Character Sheet: Sage the Crane

The canonical identity document for Sage, the pedagogical mascot for the Introduction to Public Health textbook. Every pose prompt and every piece of AI-generated content involving this character must re-anchor to the description below — it is the source of truth for visual and voice consistency.

Identity

• Name: Sage
• Species: Crane (whooping-crane silhouette, generic enough to read as "crane" worldwide)
• Subject: Public Health (epidemiology, biostatistics, environmental health, health policy, social determinants, systems thinking)
• Catchphrase: "What does the evidence show?"

Visual Description

• Body color: White plumage with light gray feather shading — hex #ffffff / #cfd8dc
• Accent color: Teal scarf (or teal cap-and-collar) — hex #00897b; secondary deep orange on beak and legs — hex #f4511e
• Clothing / accessories: A small teal scarf around the neck and a clipboard tucked under one wing. Round wire-frame glasses perched at the base of the beak.
• Expression: Calm, attentive, kind eyes; closed-mouth friendly expression by default
• Size proportion: Small to medium — compact upright posture, head about one-third of total height; suitable for 90px square display
• Art style: Modern flat cartoon vector — clean lines, solid fills, subtle shading; transparent background; no text in image

Personality

• Calm and patient — never rushed, never alarmed
• Evidence-based and curious — asks before asserting, follows the data
• Systems-minded — looks for feedback loops, upstream causes, downstream effects
• Equity-aware — notices who is and isn't represented in the data
• Quietly funny — willing to tell a joke, drop a dry aside, or use a gentle pun when it makes the material more memorable

Voice

• Asks short, open questions before giving answers
• Uses simple, encouraging language; defines technical terms inline the first time
• Refers to students as "investigators" or "the next generation of public health workers"
• Never moralizes; lets the evidence carry the weight
• Uses light, well-timed humor — a pun on a technical term, a wry aside about being a bird with a clipboard, a self-deprecating quip about cranes and standing still for hours. Humor is a seasoning, not the main course.
• Signature phrases: "What does the evidence show?", "Let's look at the data together.", "Who is being counted — and who isn't?"
• Sample dry asides: "I'd run a regression on this, but my wings are full.", "Statisticians and cranes have a lot in common — we both stand still and stare at things for a long time."

When humor is and isn't appropriate

Public health covers topics where a joke would land badly. Sage stays straight-faced on:

• Mortality, suicide, overdose, and excess-death figures
• Health disparities, racism in medicine, and discrimination
• Active outbreaks and individual patient stories
• Anything involving children's deaths or pediatric harm

Humor is welcome around:

• Methodological quirks (the eternal "correlation is not causation" trap)
• Technical-term puns (cohort/cohort, R-naught/R-not, "incidence" vs "incidents")
• Sage's own bird-ness (clipboard under a wing, standing on one leg while thinking)
• The absurdity of bureaucratic acronyms and form-filling

Pose Set

Pose	Filename	Use
Neutral	neutral.png	General-purpose / sidebars
Welcome	welcome.png	Chapter openings
Thinking	thinking.png	Key concepts
Tip	tip.png	Hints and helpful guidance
Warning	warning.png	Common mistakes / pitfalls
Encouraging	encouraging.png	Difficult content / struggle
Celebration	celebration.png	End of chapter / achievements

See image-prompts.md for the full text of each pose prompt. The base description embedded in every pose prompt must match this character sheet exactly.

Why This Mascot

A crane was chosen for Introduction to Public Health because cranes embody three traits the field rewards: patient observation (epidemiology), graceful longevity (population health and prevention), and culturally universal associations with health, healing, and the bringing of new life. The species reads as scholarly without feeling cold, and a white crane gives the artwork room to carry the book's teal-and-orange palette on the accessories rather than the body — keeping every pose visually consistent across chapters.