Skiff, Gill, Faro (ensemble)

"Touching first," said Skiff mildly, "is how you break a rule you didn't know was there."

"Or try for an answer the numbers never allowed," added Gill.

Sprocket pulled the cloth. Underneath sat a genuinely nasty contraption: a set of colored tokens that had to be delivered across a board to matching slots, with a fill-line that could only hold certain amounts, and a strict rule that two particular colors could never touch. The apprentices pounced and were tangled within seconds. The three planners just... stood there, looking, while the losers piled up around them.

"Before anyone moves," Skiff said, quietly enough that only the cohort leaned in, "let's say what can never happen. Red and green tokens can't share a slot — see the warning stripe? That's a wall. And the middle lane is one-way — another wall. Every plan we make has to keep both true at every single step, including the steps in between." Skiff pointed at three moves the pouncing apprentices had already made. "They broke the red-green rule twice and the one-way lane once, and they don't even know it yet — the board will punish them in a minute. We won't, because we drew the fences before we moved. When you know the walls, most 'obvious' moves cross themselves off, and the few that remain are your real choices."

Gill went next, crouching to read the fill-line.

"Now the numbers," Gill said, tapping the fill-gauge, which held either two units or five, nothing else, poured between two channels. "The blue slot needs exactly four. And a lot of people are about to spend all night trying to make four the wrong way." Gill did the little arithmetic-with-channels aloud — five, pour off three into the small channel, two remain, and so on — the way Gill always turned pours into sums. "Four is reachable with a two and a five, because nothing bigger than one divides both, so we can hit any whole number we like. If that gauge had been a two and a four, I'd have told you to give up on the odd slots and save your evening. But it isn't. Four is waiting. The numbers allow it — I checked before we touched." One apprentice, overhearing, stopped trying to force three units into a slot that could only ever hold even amounts, and looked slightly ill.

"And now the future," Faro said, tracing an invisible sequence with one finger, touching nothing. "Say we deliver the red token first — feels natural, it's closest. But look four moves on: red in its slot blocks the only lane the green token needs, and green can't wait, and we're stuck. So red-first is a trap wearing a nice hat." Faro's finger walked a different, duller-looking path. "This move instead — the boring one, shifting the yellow token nobody cares about — opens the lane green will need, keeps Skiff's walls intact, lands on Gill's reachable four, and three moves later everything flows. I've walked the whole road in my head. It's clear. Now we can touch the board." And only then, with the walls named, the numbers checked, and the road scouted, did the three of them make their first real move — which was, of course, the last first-move they needed to make, because the rest unspooled exactly as planned while the pouncers were still untangling.

They finished long before anyone else, having touched the board about a third as many times.

Sprocket, delighted, awarded them the naming rights, and they named it — what else — Plan Before You Touch. One of the tangled apprentices, more curious than sore, asked how they'd been so sure.

"We weren't sure because we're clever," said Faro. "We were sure because we did the thinking where it's free — in our heads, before the board could punish us."