Start documenting the story: premise, structure, and Chapter 1

Adds story.md covering the overarching premise (a prophecy caused by
the attempt to prevent it), the eight-movement story structure, the
Great Explosion backstory, core characters, and a detailed breakdown
of Chapter 1's opening - the bounty party's retrieval of the
protagonist, the mountain teleportation-logistics trap that splits
the party, and the confrontation with the king.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

story.md

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+# Story
+
+This document tracks the game's narrative - premise, world, characters, and
+lore - as it's developed. It will grow incrementally; sections marked
+**TBD** are placeholders for details not yet locked in.
+
+## Premise
+
+At its core, this is a story about a prophecy someone tries to prevent,
+only to become the one who causes it.
+
+A king is warned by a fortune teller that a mage wielding
+**Culinary/Hospitality Magic** *(name not final)* - a magic of creating and
+enchanting food, drink, and other everyday comforts, the kind of thing a
+normal person would dismiss as "nice to have" rather than a weapon - will
+one day be the one to bring him down.
+
+Rather than risk it, the king moves to wipe out every caster of that magic
+in his kingdom. The culling nearly succeeds: only a handful of casters
+survive, among them our protagonist - who, at the story's start, doesn't
+even know she has the power herself. It is this act of trying to prevent
+the prophecy that sets in motion the very events that will fulfill it.
+
+## Story Structure
+
+The story is told across a run of chapters, grouped into eight broad
+movements. Individual chapter-to-movement mapping is **TBD** - these are
+the beats each stretch of the story needs to hit, not a fixed chapter
+count.
+
+1. **The Intro** - Establishes the protagonist. Plants the first, vague
+   seeds that she's powerful in a way that's unfamiliar and a little
+   unsettling - a kind of magic people haven't seen in a long time, if
+   ever.
+2. **The Buildup** - She starts learning about a wider world she didn't
+   know existed. Something is subtly steering her toward conflict - not
+   overtly, but persistently - and nobody around her can say why, or even
+   quite agree that it's happening.
+3. **Early Realization** - Threads start connecting back to the king.
+   Former enemies let information slip, whether by accident or design,
+   and the shape of something larger starts to form.
+4. **The Realization** - The big reveal: who she thought she was isn't
+   true. She is a culinary mage. This is who she is. The only questions
+   left are why, and how.
+5. **Full Circle** - The king's intentions and motives come out in full:
+   why she's a threat to him, and how he orchestrated events from the
+   very start.
+6. **The Buildup (Endgame)** - Goals are set and motivations are clear on
+   both sides. She has to stop the king, while he's simultaneously moving
+   to stop her.
+7. **The Finale** - The prophecy is fulfilled.
+8. **What's Next** - This world has more stories left to tell - this is
+   only the surface. Freedom has been won, but now it has to be
+   maintained. Sets up potential future games in the same world.
+
+## Chapters
+
+Detailed, scene-level breakdowns of individual chapters as they're
+developed. Currently covers the opening of Chapter 1 only; more to come.
+
+### Chapter 1: The Intro
+
+The story doesn't open on the protagonist - it opens on a small party of
+bounty hunters, though they'd bristle at the word; they consider their
+work more noble than that. They've been secretly hired by the king on a
+straightforward job: rumor has it a culinary magic user is living far up
+in a freezing mountain range. Go get her. Bring her back alive.
+
+We follow this chapter through the party leader's perspective - the
+story's second main character. He's honor-bound to a fault, treating the
+king's word as gospel without question. Even so, the job needles at him
+from the start: why this person specifically, why this remote location -
+questions he swallows, because it isn't his place to question the king.
+
+Getting to the mountains feels like a stroke of luck: a teleporter takes
+them straight up the mountain for next to nothing. What the party doesn't
+yet understand is *why* it was so cheap - a teleporter at the mountain
+doesn't care what they're carrying upward, only that it gives them an
+excuse to make the climb, since all that actually matters to them is
+filling their mana hauling ore back down (see World Notes). Getting a
+teleport back *down*, they'll soon learn, is another matter entirely.
+
+They arrive to find an isolated, blizzard-bound mining town built around
+that rare ore. The culinary mage they've come for is well-liked and
+respected here, and a group of outsiders showing up to take her away, on
+the word of a king who has never done anything for this region, does not
+go over well - the town turns on them.
+
+Then comes the first real complication. The party's funds - a stipend
+from the king that was never generous to begin with - come nowhere close
+to what it costs to buy a teleport back down: ore shipments and
+deep-pocketed royalty take priority over everyone else, always. With no
+way down, and nowhere welcome to wait it out, the party fractures. Some
+see easy, guaranteed pay in the town's mines and no reason to stay loyal
+to a king who clearly doesn't value them; others still see the king's
+request - however small and uncertain the eventual payout - as the job
+they signed up to finish. The party splits, and what's left sets out to
+trek down the mountain the old-fashioned way.
+
+What remains is a smaller group, supplies dwindling, no clear sense of why
+any of this is still worth it, hauling what feels like dead weight: a
+prisoner who, as far as anyone can tell, wouldn't hurt a fly.
+
+Around the chapter's midpoint, the party leader gets the sense they're
+being followed. Nothing confirmed, no confrontation - just a feeling, a
+shape at the edge of the blizzard, tracks that shouldn't be there. He
+says nothing to the rest of the party. The audience is left aware someone
+or something is watching, well before anyone in-story can do anything
+about it.
+
+As the journey back wears on, she shows her true character - even as a
+captive, she uses her magic to help the party survive. It's this, more
+than anything, that starts cracking the party leader's certainty. He
+keeps carrying out his orders. He just isn't sure of them anymore.
+
+The chapter's climax comes at the castle. The party presents her to the
+king, and she's dragged off to the dungeon - implicitly to be executed, or
+simply to disappear. In open defiance, the party leader confronts the
+king: who is she, and why did his party go through hell to drag her here?
+The king, unwilling to admit to anything about hunting culinary mages
+specifically, dismisses him as a traitor for questioning the crown -
+denies him payment, and all but tells him to be grateful he's keeping his
+head.
+
+## The Great Explosion
+
+The king's culling didn't go quietly. Cornered, the targeted mages ended up
+unleashing a magical explosion on a catastrophic scale - one that killed
+most of their own kind along with it.
+
+The event is so significant to this kingdom that it reset their calendar
+around it. Where the rest of the world reckons time by the old calendar
+(currently **Year 4192**), this kingdom counts years as **AGE** - "After
+the Great Explosion." The story opens in **Year 25 AGE**.
+
+Within the kingdom, the event itself is barely spoken of - referenced only
+obliquely, in hushed tones, as "the Great Explosion." What actually
+happened is not public knowledge and is revealed to the player gradually
+over the course of the story, rather than up front.
+
+## World Notes
+
+- **Two calendars**: the wider world uses a conventional year count
+  (Year 4192 and counting); this kingdom alone uses Year *N* AGE, counting
+  from the Great Explosion. The disparity itself is a hint to outsiders -
+  and to the player - that something happened here.
+- **Culinary/Hospitality Magic**: magic themed around food, drink, and
+  comfort - underestimated by most as domestic or decorative, not martial.
+  Exact mechanics/rules TBD.
+- **Teleportation Magic**: the rarest and single most valuable magical
+  skill in the world - fewer than 1% of magic users can do it at all.
+  Teleporters are indispensable for logistics (messages, cargo, urgent
+  travel) and can effectively name their own price; they're held in
+  correspondingly high regard almost everywhere.
+  - This reaches its extreme in the mining mountains. A rare ore is mined
+    there *(name TBD)*, valuable enough and difficult enough to move any
+    other way that the teleporters working that route are among the
+    highest-paid individuals anywhere in the world.
+  - A teleporter at the mountain cares about exactly one thing: getting
+    ore *down*. They'll spend their entire reserve of mana hauling as much
+    of it downward as they can carry, and nothing takes priority over that
+    - short of a royal client with genuinely deep pockets.
+  - Because of that singular focus, teleporters will take almost any
+    paying job to get back *up* the mountain first - they don't care what
+    (or who) they're carrying, only that it justifies the trip so they can
+    turn around and come back down loaded with ore. Supply runs upward are
+    therefore easy and cheap to arrange; there's never a shortage of
+    teleporters looking for an excuse to make the climb.
+  - Getting a teleport *down* the mountain is the opposite problem
+    entirely - one outsiders unfamiliar with the trade routinely
+    underestimate. See Chapter 1.
+
+## Characters
+
+### The Protagonist
+One of the last surviving casters of Culinary/Hospitality Magic. Does not
+yet know she has this power. Her arc is the prophecy's fulfillment - the
+king's attempt to prevent her existence is, narratively, what creates her.
+*(Name, background, and how she discovers her power: TBD.)*
+
+### The King
+Ordered the culling of all Culinary/Hospitality mages after being warned
+of the prophecy. Motivations beyond self-preservation, and his current
+awareness of how the prophecy is unfolding: TBD.
+
+### The Fortune Teller
+Delivered the original prophecy to the king. Role beyond the inciting
+incident: TBD.
+
+### The Party Leader
+The story's second main character, and whose perspective opens Chapter 1.
+Leads the band of bounty hunters secretly hired by the king to retrieve
+the protagonist from the mountains. Honor-bound to a fault, and treats the
+king's word as absolute - but the ordeal of the retrieval, and the
+protagonist's own conduct as a captive, starts opening cracks in that
+certainty. Still carries out his orders even as he stops trusting them.
+Publicly denounced as a traitor by the king at the end of Chapter 1 for
+questioning why she was really taken.
+*(Name and background: TBD.)*
+
+## Themes
+
+- Self-fulfilling prophecy - the act of prevention *is* the cause.
+- Power in what's dismissed as harmless or domestic.
+- Institutional violence and its cover-up - a kingdom that has to
+  reorganize its own sense of time to live with what it did.
+- Blind loyalty vs. conscience - orders followed even as faith in them
+  erodes.
+- The crown's disregard for the people who prop it up - a distant king
+  extracting from a region (soldiers, subjects, this mage) that owes him
+  nothing and gets nothing back.
+- Humanity mistaken for weakness - the "prisoner" who helps her captors
+  anyway.
+
+## Open Questions / TBD
+
+- Final name for Culinary/Hospitality Magic.
+- Protagonist's name and how her power surfaces.
+- How much of the Great Explosion's truth the player learns, and when.
+- What the "couple of casters" who survived alongside the protagonist are
+  doing now - allies, threats, or unaware of each other entirely.
+- Why the king specifically wanted *this* mage, from *this* location -
+  deliberately left unanswered in Chapter 1, to be paid off later.
+- The party leader's name, background, and what became of the bounty
+  hunters who split off from his party.
+- The mining town's name and its rare ore.
+- Whether/how the party leader and protagonist's paths cross again after
+  Chapter 1.
+- Who (or what) is following the party partway through Chapter 1 - seeded
+  as an unconfirmed presence, payoff TBD.
+- Whether teleportation magic (and its rarity) becomes relevant again
+  beyond Chapter 1's logistics trap - e.g. a named teleporter character,
+  or its scarcity mattering to the wider plot/prophecy.