A branch switch does not change the length of the story. It changes which
story it is. Four panels keyed on actions.length and so could not tell the
difference: the Branches panel drew one branch while the reader was already
on a second, Insights showed the prompt built for the path just left, the
script-state drawer kept the other line's numbers, and the Memory Bank did
not notice a deleted branch taking its memories with it.
Only the world-state drawer was right, and only because it happened to
carry stateKey already. They all key on the pair now, and deleting a branch
bumps it too — that is the one operation that changes what is stored
without a turn being played and without the story on the current path
moving by a single action.
tools/branch_fixture.py is the thing that could show it. The stress
fixture's world state is empty, so it cannot answer whether a switch puts
the scoreboard back, and its story is one branch. This builds a small
bootable adventure with a stat schema, a gold script, two takes on one turn
that differ by 35 hit points, a fork, and a memory on each side — with both
branches the same length on purpose, because equal length is precisely the
case a length-based key cannot see.
Verified in a browser with the drawer open: hp 60 to 95 and back, the bar
redrawn, the story swapped to the other take, Insights carrying the scratch
and not the beating. The Memory Bank deliberately does not change on a
switch: the drawer is adventure-wide so a memory is always findable to
delete, and retrieval is the path-scoped half.
396 tests, build clean, no new lint.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015H5qiyiR7gtFQaoDphHZ3g
