3.9.x: spell trails fly to targets, fight playout Skip controls, first-time intros across the base

Spell casts have visible trajectory. When a hero or enemy casts, a sparkle trail tinted by the caster's school color flies from their cell to each affected cell. AoE casts spray one stream per targeted square with a small stagger; heals stream to each healed hero's current cell. Fires on both planning recording and playback. Pure moves and Skip Attack don't emit anything — the visual is specifically a cast signal so the field stays readable.

Fight playout has real controls now. Auto-advances every 500ms by default (was tap-to-advance every step), plus two new explicit controls: Skip stage advances past the current playback stage; Skip all jumps straight to the end. Lets you blow through repeated playback when you already know the outcome instead of tapping through every micro-frame. Elemental-strain stat pulses and dead-unit pickup visuals also got fixes in this pass.

Combat planning fixes a small but annoying edge. Move a hero, then Skip Attack — Skip Attack used to stay visible and Cancel Move used to disappear, leaving the hero locked into the skip with no undo. Now Skip Attack hides as soon as you've committed (skipped or cast), and Cancel Move stays available regardless. Also: the battle scene no longer gets stuck in an end-of-scene loop after a multi-fight win (the scene-end check was misfiring on multi-fight scenes).

The Materials and Aspects tiles on the hero popup — the two entry points into the spell-crafting economy — stay "Opens soon" until Maya finishes a craft using the Heal effect sigil. Once that fires, the next tap on either tile triggers a one-shot Maya intro dialogue (id 128 for Materials, 129 for Aspects), then the panel opens normally. Tutorial flags across the client are unified into the same set, and bazar / arena entry intros run for the first visit each — with Maya, Tara, and Grey hints scripted in.

Polish across the board: a Back vs Close distinction on hero-popup back/close buttons (Close exits; Back returns to the previous panel), an alchemy highlight fix, Grey's VS-screen banner art, crafting-popup layout fixes for iOS, a dialogue typo pass, the teahouse_mid background asset, teahouse and library/bazar trigger nudges.