel B only, and you are living in Channel B. If the real box ever goes anywhere, that is the scene. Until then the scrapyard is the honest guess.

The shape I need, per memory

Cara’s word, “trailers”, is not on this list and stays.

How to send it

• The remaining call: one line in the session is enough (“I’ll read the sign-off”, or “Ed”). I mark the series sheet and the episode files, and commit.
• A real dream: paste the five-line shape above, or just tell it to me plainly and I will fit it. I edit the single segment, run the word-for-word and dash checks, and commit it as “Episode N: real substitute for …” so the swap is visible in the history.
• If a swap arrives after the v4 window closes, it still goes in; the re-record is one segment at the ordinary rate.

Everything else is in the repo: episodes/00-series.md for status and the recording order, and the conventions at the top of episodes/01-test-card.md.