Keeper of the Charter
Somebody asked you a question. Charter Street has eight doors on it and every one of them is open. You carry six instruments, and the only thing that decides whether you get an answer is whether the instrument you present reaches the body you present it to. Walk it in 3D or read the identical block in text.
There is no subpoena in your kit, and that is deliberate. The design note for this game put one there — a “Subpoena Hook” among the items. A member of the public cannot subpoena anybody. That power belongs to courts and to legislatures, and a game that hands one to a player teaches a false civics to exactly the reader this project exists to equip — the sort of error that walks somebody into a records office believing they can compel a person to appear. Your kit is the six levers a real person may actually use.
Nothing here is a dungeon and nobody here is a monster. No door is locked. Nobody is hostile. A records office withholding under one of nine statutory exemptions is obeying a statute, not guarding treasure, and a clerk who refers you elsewhere has done their job correctly. A game where you defeat an agency teaches that government is an adversary to be overcome, which is the opposite of what these levers are: they are entitlements, with clocks the body owes you.
One of these questions cannot be answered. Every instrument on this block reaches a public body. A private company’s internal reasoning is not a public record, not a federal award, not a rulemaking docket and not a lobbying filing. Concluding that no lever reaches a question is a full ending here, because a game where every question yields would teach that transparency law is stronger than it is — and send a real person out expecting doors that do not exist.
The question you were asked
The city council awarded a contract without an open bid. Who signed it?
Charter Street
A wide street with eight doors on it. Every one of them holds records somebody is entitled to see. None of them is locked, and none of them will hand you anything you asked for the wrong way.
A real answer, not a giving-up button. One of these questions cannot be reached by any instrument here, and saying so is the correct finding for it.
This is a game about which lever reaches which body. It is not legal advice. If you have a real matter with real stakes, talk to a lawyer. The procedures themselves — every step, every deadline beside the statute it comes from, and everything each one cannot show — are at /transparency.
Every instrument’s reach, clock, cost and limit is generated from the same record the Transparency Toolkit runs on, so the game cannot drift from it. Nothing here is scored, saved, sent anywhere or compared to anybody, and there is no timer beyond the one in the round. This is a game about which lever reaches which body and it is not legal advice — if you have a real matter, talk to a lawyer. For the procedures themselves, with every numbered step, every deadline beside the statute it comes from, and everything each one cannot show, go to the Transparency Toolkit.