**Status.** Two story options developing the owner's leading draft, for early reaction. Neither is canon and no player penalty is selected.

**Scope of the field.** *(Stated as this fiction's rule, not as a claim about real biology.)* It repairs **living tissue toward a template of form**, brains included. The template describes anatomy, not content, so it never rolls memory back: what a person learned yesterday is still there tomorrow, because the field was never holding a copy of it to restore.

**What ties a shift to the player.** Registration is of **a docking vessel's occupant, at the moment that vessel docks** — it couples one person to one berth. It is not "whoever crosses the collar". A rescued survivor walking from station side to ship side is not arriving on a docking vessel, so nobody is registered by being brought aboard, no colonist gains a return point this way, and their deaths cause no shifts.

**The human misreading, and the failed intervention.** Humans found wounds closing and the dead getting up, and built a hospital. Research traced the effect to the core and **opened the seals** to strengthen it. Widening the field coupled it to the one inside, and the template began to include that anatomy — so healing now repairs toward something not entirely human, which is why healing machines turned harmful, the over-restored become creatures, and the core team changed without ever losing what they knew.

**Both alien languages, doing semantic work.** The builders' operational script covers seals, ports and regulator states, and the player uses it to work the containment.

**Consequential actions.** The apparent escape is undocking, which ends revival.

The deeper action is re-seating the builders' seals. Sealing restores the *template*, not the field's reach: decoupled from the one inside, the field goes back to repairing toward an ordinary human form, so healing becomes safe, no new creatures form, and **revival continues working exactly as before**. Continued exploration stays non-mortal. The cost of sealing is not mechanical — it cuts off the one inside, who is the party asking for it.

**This is not a reason to prefer B.** Directed shifting does not require an empty core — a captive drawing architecture toward itself works equally well, and Option A can have it. It is a map question separable from the prisoner-versus-empty choice, and it now sits beneath the owner's selected direction: whatever is bound stays bound, and steering describes only how the *unbound* remainder moves. Each option could motivate that steering differently — an engine seeking a candidate, or a captive pulling the station toward itself — and neither needs it.

**Both alien languages, and the survivor.** The builders' script, and **the departed one's**, which the engine reproduces: its structure names a candidate, so a player who learns it can read which name the engine currently holds. Yeva is as above, and her stake is that Dorn's name has started appearing.