Story phase 1: the spine — acts, cups, chapters, checkpoints

The front door now continues the story. An act is its league cup, whose
final is the boss's own body (acts II and IV play their band out of
ladder order for that), then a ten-game gore chapter on the act's court.
The chapter has no duel at all, takes the act's weapon stock into the
rack, meets a mid-boss after game 5 (the checkpoint: restock and full
blood) and the act boss after game 10, then the act card. Death is not
permadeath: it counts the attempt, banks nothing on the boards, and
TRY AGAIN restarts from the checkpoint the profile holds. Barrels hold
what the act has earned. The chapter plays the arcade's games
base+1..base+10 so every director curve keeps its slope.

Profiles from before the story start it from the top (league, cups and
champion reset; level kept). The server mirror stores the act and
checkpoint and only ever moves them forward.

Plain cards stand in for the screens (phase 3) and the transformation
(phase 2). Six new tests.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

server.py

@@ -126,6 +126,13 @@ def clean_profile(payload):
                'at': at,
                'n': re.sub(r'[^A-Z0-9 ._-]', '', str(p.get('n', '')).upper()).strip()[:NAME_MAX],
                'tour': word('tour'), 'kit': word('kit'), 'skin': word('skin')}
+        # THE STORY (2026-10-15): the act and the checkpoint, nothing else. The rack a checkpoint
+        # hands back stays on the device — a wiped phone restarts the act's chapter, not its middle.
+        st = p.get('story')
+        if isinstance(st, dict):
+            cp = str(st.get('cp', 'cup'))
+            out['story'] = {'act': max(1, min(int(st.get('act', 1)), 5)),
+                            'cp': cp if cp in ('pro', 'cup', 'chap', 'mid', 'done') else 'cup'}
     except (TypeError, ValueError):
         return None
     return who, out