Every way a person ends up in a room with a cast, and the one creation-time control. A chat is a room: a persona cast, one or more humans, one model voicing the cast. What differs between the doors is only who picks the cast — you, the room, or the persona you were already looking at.
| door | who picks the cast | where it is |
|---|---|---|
| New chat | you — hand-pick from the library with the fuzzy search and the “Try searching” terms | the head button → New chat |
| Call the panel | the room — describe your situation and it curates a panel you can edit | the head button → Call the panel |
| Message | the persona — you were reading its page; the chat is 1:1 with that seat | the persona page's Message button — greyed, with a reason, when the persona is private to you |
| Invite · share · scan | a person — brings a human into a room that already exists | chat info, or the same menu's Add contact / Scan; see Who can reach whom |
There is one door, and it is the same door on every root: a single button in the head — ✎ on Chats, ＋ elsewhere — opening a four-item menu, New chat · Call the panel · Add contact · Scan. The first two make a chat, the last two are about people. It asks rather than deciding: hand-picking a cast and describing what you want are different intents, not one act with a default. The landing's 「Call the panel」capsule, its muted wide twin and the composer under it were all retired 2026-08-08, so the affordance sits in the corner every messenger keeps it in.
The one dial at creation is Character vividness — how vividly each persona plays itself, three notches, baked into the cached prefix. The old Temperament dial was retired: conflict is the floor producer's call now, steered in plain language.
All three modes are sub-pages now, not cards: full screen on narrow, the right pane on wide, the one shared ‹ in the corner. Call the panel gives you removable rows with the reason on the right, three panels a tap apart, and the dial folded behind Advanced; New chat is the library picker with its fuzzy search. The convene glyph — an arrow into three heads — is the one mark that says this makes a panel, not a message.
Nothing scored. What a harness here would check: the seating door (every create · invite · moment-join endpoint requires each slug be discoverable by the seater — built in v399, never put under a battery), the panel the convene step curates against a fixed set of situations, and the cast cap.