M2 — the window between a contract being placed and the monster finding its
target. Anyone can ward the victim (!mischief bless, €25, three max, +10% MaxHP
of temp HP each) or pay the tier delta to send something worse (!mischief
escalate, one step, boss is the ceiling). TwinBee DMs the victim on placement so
they can go and ask for wards.
Escalation money joins the payout basis, so piling on raises the purse the target
walks away with if they live — and an escalator is unsealed on a survival exactly
like the buyer. Cruelty and generosity are the same button.
Both commands are CAS-then-refund: the ward cap and the one-step limit live in
the UPDATE's WHERE clause, because a scramble is precisely when four people press
the button in the same second.
Also fixes a real bug this exposed: the delivery built its fight from the copy of
the contract the due-sweep handed it, but the window keeps writing to an open row
right up to the claim. A last-second escalation was paid for and then delivered
the old tier's monster. The claim is the fence; read on that side of it.
The 24h cooldown and the one-boss-a-week cap both keyed off any resolved
contract, and a fizzle resolves. So a target could have a friend point a
grunt at them, extract, and buy a day of immunity for the fizzle rake.
Both caps now only count contracts that were actually delivered.
Delivery also ran a full combat against the target's sheet without their
advUserLock. hasActiveCombatSession only sees the turn engine — the
target's own autopilot walk resolves its fights inline under that lock
and reports no session, so a delivery could race it and lose a fight's
worth of HP writes.
Also: don't tell a buyer a rival beat them when the insert simply failed.
Mischief Makers M1 — the core engine, Matrix-only. `!mischief send elite @user`
debits the buyer, tells the games room a hit is out, and an hour later a monster
from the target's own level bracket walks into whatever dungeon they're in.
Survive it and they keep a cut of the money and the buyer is named; don't, and
they wake up on a cart home.
The monster comes from the target's bracket zone pool, not the arena ladder and
not the dungeon they happen to be standing in — the same selection code the M0
pricing sweep ran through, so the fee table can't drift away from the fight it
priced.
Three things that are load-bearing and don't look it:
* Survival is read off the target's HP, not PlayerWon. The engine's timeout is
a retreat, not a lethal blow — somebody who ran out the clock with HP left
held the thing off, and a bought monster that merely outlasted them hasn't
earned a maiming.
* Nobody dies for money, and that includes the party. The delivery skips
closeOutZoneWin/Loss (the fight is extrinsic to the dungeon — crediting it
would let a buyer unlock the target's kill-gated resources for them), so
nothing else floors a downed seat. Without floorMischiefRoster on BOTH
outcomes, a member the leader outlived is left alive at 0 HP, which every
`HPCurrent <= 0` gate reads as broken rather than dead.
* One live contract per target is a partial UNIQUE INDEX, not a read-then-write
check. Placement holds only the *buyer's* lock, so two buyers racing at the
same victim would both pass an in-code test. The loser is refunded.
Payouts are a percentage of the base fee, never of what the buyer actually paid —
the sign surcharge is a pure sink. Capped at 75%, so a survival purse is always
strictly less than the outlay and collusion loses to !baltransfer, which is free.
That cap is the entire anti-collusion story; no danger multiplier needed.
A crash between claiming a contract and closing it out used to be unrecoverable
in the design: the row would strand, the target could never be targeted again,
and the buyer's money was gone. The stale sweep refunds those in full — that one
is our fault, not a bet they lost.
Contract timestamps bind as Go time.Time, never CURRENT_TIMESTAMP. The driver
stores RFC3339 and SQLite's own stamp is space-separated; the two compare
lexicographically wrong.
Pete learns four mischief_* event types in a separate commit, and has to deploy
BEFORE this does — an unknown event_type is a 400, which retries and then parks
the bulletin forever.
