**Status.** A provisional proposal for review, not owner-approved. It works one limited, local discovery across three visits: what the player can observe, what they may reasonably think, what would settle it, and what changes afterwards. Example fiction is labelled. Nothing here answers revival, the station's history or the escape, and no alphabet or language system is designed. This is one chain about one kind of inscription; it is not one of the brief's two alien languages, and the relay/sink/isolator service stamps are not either.

*(Proposed fiction.)* **Wall strings**: short runs of cut alien signs, three to five characters, on plain wall surfaces. They are the builders' work, not the crew's painted copies, and unlike the service stamps they sit on *walls* rather than on components. What they say is not proposed here. What the player can learn is where they appear and where they do not.

**Observed.** In a junction, a wall string cut beside a closed pressure door. Fifty paces on, the same string on blank wall with no door, no machinery and nothing else marked.

**Plausible readings.** It names the place. It labels the door. It warns of something. It marks something not currently visible.

The second instance weakens "labels the door", but does not kill it: a door could have been removed, or a string could refer to a door further along. That is the honest state of the evidence after one visit, and the design does not resolve it here.

**Records.** The journal holds a framed facsimile and the location. The reading — which of the four it might be — is the player's own note, and the journal never holds it.

**Observed.** A third instance, where a wall panel has been removed and left off. Behind it runs a duct, large enough to move through. Returning to the second instance with that in mind, the same seam pattern is visible in the blank wall: a panel, still in place.

**Physical states, precisely.** At instance three the panel is *off* and the duct behind is open and continuous. At instance two the panel is *on*, and whether anything lies behind it is unknown until it is opened. At instance one the panel beside the door is on.

**Revised readings.** The string marks a duct behind the wall. Or it marks a passage. Or it says something about the wall itself and the ducts are incidental.

**The test the player can now run.** Both surviving readings predict things. Open the panel at instance two: is there a duct? Find a duct entrance elsewhere with no string: does that break the rule? This is where the chain stops being observation and becomes a prediction the player can be wrong about.

**Observed.** Two findings that matter, and they point the same way.

First: a wall with a duct plainly behind it — audible, visible through a grille — and **no string**. So "a string means a duct" is wrong.

Second: at every stringed instance the player has opened, the duct behind can be entered *and* leads somewhere reachable. At the unstringed duct, the run is welded closed a short way in.

**What is earned.** Not merely that a guess was wrong. The strings mark walls that can be *gone through* — access, not ducting. That is a positive, useful reading built from a correlation the player tested rather than a translation they were handed.

**And it reinterprets what was already seen.** Instance one was never about the door. A string beside a closed pressure door means the wall next to it is a way past. Every string already recorded becomes a candidate route, including ones walked past without interest.

**Residual ambiguity, stated honestly.** "Access" is well supported but not uniquely proven. A real rival survives: the strings might mark walls a maintenance team was responsible for, which would correlate with access without meaning it. What would distinguish them is available in the world — find a string on a wall with no duct and no way through but other maintenance evidence, and the rival gains; find accesses consistently stringed regardless of who maintained them, and it loses. The chain does not claim to have run that test.

**Before.** The long service route is walked corridor by corridor, and its jammed pressure door costs a run of world-time stages under whatever pressure the area supplies.

**After.** A string recorded two visits earlier sits on a wall short of that door. The player packs the cutter for panel work rather than an extra module, takes the crawlway, and comes out past the jam.

**Motivation.** A shorter route, less exposure, and the oxygen the door stages would have cost.

**If the prediction fails.** The panel comes off and the duct is collapsed, or welded, or leads somewhere sealed. The player has spent the detour's oxygen and time and must fall back to the door with less margin than if they had gone straight there. One failure does not overturn the reading — a well-supported correlation survives a case that does not fit — but it adds a real qualification: some accesses are no longer usable, and a string is a claim about the builders' intent, not a guarantee about the station's present state.

**A revelation that needs no reward.** The strings also say something about the builders: they moved through their walls routinely enough to mark it as ordinary. That is worth knowing for a player who never uses a crawlway, and it is not paid out in capability.

The chain does not depend on order. A player who never records instance one can begin at the open panel, where the duct is plain, and the "duct" reading arrives immediately — but the access refinement still needs the negative case, so the chain completes the same way with its steps in a different sequence. Strings recur at several sites under fixed geometry, so nothing is lost permanently by walking past one. What order changes is which hypothesis the player holds first, not whether the chain can be finished.

Shown the facsimiles aboard, Dorn says the crew called these crawl marks and used them to get around when the main runs were blocked. They never knew what the signs said; they knew what they meant in practice.

That is reliable, limited and true. It confirms the access reading without deciding where the player should go, what the signs literally say, or which crawlway is worth the oxygen. It is also not a gate: a player who never asks reaches the same conclusion from the panels and the welded duct. Help here shortens the road; it does not own it.

**Survivor-led interpretation**, where the decisive step is a survivor reading the strings rather than the player testing them.

Its case is real. It is far more reliable — no player stalls at visit two — it gives the colony a visible role in discovery, and authored dialogue can carry nuance that physical evidence cannot. It need not be a mandatory gate either; the same content can be offered rather than required.

The reason to prefer player-led is narrower than "gates are bad": it is that the *decisive* evidence should be something the player can be wrong about. The failed prediction above is only meaningful because the player made the claim. If a survivor supplies the reading, visit three becomes verification of something already true, and the discovery stops being theirs.

**Provisional choice:** player-led evidence, with truthful and limited survivor help available throughout.

**Accepted costs.** Redundant authored instances — several stringed sites, at least one unstringed duct and one unusable access — plus dialogue for more than one knowledge state. A player who never compares can stall, and the redundancy is what stops that being fatal. Both are content cost, and none of it is measured.

**What would reopen this.** Evidence that the physical distinction between the stringed and unstringed ducts is not readable in play without dialogue. Then survivor readings should carry the decisive step, and the honest response is to say so rather than to keep a deduction players cannot make.

What the strings actually say; who cut them; whether the maintenance rival survives testing; the second alien language, untouched here; and the revival, history and escape questions, none of which this chain approaches.