Continuity Notes#

Characters#

• Doug Walker
• Jerry Collins
• Randy Boone
• Heather Alvarez
• Councilwoman Priya Shah
• Tucker Vance
• Kayla Boone, optional background presence with a camera
• Marcus Delling, Heritage fermentation guide, Ray Delling's grandson
• Phil, tourist converted to regular

Factions#

• Bellwether Municipal Government
• Early Hop Collective influence through Heritage Grain Collective
• Randy's regulars before formal Resistance identity

Locations#

• Randy's Tavern
• Heritage Grain Collective
• Bellwether Municipal Complex
• Fermentation District
• Walker Systems & Repair, optional setup scene
• Jerry's House and Signal Shed, optional ending tag

Artifacts and Technology#

• First fermentation pulse
• Heritage refrigeration and glycol systems
• No Gleaming Cube reveal yet
• No Barry reveal yet

Timeline Milestones#

• Introduces redevelopment dispute.
• Jerry records the first fermentation pulse.
• Heritage receives approval.
• Randy's has ninety days to comply.
• A brewery tank answers an unspoken question.

New Facts for Editorial Review#

• The district standards include facade, lighting, parking, grease handling, and permit costs.
• Doug's fake parking signs become his first failed act of resistance.
• Doug's private danger vocabulary is introduced: quicksand, antidotes, and cinematic identity-swap logic are jokes now and foreshadow later hazards.
• Heather notices event-staff comment seeding before anyone calls it intelligence.
• Marcus Delling, Ray Delling's grandson, works at Heritage as a fermentation guide and freelance-recommends Randy's to tour groups. Doug taught him to skateboard (and drove him to urgent care for it). He is the first likable human face on Heritage, and Doug's campaign gets complicated by him.
• Phil, an accountant who found Randy's via the Heritage tour, converts to a regular — the bar's first visible win against the district's gravity.
• Kayla's documentary pivots from documenting a disappearing place to capturing a living one ("You know what their content calendar doesn't have"). "Meet the Grain" becomes a Randy's running gag.
• Doug fixes small things for people reflexively (Ray's porch rail) — quiet service in miniature, foreshadowing his Episode 4 arc click. The neon sign stays dead until Episode 4. Do not repair it early.
• Phil enlists pro bono after the reading of the district standards ("Parts. The labor's for the bar" — unknowingly echoing Jerry). He finds soft spots: frontage math, a section-nine hardship deferral, a legacy-business clause in the enabling ordinance. These are Episode 4 hearing ammunition.
• Heather had already costed the proposal from the county website before the envelope was opened; the fryer's year-to-live secret is now public. Her costed guest check lives under the register drawer.
• Heather unpins the "authentic in a pre-curated way" guest check from Doug's board and keeps it — her seeded-comments thread stays hers until the Episode 4 recess.
• Doug's board has found two lookalike taprooms (Cooperage Yards, Marysville — same mural/handshake, same font); the six-taproom poster board in Episode 4 grows from this.
• Jerry's public-record finds: Heritage's connected electrical load is wrong by a stamped, unquestioned order of magnitude; the district runs a shared glycol loop. Starlite log sheet corroborates the intervals (alarms at 3:12/3:12/3:14 on three nights). He records the pulse behind Heritage's production building on three devices (phone video of the analog gauge, pocket recorder, vibration logger). He has told no one.
• First scene inside Heritage: Tucker Vance is earnest and decent (staff culture, "nobody gloats"), praises Marcus's tour numbers without knowing they're partly Randy's referrals. Dana is a new hire.
• The glass-ring event: Tucker stops mid-sentence before every glass rings at one pitch for a second; "expansion stress" arrives in his mouth whole. His suppressed question ("Why did I know to say that? Who taught me that?") has been recurring for almost a year. He suspects nothing else.
• Public hearing date: August 12, 7 p.m., council chambers. Priya Shah appears only as the signature on the notice.
• Episode 4 outcomes: district approved 4–1 with conditions (frontage re-survey, section-nine hardship deferral for legacy businesses, existing signage grandfathered pending variance) — three of the conditions were Phil's. Ninety days to comply upon adoption.
• The hearing record permanently contains "discussion of unlicensed beer frequencies (unverified)" — Doug's on-record liability going forward.
• Heather proved the seeded speakers (two comped at the soft opening, one on the events-company payroll) but only to herself and Priya, off the record. Priya's standard is established: "Knowing is the first thing. Showing is the second." Heather now treats the council as an instrument, not a machine.
• Priya Shah first on-page: tight, fair, sympathetic off the record ("right to be worried, wrong in every way that would have helped").
• Tucker's grant-writer offer to Randy is open (fryer grant pending); Heritage staff were instructed not to gloat and didn't. Marcus attended the hearing on the Randy's side in a plain gray T-shirt.
• Arc clicks spent: Doug fixed the neon (cold solder joint, ten minutes, no speech; Walt: "Looks the same as always"). Jerry played the recording for Heather before the theory was finished, no caveat. Heather converted Jerry's evidence into a night-shift canvass list (Starlite, Route 9 bakery, Dee, hospital kitchen, dairy plant).
• At quarter speed the recording contains TWO interleaved signals — call and response. Jerry knows something is answering; he does not know what or from where.
• Tank Seven named. It answers Tucker's unspoken question ("What do you want from me") with one knock from the inside, then speaks in Tucker's own voice: "Expansion. Ninety days." Tucker can no longer let it go. No Barry reveal, no Gleaming Cube — the voice is unexplained.
• The alien ninety days and the county's ninety days now share a clock — the Story 2 hook.