**Status.** Two story options developing the owner's leading draft, for early reaction. Neither is canon, no shift topology or player penalty is selected, and every detail remains open.

**Scope of the field.** It repairs **living tissue toward a healthy anatomical template**. It holds no biography, so it never overwrites memory — it mends structure and leaves content alone — and it does not touch objects. Besides repair it **relocates**, returning the repaired body and whatever is on it to where that body was registered. Knowledge, evidence and carried property survive because the field was never positioned to take them.

**Why a door the player opened stays open.** Nothing restores object state. Reconfiguration moves architecture rather than rewinding it: a section re-seats elsewhere with its door still open, because the machinery that moves fabric has no opinion about that fabric's state.

**What ties a shift to the player.** Reconfiguration is driven by the **docking collar's intake cycle**, which runs when a body is registered there. Ward patients revive where they lie and trigger nothing; only the astronaut arrives at the collar. Rooms never move while the player stands in them, and no live rearrangement is proposed.

**When revival actually stops.** Only by leaving the field, and the game says so before the player commits, so undocking never ends it unknowingly. Whether the player may keep exploring *mortally* after a deeper action is a **separate proposed exception**, not adopted here.

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**The ancient aim, and why they left.** They set a field in the core to make one of their own unable to die. It worked, and the result could not leave the field without dying: a person bound permanently to a room. Unwilling to kill it or live beside it, they sealed the core and went.

**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 and the over-restored become creatures. The core team were not maddened by a fact; they were edited by proximity, and their notes read as madness because their sense of themselves was changing.

**Two legacies, and ship revival.** Builders' containment — isolator seals, pressure gates, field regulators in their cut script — against hospital machinery: restraint beds, dosing lines and triage stations under human labels, still working toward a drifted template. The intake scanner at the docking collar registered the astronaut at the airlock, so that is where the field returns them.

**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. The second is **the being's own**, used for utterances rather than labels: near the core one construction recurs with a single element varying, because it has addressed people one at a time for a very long time. That structure distinguishes a refusal from a request, and shows the latest inscription is addressed to whoever reads it now.

**A survivor with bounded evidence.** Yeva ran the hospital's plant and pressure systems: she knows which machines humans installed and which were already here, and that the core team came back different. She reads neither script. Her stake is Dorn, treated after the seals opened, changing in a way she cannot name.

1. Marks on the creatures match those on the astronaut's healed injuries. *Changes:* certain builders' isolators read the field's pattern, so a marked astronaut passes where they could not — the same thing happening to Dorn.

2. Ward logs show healing was stable until the seals opened. *Changes:* the regulators are adjustable, so the field can be narrowed, not just avoided.

3. The being's inscriptions address individual builders in sequence, the last addressing whoever comes now. *Changes:* it can be answered — an act the player performs, not a document they read.

**Consequential actions.** The apparent escape is undocking, which ends revival. The deeper action is re-seating the builders' seals: the field narrows to the core, healing becomes safe, no new creatures form, and dying stops being safe outside it. The final action is answering the one inside.

**Player corruption — provisional branch, not a choice.** Marks accumulate with each restoration, visible on the body. **Branch 1:** they grant passage through pattern-reading isolators and nothing else, stop once the core is sealed, and involve no counter, deadline, decay or ending lock — which honestly makes deliberate death a visible way to buy passage. **Branch 2:** marks are evidence only, losing that incentive and the menace's teeth with it. Systems' comparison should decide.

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**The premise this changes:** the captive being. In the owner's draft the core holds one; here it holds nothing alive. **The creative cost, plainly:** the draft's strongest image goes, and with it a prisoner to free and a person to answer, replaced by a machine with no one inside — colder, and giving the player nothing that can reply.

**The ancient aim.** The same attempt succeeded: the ascendant stopped needing the field and left, and the builders sealed the core and went, because the engine would not stop and there was no longer anyone it was for.

**The core, and the failed intervention.** The core holds the engine's retained template of the departed — a mould, not a body. Researchers who opened the seals took it for a patient and tried to *treat* it; treating a template corrupted it, and every body repaired since has been mended toward a corrupted mould. Legacies are as above, plus approach machinery that admits candidates and turns others back. Ship revival is the same intake registration.

**Shifts with a direction, and their cost.** The collar cycle re-seats fabric *toward the core*, since the engine reads each arrival as a candidate approaching. **Trigger:** the intake cycle. **Limits:** movable builders' fabric only. **Cost:** the station grows harder to cross without nearing the core, and repeated death accelerates it — though a carried regulator part damps the steering, so it can be declined.

**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.

**Three discoveries that change what the player can do.** Late human notes in a script no human could have known — *the player can read who is held*. The core holds a mould, not a body — *the throne can be approached rather than feared*. The shifts have a direction — *a damper can be carried to stop being steered*.

**Consequential actions.** Undocking ends revival. The deeper action is that the engine will take a template: supplying a stable one stops the drift and the creatures, and binds whoever is used — including the astronaut.

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**Option A.** It keeps the image the owner leaned toward and turns it into something the player can act on: a final action that answers someone rather than operating a machine.

Option B's advantage is mechanical — directional shifts give repeated death a visible, declinable consequence, a stronger use of the shift rule than A manages. If the owner prefers a station that steers, B is the better frame and the cost is the prisoner.