A face made of typed characters — nine rows of monospace text that blink, glance, talk and think.

Renders into a DOM <pre> element. No canvas, no WebGL, no images — the face is real selectable text.

What it can express

• A nine-row face, 15 columns wide — hair, brows, eyes, nose, mouth, chin, a blank, a caption row and a thought row — assembled as one string and centred to a fixed 15-column grid
• Six mouth glyphs that actually fire — three closed ('‿' smiling, '⌒' downturned, '‗' neutral) and three open ('o' for the oh vowel, '═' for ee, and 'O' when the mouth is wide open)
• Blink and horizontal gaze — blinking swaps the eyes to '─'; gaze shifts the pupil left or right in three discrete positions — there is no vertical gaze in the glyph
• Brows that lift — on or off — brows are binary: '/' and '\' when lifted, '_' and '_' when not. There is no partial raise and no per-side asymmetry
• Listening cheeks — the cheek brackets thicken from ' (' to '((' while the agent is listening — a whole-face state read at a glance
• Hair that reacts to loud speech — the hair row grows an extra '/\' when speaking with the mouth more than half open
• A thought bubble and an interrupt mark — '. o O ( … )' while thinking, '!' when interrupted
• A spoken-word ribbon — the last 26 characters of transcript ride under the face while speaking, showing the most recent 15
• The five agent states — idle, listening, thinking, speaking, interrupted — the same five every engine here speaks
• Selectable, copyable text — because the face is a <pre>, a visitor can select it, copy it and paste it anywhere — no other engine here can be pasted into a chat message

Moods: 25 protocol moods, folded onto two scalars — a smile bend and a brow lift — then resolved by the glyph table into roughly six distinguishable faces. A real mood layer, but a coarse one.

What it costs a device

Why light: It costs what an empty page costs. Nothing rebuilds geometry — the whole face is one diffed string assignment per frame into a <pre>, and the browser skips the write entirely when the text has not changed.

Dials it really exposes today

Try it

Honest limits

• Two of the eight mouth glyphs never appear. The f/v and m/b/p shapes read viseme keys the frame driver never produces, so those branches are dead on this path — six of eight reachable.
• Brows are on or off, and both move together. No partial lift, no raised single brow, no wink.
• The smile disappears while it talks. Mood only reaches the mouth in the closed-mouth branch, so through a whole spoken sentence the mouth is a viseme glyph and the only mood channel left is the brow lift.
• On the older bridge path (talk.html ?face=basic-ascii) the mood layer is dead — smile and surprise are passed as literal zeros, so all 25 moods collapse to one neutral mouth. Only the mount used by the Universal Stage carries moods.
• No seal/export door. Sketch, SVG and Kinetic can be sealed into a portable .alive.json from the Universal Stage; ASCII cannot. The ASCII wear gate exists only in staged-patches and is not live.
• Keeps animating when scrolled off-screen. Only the SVG engine pauses on offscreen/hidden; the shared frame driver re-arms its rAF loop unconditionally, so a card scrolled out of view still costs what the table says.
• You cannot load this engine alone. The mount contract statically imports every 2D engine, so ASCII, Sketch, SVG and Kinetic each pull the same ~299 KB module graph — measured byte-identical across all four.

Numbers are software-renderer numbers. Measured 2026-08-04 on the estate box (18 vCPU, load 2.8–5.3 during the run) under chromium_headless_shell-1232 + SwiftShader, 3 runs per cell, median reported. SwiftShader rasterizes on the CPU, so a real phone GPU changes the picture — most of all for 3D. Read the ordering between engines, not the absolute figures. Evidence for every claim: CARD-FACTS.md. Harness: work/measure-engines.mjs.