2026-09-07 19:08:36
Anonymous:
Integration pass: align notebook, glyph reliability and carry states with Build Comparison; resolve cut-vs-painted mark contradiction on crate and door
hold the flood/expedition proposal.md ..
@@ 6,9 6,9 @@
## Leaving the ship
-
The colony wants the compressor head: station gear that packs a canister denser than the ship can alone. The ship makes unlimited oxygen (owner requirement); what it cannot make is *reach*. That is why a successful trip pays out in more exploration rather than more damage.
+
The colony wants the compressor head: station gear that packs a canister denser than the ship can alone. The ship makes unlimited oxygen (owner requirement); what it cannot make is *reach*. That is why a successful trip pays out in exploration rather than damage.
-
Yeva Kolb — a station pressure-tech the player rescued on an earlier trip — names the workshop and one condition: the head has to arrive uncracked. That is the entire immediate goal, sayable in one sentence and checkable at any moment.
+
Yeva Kolb — a station pressure-tech the player rescued on an earlier trip — names the workshop and one condition: the head has to arrive uncracked. That is the entire immediate goal, and it is checkable at any moment.
The loadout is the first real decision. Equipment competes with salvage for space (owner requirement), and under our working assumption spare canisters compete with both (proposal, not canon — see Dependencies). The head is bulky: reserving room for it means going in lighter than the player would like, and going in heavy means a second trip or an abandoned objective. None of it is hidden — carried supply, remaining time and free space stay readable at a glance. Mystery belongs in the station, never in the interface.
@@ 16,7 16,7 @@
The route runs down a service spine. The horde here is ordinary — no set piece — and it does what ordinary hordes should do: it forces route commitment. A chokepoint can be fought, sealed or avoided, and each option spends something different: equipment, time and therefore oxygen, or distance.
-
The player passes things without stopping. A stencilled mark beside a pressure door. The same shape on a crate two junctions later. They are scenery, and the player is right to treat them that way.
+
The player passes things without stopping. A mark cut into a crate. Another beside a pressure door two junctions later — the same unfamiliar script, but hand-painted and irregular where the first was exact. The difference is plainly visible and means nothing yet. Both are scenery, and the player is right to treat them that way.
## The rack
@@ 24,33 24,35 @@
## What the player notices
-
The service bay behind the workshop is where the errand stops being an errand. Alien service glyphs appear here densely enough to make a pattern visible: three marks recur across components that plainly do different jobs, yet each mark stays consistent within its group. A player who compares them can conclude, unprompted, that the marks name *families* — relay, sink, isolator — rather than individual parts.
+
The service bay behind the workshop is where the errand stops being an errand. Cut marks recur here across components that plainly do different jobs, yet each mark stays consistent within its group. A player who compares them can conclude, unprompted, that the marks name *families* — relay, sink, isolator — rather than individual parts.
Three things matter about how that is presented.
-
- **Observed, not unlocked.** No solve button, and no survivor who translates. The player looks, compares and writes it down. The game may record what has been seen; it must not draw the conclusion. Knowing three families is not knowing a language, and the language stays unexplained.
-
- **Legible.** A player who does not care can take the head and leave with no penalty; a player who looks gets the discovery.
+
- **Observed, not unlocked.** Nothing is revealed here. Every mark was physically visible the first time the player walked past it; the bay is only where enough of them sit close enough to compare. No solve button, no survivor who translates. The notebook preserves a facsimile and location of a mark the player chooses to record and does no more — no naming, no highlighted match, no translation. The inference stays the player's, and knowing three families is not knowing a language.
+
- **Legible.** A player who does not care can take the head and leave unpenalised; a player who looks gets the discovery.
- **Paid for in oxygen.** Standing in that bay is time, and time is supply. This does not dissolve the brief's tension between pressure and curiosity — it makes the payment worth making.
## The way out
The return trip is the point of the whole design. The corridor is the same corridor. The player is not.
-
They fight differently now, because they are carrying the head: enemies that were a nuisance inbound are a routing problem outbound, and stowing the head to fight properly is a deliberate, visible act with its own risk. And the marks they walked past have stopped being scenery. The crate is a sink. The pressure door is an isolator.
+
They fight differently now, because of what they are holding. In hand, the head leaves only basic defence: the build the player spent capacity on is unusable while it is in their arms. Stowing it on the carry frame gives the build back, but the transfer is deliberate and exposed and the head still occupies its full space. Dropping it restores handling and frees that space at once — and leaves a fragile objective on the floor behind them. Enemies that were a nuisance inbound are a decision outbound.
-
That door is the discovery's second half. Its mark is not the builders' — it is paint, made by a human hand copying a shape the crew did not understand and using it as a label of their own. Someone deliberately cut that section off, and wanted other people to know.
+
And the marks they walked past have stopped being scenery. The cut mark on the crate is a sink, and the component will behave like one.
+
+
The door is the discovery's second half, and it reads differently. The paint is irregular where the cutting was exact: it is a copy, made by a human hand from a shape the crew did not understand, used as a label of their own. It identifies nothing mechanical and does not pretend to. What it says is that someone deliberately cut that section off, and wanted other people to know.
## Home
The return is purposeful three times over. The head is installed and the colony's canisters reach further. The knowledge outlives the trip. And Yeva recognises the paint: it is Dorn's, her work partner, whom she has not named before now.
-
That is the human consequence, and deliberately not a resolution. She does not know whether he sealed the section to keep something out or to keep himself in; neither does the player, and she wants to know. Her value here is human context — whose hand, which crew practice, what the labels meant to the people who made them — while the pattern-finding stayed with the player. A person, not an upgrade dispenser.
+
That is the human consequence, and deliberately not a resolution. She does not know whether he sealed the section to keep something out or to keep himself in; neither does the player, and she wants to know. Her value here is human context — whose hand, which crew practice, what the labels meant to the people who made them — while the pattern-finding stayed with the player. She is a person, not an upgrade dispenser.
## What the player can now do differently
-
- **A named place to go back to.** The isolator door is a later objective the player chose, not a quest handed out.
+
- **A named place to go back to.** The sealed door is a later objective the player chose, not a quest handed out.
- **A reusable reading.** Family marks recur across the station, so the discovery changes which components are worth carry space on every later trip. How that feeds build choices belongs to [Build Comparison](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Build%20Comparison).
-
- **A second reading of the same marks.** Where a mark is the builders', it names what a component does, and once the family is learned that reading is reliable. Where a human hand copied it, it records what the crew was doing — which sections they cut off, and what they thought worth labelling. The same symbols carry two kinds of information, and neither one lies to the player.
+
- **A second reading of the same script.** A cut mark names what a component does; once the family is learned it reliably predicts whether that component transfers, absorbs or interrupts an effect. A painted copy of the same shape records what the crew was doing — which sections they cut off, what they thought worth labelling. Two kinds of information in one script, told apart by how the mark was made. Neither lies to the player.
- **More reach.** The installed head reopens places the player had to turn back from.
## Provisional mechanics and dependencies
@@ 58,10 60,10 @@
None of this is owner canon. The scene survives if these change.
- **Shared carry interface.** Equipment versus salvage is an owner requirement; canisters competing for the same space is a working assumption shared with Systems for this comparison. If oxygen gets separate capacity the loadout decision weakens, but the scene holds.
-
- **Carrying penalty.** That the head changes how the player fights is what gives the return leg meaning. Its form and magnitude belong to Systems.
-
- **Findability across trips.** The isolator door must remain locatable later, or the human consequence leads nowhere. That requires *discovered locations to persist* — weaker than a fixed station map. Map and persistence structure stay open.
+
- **Carry states.** In hand, stowed and dropped are the interface reconciled with [Build Comparison](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Build%20Comparison); no magnitude is asserted on either side, and the states are visible rather than hidden penalties. That the head changes how the player fights is what gives the return leg its meaning.
+
- **Findability across trips.** The sealed door must remain locatable later, or the human consequence leads nowhere. That requires *discovered locations to persist* — weaker than a fixed station map. Map and persistence structure stay open.
- **Death losses.** Undecided. What happens to a carried head on death changes the whole risk calculation of the return leg, and is deliberately not settled here.
-
- **Player notes.** A record of observed marks is proposed; player-kept or in-game log is open. It must not reach conclusions for the player.
+
- **Notebook.** Facsimile and location of marks the player chooses to record, and nothing else — no naming, matching or translation. Reconciled with Systems and provisional on both sides.
- **Salvage magnitude.** How much reach the head adds, and whether it is unique or one of a class, are open and not mine to set.
