VISUAL QA — checked against companion.md "Known drift" table
============================================================
All three candidates: RECOMMEND DENY. None is promotable.

candidate-A  (point / thumbs-up / shrug / think)   512x512, 77.4s
  FAIL  Legs and feet on all four      <- sheet4 defect, recurred
  FAIL  Ears/horns on head             <- "No ears" in style block
  FAIL  Not the pebble silhouette; reads as a bear/panda
  FAIL  Gradients and shading throughout
  FAIL  Desaturated grey-teal, off palette
  FAIL  Requested poses not legible; all four near-identical
  WARN  Characters nearly touching - gap instruction partly ignored
  PASS  No text anywhere

candidate-B  (heart / tablet / sparkle / welcome)  512x512, 72.5s
  FAIL  Wrong creature entirely - horned, snouted, clawed, teeth
  FAIL  Legs, feet and claws
  FAIL  Gradient background
  FAIL  None of the four props rendered (no heart, tablet, sparkle)
  FAIL  All four poses identical
  PASS  No text anywhere

candidate-C  (first capability test)               512x512, 19.4s
  FAIL  Garbled text across the lower frame  <- hard rule 4 breach
  FAIL  Legs and feet
  FAIL  Gradients and shading
  FAIL  Off-palette

Common cause: the img2img reference holds LAYOUT (four-up row) but not
IDENTITY. The model substitutes its own creature and ignores the
negative constraints (no legs, no ears, no gradients) that the whole
style block exists to enforce.

Not generated: two 768x768 runs of the same two sheets were queued at
the same time and sat ~245 deep against a 900s server-side cancel.

candidate-D  icbinp-xl (point/thumbs-up/shrug/think)  512x512, 99.2s
  FAIL  3D RENDER - specular highlights, soft form shading, cast
        shadows, depth. Breaches RULE ZERO ("if a viewer could believe
        a camera made it, we don't use it"), despite an explicit
        "NOT a photograph / no 3D render / no depth of field" block.
        This is the model doing what it is built for.
  FAIL  No arms at all - so none of the four poses exist
  FAIL  Wrong face: one large eye plus one small dot, no smile
  FAIL  No belly patch
  FAIL  All four figures identical
  PASS  No legs, no feet        <- first candidate to get this right
  PASS  No ears
  PASS  No text
  PASS  Teal roughly on-palette, pebble-ish silhouette

  Note: adding photoreal negatives did NOT suppress the photoreal
  register. A photoreal checkpoint renders photoreally; prompt-level
  negation does not override what the weights are tuned for.

FINAL TALLY — AI Horde session, 1 Oct 2026
==========================================
~16 submissions -> 4 images -> 0 promotable.
  3  wiped by a tools-mcp restart (job state is in-memory only)
  2  wiped by a second restart
  5  refused outright on kudos (403, zero balance)
  3  cancelled at 901s (two vector-art 768, one sdxl 1024)
  4  completed: candidates A-D, all denied

Same day, agy / gemini-3.1-flash-image:
  2 submissions -> 2 sheets -> 8 poses -> both promotable, ~2 min each.

Conclusion: the free Horde tier is not a substitute for agy for this
character. Its failures are structural (kudos wall, in-memory job
state, unbounded queue), not prompt-level.