Hold The Horde — Hospital Story Directions

Two story alternatives developing the owner's early hospital draft. Nothing here is canon.

The astronaut's question

The station's only message was stay away. You docked anyway, because your ship was broken. Then you died in a corridor full of things that used to be patients, and woke in your own berth with everything you had been carrying. The station had rearranged itself while you were gone. The doors you had opened were still open. Nothing had rewound except you.

That is the question every trip carries: why do I come back? The answer is somewhere inside, and the station keeps showing you pieces of it. The wards have restraint beds and dosing lines under human labels. Ward logs describe patients whose wounds closed overnight and patients who got up after dying. Grease-pencil notes on a wall count pressure cycles until one day they stop. The machinery holds two kinds of alien writing. One is cut precisely into the station's fabric. The other, in a later hand, labels paired fittings and writes lines that change after you work.

The deepest part of the station is its core, behind seals whose builders pointed them inward.

What both alternatives share

The owner's draft is the starting point. An alien race used the station for an experiment to reach godhood and abandoned it for an unknown reason. Humans later made it a hospital because healing was extraordinarily fast there, and even the dead returned. Researchers found something in the core, the knowledge harmed them, healing machines became harmful, and repeated restoration may relate to the creatures.

The team's working explanation is shared by both alternatives.

• An ancient field repairs living tissue toward a template of bodily form.
• It never rolls memory back. People changed by it keep what they knew while becoming different, which is why the core team's notes read like strangers writing with their memories.
• Humans opened the builders' old isolation to strengthen the field and inserted their own treatment profiles. Some hospital machines now repair toward a mixed, changing form, and that made at least some of the creatures.
• When you docked, the ship's berth was registered as your return point. After a death, the same intake returns your body and whatever you carried, and re-seats the unjoined parts of the station.
• The field does not rewind objects, which is why opened doors stay open, completed work persists, and rooms you joined stay joined.

Both alternatives also share their early discovery, on purpose: the player cannot tell which story is true until late. In a regulator gallery, you pull one fitting. When you return to the gallery's panel, a new line in the later alien hand has appeared. It repeats an address pattern you recorded beside your ship's berth and the mark on the next fitting still in place. Comparing those three visible strings gives you a prediction to check with that fitting's matching plate. Something in this station may be writing to you.

Seating that fitting's own plate in a reply socket quiets the line once. The console responds; nothing yet shows whether anyone is responding. A ward encounter can make the harmful profile personal without answering that question. Dread comes from the address; curiosity comes from the fact that you can answer it.

One person inside the pressure ward

At objective 6, the astronaut wants to cross the Jammed Pressure Approach, reach the Sampling Loop and close one Breath Bank cap. The long hall first shows a Flanker side lane. Deeper in, two ward doors warn before their one 40–80-body Presser release. A cutter-opened service passage can bypass the long lane, and either ward door can be locked as lasting work. Those encounter rules remain owned by the placement inventory.

Before the release, a hall-side record drawer is reachable but takes exposed time to open and capture while the game runs; interruption before completion yields no record. Reading or comparing the completed capture in the journal fully pauses the world. In this proposed scene, its card names Nadi Kelm, a pressure-yard fitter recovering from reconstruction of her left knee. It pairs restraint strip 4B-17 with ceramic brace H-26 and the ward's active treatment profile. A rehabilitation note records a small dispute: an automatic carrier moved before Nadi gave her ready signal, so she stopped the pass and made the floor mark be repainted as a request rather than an order.

If the open ward release commits before its source is permanently sealed, one ordinary Presser already counted inside its first portion carries the repaired yellow-and-blue 4B-17 strip and the large H-26 plate at its left knee. Its tissue pattern also matches the card's active profile, but that shared profile or a strip by itself could belong to many patients. The paired strip and body-specific brace serial make the identification credible. They establish whose altered body crossed the threshold, not whether Nadi's memory, will or consciousness remains. Its gait and attack prove nothing further.

The marked Presser keeps ordinary warning, contact, condition, recovery and reward. It is neither protected nor slowed for inspection. A developed Storm Choir can defeat it with the surrounding bodies; no replacement, tougher answer, missed reward or accusing prompt follows. The player may instead lock the ward doors after arrivals cross, take the service passage, retreat, or seal in time.

There are two useful knowledge orders. A player who captures the card first may recognise the two marks while the crowd is moving, then decide only how to survive and use the density. A player who overpowers the release before noticing can return in the quiet: a fixed inspection comb at the ward threshold has caught the torn outer tab of 4B-17 as that body passed, beside its impressed H-26 equipment field. The fixed drawer connects the trace to Nadi and preserves the discovery without a corpse or a carried loot item. If the player bypasses or prevents the release, the drawer still tells her history, but the journal must not claim that the astronaut met her body.

The live presentation is a one-time local event, not a new population rule. The first eligible commitment of this open-local-source ward stage spends it and includes the marked Presser in the first portion; there is no same-expedition replacement. If it crossed, the tab in the fixed comb remains as completed local evidence. Later expeditions refill viable sources with generic bodies only, while sealed ward doors stay sealed and bodies already through a late seal remain. A bypass before commitment defers the live presentation; a preventive permanent seal omits it, leaving only the reachable card. The sealed-local-source route supplied from R35 never moves Nadi into its migrated population. No corpse is promised to remain. This state controls what is presented, not whether defeating that body ended restoration or where Nadi's identity could exist later.

Back aboard, sharing the captured card and any threshold trace with Ivo is optional and extends I2 — Two actual passes in the cast map; it does not add a sixteenth primary scene. Ivo must already be home, and the player may defer or never show him. If he is absent, no one contributes his memory or reacts unseen.

Ivo: “Nadi Kelm. She made me repaint that square.”

Astronaut: “The strip and knee plate matched. It came through the ward door.”

Ivo: “Then you know whose body crossed. You don't know who was looking out through it.”

Ivo: “She stopped the carrier because it moved before she said ready. I called that caution. She called it being heard.”

If the astronaut cleared the lane before recognising her, Ivo adds, “You were surviving a ward release. I won't turn that into a test you could fail.” If the ward stayed sealed, he says, “Then her record is what reached us. You didn't owe the machine a meeting.” Neither response grants or removes help, friendship, equipment or an ending. The exchange gives a particular life room beside the combat result; it does not make Ivo an authority on the core, identify the last-transfer recipient, select a first survivor, decide whether changed form preserves a person, or settle any pending rescue rule.

This fuller version adds a record, one readable strip-and-brace variant, a fixed threshold trace, local unspent/presented/prevented states and optional Ivo lines. Any special model, decal, portrait, voice or animation would be future asset work and is not approved here. Recognition may be moving because a triumphant build becomes evidence about one person without becoming a wrong choice. It will fail if the marks are too subtle, glow like a quest target, interrupt the horde with a checklist, or use pity, guilt or scolding dialogue to punish combat.

The cheaper alternative keeps Nadi's fixed card and folds two lines about her disagreement into Ivo's existing scene. It removes the marked Presser, threshold trace, presentation states and any new visual asset. That version is harder to mistake for a protected target and costs much less, but the player can learn only from records after pressure has passed; a particular former person never changes the meaning of the horde while it is happening. Neither treatment chooses between the two core alternatives below.

Alternative A — someone sealed in

What is true. The builders' experiment worked on one of their own: it could no longer die, and could no longer leave the field. Unwilling to kill it or live beside it, they sealed the core and left. The humans who opened those seals coupled the field to it, and their treatment profiles began repairing toward its changing shape.

Later reinterpretation. You reach the core's pressure iris and open a sight baffle into a small evidence cell beyond it. Behind the glass, living tissue slowly exchanges material with the containment line, independent of anything the console writes. The surprise is that it moves. The seals pointing inward now mean what they looked like: something kept in. A human note calling the core a prisoner was literal. The lines addressed to your berth might come from it, or might be an automatic job system; the tissue proves life, not a speaker. The ward creatures stop looking like a curse and start looking like a coupling.

Deep consequential action. You can re-seat the builders' old isolation. It is mechanical work at the iris, done while the game runs: the coupling tell goes dark and the harmful profile feed disconnects. Ordinary revival keeps working, and the act can be reversed from the same place. You can leave the coupling open, or wait. The payoff is an informed intervention whose meaning remains uncertain. There is a clear practical reason to disconnect the harmful line; keeping it open briefly lets you observe its live behaviour before acting. If the lines were a request, sealing may answer it; if they were procedure, you have shut a dangerous machine and cut a living thing off from a hospital that fed on it. A player who never reads the lines can seal for practical reasons alone.

Attachment. Yeva, who ran the plant and pressure systems, wants the harmful line isolated. Dorn, treated after the seals opened, refuses the idea that restoring an older shape restores an earlier person. Mara asks you to capture the live feed before you cut it. The signal stops while isolation is closed, but an existing capture remains. Reopening can reveal the current feed if its source is still active; it cannot recreate an earlier state you never recorded. None of them withholds help if you choose otherwise.

How it could fall flat. The tone does the persuading. If the tissue behind the glass is staged as pitiable, the player seals because the story told them to, and the question of whether anyone was asking is settled by music rather than evidence. Or the practical reason to seal is so strong that nobody wonders about the other one.

Alternative B — the one that left

What is true. The same experiment succeeded completely. The being stopped needing the field and left. The builders sealed a core that kept running for no one and went. What remained was the field's retained template of the one who left: a mould, not a body. The humans who opened the seals took that mould for a patient and tried to treat it. Treating a template corrupted it, and the connected hospital treatment fixtures began mending bodies toward that damaged mould.

Later reinterpretation. Behind the same sight baffle, the evidence cell holds an inactive chamber and a lattice replaying stored anatomical patterns. There is no living tissue in this cell. The surprise is the absence: you were braced for something. Together with the stored anatomy and the builders' departure records, this supports the proposed explanation; an empty cell alone cannot establish what happened everywhere in the station. The inward seals were built to hold a process, not a prisoner. The lines addressed to your berth are procedure the machine still runs, and the human note that said prisoner was people projecting a person onto machinery. The creatures were not near something; they were made from a broken pattern.

Deep consequential action. You can choose which already-evidenced repair profile the connected hospital treatment fixtures use next, or leave them untouched. In the proposed evidence scene, two recorded sample treatments show the distinction: the human profile closes damaged tissue toward its earlier human form; the ancient profile closes it into a repeating ridged structure. Both repair, but they disagree about what a repaired body should be. Those samples do not establish a person's future health or identity:

• A cleaned human baseline, recovered from the hospital's own records, would guide the next restoration at those connected fixtures.
• The ancient template risks repeating an experiment nobody understood.

Turning this selector does not instantly transform or bind anyone. Its proposed reach is those hospital fixtures, with the ship's separate intake outside that selector. Whether repeated revival changes the astronaut remains an open story choice; this scene does not settle it.

Attachment. The same people care, differently. Dorn's objection sharpens: whose body is the "right" profile? Yeva wants the machine fixed, not mourned. Mara still wants the old pattern recorded before it is overwritten.

How it could fall flat. The reveal lands as it was only a machine, and the player feels cheated of the figure the station seemed to promise. The final choice reads as a settings menu.

The two languages in either story

Neither language is translated, and neither is required to progress.

• The builders' language, cut into walls and machinery, gives practical rules. Word order in facility runs predicts which service main a room controls. Recurring wall strings suggest candidate passages worth opening. Those rules help you choose a control or a wall to open at the core's iris.
• The later visitors' hand labels the two ends of transfer lines and writes the addressed lines. Learning it predicts which end receives, and lets you defer a job with its matching plate.

In Alternative A, whether that hand belongs to the one inside is left open. In Alternative B it is procedure copied from those who left.

The details live in the Two Language Discovery Map and the gallery scene in Alien Utterance Discovery.

What does not change

• Every return home ends temporary combat upgrades.
• Carried property comes home, even after death.
• Death shifts the unjoined station, and joined rooms stay joined.
• Connecting the whole station remains one of the deepest late puzzles.
• Rescues stay short.
• The journal pauses everything.

Neither alternative makes the player lose memory, gives survivors a mortality rule or forces an ending. The three options for whether repeated revival affects the player, and the team's recommendation of safe ordinary revival plus a voluntary treatment, are in Resurrection and Corruption. The chains of evidence, departure and core choices are laid out in Story And Ending Map.

Comparison and recommendation

Team recommendation: Alternative A. It keeps the image of something sealed in, it gives the astronaut's question a someone at the bottom of the station, and one physical act can mean repair or reply depending on what the player has come to believe. Its evidence can support life without proving a request, which keeps the ambiguity honest.

Choose B instead if the owner prefers colder horror, or finds the captive too likely to become a sympathetic quest-giver.

Open questions

Still open for the owner:

• The core image: Alternative A or Alternative B.
• Whether voluntary undocking is the apparent ending.
• Whether repeated revival affects the player.
• Every causal detail above.
• The full one-time Nadi presentation or the cheaper record-only treatment.
• Nadi's final name, identifiers, dialogue and visual treatment; none is approved for asset production.