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

One relay-family part, carried home in the pack. It has three possible uses and they compete: it can stay in the rig for the next sortie, it can power the packing bench, or it can power the rig Dorn has built. It is one object and it can only be in one place.

*(Proposed fiction.)* Yeva is at the packing bench. The compressor head is installed and dark, and a lead lies loose beside it where a relay would go. She has done the work; what is missing is power routing.

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

Neither of them asks first. Both look at the pack.

**Yeva wants the bench powered.** She installed the head and worked out the routing to the ship's supply. Powered, the bench packs more of each canister's charge into usable form, which is reach on every later sortie. Ship oxygen is unlimited; this is not about making more of it, but about how much of a filled canister the astronaut can actually spend.

**Dorn wants to know whether the section he sealed held.** His rig couples to a hull sensor line and puts it in a headset. He built it himself and has been waiting on one part.

**What the rig can actually tell him, and what it cannot.** It carries pressure movement: whether something behind the seal is moving air, and roughly where along the run. That is all. It does not say what is there, whether the section is safe to open, or whether the seal held in the sense he means it. He says so before the player asks — he wants to listen anyway.

**And each has already given to the other's work.** Dorn services the packing gear once it runs; the bench does not stay working without him. The housing carries an old maintenance card of his, crew names crossed out, and it was Yeva who asked him to leave them rather than polish them off.

Seating the relay is a deliberate act at either place, and it can be pulled out again: the thing goes dark and the part returns to the pack. What it cannot do is be aboard and in the rig at once. Leave it in either seat and the astronaut departs without it.

**The two payoffs behave differently, and the difference is not arbitrary.** Dorn's is knowledge: once he has listened, he knows what he heard, and pulling the relay afterwards takes nothing back. Yeva's is capability: the bench only packs densely while it is powered, so removing the relay stops the benefit — though canisters already packed keep the charge they were packed with, and go out in the pack as they are.

**So a sequence is genuinely available.** Seat the relay in Dorn's rig, let him listen, pull it, seat it in the bench, pack a canister, pull it again and leave with the part. The article does not pretend this is forbidden in order to manufacture an exclusive choice. What it costs is the time aboard and the fact that the bench is dark again when the player goes.

**Postponement is a real answer.** Set the part down uncommitted and leave with it. Nothing degrades, nothing is deducted, and neither project is spoiled. Both wait, visibly unfinished, and the two of them go on with other work.

Later, unprompted, Dorn tells Yeva which of the crossed-out names he crossed out, and why.

She remembers that shift differently. Not dramatically — she simply says it was not like that, and describes what she recalls.

Neither account is corrected by the game. The player is left holding two attributed memories from two people who were both there, which is not the same as knowing what happened on this station. What the crew believed and what the station is remain separate things, and this scene settles nothing about the second.

If the player wants Yeva to know what Dorn heard through the headset, that is something someone has to say. It does not become common knowledge by having happened.

Concrete, and it follows from the part.

- **Relay left in the bench.** The astronaut leaves without it: denser canisters and more reach, but no relay in the rig and none to seat in a station fixture this trip.

- **Relay used in the rig, then reclaimed.** They leave carrying it, plus what Dorn heard — movement at a particular point along the sealed run — which makes one place worth going and does not say it is safe.

- **Postponed.** They leave with the part and no new information, which is a defensible trip.

The bench is the shared facility, and it is also two people's personal work: her routing, his servicing, his crossed-out names on the housing. The rig is Dorn's private question, and it becomes shared the moment he tells anyone. A personal project here involves others, and the communal one carries individuals in it.

**The choice this scene does make** is which kind of ask absorbs a lasting commitment. Dorn's payoff is knowledge, so it can be bought with a loan — the part comes back and what he learned stays. Yeva's is ongoing capability, so it has to be paid for by leaving the part behind. That is a reason drawn from what the two payoffs actually are, not a rule that personal asks must come before shared ones or that communities form in a fixed order.

**The strongest alternative** is to make the personal commitment the permanent one: the part seats irreversibly in Dorn's project and is gone. Its case is real — a gift that can be taken back may weigh less than one that cannot, and permanence is the clearest way to make a commitment feel like one. It is a coherent design and it would change this scene's texture more than its structure.

**Accepted costs.** Reclaimability may drain the decision of weight, which is the alternative's whole point against it. The asymmetry between the two payoffs may read as convenient rather than natural. Bespoke wants and dialogue states do not compose across a growing cast. All three are anticipated costs, not measured ones, and nothing here shows that a canister packed by someone who knows the player is felt differently from one that is not.

**What would reopen the choice.** If loans read as free, the permanent variant is better. If people begin to read as stations that dispense benefits, the answer is fewer projects that want scarce parts, not more ceremony around them.

How much material the colony absorbs over time, which is a colony-economy question and out of scope; whose account of the crossed-out name is right, which the design does not adjudicate; the station's own history, untouched; and what Dorn eventually decides to do about the section he sealed.