2026-09-08 14:42:51
Anonymous:
Owner selected shift Option 3: bound connections persist through shifts with a station-wide late puzzle; status corrected and steering placed beneath the selected direction
hold the flood/hospital story directions.md ..
@@ 1,6 1,8 @@
# Hold The Horde — Hospital Story Directions
-
**Status.** Two story options developing the owner's leading draft, for early reaction. Neither is canon, no shift topology or player penalty is selected, and every detail remains open.
+
**Status.** Two story options developing the owner's leading draft, for early reaction. Neither is canon and no player penalty is selected.
+
+
The shift *approach* is no longer open: the owner chose that certain actions **connect rooms into groups that stay connected through shifts**, and asked that connecting the whole station this way be one of the game's deepest and latest puzzles. What remains open is how links are discovered and made, which connections qualify, how unconnected areas keep shifting, and what completing the station-wide connection does to later shifts. Both options below are compatible with that direction and neither depends on a particular mechanism for it.
## What both options share
@@ 67,7 69,7 @@
**Shifts with a direction, and their cost.** The collar cycle re-seats fabric *toward the core*, since the engine reads each arrival as a candidate approaching. **Trigger:** the intake cycle. **Limits:** movable builders' fabric only. **Cost:** the station grows harder to cross without nearing the core, and repeated death accelerates it — though a carried regulator part damps the steering, so it can be declined.
-
**This is not a reason to prefer B.** Directed shifting does not require an empty core — a captive drawing architecture toward itself works equally well, and Option A can have it. Whether shifts wander or steer is a **map question, separable from the prisoner-versus-empty choice**, and should be answered on its own terms.
+
**This is not a reason to prefer B.** Directed shifting does not require an empty core — a captive drawing architecture toward itself works equally well, and Option A can have it. It is a map question separable from the prisoner-versus-empty choice, and it now sits beneath the owner's selected direction: whatever is bound stays bound, and steering describes only how the *unbound* remainder moves. Each option could motivate that steering differently — an engine seeking a candidate, or a captive pulling the station toward itself — and neither needs it.
**Both alien languages, and the survivor.** The builders' script, and **the departed one's**, which the engine reproduces: its structure names a candidate, so a player who learns it can read which name the engine currently holds. Yeva is as above, and her stake is that Dorn's name has started appearing.
