# Comedy Doctor — Chapter 20: No Advice / Keys Here — ROUND 8 (final current-text verification)

Register audited: warm, precise, lightly comic; never sitcom, never banter-for-banter (READING_GUIDE §2). Target-reader calibration: O'Leary warmth, Henry at ~60% banter density, Morisaki/Coffee quiet — a reader who wants small routines to carry feeling and is bored by workshopped wit. Chapter-card demands (CHAPTER CARD - 20): comedy must arise from June's arithmetic self-defense, Ruth/Sam's care-without-advice, Asha's load-in directness, Nia's professional briskness; Ruth one sharp line max; no inspirational refusal; prose dials "June plain, less jokey, precise about money and materials"; the humor must not soften the Tasker loss.

Scope note: this round audits the current text after Plain Translation round 2 verified its three orders executed verbatim (line 13 chiasmus killed; line 87 Asha sample-line varied to "The room's ugly. At $340 you'll forgive it."; line 129 June column-cap replaced with "I know. I want the wall anyway...") and Dialogue Doctor round 13 returned CLEAN. Four round-7 inventory items no longer exist in the form scored there: old item 2 (the stepping-back chiasmus — flattened by order), old item 6 (the "look provisional" scarf read — absent from the current text entirely; line 23 now carries plain description, "orange scarf bright in the stairwell," which attempts nothing and installs nothing), old item 25 (replaced), old item 30 (rebuilt — June's half of the column figure is gone). The inventory below is rebuilt from scratch against the current text; the two surviving repair-site comic lines and the column exchange are prime suspects, not pre-cleared repairs. Two light attempts the round-7 inventory did not log (the not-sent email coinage at line 95; June's "nobody got loud" at line 133) are logged now — an unlogged attempt is an inventory failure regardless of whether it lands.

INVENTORY:

1 — "Twenty-six hours, give or take the walk from the sink to the table." (line 3) — mechanism: mock-precision (deadline tolerance measured in footsteps) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: sets the noon clock and June's arithmetic-as-coping in one stroke; frame varied at item 41 — workshopped: no.

2 — "She had kept stepping back from paintings all fall as if the problem were viewing distance." (line 13, repair site) — mechanism: rueful mock-diagnosis (a decision problem misfiled as an optics problem) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: names her avoidance pattern in her own trade term and plants the payoff cashed physically at lines 157–159 — the step back "the distance she'd have at Dana's," the step in, "The corner stayed." — workshopped: no. (Repair site, interrogated hardest for under-commitment: the round-7 chiasmus — "...when the problem was in the drawing" — is dead per the executed Plain Translation order, and what remains is the quietest item in this inventory. It still lands for this target reader: the "as if" frame is a self-aimed joke in June's card register (jokes at her own expense; visual/craft nouns instead of feeling words), and its commitment is the plant, not the sentence's own cadence. "Viewing distance" is antecedent-bound; no balanced halves survive; no new quotable was installed. Scored 2 on the Morisaki-quiet calibration; a generic-workshop calibration would score it 1, which is exactly the miscalibration this audit is barred from making.)

3 — "She'd done it four times and it came out the same every time: the left page won." (line 13) — mechanism: deadpan contest-frame (a two-page spread scored like a match) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: certifies the offer's goodness in June's own arithmetic, which the refusal must later cost — workshopped: no.

4 — "Mara wants her dish back before Luis refills it." (line 17) — mechanism: implied escalation (the Valdez care-conveyor pre-empted) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: motivates the visit; pays the Ch18 blue-dish tether as a practical object per the standing order — workshopped: no.

5 — "door sticks, push don't pull." (line 19) — mechanism: understatement (assent rendered as mechanical instruction) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: June admits the cohort to her apartment for the first time in the book, in the only register she can afford — workshopped: no. (Door-joke count: instruction about a literal door; the chapter's one door joke is item 19.)

6 — "We're double-parked," Ruth said. "Two minutes." / "Two minutes is right," June said. (lines 25–27) — mechanism: mutual-boundary deadpan — source: character+situation — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: both parties want the care bounded; the visit's terms are the chapter thesis in miniature — workshopped: no.

7 — "There's coffee. There hasn't been milk since Sunday." (line 27) — mechanism: hospitality with deficit disclosure — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: the fridge documents the rupture week without a feeling named (dish since Tuesday, milk since Sunday, decision due noon Friday) — workshopped: no.

8 — "What's the freight?" (line 29, with the corner-test) — mechanism: trade-register deadpan (a domestic errand priced as shipping) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: opens June's routing beat on Sam's terms — contents, weight, destination — so nobody has to ask how she is — workshopped: no. (Portability re-checked on the current text: the words port, the function doesn't — the question is asked of a box of Odile's catalogs June cannot carry back herself, and its answer is item 9.)

9 — "Catalogs. Eight. They belong at the studio. They're Odile's. … If Theo is there, could you leave them at Sonia's with a note for Mara? If he isn't, inside the door is fine." (line 31) — mechanism: over-specification as self-defense (contingency routing for one box) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: Theo-avoidance rendered entirely as logistics; the cardboard edge pressing "a line into her thumb" keeps the cost in frame — workshopped: no.

10 — "We know how to deliver a box," Ruth said. (line 33) — mechanism: flat correction — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: punctures the over-instruction without touching the feeling underneath it — care without advice as a speech act — workshopped: no.

11 — "The box is the errand. The dish is separate." → "Actually, no. Tell Mara I'm bringing the dish myself Tuesday. Tell her I'll sit where she tells me." (line 35) — mechanism: over-categorization deflated by live reversal, capped by pre-emptive surrender to Mara's seating authority — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: June's control taxonomy fails in the right direction on the page; commits her to cohort re-entry before the job decision exists — workshopped: no.

12 — "She'll like that better than the dish," Sam said. (line 37) — mechanism: warm deflation — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: names what the visit was actually for without giving advice — workshopped: no.

13 — Sam "picked the box up properly this time, knees," carried it to the door, and "moved the chair that was blocking the door's swing six inches to the left." (line 37) — mechanism: physical repetition-with-variation, one-word method note — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: Sam's owned care move (making physical room) enacted, not stated — workshopped: no. (Ch16 chair-count family check: action, not a count-shaped joke.)

14 — "You can leave that part out," Ruth said. "We came for the dish." (line 45) — mechanism: scope-limiting mercy — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: releases June from explaining Tuesday; privacy honored as jurisdiction; keeps Ruth's confession (excluded, below) from turning therapeutic — workshopped: no.

15 — "I'm not asking for an opinion. I want to be clear that I'm not asking." / "We have a car," Ruth said. (lines 47–49) — mechanism: non-answer as answer (opinion refused, inventory supplied) — source: character+situation — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: the chapter card's engine in two lines — the ban on advice honored to the letter and answered in transport — workshopped: no.

16 — "If the answer involves moving anything heavier than this, you have our number. That's not an opinion. That's a hand truck." (line 51) — mechanism: literalization (advice converted into equipment), punchline-timed — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: the offer is valid for either city, so it steers nothing; care lands as labor while the decision stays June's — workshopped: no. (Re-interrogated as the chapter's most workshop-shaped line: it carries the "not X. That's Y" template and topper timing on Ruth's straight line. Survives on the same current-text grounds round 7 proved: the joke's entire content is a refusal to say anything wiser, it is speakable in one breath by a person holding a box, its partner line is aggressively unquotable ("We have a car."), and June denies it a rimshot with "Noted." Template count still 2 with Asha's half-instance at line 71; rest ordered forward, not against this text.)

17 — "Noted," June said. "Both of you--thank you. For the box." (line 53) — mechanism: scope-limited thanks with a fumbled object-tag — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: June accepts care while refusing to be caught needing it — her card contradiction on the page; "For the box." misfiles the gratitude on purpose — workshopped: no. ("Noted" count: 1 of the licensed 2.)

18 — "the box of catalogs left June's apartment a quarter before eleven on Thursday." (line 55) — mechanism: mock-precision clock notation — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: closes the visit inside the chapter's visible-clock discipline; the Theo-adjacent freight exits without June touching the studio — workshopped: no. (Arithmetic: arrival 10:40 at line 23, exit ~10:45; computes.)

19 — "Talk fast, I'm holding a door with my whole body." (line 63) — mechanism: hyperbole grounded literal — source: situation+character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: prices Asha's attention and sets the call's economy — June's two asks must fit a closing gate — workshopped: no. (The chapter's one door joke; item 5 is instruction, Sam's hip-opened door at line 55 is action.)

20 — "Say the studio clause again." … "Who writes that?" Asha said. "Nia Torres, apparently. I've seen her hang at the co-op. She'll eyeball a run and put a level on it anyway. She's serious." (lines 67–71) — mechanism: priority-reveal + self-answered question + trade specificity — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: of nine terms, Asha asks back for the clause June wants most — an independent installer certifies exactly what June is about to refuse; plants the level item 40 varies — workshopped: no. ("go get your clause": absent; this earned interrogative is where it would have gone.)

21 — "and the radiator is decorative." (line 83) — mechanism: deadpan trade-fact (heat priced as décor) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: prices the chosen path honestly mid-pitch and arms the reserved contrast with Tasker's "radiators that worked" (line 9) — the two-line ledger of what June gives up — workshopped: no. (Contrast pair verified at two; the three heat facts at lines 83, 99, and 125 stay distinct transactions.)

22 — "Wear the coat inside until February." (line 83) — mechanism: cost restated as apparel policy — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: keeps the New York path priced inside a rent-and-dates list; plants FEB = coat (item 39) — workshopped: no. (Coat cap: this and line 155 are the licensed pair; Ruth's buttoned coat at line 23 is a garment, not an instance.)

23 — "Take the crating if you get it. It's indoors." (line 87) — mechanism: two-word deflation (the job's best feature is shelter) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: sets December's floor at survival level; sharpens what refusing Tasker's benefits actually buys — workshopped: no.

24 — "The room's ugly. At $340 you'll forgive it." (line 87, repair site) — mechanism: forgiveness quoted at a rate (invoice-brain price-judgment, second-person prediction) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: the room June chooses is sold to her at its true value by the person who found it; no one romanticizes the $340, and line 151 ("worse than described") pays the prediction — workshopped: no. (Repair site and this round's first named check. The old sample-line issue is not revived: the card string "Not pretty. Cheap enough to forgive." and its "X enough to Y" aphorism cut are absent chapter-wide, verified; the forgiving agent moved from the room's price to the tenant, and the forgiveness now carries a stated rate — Asha's card mechanism ("money/time specifics; no mystique") rather than a composed cut. Portability hunted: "ugly but cheap" is every city's apartment joke; this rendering is bound to the $340 the chapter's ledger prices three other times (lines 11, 99, 125) and to a specific room shown by photo before the chapter ends — non-portable in function. Delivery still amputates landing room: spoken after her name is shouted off-phone, with the hang-up two lines later. "Ugly" checked for June-bleed since it sits on June's word list: shared working-painter bluntness; the syntax — rate-anchored second person — is Asha's, and June's version of the same content would run optical, not fiscal. Source stays character, hers.)

25 — "and Asha hung up before the word was finished." (line 89) — mechanism: timing undercut — source: situation — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: the favor closes as business; Asha's shift does not pause for June's gratitude — the consent boundary made structural — workshopped: no.

26 — "the email she'd been not-sending to Nia for nine days" (line 95) — mechanism: verbed negation (procrastination as a sustained activity, with a duration) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: nine days of the Tasker want maintained and refused in one participle; the deletion that follows ("The To field was still empty. She deleted it.") is the chapter's first no, performed before the phone call says it — workshopped: no. (Not logged by round 7; logged now.)

27 — "All right," Nia said. "Walk me through it. I ran the math with you three weeks ago. It wasn't close." (line 107) — mechanism: understatement, agonistic deadpan (the math on record) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: refuses to accept the no on politeness terms; forces June past arithmetic to the Vandercook — workshopped: no.

28 — "They'd call the key number. It would be my phone." (line 117) — mechanism: dark deadpan literalization (the offer's best clause restated as her phone ringing) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: the refusal's actual mechanism made concrete inside the confession; the clause is real and the trap is real at once — workshopped: no. (Sweetness check ran hardest here again: the two flat sentences are the confession, not anesthetic for it.)

29 — "February is a blank line in my notebook." (line 125) — mechanism: deadpan self-pricing (the counter's worst line stated in notation) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: June makes her own counter honestly worse; no inspirational refusal — workshopped: no.

30 — "That's a worse offer," Nia said. "That's a worse offer on every line I have a column for." (line 127, rebuilt post-repair) — mechanism: deadpan verdict escalated by enumeration, same-speaker doubling — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: Nia stays right on the record — the no-strawman obligation — while losing a hire she is right about; the loss is priced at its largest exactly here — workshopped: no. (This round's second named check, structural half. The round-7 item was a two-speaker completed figure; June's capping half — "The line it wins on doesn't fit in a column. Ten feet, north window." — is dead chapter-wide, verified: neither the string nor the doesn't-fit-in-a-column shape survives. The column metaphor now opens and closes in one mouth and is answered by object business (the receipt turned print-side up, "the Marchetti header, the faded total") and a plain want, not a counter-metaphor. What survives is a single shaped construction on Nia's side of an otherwise bare-spined call ("But.", "Okay. Tell me the counter."), inside her payroll diction; the duet-polish risk rounds 6–7 tracked is structurally gone, not merely defended.)

31 — "If the program ever needs freelance install, I itemize and I'm fast." (line 129) — mechanism: dry professional self-summary — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: keeps the professional door open without pleading; hands Nia the diction item 34 pays — workshopped: no. (Adjacent to the repair; unchanged in function; the new sentences ahead of it are non-comic — see the exclusions.)

32 — "Noted," Nia said. "You know what I'm going to ask next." (line 131) — mechanism: repetition-with-variation across speakers (June's word handed back in Nia's register) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: the mirrored "Noted" rhymes the two refusals — June's of advice, Nia's of persuasion — and pivots to the referral — workshopped: no. ("Noted" count: 2 of 2; spent, third banned.)

33 — "I watched her keep six installers moving while the freight elevator was stuck and nobody got loud." (line 133) — mechanism: understatement-in-praise (a crisis certified by the absence of volume) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: June's card care move — precise, unsentimental praise — doing the reference's work with evidence instead of adjectives; sets up Nia's paperwork corroboration (item 34) — workshopped: no. (Not logged by round 7; logged now.)

34 — "I know her invoices," Nia said. "She itemizes. That's already more than most references." (line 135) — mechanism: professional metonymy (character vouched by paperwork) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: the reference lands in the book's material idiom; Asha becomes plausible on evidence, not on June's guilt — workshopped: no.

35 — "It's 10:52," Nia said. "Have her email before one. I have payroll at eleven." (line 139) — mechanism: bathetic close, scale juxtaposition (June's crossroads vs. the program's Tuesday payroll) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: anti-sentimental exit seconds after "come see it"; the timestamp is cashed as fact at line 147 ("Said no at 10:52") — workshopped: no. (Spoken-timestamp move single-use; verified no second anywhere in the chapter.)

36 — "a thumbs up, and eleven seconds later, *ok now the boring parts.*" (line 147) — mechanism: deflation pivot with mock-precise timing — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: swings the chapter from verdict to execution; refuses congratulation — workshopped: no. (Idiom spent per tracker; retire or vary in future Asha texts.)

37 — "The front room was worse than described: bare bulb, paint-scabbed floor, the north window putting flat gray light across ten feet of empty wall. June looked at the light longest." (line 151) — mechanism: listing-convention reversal + priority reveal — source: situation — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: de-romanticizes the chosen path in the same beat that confirms it; pays item 24's prediction; the want re-sharpens on the one thing a painter needs — workshopped: no. ("listing of my dreams": absent; this inversion is where the quip would have gone.)

38 — "She had no printer. Paragraph 14 allowed email; she checked. In the email body she typed January 31 twice, once in the sentence and once in the subject line." (line 153) — mechanism: bureaucratic deadpan, belt-and-suspenders diligence — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: material precarity and proper leaving in three flat sentences; the doubled date is the person who ran the math four times — workshopped: no.

39 — "She filled the blank in the notebook: FEB = coat." (line 155; setup "FEB = ." at lines 11 and 91) — mechanism: blank-equation payoff, repetition-with-variation — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: the chapter-long unfilled equation answered with endurance instead of money; the cost stays visible inside the joke, and it lands only after the no is spent — workshopped: no. (Paid and spent; any later coat mention must be a literal garment.)

40 — "one nail, level enough." (line 161) — mechanism: self-directed deflation; one varied callback to Asha's level line (item 20) — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: the professional installer permits herself imprecision where the work is finally hers — workshopped: no. (Level family closed: plant plus one variation.)

41 — "Twenty-nine days until Dana's key. Thirty-one days until Kessler's armory load-in." (line 161) — mechanism: paired mock-precision countdown, frame variation on item 1's twenty-six hours — source: character — funniness: 2 — portable: no — dramatic work: converts the decision into schedule; every counted day runs toward an unheated room and net-45 money, so the counts price the choice rather than celebrate it — workshopped: no. (Epigram risk re-checked on the current text: both counts are verifiable arithmetic off dates the chapter itself establishes (Dec 4 → Jan 2, Jan 4), and the cadence close is refused — the back-of-hand crating note, the washed cup, and the study left visible follow, so the last beat is logistics, not a stamp.)

Considered and excluded (not attempted comedy, each with its ground): **"I know. I want the wall anyway. It isn't about the program." (line 129, repair site — this round's second named check, register half)** — direct-register seriousness, not attempted comedy: a concession-opener, a want stated plainly (§2's protected register; the June card's "I don't know what to do with wanting it" finally resolved into wanting it out loud), and a factual disclaimer with a named referent. No comic mechanism is present or needed; counting it would misprice the chapter's one unguarded want in dialogue. Its effect on the comic inventory is subtractive only: it dissolves the round-7 two-speaker column figure and leaves Nia's verdict (item 30) as the exchange's lone comic item — the exchange is funnier-shaped in memory than on the page now, which is correct for this beat. Ruth's "This fall I noticed things. I kept them to myself and called it manners." … "Some of it was easier for me." (line 41) — confession, not wit; her 1/1 licensed sharp construction, spent on self-implication, delivery broken by the bag strap. "June looked at the receipt so she wouldn't look at Ruth." (line 43) — stated motive, no joke. "The class is--" She stopped. "The class is the part that works." (line 43) — card-true fracture under exposure; earnest. Asha's "Send my name because I'm qualified. If you're trying to feel less bad, don't." (line 75) and June's "I did want to feel less bad." (line 77) — consent boundary and plain admission; the edge is ethical, not comic. "a body on January 4, eight a.m." (line 83) — freight-world trade diction, not an attempt. "and it was the best part of the dish" (line 35) — earnest thesis material (the flaw seen truly); a comic reading would misprice it. "places where wanting had been scumbled over need" (line 99) — earnest inspection figure; with line 13's viewing-distance diagnosis it holds the craft-figure count at two, and the repair moved line 13 from figure-grade to diagnosis-grade, so the ceiling now holds with margin. The "Okay. No chair." thread (line 97) — rupture pain left unopened; correctly untouched by any comic item. "The To field was still empty. She deleted it." (line 95) — the cost beat item 26 must not touch, and doesn't. "Torres." (line 103), "But." (line 111), "Okay. Tell me the counter." (line 123) — brisk elicitation, flattened by prior order; no longer attempts comedy. The printer "catching for half a second" (line 107) — literal waiting texture; no caption on Nia's delivery. "The rectangle by the door was bare except for a strip of dust where the box had been." (line 55) — concrete absence, no gloss. "She read it twice for typos and sent it." (line 149) — diligence texture, folded under item 38's family, not a separate attempt. "ask Chelsea office re: December crating" on the back of her hand (line 161) — action texture serving item 41's refused cadence. Line 23's "orange scarf bright in the stairwell" — plain description; the round-7 comic read of the scarf no longer exists and nothing replaced it.

DISTRIBUTION CHECKS:
- Density: 41 attempted items across ~3,100 words of a flag:reflective decision chapter — at the register's commitment (Henry-at-60% means spark without volley; nothing runs longer than two comic turns, and the rebuilt column exchange now runs one). The comedy-free stretches are the right ones: Ruth's confession (lines 39–45, excluding the mercy beat that ends it), the Vandercook/key-number confession frame (lines 109–123 carry one dark item, 28, which sharpens rather than relieves), and the study verification (lines 157–159).
- Source: character 36, character+situation 3 (items 6, 15, 19), situation 2 (items 25, 37), narrator-overlay 0. Overlay hunt performed on every narration-borne item (1, 2, 3, 13, 18, 26, 37, 38, 41): each is June's focalized optical/arithmetic idiom doing scene work; none is a wit-layer painted over the scene. Note: the one round-7 item that lived nearest the overlay line (the scarf read) is gone from the text; its removal cost nothing and clarified the count.
- Mechanism variety: deadpan family 8 (items 3, 7, 8, 21, 23, 29, 31, 38 — distributed across June, Sam, Asha, and the narration); understatement 3 (5, 27, 33); deflation 3 (12, 36, 40); repetition-with-variation 3 (13, 32, 39); mock-precision 3 (1, 18, 41); literalization 2 (16, 28); reversal/priority-reveal 3 (11, 20, 37); plus singletons (implied escalation, mutual-boundary, hospitality-deficit, flat correction, scope-limiting mercy, non-answer, hyperbole grounded literal, timing undercut, verbed negation, enumerated verdict, understatement-in-praise, metonymy, bathos, blank-equation payoff, rate-quoted forgiveness). Not MONOTONOUS: the deadpan share is the committed register, it is spread across four mouths and the narration, and no two adjacent items repeat a mechanism in the same mouth.
- Emotion-displaced-into-logistics family: six instances (5, 9, 15, 16, 17, 35). The card's mandated engine, each instance functionally distinct — invitation, routing, contract-setting, equipment, thanks, exit. Watch-level concentration carried forward; nothing in the text names or rates the no-advice mode (tics ledger "achieved / fragile" condition re-verified against the current text).
- Sweetness (the special check — the Tasker loss): the loss chain is comedy-free at every link — GOOD in her own handwriting (lines 9, 77), "The job's good, Nia." (109), "I know. That's why this is hard." (117), "That's a worse offer." / "It is." (127–129), the receipt turned to "the Marchetti header, the faded total" (129), "I want the wall anyway" (129 — direct want, not wit), the receipt folded into the notebook (155). The comic items nearest the chain (28, 29, 30) each make the loss more expensive, not less: 28 is the trap stated flat, 29 prices her own counter down, 30 lets Nia win every column on the record. The repair at line 129 removed the one item that let June end that exchange on a shaped win; the current text leaves her holding a want against a conceded worse offer, which is sharper. Item 39 re-tested as consolation: it is a cost (February = endurance). Not OVERSWEETENED.
- Cringe: none. No item plays to a generic workshop; nothing condescends to the O'Leary/Henry-at-60%/Morisaki reader; no art-world contempt; the one physical-comedy beat (13) is competence, not pratfall.

TRACKER / STANDING-CAUTION CHECKS (per the round-8 charge, verified against the current text):
- "go get your clause" — ABSENT (the clause is named at lines 9, 67, 69, and 135, always as material fact; the quip does not exist).
- "listing of my dreams" — ABSENT; line 151 inverts the listing convention instead ("worse than described").
- Excess coat joke — CLEAN at the licensed pair (lines 83, 155); Ruth's buttoned coat (line 23) is a garment, not an instance; no third heat-as-apparel beat anywhere.
- Third "Noted" — NONE; exactly two (lines 53, 131), the deliberate cross-speaker mirror; spent.
- Repeated door joke — NONE; one door joke (line 63); line 19 is mechanical instruction, Sam's hip-opened door (line 55) is action.
- Third bare "I know" concession-opener — NONE; exactly two from June (lines 117, 129), non-adjacent, each followed by different content; Nia's "I know her invoices" (135) is a different object and function. The Plain-Translation/Dialogue-Doctor WATCH (no third in Ch21) is endorsed and carried.
- Ruth sharp-line cap — 1/1, spent on the confession; "We know how to deliver a box" and "We have a car" re-checked as second candidates and ruled flat logistics with no image.
- "not X. That's Y" template — two occurrences (item 16's paired sentences; Asha's half-template "That's not me being polite," line 71); rest the shape in Ch21.
- Asha card-recitation — the near-verbatim anchor round 7 cleared in situ ("Cheap enough to forgive") has since been varied by order; the current text contains zero card-sample recitations from Asha, and the forgive-the-room coin is retired for the book after line 87's re-agented use.
- Level family — plant (line 71) plus one varied callback (line 161); closed.
- Blue-dish tether — practical object, reversed into the Tuesday promise (line 35); compliant and transformed.
- FEB = coat — paid (line 155) and spent; boring-parts idiom spent (line 147); spoken-timestamp move single-use (line 139).
- Craft-figure ceiling — two (lines 13, 99), with line 13 reduced by repair from figure to diagnosis; ceiling holds with margin.
- Ch19 inheritances — no stool-count joke (the chair move is blocking), no jar symbolism (the water jar is a literal paperweight, lines 7, 157); room/side/reach vocabulary rested.
- Ch18 ledger/debt narration figures — zero; every dollar in the chapter is literal decision material required by the card.
- "I'm cargo" callback allowance — unused here; still available once.

SPECIAL ROUND-8 CHECKS (per charge, dispositions indexed):
- Asha's repaired line "The room's ugly. At $340 you'll forgive it." — item 24: lands in-register (rate-anchored second-person invoice judgment, her card's mechanism); does not revive the "cheap enough to forgive" sample-line issue — the card string and its aphorism shape are absent chapter-wide, the forgiveness is re-agented and priced, the family is retired, and the delivery (off-phone shout, hang-up) still denies it landing room.
- June's repaired Nia-call line "I know. I want the wall anyway." — excluded from inventory as direct-register seriousness, correctly so; its inventory effect is that the column exchange's comedy contracts to Nia's single verdict (item 30), the two-speaker completed figure is structurally dead, and the "I know" concession-opener count stands at the licensed two.
- Rebuild verification — no new partial, portable, workshopped, oversweetened, or monotonous item introduced by the repairs: line 13 flattened without residue (item 2 survives at reduced wattage as a plant, funniness-2 on the committed calibration); line 87 varied without an aphorism cut (item 24); line 129's new material is non-comic and its surviving neighbor (item 31) is unchanged in function. Two previously unlogged light attempts (items 26, 33) were inventoried and pass all six fields. The intervening loss of the round-7 scarf item installed nothing: line 23 is now plain description attempting no comedy.
- Standing cautions — all verified above; none breached.

VERDICT: **CLEAR**
All 41 items score funniness-2; sources are character/situation throughout with zero narrator-overlay; no item is portable in function and none fails the workshopped test after interrogation; mechanisms are varied across five mouths and the narration; the comedy consistently does the card's work — care rendered as logistics, the New York path priced honestly, the Tasker loss kept sharp at every link, and the latest repairs removed comic material rather than adding risk. Strongest item: 16 — "If the answer involves moving anything heavier than this, you have our number. That's not an opinion. That's a hand truck." — the chapter's engine (no advice, total help) compressed into equipment, priced by Ruth's flat "We have a car." and June's refusing "Noted." Weakest surviving item: 2 — "She had kept stepping back from paintings all fall as if the problem were viewing distance." — the quietest attempt in the inventory, surviving on self-knowledge in trade diction after the repair took its cadence; any flatter and it exits the inventory as narration, which would cost nothing — its payoff at lines 157–159 is object-borne either way.

REVISION ORDERS:
None. No item in this inventory scores funniness-1, reads portable in function, or fails the workshopped test; the two repair-site comic items (2, 24) were interrogated in place and hold in the current text; the third repair removed a comic item cleanly (June's column cap) without installing a substitute, and the exchange it left behind is inventoried at its true single-speaker value (item 30). Forward obligations bind Ch21+, not this text: rest the "not X. That's Y" template; no third "Noted"; no third bare "I know" concession-opener from June; no Asha card-sample recitation (the forgive-the-room coin is retired for the book); coat, boring-parts, FEB-callback, and level families closed or spent; spoken-timestamp move single-use; the emotion-into-logistics family must not become Ch21's default engine. The chapter is committable on comedy.
