Affect

Pinakes can carry a character’s affect, meaning what state they are in, as coordinates in VAD space: valence (pleasant to unpleasant), arousal (activated to lethargic) and dominance (in control to helpless). Each runs from −100 to 100 in records, since Lexicon has integers and no floats.

Affect is declared, never inferred. It lives in its own affect: field. A chapter or stretch without one gets no coordinates, and a label Pinakes cannot resolve is reported, never scored as neutral.

Affect is not a register

A voice register (public, private, under-pressure) says who the character is talking to and how guarded they are. It describes their speech. Affect says what state they are in. A character can be in a public register and furious.

The two used to share a field: the first version of this engine gave registers fixed coordinates and read affect out of the register annotation’s parenthetical. On Supper Club Secrets Book 1, every stretch got its register’s numbers rather than the character’s, most chapter events were scored from labels nothing recognised, and pinakes context told the drafter to write a character in performative chaos as “measured, steady, and deliberative”. So registers have no coordinates, the parenthetical in registers: stays a note, and affect is written where it can be checked.

Declaring affect

In a chapter: a shift

registers:
  Noah: "under-pressure (asks the right questions, then lashes out)"
affect:
  Noah: "curious → angry"              # labels: he enters curious and ends angry
  Jasper: { v: -40, a: -30, d: -50 }   # or a shift from wherever he was

Keys resolve like registers: keys. Each entry compiles to one character.affect.event.

• A label transition is an endpoint. The character ends the chapter in its last step, whatever they entered with. The first step is your claim about how they entered, which the continuity check tests. The event records both (from, to) and delta, the last minus the first.
• Numbers are a shift, added to whatever state the character was in.

A longer transition (a → b → c) keeps the first and last and records the middle in stimulus. A chapter records a change, so a single label is affect-malformed.

In a stretch: a state

---
character: Emma
asOf: "2026-10-02"
register: private
affect: subdued            # or { v: -20, a: -30, d: -30 }
---

A stretch that declares affect: compiles with coordinates and, when they fall in a basin, an attractorBasin and behavioralDirectives. Without affect: it has none of them. A stretch is authored deliberately, so an unresolved label there is an error (stretch-affect-unresolved).

Affect in a stretch follows the stretch rules: character knowledge only, and never a state that names something the character cannot know yet.

The vocabulary belongs to the universe

Pinakes ships a small core of labels: alarmed, quietly alarmed, panic, paralyzed, guarded, curious, warm, elated, defiant, deflating, exhausted, stoic, skeptical, animated, conflicted, softening. pinakes.yaml adds to it or overrides it, with integers in [−100, 100]:

affect:
  labels:
    angry:    { v: -60, a: 60, d: 40 }
    relieved: { v: 40, a: -50, d: 10, aliases: [relief] }

Matching is exact after lower-casing and collapsing whitespace, and nothing looser: not warm does not resolve to warm. An alias that collides with another label or alias is a config error, because the label would otherwise resolve to whichever entry was read last.

Attractor basins

A coordinate may fall in a basin, a named region with drafting tendencies. The built-in five are tried in this order (values on the −1 to 1 scale):

Basin	Region
hyper-vigilant	a > 0.35 and v < -0.15
depressive-exhaustion	a < -0.25, v < -0.25 and d < -0.15
manic-fixation	a > 0.45, d > 0.25 and |v| > 0.20
dissociative-numb	a < -0.45, |v| <= 0.25 and d < -0.20
grounded-stoic	|a| <= 0.35 and v >= -0.15

A coordinate none of them claims has no basin, and the record carries no basin and no directives. grounded-stoic is a band, not a leftover: high arousal with positive valence is not measured and steady.

A universe can phrase the built-in basins’ tendencies in its own voice-guide terms, and add basins for regions the built-ins leave. An added basin needs inclusive integer bounds (when, any of v, a, d) and directives, and is tried after the built-ins, in the order listed:

affect:
  basins:
    grounded-stoic:
      directives: ["Says less than they know."]
    buoyant:
      when: { v: [20, 100], a: [36, 100] }
      directives: ["Talks fast and laughs at their own jokes."]

In pinakes context

When the latest approved stretch on or before --as-of declared its affect and landed in a basin, the bundle includes:

## Affect state (advisory — the voice guide and register win on any conflict)

[INTERNAL_AFFECT_STATE]
DIMENSIONS: Valence=-0.20 | Arousal=-0.30 | Dominance=-0.30
ATTRACTOR: ...
SUGGESTED_TENDENCIES:
  - ...
[/INTERNAL_AFFECT_STATE]

Without dynamics it is the mid-tier stretch’s declared affect, so it looks only backward. For every other stretch the block is absent. To keep it out of drafting altogether:

context:
  affect: off     # default: auto

Between declarations: dynamics

Declarations are sparse: a stretch every few weeks, and a chapter only where something moves. Dynamics carry a character’s state between them, so the bundle can answer “how is he a week after the shock?”

They are off until a universe chooses a rate. There is no default, because a rate nobody chose would be a number that looks like data:

affect:
  dynamics:
    halfLifeDays: 4        # required: turns dynamics on
    discontinuity: 60      # optional: turns on the continuity check

Each character’s temperament goes in their codex frontmatter:

codex/characters/noah.md

affectBaseline: { v: 0, a: 10, d: 20 }   # or a label; the state they relax toward
affectHalfLifeScale: 2                   # optional: holds a grudge twice as long

affectHalfLifeScale multiplies the universe’s half-life, so retuning the universe moves everyone and keeps their differences. A value that is not a positive number, or a baseline that is not one resolvable label or triple, is affect-malformed, and that character is not replayed at all. These fields are checked even with dynamics off, so a bad value fails when it is written.

How the state is computed

For a character on a date:

1. Start from their latest approved stretch on or before the date that declares affect:. If there is none, there is no state. Pinakes never gives a character a state nobody declared.
2. Replay their affect events that ended after that stretch’s asOf and on or before the date, in order. An event ending on the stretch’s own date is already in it, since a stretch looks back over its day. A chapter still running on the date has not happened yet.
3. Between events, the state relaxes toward the baseline: x = b + (x₀ − b) · 0.5^(days / halfLife), counting whole days from each chapter’s last date. With no affectBaseline, nothing decays: the state holds, and the block says not decaying: no baseline.
4. Classify the result into a basin, as for a stretch.

A new stretch re-anchors the replay: the author wins. The baseline itself never drifts; to say a character’s temperament has changed, change affectBaseline.

With dynamics on, the context block shows its working:

[INTERNAL_AFFECT_STATE]
DIMENSIONS: Valence=-0.36 | Arousal=0.36 | Dominance=0.28
ATTRACTOR: hyper-vigilant
ANCHOR: stretch.jasper.book1.2026-10-02
EVENT: affect.event.jasper.book1.ch14 (ended 2026-10-05, 3 days before)
DECAY: half-life 4 days toward baseline
SUGGESTED_TENDENCIES:
  - ...
[/INTERNAL_AFFECT_STATE]

The state is computed when asked for, never compiled into records: it changes whenever a chapter or the rate is edited, and record ids are permanent. The library returns it from affectStateAt(universe, character, asOf).

The continuity check

With discontinuity set, lint checks your declarations against each other:

• Entering a chapter. A transition’s first step is compared with the state the replay has the character in going into it.
• At a stretch. A stretch’s declared affect is compared with the state replayed from the stretch before it.

Where the two are further apart than discontinuity (straight-line distance in the −100 to 100 units), affect-discontinuity warns. It is never an error: the jump may be meant, and off-page events happen. The stretch still re-anchors either way; the warning only asks the question.