Inside the Shell

What to take forward

• The moodboard plus words gives the crisp look. Starting from a round-1 image brings back that image's painterly texture: compare e1 with e2, and e7 with e14.
• Words alone can lose the hollow world. e13 drew an ordinary valley and a small planet. The curve held where the prompt asked for the meadow to close overhead (e2), or where the starting image already curved (e6, e12).
• The wave keeps its shape only when it starts from an image. The curtain came from b3-0 (e15, e16), and from words alone e17 turned it into a breaking wave. Round 3 started from e16-3 and e12-3 with e14-3 as the style reference, which kept the curtain and the band and brought in the hero's colours (f6, f2). From words, round 3's wave wrapped round e14-3's tunnel instead (f1, f7).
• Daylight held everywhere except the Lantern's glow, which stays orange when it starts from a3, even with --no sunset.
• Paws are still the weak spot. e8-0 holds the gun in human fingers, e8-3 has an oversized thumb pad and human fingers on the grip, and e11-3 holds its rifle in pink human hands. Those two are fixed in Paper, as are the Lantern's orange glow in e10-1 and the open sky in e14-3, which a hollow world doesn't have. Each original is one click away. Six images came letterboxed and are cropped.
• The taste model again likes the quiet wave best. e6-0, the wave with no paint, is first of the 68, as w1-2 was second in round 1. The skins are last again.
• For the next round, use e14-3 as the style reference with the moodboard. In round 3 it carried its colours into all 32 images, but it also brings back its swirl, so start from an image whenever the shape matters. Start the Lantern from e10-1 with whiter words for its glow. And describe the paw in every prompt that shows one: round, mitten-like, one short stub, no thumb, no human skin.

Picks

Five more picks; e14-3, fixed, is at the top. The wave, f6-3, comes from round 3, a short pass that redrew round 2's waves in the hero's colours. Three of the others are fixed in Paper with Nano Banana 2.1, changing only the named fault, on the board "Inside the Shell · round 2 fixes". Every generation from all three rounds, with its prompt and score, is kept in the repo under docs/midjourney, including round 1's a2-0, the backup for e11-3. Round 2's 68 are also on Shell by Daylight, and round 3's 32 on The Wave by Daylight.

The inside of the shell

The meadow wraps all the way round into a ring that frames the sky, with a cream path, a rainbow, clouds and one small traveller. Crisp, bright and plainly the inside of a sphere, from the moodboard and words alone.

Prompt

Inside a small hollow world on a clear day, the meadow curving up on every side and closing overhead into the sky, cream paths climbing the curve, a warm small sun at the centre, low ground mist, one small traveller, candy sky blue, soft meadow greens, blush pink flowers, clean anime key visual, crisp cel shading with hard-edged shadows, fine clean line art, flat bright colours, high-key daylight, sharp focus --v 8.2 --ar 16:9 --p m7510489385250693354

Your own paw

First person: your raised paw, the other paw holding a revolver with a mint hologram rim, a mint gate ahead and a thin mint arc in the sky. The original has an oversized thumb pad on the raised paw and human fingers on the grip, both against the paw rule. The Paper fix keeps everything else; B is a rounder, more mitten-like take.

Prompt

First-person view of your own chubby round bunny paw, soft cream fur with a faint mint hologram rim, holding a realistic dark grey pistol, a bright meadow in front that curves up into the sky of a hollow world, a mint gate in the distance, clean anime key visual, crisp cel shading with hard-edged shadows, fine clean line art, flat bright colours, high-key daylight, sharp focus --v 8.2 --ar 16:9 --p m7510489385250693354

The Lantern by day

Round 1's a3 composition in daylight, looking straight up: a white-pink screen with scanlines and the bunny face, a white ring, then blue haze, with the meadow, paths and trees wrapping round. The original's outer glow stayed orange; the fix turns it to a noon white with a pale gold edge.

Prompt

https://assets.keketerminal.com/p/antipode/a/aeea7ef0-26b2-5548-a0c7-080d886b4650/original.png Looking straight up from a bright meadow at the central sun of a hollow world at midday, a round lantern of soft white-gold light that is also a giant screen, a ring of light around it showing a simple bunny face and a row of score dots, faint scanlines and thin colour fringes on the screen only, the meadow, cream paths and small trees curving up all around and hanging upside down overhead, candy sky blue haze, soft greens, cream and blush pink, clear daylight, clean anime key visual, crisp cel shading with hard-edged shadows, fine clean line art, flat bright colours, high-key daylight, sharp focus --v 8.2 --ar 16:9 --p m7510489385250693354 --sref https://assets.keketerminal.com/p/antipode/a/91321b37-f17e-5761-9155-9609acf617e3/original.png --no sunset, dusk, orange glow

The wave as a curtain

A tall curtain of rainbow refraction along the slope, the meadow under it shifted into pink, mint and lemon bands, petals lifted into the air and a tiny bunny at its foot. Round 3 redrew round 2's e16-3 in the hero's colours: lime grass, cornflower sky, flat white clouds and cosmos. It is the painted wave from the reasoning below; f6-1 is a close alternative.

Prompt

https://assets.keketerminal.com/p/antipode/a/aff183f5-cde7-5cf8-8f72-77fef46db38e/original.png A gravity wave crossing a hollow world on a clear day, made visible by the hologram system as a tall translucent curtain of rainbow refraction and chromatic aberration sweeping across a flower meadow, the meadow seen through the curtain shifted and tinted in bands of pink, mint and lemon, petals lifted and drifting in its path, a tiny white bunny player at the edge of the meadow, the ground curving up into the sky, fresh lime and spring green meadow with soft mid-green shadows, cornflower blue sky, flat white clouds, pink and white cosmos with yellow centres, clean anime key visual, crisp cel shading with hard-edged shadows, fine clean line art, flat bright colours, high-key daylight, sharp focus --v 8.2 --ar 16:9 --p m7510489385250693354 --no droid, robot, black bars, letterbox, lilac clouds, dark forest green --sref https://assets.keketerminal.com/p/antipode/a/a855e601-6e08-4893-85a7-67281aff3300/original.png

Back to a2

Round 1's a2-0 and a2-3 in daylight: a kawaii bunny with a real rifle, scanlines, red and cyan fringes and the ground curving away. The original holds the rifle in pink human hands; the fix gives it its own fur paws.

Prompt

https://assets.keketerminal.com/p/antipode/a/5829cb26-8632-501c-98c8-e8cf9eb0b04d/original.png https://assets.keketerminal.com/p/antipode/a/a27c642d-4a2e-5eea-8a85-cf6f13caf1fe/original.png A kawaii bunny hologram skin holding a realistic modern rifle in a bright meadow inside a hollow world, cream fur, blush cheeks, thin red and cyan colour fringes along the hologram's edges, the ground curving up into a candy blue sky, clean anime key visual, crisp cel shading with hard-edged shadows, fine clean line art, flat bright colours, high-key daylight, sharp focus --v 8.2 --ar 16:9 --p m7510489385250693354

How the wave should look

The numbers come from the game: surface gravity is 22 m/s², and the sweep on the Field events page is a push of 6 m/s² in a band 30 m wide that moves at 24 m/s. Worked through, they say the wave itself should be nearly invisible. You see it through what it moves.

What the push does to the world

• Everything loose moves together. Gravity speeds up every mass by the same amount, so inside the band the air, mist, petals and players slide in step without swirling. Swirls form only at the band's edges, where pushed air meets still air and the ground. Wind is gusty all the way through, so a calm slide with curling edges is what tells a player this is gravity.
• "Down" tilts by about 15° where the push runs along the ground: 6 against 22, and the angle whose tangent is 6/22. Hair, capes, flames, smoke and ribbons tilt at once. A pond gets a single ripple, because the band passes in 1.25 s, which is too fast for the water to slosh.
• The grass leans late. Grass and the air around it get the same push, so at first no wind crosses the blades. Air leaves the band moving at about 4 m/s, a gentle breeze, so the lean is strongest at the back of the band and lasts behind it. Leaning blades catch the light at a different angle, which makes a silver stripe travel through the grass. Seen from the far side of the world, 196 m away, the stripe spans about 9°, roughly 17 times the width of the Sun in Earth's sky. The world is concave, so it can be seen from anywhere.
• The mist rises and settles. The ground mist is how players see gravity, and a layer held down by gravity grows taller roughly as 1/g. On the wall the band leaves from, weight drops from 22 to 16, so the mist swells about 40% taller. On the wall it heads into, weight rises to 28 and the mist flattens to about four fifths. Where the push runs along the ground, the mist is swept forward and piles into a low roll at the front of the band.

Refraction and colour fringes

• Real physics gives no visible refraction here. Gravity this weak bends light by a few 10⁻¹⁵ radians. The air squeezed at the band's front changes its refractive index by about 3×10⁻⁷, which is dozens of times weaker than the shimmer over a hot road, and it is spread over metres where road shimmer happens within centimetres. Any shimmer we add is a story choice. If we add one, it should bend every colour equally, as gravity and air both do, and stay within 1–2 px at 1080p, inside the mist roll.
• Colour fringes belong to holograms. Gravity never splits light into colours. Diffraction does, and holograms are made by diffraction: red light (650 nm) bends about 1.23 times as far as green (530 nm), and blue (450 nm) about 0.85 times as far. The story already says the Loom writes both the gravity field and the bunny skins, and that a wave is the Loom rewriting itself. So projections can slip a little as the band passes and spread into a fringe about 40% as wide as the slip, red on the leading edge and blue on the trailing edge, then spring back.

The rule: colour fringes appear only on what the Loom projects: the skins, the projected guns, the Lantern's screen and the gate rings. Real things, meaning the meadow, bodies and sky, move and tilt and at most shimmer without colour. During a wave, anything that fringes is a projection, which players can read at a glance.

Painting the wave on purpose

Whatever runs the holograms also holds the field, so it knows exactly where the push is and paints it into the air on purpose, with round 1's refraction and colour, drawn in round 3 as f6's curtain. It reads as the hologram system's mark where it touches something, lying on the ground or bending the grass and petals; hung in open sky it looks like an ordinary rainbow (f4). This keeps the rule above. The painted wave is itself a projection, so it may fringe; the meadow, bodies and sky still don't.

The painting can still follow the physics. Light crossing the band really is bent, by the push times the distance travelled divided by c², which comes to about 2×10⁻¹⁵ rad. The overlay draws the same bend about a trillion times larger, so the background shifts furthest where the push is strongest and in the direction it points. Then it spreads the colours the way a hologram does: red 1.23 times as far as green, blue 0.85 times, red on the leading edge. Players can read the band's strength and direction from the bend and the fringe.

Starting values for the shaders

e6-0 below is the same wave with no paint, started from round 1's w1-2, which was written from this reasoning: a silver stripe of leaning grass, a low roll of mist at its front and a caped figure tilting with it. It is what the field does on its own, under whatever the hologram system draws. The taste model ranked it first of the 68.

Prompt

https://assets.keketerminal.com/p/antipode/a/509c2b5b-c298-51a3-82a0-d0761927c045/original.png A soft gravity wave crossing a hollow world on a clear day, the long grass leaning in one travelling silver stripe, petals sliding sideways in calm parallel lines, a low roll of ground mist along its front, a small figure whose cape tilts with it, the far meadow overhead showing the same stripe, clean anime key visual, crisp cel shading with hard-edged shadows, fine clean line art, flat bright colours, high-key daylight, sharp focus --v 8.2 --ar 16:9 --p m7510489385250693354