🫧 Ember + Stewie — visual system spec

Every helper — Ember or Stewie — is a 3D character standing inside its own enclosed field: a glass bubble, or a steel ring / set of rings. When two are on screen together (your active Ember trailing you + the local Stewie), which one is "in front" is obvious from forced perspective and layering — size, position, and the back one sitting at roughly 90% opacity (a number to tune, not a fixed rule). The back one hovers slightly behind and to the side of the front one — both are always tappable, neither is hidden.

All ten Embers travel with you by default, on a stack you can open. One is "on duty" (front, full opacity, the one giving the current tour); the rest are reachable but recede. Tapping a different Ember in the stack swaps who's front.

Walking into a realm (e.g. MushPlex) with Timey on duty: Timey doesn't disappear. He steps back into the trailing/back position, and Mushee — the local Stewie — steps into front and gives the actual tour. Timey stays visible and tappable the whole time, and — this is the detail worth keeping — he has opinions about what Mushee is saying. Tap him mid-tour and he can comment, even though he's not driving. Two voices, one screen, always clear which one is hosting.

An Ember never owns a realm the way a Stewie does. But an Ember can be the one who seeded it most — originated it, trained its Stewie. Worked example, as you gave it: MushPlex is one of Plexy's. Plexy is about weaving — "your health is very much woven together by all the streams of influence you put into it" — and she governs how body and brain function when you mix all those streams together. Mushee was trained by Plexy and carries that weaving lens into the mush realm specifically. This gives every realm a quiet second layer: who hosts it (the Stewie) and whose lens it was built from (the seeding Ember) — worth deciding per realm, not just for MushPlex.

First arrival in a realm, the Stewie's light has gone out a bit — Mushy greets you warm ("hey hey hey, welcome, nice to see you") but dim. Your Embers' presence reanimates him — a few laps of interacting and his light visibly grows. Your own question, and it's the right one: "it's not exactly a lantern, is it? It's the actual Stewie." Correct — and worth flagging loudly:

Steward — Old English stīweard: stī ("hall," possibly "sty" — OED explicitly says there's no real ground for reading it as "pig-sty keeper," despite how that reads today) + weard ("guard, keeper," from Proto-Germanic *wardaz, ultimately PIE *wer-, "watch over, perceive"). Literally: keeper of the hall.

Is it still commonly used? Not archaic, but not everyday either — it survives in specific lanes (union "shop steward," motorsport/event "race steward," environmental "stewardship" — now nearly a synonym for sustainability) but has receded sharply from the one context most people used to meet it in daily life: air travel. "Steward/stewardess" was displaced by "flight attendant" through the late 1990s. So your instinct is right — it survives in niches, not in daily speech, which is exactly why "Stewie" was free to mean something new without fighting an existing everyday sense.

Its historical counterpart: a steward serves and manages a house on someone else's behalf — the natural paired role in that household frame is the guest, the one received into it, not managing it. That's not a guess bolted onto our canon after the fact — it's already been found independently: Latin hospes (root of both "host" and "hospitality") meant both guest AND host at once — the same relationship seen from its two ends. Which is exactly the Stewie law already locked: master at home, guest everywhere else. The etymology agrees with the character note twice over, from two different words.