Iron ChIF: Season One Episode 1 (lpsmith vs. Afterward, using Inform 7)

mathbrush · February 22, 2026, 2:25pm

You’re absolutely right, I am filled with a passion to declare some highlights in scroll-based IF history!

Opens the great tomes of Keyboard Stadium lore

Words are power, and in interactive fiction, that is especially true. We fantasize about magical texts that change the world, but in interactive fiction, text is the world, and scrolls can execute any command that the game engine is capable of. We could even have a ‘scroll of anonymously abiding by rules’, if @VictorGijsbers was inclined to make such a game.

I immediately think of Enchanter as the defining example of scrolls in games. Others may have used scrolls before, but Enchanter has spawned so many imitators that it stands supreme.

In enchanter, scrolls can be cast as-is, or copied into a spellbook, where they then must be memorized and then cast, in imitation of D&D which imitated Jack Vance. In that game, scrolls can have immense power (like gaspar, providing for your own resurrection) or almost no power at all (like filfre, making gratuitous fireworks). These spell names have become the names of many of the most technical IF products: blorb, filfre, frotz, gnusto, guncho, nitfol and zifmia are all entries for IF specifications or products on the IFWiki page.

Many games have used scrolls that change the world since then. Graham Nelson himself anonymously entered and won the second IFComp with a scroll-based game (The Meteor, The Stone, and a Long Glass of Sherbet), one of the longer IFComp winners. Scrolls were also used by countless Inform imitators that fell ignored by the wayside over the years (may this not be the fate of our competitors!). Graham Nelson’s combat-focused Reliques of Tolti-Aph did not receive much recognition, for instance).

The format of scrolls branched and became looser over time. It became common for games to keep the spells and drop the scrolls (like Oppositely Opal or Suveh Nux).

But nostalgia is powerful and many feel the pullof the old ways. Daniel Stelzer’s first big game was Scroll Thief, an epic library-based game centered around spell scrolls. Even I could not resist their siren call, with my own game Never Gives Up Her Dead having an area dedicated to technologically-influenced spell scrolls.

But why limit the authors? Zork-style spell scrolls with silly names will evoke nostalgia, but there is more than one way to alter the world. A scroll could be a peace treaty, or a symbol of the past, something like Floatpoint where the player has a chance to influence a ceremony or negotiations. It could be a love letter that means the difference between life and death. Or the judges could push it to the extreme: ‘a scroll’ could be forced to mean a scroll of the mouse on a webpage that affects reality.

In any case, this is a topic drenched in history and associations. I have a fondness for scroll-based games and feel like it will be hard to go wrong here (but nothing is impossible for the dedicated author). Good luck Chefs!

jjmcc · February 22, 2026, 2:41pm

Holy cow, our Technical Advisor has announced himself with a mic-drop worthy entrance. There is so much I want to explore with him, sitting as I do so FIRMLY on the ‘programmer learning writing’ side of the house. As a (loudly) avowed TADS-stan my impulse is to explore every nook and cranny of this alien (to me! apparently not to most of the human race!) paradigm. I found myself aliasing constructs in my head to their TADS counterparts and getting giddy with the thrill of exploration.

But it occurs to me that perhaps our Iron ChIFs themselves will be my best (and somewhat contractually obligated) exploration avenue. How do they attack the ingredient in this vernacular? What does Inform make easy, what does it make hard, how will that…

Ok, the language is named INFORM. That word has real uses, it’s one I personally use a lot, and it’s just going to look like lazy punsterism on my part!

How will that, eh, INFLUENCE their dishes’ conception and execution? What speed bumps will it impose, and how elegantly do our ChIFs skirt those? I can’t wait to see!

Enter our Chairman and a scroll that alters the world around it. He’s puckish, that one! An ingredient pregnant with IF fantasy-adjacent history (as our resident historian was quick to point out). For me though, it’s the clause behind it that really intrigues. “Alters the world around it” In the context of IF, this suggests the possibility of PLAYING WITH THE RULES OF REALITY or, more to my direct fascinations PLAYING WITH INFORM’S WORLD MODEL AND ASSUMPTIONS

Will Inform itself be a barrier to this subversive ingredient? Where will our ChIFs focus their world-alterations, and in the blindingly short span they have, how can they leverage Inform’s strengths to streamline everything else?

Here.

We.

GO.

jjmcc · February 22, 2026, 2:46pm

Fellow Horsemen, a question. How many of us have tinkered with Inform in the past? Clearly our Middlebrow Rider has, just as clearly I have NOT. I ask this not to undermine the audience’s confidence in us, but because I am HUMMING with the thrill of exploration here.

CMG · February 22, 2026, 2:58pm

A classic ingredient! This selection taps a vein running right back to the dawn of the medium. From Enchanter to Hadean Lands, world-altering scrolls are an IF staple.

As our esteemed host Otis T. Dog suggests, and as my fellow Apocalypse Horsemen continue to affirm, the ingredient lends itself automatically, almost inevitably, to a magical interpretation. Perhaps even more than the phrase “alters the world,” the word “scroll” has the flavor of magic embedded. Not a book or a page or a sheet, but a scroll. It is a wizardly word. The wind blows strongly in the direction of the fantasy genre.

But will our competitors sail with the wind, or against it? There are many ways, after all, to “alter the world.” The ways needn’t be magical! Couldn’t an archaeologist, for instance, discover an ancient scroll that “alters the world” by providing new context for some historical event? The Dead Sea Scrolls spring to mind. And that is just one example – the first to pop into my head! Love letters and diplomatic treaties, as Death has mentioned, are more non-magical possibilities.

Say, however, that our competitors do lean toward magic. There may be a temptation, and indeed there is a precedent – a precedent so large in the IF canon, it may be said to loom – to develop a magic system, of which the scroll contains some key in the form of a spell or a sigil or whatnot.

A devilishly tricky task – the systematization of magic! Like a joke that dies upon explanation, magic risks losing its magical spark when subjected too rigorously to rules-based parameters. A great many magical systems in fiction, in this judge’s admittedly subjective and perhaps faintly snobbish opinion, are not magical at all! They may call themselves magic, but they are not!

To spice a dish with true magic is no task for the faint-hearted. Easier, perhaps, to use the imitation stuff, especially when our competitors are under a time limit. I wouldn’t blame them for reaching, here and there, for this or that trope to provide easy “glue” for their games. Doubly so if they determine to tackle the daunting task of developing a system!

Comedy, I suspect, will provide the base. Magic must not always involve comedy, of course, but the two flavors are frequently paired in the world of interactive fiction. And our competitors have both already demonstrated a humorous approach to this challenge!

The ingredient is so flexible, however, that – much like magic itself – it could go anywhere. Even the sky is no limit! This is not one of those ingredients like, say, truffle oil, that would powerfully assert itself and dictate certain flavors in the dish. It’s an ingredient more like salt: universally applicable.

I have done my fair share of tinkering over the years!

Encorm · February 22, 2026, 3:13pm

At risk of living up to my horseman title, my career has been strictly in Twine. (I have enough of a programming background that I struggle with the natural language aspect, but not enough of one to be able to knuckle under and learn it anyway.) But rest assured that if I sic the cats of war on anyone it will not be over something so trivial as language preference – the days of acrimony between the communities are long past and I’m exited to get an up close and personal view of the arcane magic of I7!

Our Horseman of Famine is being a touch modest here – I seem to recall some of his Inform 7 games have been very well received indeed!

mathbrush · February 22, 2026, 6:05pm

Great question! I’ve used Inform a lot in the past, though I have crossed into forbidden paths (I used Instead rules almost exclusively, which is the Chaotic Evil branch of Inform rules. Here’s the list which I certainly didn’t just make up on the spot and which couldn’t contain any inaccuracies):

Alignment	Lawful	Neutral	Chaotic
Good	Check	Report	Before
Neutral	To (do some phrase)	Carry out	To say
Evil	After	After reading a command	Instead

I had a great experience going through and reading and discussing the entire Inform 7 manual with the help of people here. Despite that, I was still caught unaware by Victor’s ‘abide by X anonymously’ rule. It seems that the depths of Inform 7 are vast and unknowable. It will be interesting to see the techniques of these two authors. Will they use cobbled-together ad-hoc code to save time? Or will they spend precious moments refining the code into an extensible system that might never extend? Only time will tell…

CMG · February 22, 2026, 6:31pm

Call me Chaotic Evil too, in that case! I have also been known to use Instead from time to time. Well, maybe I haven’t been known to do it, since people aren’t exactly discussing my coding habits in the town square.

But the Chaotic Evil alignment is fitting for two Apocalypse Horsemen, I would say! In fact, running my eyes down that chart, I might fall more into the Chaotic column than anything else… I rarely ever use Check or Report.

jjmcc · February 22, 2026, 7:51pm

The impulse to characterize your engagement according to DnD alignments is wonderfully resonant with our Secret Ingredient, and will no doubt be a useful tool in analyzing our competitors dishes! Which, for my money the Law-Chaos axis has ALWAYS been more compelling than vanilla GNE. I will leave as an exercise for the reader which pole(s) I gravitate towards.

Also, a review of DOCUMENTATION is kind of an amazing thing to have on one’s CV. I am honored to count these worthy Horsemen as my Ride-Or-Dies. Or in the case of @mathbrush, BOTH.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but the uneasy silence that has fallen over Keyboard Stadium as our competitors wrangle their takes on the Secret Ingredient gets tauter by the minute! What Scroll? What Reality Bend? What indeed has the Chairman wrought???

Zed · February 22, 2026, 8:13pm

There are indeed details that one will end up needing to simply remember or need to look up. And if there’s anything thing in this world I can speak to, it’s how to look things up regarding Inform. Victor’s corpus demonstrates that he has it sorted, but for the edification of any whom it might help…

The single most valuable resource I know is Inform 7 documentation and resources. Since I actively curate it, this is tautology: when I think I know a way to make it more valuable, I change it. Admittedly, it is very long and very dense. However, everything below and much more can be found therein.

The best places for looking up particular phrases are the documentation’s General Index and the Project Index’s Phrasebook.

In the General Index, phrases are sorted according to their first word, e.g., (arithmetic value) times (arithmetic value) is placed under T for times. If you’re unsure of the first word, the alphabetization won’t help, but you can search the text for any word you do remember.

The General Index only offers phrases from the built-in extensions. The Project Index, however, is custom-made for your project every time you build it, so it reflects whatever extensions you may have included as well as whatever you’ve specified in your own code. It groups phrases according to origin, reflecting the order in which the compiler encountered their definitions. Since it’s legitimate to override phrases, it offers an opportunity to sanity-check that you’re not inadvertently getting a different version of a phrase than you expected.

For the sequence of rulebooks within an action, WI chapter 7: Basic Actions is basic indeed and doesn’t even mention Check, Carry out, or Report rules. WI 12.2: How Actions Are Processed includes a helpful flowchart illustrating the order, but the table at the end of Jim Aikin’s Inform Handbook is invaluable and helpfully includes the details regarding which rulebooks stop the action by default. If you crave minutiae, consult Action Processing’s gory details.

A closely related topic, that which often inspires checking the rulebook order is when to use which action rulebooks?, wherein I grind my Don’t just put everything in Instead rules axe.

If you want to customize the built-in actions’ behaviors, you need to know what they are and when they do what, and there’s no more authoritative source than the Standard Rules for Actions themselves. Chairman Otis helpfully annotates them in the Standard Rules Action Reference.

Another resource of broad utility is the search page of my I7 docs web remix which offers the whole texts of both Writing with Inform and The Inform Recipe Book on a single page so that you can search the docs within your browser.

lpsmith · February 22, 2026, 8:25pm

A report from your challenger on a moment (or several) before finally stepping into the kitchen…

Friday evening, late: Three challenge ingredients are presented. Option 3 is an obvious-to-me frontrunner, but I want to give the others a chance. I start to get the inklings of an idea for Option 1… and 13 minutes later, the bold and decisive Iron ChIF I7 has eliminated it. OK, then! Could I do something with option 2? And if I could, would it be better than 3? I banter a bit with my son about some ideas, and he comes up with a pretty good rough premise… but I’m not sure it resonates enough with me as-is. I could tweak it? And if I do indeed go with option 3, is the obvious enough? What’s my ‘in’ to the story?

I have time, and despite the precedent of taking only 13 minutes to make a decision, I’m doing this on my own schedule: I go to bed.

This is an excellent idea. As I drift off, I latch on to the core intriguing-to-me contradiction at the heart of my first impression of option 3: “A scroll that alters the world around it”: a magic item that affects its surroundings. But it’s a scroll. The affordance of a scroll is to read it. And tradition tells us that reading a scroll discharges its power, meaning that its initial passive effect comes to an end. A backstory begins to form in my mind as sleep arrives for real.

When I wake up Saturday, I fire off my response: option 2 is out, we’re using scrolls.

I’ve committed to not write a single thing down until 4:00 AM my time on Sunday, even if it’s not code. So the ideas marinate in my head a while, and early afternoon, after baking cookies with my daughter, I head out on a walk with my son: our traditional space to brainstorm with each other about ideas (stories, RPG campaigns, game mechanics, moral dilemmas, whatever). And, you know, spoilers, but to let you in on everything, I recorded it (at least until my phone ran out of battery):

Saturday night, as I’m drifting off again, my vague, “I dunno, maybe bird people” suddenly morphs into much more concrete images in my head. “Some sort of castle, maybe?” turns into a living aerie, towering above a forest canopy. Connections are forming and my brain is buzzing so hard that it’s difficult to go to sleep. I finally do, only to wake up again at 3:45 AM, 15 minutes before the competition officially starts. I consider finding my computer to post something, but… I really should sleep. And sleep does eventually return, layered on top of excitement.

Sunday, I’m in charge of things: stuff at church, getting my daughter off to work, singing. But by noon, I’m home. And we’ve reached the present. These words are the first concrete things I’ve produced for this competition based on the ingredient. I have six hours before I have to send off something to my Day 1 betatester. I know my opening scene, I have my closing scene. I have verbs to implement, introductory text to write, even a possible title. Everything will go live on Github as it happens; I’ve committed myself to updating regularly; we’ll see how that pans out as we go.

Wish me luck!

Zed · February 22, 2026, 8:34pm

[!error]

NOOO!!!

what do I even go on diatribes for?

Ahem, sorry about that, I’m back now.

CMG · February 22, 2026, 9:14pm

What can I say? Instead works for me! I have heard tales of grief caused by Instead, but have never experienced any grief myself. I do use Instead much less nowadays than I did when I first started writing games, but my movement away from Instead is more due to hypothetical benefits than anything tangible in my design process that demands a change…

But enough about the foibles of Instead!

The Challenger has spoken!

Inaction: a commendable technique! And I’m dead serious. This truth seems occasionally overlooked, but not working on a project is sometimes the most productive way to work on a project. The brain really does need to relax and breathe. I have been guilty of sitting at my desk, grinding away, forcing words to appear on the page, when I feel a deadline’s pressure, but this is far from the best approach. When I catch myself doing it, I try to stop! I make myself read a book, go for a walk, watch a movie, do anything else.

Our Challenger, it would appear, has impeccable scheduling hygiene – a powerful tool of no small importance in Iron ChIF’s high-pressure and time-sensitive crucible!

I haven’t yet listened to the full brainstorming session on Youtube, but in the Challenger’s hands, the ingredient does seem to be stabilizing, from the airy realm of infinite possibilities, as a classic magical scroll.

Comedy, though? My prediction in that department may have been premature! Rather than a funny fantasy, we might find ourselves with a moral dilemma: the question of whether or not to use the scroll(s) in question, and thereby diminish the magic’s potency. An intriguing reversal of my own implicit assumption about how text functions! Normally, I would imagine that the more people read a piece of text, the more power it might exert; and the fewer people read it, the less. The Challenger’s interpretation has certainly piqued my interest. (To say nothing of the bird people!)

jjmcc · February 22, 2026, 9:23pm

Our challenger opens up first, only to reveal that the battle had already begun! He sensed an opening, only for the Iron ChIF to cruelly parry it away. I am immediately swept up in sympathy for the process: going to bed to sort out mental chaos is one of the most used tools in MY box as well. And then our challenger backs it up with a 47 minute brainstorm video? OF HIS ACTUAL, HUMAN FACE AND VOICE??? A compellingly bold statement in this age of digital shenanigans! Very well, Challenger, you have my (nearly) undivided attention for the next 47 minutes…

mathbrush · February 22, 2026, 9:55pm

I couldn’t resist a peek at the github repo. It seems that the counter is prepared and the implements are sharpened but the ingredients are not yet entered. I was most intrigued by the list of kitchen appliances:

Include Response Assistant by Aaron Reed.
Include Version 7.1.1 of Hybrid Choices by AW Freyr.
Include Basic Screen Effects by Emily Short.

Hybrid Choices has been a solid choice for IF artisans for over a decade now, including in two-time IFComp Winner Steph Cherrywell’s games. Even with the game barely begun, this chIF is making tasty decisions.

VictorGijsbers · February 22, 2026, 10:18pm

For the amusement and edification of the audience, I’ve written a miniature Inform 7 game with a scroll that changes the world around it. I invite you to take a look, and especially to install or start up Inform 7 and play around with this code. As you are waiting for the real cooks to do their thing, you can engage in some low-level at-home cooking yourself! Improve it, add to it, and share your additions in the Audience Thread… or ask desperately for help when Inform does not do what you want! (The code is pasted below and also, perhaps more conveniently, attached as a file.)

"IronChif Test" by "Victor Gijsbers"

Section -- The Laboratory

The Magical Laboratory is a room. "This used to be the laboratory of the great wizard, Karen. Now, almost nothing is left -- ransacked by other looters, no doubt. Only an ancient desk stands here, surrounded by emptiness. The only exit is south." The player is in the magical laboratory.

The ancient desk is scenery in the magical laboratory. "You can see that it's ancient from the quaint carvings on the legs. Quaint always means ancient." [Scenery is stuff you cannot pick up, and which is not mentioned as an item lying around in the room.]

The quaint carvings are part of the ancient desk. The description of the quaint carvings is "Skulls, flames, tentacled monstrosities, good-looking young men wrestling with the monstrosities... wait, that's not exactly wrestling, is it?" [If something is part of something else, you can't manipulate it as an independent object. It's an easy way to add some merely flavourful details to things.]

Negativity is a truth state that varies. Negativity is false. [We will keep track of whether the world is in negative or not.]

On the ancient desk is the scroll of the negative. The indefinite article of the scroll is "the". The description of the scroll is "[if negativity is false]It's a strange scroll: instead of black ink forming letters on white paper, the paper has been entirely inked [italic type]except for[roman type] the letters[otherwise]Now the scroll looks normal: black inked letters on white paper[end if]. You can probably read it -- but then weird magic might happen again!" [The description of the scroll will change depending on whether the world is negative.]


Section - The Scroll

Reading is an action applying to one thing and requiring light. [Requiring light... so you can't do it in dark rooms!]

Understand the command "read" as something new. Understand "read [thing]" as reading. [We needed the first sentence because 'read' is usually a synonym for 'examine'. We don't want that!]

Carry out reading:  [Carry out is the rulebook that should contain the rules describing what an action does when performed.]
	say "This verb is usually applied to texts."
	
Carry out reading when the noun is the scroll of the negative:  [This is a more specific rule than the one above, and therefore it will trigger first.]
	say "As your eyes scan the page, the words seem to take on a life of their own. Suddenly, everything around you flickers -- black, white, black, white, black -- and then the world is changed.";
	repeat with place running through rooms: ['place' is a temporary variable. It runs through all the rooms, so we can change all the dark rooms to light ones, and all the light ones to dark ones.]
		if place is lighted:
			now place is dark;
		otherwise:
			now place is lighted;
	if negativity is false: [and we switch negativity. I suppose there's a more elegant way to do this...]
		now negativity is true;
	otherwise:
		now negativity is false;
	rule succeeds.  [This line stops the carry out reading action, making sure that the more general carry out reading line is never reached.]
		

Section - The Maze		

First Corridor is south of Magical Laboratory. "A twisting corridor, going north, west, and southwest." [Inform automatically makes these connections two-way, so Magical Laboratory is also north of First Corridor.]

Second Corridor is southwest of First Corridor. "A twisting corridor, going northeast and north." 
Second Corridor is dark. [This room starts out dark. You can move around in it, but otherwise, your actions are very limited.]

Third Corridor is north of Second Corridor. Third Corridor is west of First Corridor. "A twisting corridor, going south, north, and east. There's a big pit with spikes in the middle -- it's a good thing you can see it, or you would certainly have fallen into it!" 
Third Corridor is dark.

Every turn (this is the defeat rule): [And now we punish exploration in the dark.]
	if the player is in Third Corridor and Third Corridor is dark:
		end the story saying "You fell into a pit full of sharp spikes!"

The big pit is scenery in Third Corridor. "It looks deadly." Understand "spike" and "spikes" as the big pit. [The understand statement makes sure that we now have a reply to 'examine spikes' and the like.]

Fourth Corridor is north of Third Corridor. "A twisting corridor, going south and east." 
Fourth Corridor is dark.

Treasure Room is east of Fourth Corridor. "Wondrous treasures are all around you."

Every turn (this is the victory rule): [And you win, but only if the room is light.]
	if player is in Treasure Room and Treasure Room is lighted:
		end the story saying "You are rich!".

story.ni (4.6 KB)

VictorGijsbers · February 22, 2026, 10:22pm

As the challenger’s Github remains tantalisingly empty, and my brain is thus forced to wander its own paths, my main thought is… could the scroll be the player character? Let go brain. It’s clear why you are not there, in the middle of the stadium, cooking for real.

CMG · February 22, 2026, 10:43pm

I entertained the same thought! As well as the idea to manufacture the scroll by skinning the sky to acquire magical vellum. The challenge ingredient really lends itself to daydreaming…

jjmcc · February 22, 2026, 10:47pm

Horsemen, Iron ChIF fans, I just went on the wildest Parasocial Walkabout. Our Challenger invited us all on a lovely winter amble outside Seattle with his son. It feels like an honor I didn’t really earn or deserve? Certainly he’s going to be weirded out when I casually bring it up in conversation down the road, as if it were a shared memory. This bold Challenger has made the decision to share his process with us, future discomfort be damned!

For those with more social savvy, or a functioning sense of boundaries, I will act as your oblivious archivist. Here then is my summary of a truly delightful 47min father/son/creepy observer brainstorm session: “mole, no, bird people.” “Schrodinger’s scroll” “passive v active effect” “SCROLL HEIST!!” “Can system commands be diagetic?” “locale v object spell effects” “No seriously, CAN SYSTEM COMMANDS BE DIAGETIC??” “Is it Art if you don’t think about it later?” “I SAW AN EAGLE” “What is the line between winking schtick and lazy repitition?” <battery died>

What a great glimpse into our Challenger’s early process. In the finest of brainstorm traditions it meanders, circles back on itself, asks more questions than answers, and carves out a vast plain of possibilities. Y’know what really haunts me though?

“IS IT ART IF YOU DON’T THINK ABOUT IT LATER?”

I mean, my walks are usually monopolized by “oh, geez what did I just step in?” not philosophical explorations of Art. Kudos Challenger, on a great walkabout.

Encorm · February 22, 2026, 10:48pm

Truly the hardest part of judging, isn’t it? I can’t help but think of all the dishes I might cook if given the opportunity… We’ll all just have to be patient and see what Lucian and Afterward come up with! And speaking of, now that Lucian is off to a fantastic start I am on absolute tenterhooks waiting to see what Afterward might be working on. What can he deliver to counter Lucian’s fantastical city of birds?

(Victor, I’ll definitely be checking out that file more in-depth later - I’m shocked at how compact and neat it is! Truly the magic of Inform 7.)

jjmcc · February 22, 2026, 11:32pm

As the hot shame of my social transgression fades, I feel it is also germain to discuss some more concrete possibilities the Challenger raised in his brainstorm session. My overwhelming technical takeaway is that this ChIF is completely unafraid of scope. A few key possibilities he seemed keen on:

A protagonist party, perhaps of playable characters, perhaps of NPCs. NPCs themselves represent scope in parser IF - making them interesting means giving them an array of amusing interactions. Some ways to limit scope include tieing them to specific scenes or locations, limiting their ability to communicate with language or other barriers, or making them pugnaciously disinterested in the player. A PARTY implies multiple characters, all seeing everything the player sees with responses to all of it. All this before he populates a castle with King/Heir/guards.
The possibility of multiple scrolls, each with ‘passive’ v ‘expended’ effects. The Challenger quickly noted the perils there, of needing to somehow constrain the open ended “all effects possible, everywhere” promise of player-controlled magic. The combinatorial explosion potential was not lost on our ChIF here.
Multiple-solution puzzles, multiple use objects. I LOVE LOVE LOVE this design choice. It bespeaks a much more satisfying, tight experience than a series of disposable objects. It ALSO, by its nature, mandates multiple dimensions to puzzles and objects, and the unintended interactions those might impose.

All of which leads me to ask, does our Challenger know the difference between days and weeks???