**Status.** A provisional proposal for review, not owner-approved. It follows one ordinary return aboard and the departure after it. Example fiction is labelled. No colony economy, cast roster, upkeep, timer, staffing rule or permanent loss is proposed, and nothing here is evidence that any of it is affecting.

A cooperative preparation scene. The player comes home with a relay-family part; two people have work that a relay would finish; and the part can be lent, used and taken back. **Nothing is consumed and nothing is given up but time aboard.** This article does not claim the scene contains a scarce material sacrifice, and does not invent a delay, a consumption or an obligation to create one.

What it is for is the other thing: what a return is like when nobody is extracting anything from the player.

*(Proposed fiction.)* Yeva is at the packing bench. The compressor head is installed and dark, a lead lying loose where a relay would go. She did the installation and worked out the routing; what is missing is power.

Dorn is on a crate a few paces off with something he has built from scrap — a tap, a line, a headset — and another lead waiting.

Neither asks first. Both look at the pack.

**Yeva wants the bench powered.** Powered, it packs more of each canister's charge into usable form. Ship oxygen is unlimited; this is about how much of a filled canister the astronaut can actually spend, and the improvement travels in the canisters themselves.

**Dorn wants to know whether the section he sealed held.** He built the rig and has been waiting on one part.

**Each has already given to the other's work.** Dorn serviced the packing gear, which is why it runs at all, and he is the person aboard who knows how to operate it in this scene. That is his contribution, not a maintenance schedule: nothing decays, nothing lapses, and who staffs what in general is not settled here.

The bench housing carries an old maintenance card of his with crew names crossed out. Yeva asked him to leave them rather than polish them off.

**The signal path.** The station's docking collar carries service lines, including a low-rate monitoring bus. Dorn's rig taps that bus at the collar and addresses one channel on it: the pressure sense at a single interlock panel. He knows that panel's address because he serviced it himself.

**What it gives.** One pressure value at one addressed point, and whether it is steady.

**What it does not give.** Not motion, not cause, not direction, not the condition of the seal as a whole, and nothing about whether anything is safe to open. One sensor at one place.

**What he observes and says.** The value is not flat. It drifts and returns, which he says a sealed dead volume should not do. He also says, unprompted, that a failing sensor looks exactly the same from here, and that he cannot tell the difference from this side.

**What that gives the player.** One bounded next objective: go to that panel and find out whether the sensor itself is faulty. That is a checkable errand at a known place, not a verdict about the section.

Seating the relay at either place is a deliberate act, and pulling it out returns the part. The two results both persist once obtained: what Dorn heard stays heard, and canisters packed while the bench was powered keep the charge they were packed with and go out in the pack as they are, occupying their normal carrying capacity.

**So the ordinary outcome is that the player gets all of it.** Seat the relay in the rig, listen; move it to the bench, pack; take it back and go. This is a valid use of one tool and it is the expected path, not an exploit the design tolerates.

- **Listened, packed, reclaimed.** The relay is in the rig with its usual expedition uses available; the pack holds canisters that were packed dense; the player carries Dorn's reading and its caveat. Cost: time aboard.

Not one scene standing in for every case. A few attributed lines and actions:

- **Lent and reclaimed.** Dorn pulls the relay and hands it back himself rather than leaving the player to retrieve it, and thanks them for the loan specifically rather than for a gift. Yeva, at the bench, says the canisters are his work as much as hers.

The crossed-out-name conversation happens on its own terms. Dorn eventually tells Yeva which name was his doing and why; she remembers that shift differently and says so. Neither account is corrected, and it is not conditional on the player having paid for anything. Two people who were both there remember it differently, which is not knowledge of what happened on this station.

If the player wants Yeva to know what Dorn heard, someone has to say it. Nothing becomes shared by having happened.

The bench is the shared facility and also two people's personal work: her routing, his servicing, his crossed-out names on the housing. The rig is Dorn's private question until he tells someone. A personal project here involves others, and the communal one carries individuals in it, so this scene does not divide cleanly and is not built to.

Whether that sensor is faulty; whose account of the crossed-out name is right, which the design does not adjudicate; how much material the colony absorbs over time, which is a colony-economy question and out of scope; and the station's own history, untouched.