This page works one local discovery across three visits: what the player can observe, what they may reasonably think, what would settle it, and what changes afterwards. The wall strings are distinct from the relay/sink/isolator service-family notation. These strings may be a fragment of an alien language.

**Wall strings**: short runs of cut alien signs, three to five characters, on plain wall surfaces. They belong to the original fabric of the station, distinct from crew paint. The player sees them on *walls* rather than on components. What the player can learn is where they appear and where they do not.

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.

**Records.** Capturing the facsimile happens while the game runs; reading back what is already stored, and inspecting the frozen visible view, happen paused. The journal holds the framed facsimile and its location, while which of the four readings the player favours lives in their own notes, in their own words, and is never promoted to fact by the game. [Clues and Help](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Clues%20and%20Help) describes note contents; [Language and Journal](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Language%20and%20Journal) covers comparison and annotation tools.

**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 what lies behind it is unknown until it comes off. At instance one the panel beside the door is on.

**The decision.** Take the crawlway, or walk to the door. Nothing is swapped in the loadout to do it: the cutter is part of the suit and cannot be left behind, so no carried tool trades against a module. The choice weighs potential savings in route length, exposure and door-work time against the panel work and the cost of an unsuccessful detour.

**If it fails.** The run pinches out, or is collapsed, or ends at a weld, and the *cause is visible* where it stops, so the player learns something rather than being told no. They have spent the detour's oxygen. Trying the door, retreating or seeking another option depends on current route state, threats and remaining supply.

Failure lowers confidence in the specific route prediction. Visible later damage may explain a blocked passage; without such evidence, other interpretations remain live.

The chain's inference does not depend on the order in which its evidence is reached. A player who begins at the open panel, where the duct is plain, may first consider the "duct" reading — but it still takes the stringed walkway to move past it, so the same practical inference follows once both are observed. A player who meets the walkway first may consider the broader reading early and compare later crawlways against it. Strings recur at several sites; walking past one does not itself consume the clue. Revisiting a recorded instance requires finding its marked room or surface in the current arrangement. Earlier recorded routes become historical after death.

Shown even one facsimile 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. It is firsthand, true and limited — it does not say what the signs mean literally, which passages are still open, or where this player should go.

**This can happen early, and that is a real path, not a lesser one.** Show him a record after visit one and the practical reading arrives straight away; the panels and the stringed walkway then confirm what he said. A player who never asks derives it from the instances instead. The paths differ in where the reading comes from and in what the later visits do — confirmation against derivation — and both leave the player judging which crawlway is worth the oxygen and what to do about the jammed door. The design does not assume every player would get there unaided, and does not make Dorn cryptic to protect a deduction. He answers what he knows.

Its case is real. It gives the colony a visible role in discovery, and dialogue can carry nuance that physical evidence cannot. Three variants are worth separating: help available early and optionally, as described above; no help at all, which pushes all the weight onto the instances; and help required, where the reading is unavailable until a particular person is aboard. Only the third creates a gate, and that is a property of that variant rather than of survivor interpretation.

The preference is to preserve an independent route to the practical reading. Required help instead makes that interpretation depend on rescue and dialogue. Either policy can retain subsequent physical confirmation, failed predictions and further reinterpretation; useful testimony can also change expectations.

**Preferred policy:** an available route through physical comparison, with truthful, limited survivor interpretation offered from the first record onward.

**Accepted costs.** Redundant instances — several stringed sites, the discriminating walkway, one unstringed welded duct, and at least one passage no longer usable with a visible cause — plus dialogue across more than one knowledge state. Redundancy reduces the chance of a player getting stuck without a way forward.

**What would reopen this.** Evidence that the stringed walkway does not read in play as different in kind from a marked duct. Then the survivor's reading should carry the decisive step rather than a deduction that is not landing.

- What the strings actually say.