chapters 7,8,9,10 complete and final

characters/mere-fields.md

@@ -32,6 +32,12 @@
 - **Extremely goal-oriented** — identifies what she wants, sees no reason to wait, moves toward it with uncomfortable directness
 - **Not a damsel** — has her own agenda, skills, and opinions about Phelan's methods
 
+### The Three-Stream Limit
+- Mere can run two simultaneous tasks without losing fidelity in either — reading while holding a conversation, chopping while monitoring a reduction, shelving while cataloguing inventory
+- Three is her hard limit. When a third input demands attention, something gives — usually whatever involves the sharpest object
+- Established example: chopping vegetables + monitoring a simmering reduction + trying to listen to Devod explain an idea = nearly lost a fingertip (Ch07, Book 2)
+- This is a consistent, recurring flaw — not occasional clumsiness. Her processing is exceptional but finite, and she hits the wall cleanly rather than degrading gradually
+
 ### How She Processes People
 - No subtext. She says what she means and assumes others do too.
 - Reads patterns in behavior but not emotional nuance — she can predict what people will *do* without understanding why they *feel* that way

characters/phelan-varrant.md

@@ -31,6 +31,15 @@
 - **Socially reluctant** — prefers to work alone. The job keeps requiring people. Central irony of his life.
 - **ADD brain** — thoughts move fast, jump tracks, hyperfocus without warning. Surfaces brilliance at inconvenient moments.
 
+### The Three-Month Cycle
+- Phelan's ADD drives a pattern he's never beaten: intense fixation on a new skill or subject for roughly three months, then the dopamine dries up and he drops it entirely
+- The learning phase is compulsive — voracious study, rapid improvement, genuine excitement. He'll talk about it unprompted (which, for Phelan, is notable)
+- The plateau is physical — the returns diminish, the thrill bleeds out, and the thing that consumed him last week now feels like chewing sand
+- He doesn't taper off. He stops. One day he's deep in earth magic theory, the next day the books are in a pile and he's sketching ward architecture
+- His life is littered with abandoned three-month expertise — enough competence in a dozen fields to be useful, mastery in none except Flaw Sight (which never stopped being interesting because it never stops presenting new problems)
+- The fire combat training is a notable exception: childhood obsession driven by survival need, not curiosity. The current Book 2 training revival is testing whether necessity can override the cycle
+- He's aware of the pattern. Doesn't fight it anymore. Considers it a feature of how he works, not a flaw — though it costs him depth in exchange for breadth
+
 ### How He Processes People
 - Reads everyone as a system — motivations, pressure points, likely next move
 - Hears what people mean, not what they say