Source rules it is built on: [Design Document r14 ec1b6c](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Document?revision=ec1b6c) §§3–6; shared grammar and the precedence stack: [Combat Rules](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat).

[Enemies](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies) · [Design Index](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Index) · [Expansion Brief](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Expansion%20Brief) · [Glossary](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Glossary)

**Name is a functional placeholder.** [World and Mystery](/Hold%20the%20Flood/World%20And%20Mystery) owns the Flood's identity and fiction.

This is the role that makes the automatic attack a decision. The cutter fires by itself at the nearest organism in reach and, under [R6](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat), **cannot be withheld**. So while a Spark is in the water you are standing in, and inside your reach, you are not choosing whether to shoot it. You already chose, by standing there.

| | |

| --- | --- |

| **Trigger** | Being **killed while standing in water**. Not proximity, not a timer, not a wind-up it performs on its own |

| **Action** | Precedence line 3 while alive: entirely ordinary, nearest reachable lit beacon, chase within pursuit range. On death in water: **the connected water is energised for one second** ([R3](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat)'s window — the same quantity as a coil discharge, deliberately, so the player learns one number) |

| **Threat** | An unprotected body in energised water loses one health per second (GDD §3). From five health, that is a fifth of the player, delivered by their own weapon, in water they walked into. Killed on dry ground it does nothing at all |

| **Hit count** | Three. No more health than anything else |

| **Conducts?** | Yes, ordinarily. It is stunned by a discharge like anything else, and a stunned Spark is not dead, so it does not discharge |

| **Charge** | Sheds once like anything else. Its death discharge is **not** a shed and yields no motes; the energising is a hazard, not a harvest |

Three layers, in the order the player receives them:

1. **The outline flickers.** Under [R4](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) glow carries only "has charge to shed", so a Spark cannot be signalled by being brighter — it is signalled by *motion in the silhouette*, which reads at crowd density where brightness does not.

2. **The cutter's target line** ([R6](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat)) draws to the body the weapon has selected. Seeing the line snap onto a flickering outline standing in the same water you are standing in is the warning, and it arrives about half a second before the hit lands.

3. **A rising whine** as it enters reach. This is the cue I would most like and the one I cannot promise: GDD §14 states sound is not designed. **Recorded as a gap.** Without it, layers 1 and 2 must carry the whole warning, which I believe is enough and cannot claim is enough.

| Counterplay | Cost |

| --- | --- |

| **Wear insulation** | One rack slot, which is a bundle of cargo or a second battery not carried |

| **Kill it from dry ground.** The cutter's reach crosses the channel edge; the discharge energises the water, not the bank | You are not in the channel, so you are not collecting motes and not discharging the coil |

| **Leave it alive.** Nothing makes a Spark dangerous except killing it | You cannot leave it alive, because the cutter cannot be withheld — so this counterplay is really "do not be within reach of it", which is a movement decision, continuously |

| Stun the crowd first and collect around the stunned Sparks | A stunned Spark is still alive and still lethal the moment your automatic weapon reaches it |

The third row is the one that makes the role. **The counterplay to a Spark is not an action; it is a position**, held continuously, in a game whose weapon takes the shooting decision away from you.

- **Cutter:** the interaction. This role exists so that "the weapon aims itself" has a cost as well as a convenience, which is what the [Cutter page](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Weapons/Cutter) asks Combat to supply.

- **Insulation:** promoted from a rack-management module to a field-survival module. Currently insulation's main job is stopping leakage between a battery and wet bundles; this role gives it a second job the player feels.

- **Coil:** a discharge stuns Sparks with everything else, and the stun does not kill, so a discharge does not set off a chain of them. The two systems do not fight.

- **Arc, and the late payoff [R10]:** a Spark killed by the chain while in water energises the connected channel, and while the water is energised the chain travels **through the water** as well as body to body, reaching every conducting body the channel connects. With Sparks spread through a channel crowd, a burst re-energises the channel repeatedly across its ten seconds. That is the late-campaign crowd-clearing payoff, and it costs five separate preparations: the arc, a full battery, Sparks deliberately left alive, a crowd routed into connected water, and insulation or dry footing. **R10 is a proposal to the Lead** and the roster stands without it.

- **Field pump:** draining a channel disarms every Spark in it. A cheap, non-obvious counterplay that costs a bundle.

- **Zero Sparks in a surge entering dry ground.** A Spark that cannot reach water is a [Drifter](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Drifter) with a worse silhouette, and placing one is a wasted role slot. This is a hard constraint in the composition budget, not a preference.

- Arrives in a surge; counts toward the limit of two non-Drifter roles per surge.

- Proportion: around 7% in [Encounter B](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies) (10 of 140). Enough that a channel crowd reliably contains some; few enough that a player wading a channel is not in continuous danger.

- **Not in the opening district's first expeditions.** A player still learning that water is a weapon should not simultaneously learn it is a trap. Middle campaign is the right entry point, and by then insulation is a module they have met.

A **silhouette edit of the base body**: the same outline with a flicker. The flicker is motion rather than a second sprite. Whether editing a sprite is permitted depends on the individual asset's licence rather than its host's general statement (GDD §14; [Asset Licences](/Reference/Asset%20Licences)). **No asset has been located, inspected, downloaded or created**, and no availability is claimed. The audio cue is a recorded gap, above.

- **Does a Spark killed in water hurt other organisms?** My position: **yes** — energised water conducts to everything the water connects, and clause 1 does not care what a body is. Consequence: a dense crowd wading with Sparks in it is partly self-destroying, which is a nice thing for a player to *discover* rather than be told. It also means the discharge is a legitimate weapon when the player is on the bank.

- **Does a stunned Spark killed during a stun discharge?** My position: yes. Stun prevents acting, not physics; the body is still full of charge. Flagged because a designer implementing "stunned bodies do nothing" would get this wrong.

- **How long is the energised second, exactly?** Tied to [R3](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) / open question C1, which the Lead owns. The Spark deliberately reuses whatever number the coil uses, so there is one quantity to learn rather than two.