This page is a proposal, not canon. `DESIGN.md` §5.4c currently closes lesson, result and score surfaces to Mai — a character beside a verdict reads as the grader's mood. The founder has asked whether that ban should stay, and this is the mascot team's evidence for the discussion: the closed surfaces, live, with the one law that we believe makes them safe — the verdict renders in the UI and she reacts to the moment; she never wears the grade. Every vignette below is running for real — press the buttons.
She listens while the mic is open; a green gets a quiet glad beat — happy eyes, one soft bounce — and an amber a small sympathetic head shake, warm again in under a second. The verdict chip does the judging.
Waiting for your take.
The riskiest room. Here she is presence, not reaction — a calm idle beside an amber result, deliberately not commenting on it. The score speaks; she doesn't.
No buttons — that is the point. Whatever the verdict, this is the whole of what she does here.
The one unambiguously happy room in the loop. The star medallion stays the celebration mechanism; her part is the same quiet glad beat, then a settle beside the recap. Loud lives in marketing, not in the app.
Six exercises, three of them spoken.
The day's arrival, greeted by someone — and the greeting is itself Mandarin: 早上好 lands every morning before any lesson teaches it. Her small talk is curriculum. And she never guilts: five days away gets 好久不见 and the same warm face — the anti-Duolingo, by rule.
zǎoshang hǎo — good morning
Two separable asks. First: open three lesson-loop rooms — the take moment, the result surface, lesson complete — under the law demonstrated above: verdicts live in UI chrome; Mai reacts in the quiet register — a glad face-beat for a green, a small head shake for an amber, a neutral warm idle beside any standing verdict; she is never sad, never disappointed, and every reaction resolves to warmth within a second. Loud celebration is marketing-only. Everything here runs on the existing corpus and the programmatic motion pipeline — no new art was made for this page. Second, separately decidable: the path's arrival greeting — she greets the day in Mandarin, time-aware, and a return after absence is welcomed (好久不见), never mourned. One standing boundary either way: conversation scenes stay Mei's — Mai never enters the partner's room. If the product team says no to either ask, §5.4c stands and nothing ships; a yes walks the loop before any mock changes.