Hold The Horde — First Survivor

Status. Two proposed versions of the R-3 encounter and the first short cooperative rescue, for owner reaction. Not canon. Both follow the selected opening — the player has already seen R-3's painted ward label, a breathable-pressure indicator and a repeated knock through a window they could not reach, and has installed the isolation bridge so the ship can give a local bearing. Neither version needs a long escort, and neither takes anything the player is carrying.

Names are proposed fiction. Version 1 reuses Dorn coherently; version 2 introduces someone new and labels her as such.

Version 1 — the one who does not want to be found

The person. Dorn, a hospital pressure-tech, in R-3 because it is the last ward whose atmosphere still holds. He has been knocking for a long time and has stopped expecting an answer.

His desire. To get out — but on his own terms. He has spent months learning which parts of this station kill people, and he wants that knowledge to survive whether or not he does.

The disagreement. The player wants him aboard now. Dorn wants the ward's records first: a wall of his own notes, taped and scratched over months, which he will not leave behind. The astronaut has one canister to spare and a route that is currently open. Dorn's answer to we should go is not without that.

The one short crossing. R-3's personnel door is jammed half-open onto a corridor the ship's bearing says is currently adjacent. The crossing is one room long. The astronaut passes a canister through the ward's equipment sleeve, Dorn connects and confirms flow, and then holds the corridor mouth against an ordinary crowd while Dorn crosses under his own power and pulls the door behind him. That is the whole transfer: one held junction, one crossing, no accompaniment through the station.

The meaningful choice, with no tax. The wall of notes cannot be carried out by a man in a borrowed suit. The astronaut can photograph it — world-time work, in the open, while the crowd is still coming — or refuse and cross now. Nothing is confiscated either way; the cost is time and exposure at the worst possible moment, and Dorn will cross either way. He remembers which the player chose.

What he contributes aboard. Not a menu. He can say which fittings on a recorded route are the kind that killed people, because he watched it happen. If the notes came out, he can name specific rooms; if not, he can only speak to what he saw himself, which is less and he says so.

The return scene. Aboard, he does not thank anyone. He asks for a working light and sits down with the ship's own recorder to say the names of people who were in R-3 before him, in order, while he still remembers them. The player can stay for that or leave him to it.

Death, abort and shift. If the astronaut dies before the transfer begins, Dorn is where he was, in a ward that still holds air, and the station has shifted — so the route the ship gave a bearing for is historical, and a new bearing must be taken. If death or a called abort interrupts the crossing, he returns into R-3 and closes the door; the ward is the abort destination because it reseals, and nothing beyond the ward is assumed to survive the shift. Labelled dependency: this contains the whole scene inside one room and its doorway precisely because the ordering of shift and refuge handling is unresolved. No teleport, no promise he cannot die later, and no claim about survivors in general.

Version 2 — the one who thinks the astronaut is the problem

The person. (New, proposed.) Aster Fen, a supply clerk, not clinical staff. She locked herself into R-3 during the evacuation and has been rationing since.

Her desire. To keep the ward sealed. It is the one thing that has worked.

The disagreement. She has watched the station change shape every time something goes wrong, and she has concluded that arrivals are what disturbs it. The astronaut is an arrival. Her position is not hysterical and she argues it well: things were stable until the ship docked. She will come, but she wants the ward's door closed and stay closed behind her, which means the astronaut cannot use it again.

The one short crossing. Same shape, different weight. The sleeve, the canister, the confirmed flow, one held junction, one crossing under her own power. But she pulls the door and seals it as agreed, and that specific way back is finished.

The meaningful choice, with no tax. Agree to seal it, or ask her to leave it open and take the argument. If sealed, the player loses a known route and R-3 stops being a place they can return to. If left open, she crosses anyway and is quieter afterwards. Nothing is removed from the pack; what is spent is a route and her trust.

What she contributes aboard. She kept the ward's supply ledger, so she knows what was moved where and when, in a place where almost nothing else is written down. That turns vague rooms into rooms with contents. She is not an expert on anything else and does not pretend to be.

The return scene. She will not take the suit off for some time. She stands where she can see the airlock and asks, twice, whether it is shut. Later she is found counting the ship's stores without being asked — not helping, exactly; steadying herself.

Death, abort and shift. Identical containment. Before departure she stays sealed in R-3 with her own reserve. An interrupted crossing returns her to R-3, which reseals. After a death the station has shifted and the bearing must be retaken. Labelled dependency: as above, and one more — if the player agreed to seal R-3 and the transfer then fails, that agreement is what makes the retry hard. The conservative boundary is that the seal is honoured only once she is actually aboard; until then the door works. I would rather state that limit than let a promise become an unrecoverable state.

Recommendation

Version 1. Its disagreement produces a choice the player makes under pressure and in public — photograph the wall while the crowd comes, or cross now — and the consequence is carried by a person rather than by a rule. The return scene is the strongest thing in either version: a man who will not say thank you, spending his first safe hour naming the dead while he still can. That is the memorable beat the brief's emotional home is asking for, and it costs no system.

Its accepted cost: Dorn's contribution aboard is soft. "He can tell you which fittings killed people" is real but hard to make legible, and if the notes are missed his usefulness shrinks in a way some players will read as a punishment for a reasonable decision. That needs watching.

Version 2's strongest case, which is genuine: Aster disagrees about the player's own presence, which is a sharper and stranger conflict than wanting one's notes, and her ledger is far easier to make concretely useful. Its cost is that its central choice trades a route rather than a moment, so it lands as a map decision rather than a human one, and the seal introduces a state I had to fence off to keep it recoverable.

Neither version establishes that any of this is affecting. Both keep carried property safe, both are one crossing long, and neither assumes any global survivor rule.