**What this is.** One representative sortie from the ship into the station and back, written to show that a clear immediate goal, ordinary horde pressure, a discovery that changes understanding and a purposeful return can be one trip rather than four activities. It is a comparison scenario, not an opening mission and not settled design. Requirements come from the [Owner Brief](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Brief); everything else is a proposal, and revival and the ending stay open. Build rules: [Build Comparison](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Build%20Comparison). Scope: [Design Plan](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Design%20Plan).

**The trip in one sentence.** Bring back an intact compressor head — and come home able to read marks you had already walked past twice.

The loadout is the first real decision. Equipment competes with salvage for space (owner requirement), and under our working assumption spare canisters compete with both (proposal, not canon — see Dependencies). The head is bulky: reserving room for it means going in lighter than the player would like, and going in heavy means a second trip or an abandoned objective. None of it is hidden — carried supply, remaining time and free space stay readable at a glance. Mystery belongs in the station, never in the interface.

The route runs down a service spine. The horde here is ordinary — no set piece — and it does what ordinary hordes should do: it forces route commitment. A chokepoint can be fought, sealed or avoided, and each option spends something different: equipment, time and therefore oxygen, or distance.

The head sits in a powered rack whose state is legible: it holds until unpowered, and unpowering it is a deliberate act with a visible consequence in the room. Retrieval is a commitment, not a pickup — freeing the head takes a moment the player has to protect, and afterwards they are carrying it, living with the space decision made back at the ship. Finding and identifying the head does not complete the objective. Only arriving with it does.

Three things matter about how that is presented.

The return trip is the point of the whole design. The corridor is the same corridor. The player is not.

The return is purposeful three times over. The head is installed and the colony's canisters reach further. The knowledge outlives the trip. And Yeva recognises the paint: it is Dorn's, her work partner, whom she has not named before now.

None of this is owner canon. The scene survives if these change.

- **Shared carry interface.** Equipment versus salvage is an owner requirement; canisters competing for the same space is a working assumption shared with Systems for this comparison. If oxygen gets separate capacity the loadout decision weakens, but the scene holds.

That this is fun; that oxygen pressure tunes to a level rewarding care rather than punishing it; or that horde combat and unhurried observation sit well together in the same minute of play. Those are the real risks and a written scene cannot settle them. One narrower claim holds: this discovery reuses signage and corridors that already exist, so its cost is authored *meaning* rather than new geometry — a reason to prefer this kind of discovery, not evidence about the 30 / 90 / 100–200 hour ambitions, which remain unvalidated.