Phase 3 closes out today and Phase 4 kicks off in the same session. The last two steps of the dialogue phase landed, and then the first two steps of the mission system were built on top of them.

The follow-up scene is Sarah checking in when Ethan returns from the first supply run. Short — 21 nodes — but it carries the full weight of what happened before he left. Players who brought Sarah into the mission planning will see a response that nobody else can: Ethan telling her that the door knock she taught him worked, and Mrs. Alvarez actually answered. Players who shut her out or kept things brief won't see it. The response isn't hidden behind a menu note — it just doesn't exist. That's the system working as intended.

The dialogue hardening work closed the gap between "a dialogue asset that compiles" and "a dialogue asset that's correct." Every time a conversation starts, the runtime now validates it completely — broken references refuse to start with a full error log rather than crashing mid-conversation. The debug dump prints node, visible and hidden responses, and last applied effects in one call.

Then Phase 4 started. The first two steps of the mission system are in and compiling clean. The data layer is a new set of types — mission definitions, objectives, branch placeholders, and runtime state — that mirror the structure of the dialogue system. Missions are data assets. Objectives are authored on the asset, not scripted per-level. On top of that, the mission subsystem now has real ownership: it can start a mission, track its runtime state, end it with a result, apply the right narrative effects on completion or failure, and broadcast to anything that needs to know.

Nothing is visible to the player yet — that comes with the objective tracker UI in Step 7. But the data and the runtime are clean, and the pattern is familiar — same architecture as dialogue, same connection to the narrative layer underneath.