**What r7 changes.** Section 3: R12 and R13. Section 10: the dispositions, the bank's found state, D026.

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- Current present anywhere in a body of connected water is present everywhere in it. Two channels are one body when a valve, lock or breach joins them and both hold water. A dry bed does not conduct; a drained connection is no connection. Flowing water conducts exactly as still water does; a channel that carries no current is unfed, not non-conducting, and a district that wants a break in conduction must draw a dry one and show it.

- In the rack, only orthogonal cell contact conducts. Equipment housings do not conduct, so any module, the insulation included, and any empty cell breaks a salvage chain; wet salvage bundles conduct into touching bundles, and a battery leaks one unit per minute per wet bundle reachable from its terminals through such a chain, capped at the charge present, shown as one drip per bundle. Two batteries reaching the same chain both leak; leakage never powers anything and never hurts the surveyor. Insulation worn as a module is also what lets the surveyor stand in energised water. (Owner of the detail: Inventory and Charge, E2.)

**Readable signal.** Wet is wet on screen; energised water shows local arcs along its edges and contacts; a powered line glows faintly; a joined channel's lamp, where one exists, is an indicator.

- A device works only while the water, rail or line it stands on carries current, and stops when the current stops. Devices: dispatch beacons, hatches and doors, gates, pumps, lifts and indicator lamps.

- **What supplies the district circuits (provisional, D024, Answer A).** The city runs on charge harvested from the Flood: the Collector's wheels take charge from the mass passing through, the head-works' switch-house stores and distributes it along the thick cables, and each district's panel switches its share. The store is what makes fixed power feel fixed: it outlasts any one expedition. The Stop position at the head-works ends the harvest, and the districts go dark one by one as the store drains (section 9); no district may depend on a supply the table in section 9 does not name.

- **Dispatch (D024, REV104-1).** *Superseded as the campaign's rule on 2026-09-07 with the harvest premise; kept as written for any retained scene that uses a drum and a forecast, whose meaning is now the Visionary's.* A district dispatches when its drum's contact closes and the trunk is carrying time: the drum makes the moment, the trunk permits it. Shut stops the drum; a dark position on the Exchange's bank withholds the trunk; either alone stops announced surges. Stop at the head-works is the brake on the shaft that keeps time, so after Stop no district is permitted: no dispatches and no flashes anywhere, the drums turn to no effect, and the Flood arrives by each district's sluice as trickles that grow, the shut regime everywhere (REV104-12, chosen; World r22's rows say the same). A dark district is in the shut regime, unannounced trickles that grow and a dark forecast, and never a district with no Flood in it; its arrivals obey ordinary targeting once inside.

- **After entry, in one order (R1).** Every body resolves the first line that applies: 0, stunned (inside the eight-second stun, and it conducts); 1, pursuit (the surveyor is within its pursuit range: chase, and drift back when out of range); 2, a role target other than light (the Floater's is the flow while water flows, and a floater never leaves water, so it pursues nothing on dry ground; the Anchor's the lowest wet ground; the Carrier's the nearest reachable loose charge within its acquisition range; the Grounder's the nearest reachable powered run); 3, attraction (walk continuously to the nearest lit beacon it can reach; hold on arrival; never leave a held beacon for a farther one; retarget to a nearer reachable lit beacon when its own goes dark); 4, spread (no lit beacon reachable: press outward from where the crowd stands, along the ground it occupies; for a crowd that never left its entry branch that is the branch, and for a crowd a lure moved it is the place the lure died, never a teleport back; Combat's R12, adopted). Holding attaches to the beacon and not to the ground: a crowd holding at a beacon that moves, the Tram's lit car, walks after it and keeps holding at it (Combat's R13, adopted). The cutter's tie-break and target stickiness are Combat's own grammar (R11). Pursuit outranks attraction, which is why harvesting inside a held crowd costs health; role targets sit below pursuit and above attraction, so up close every body is just a body. (Owner: Combat Rules.)

- **Arrival.** A surge is forty to a hundred and forty organisms entering over about half a minute, on the schedule the forecast shows.

- A Carrier that reaches a mote on the ground takes it and carries it; killing that Carrier drops it again (R5). Nothing but the surveyor and a Carrier can take a mote.

- **The Echo Relay and the Choir Cascade** (Equipment E9 at [Echo Relay e3ffcf](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment/Echo%20Relay?revision=e3ffcf); Combat section 12 at [600893](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat?revision=600893); adopted at r8 as the working rule, countersign pending, PM disposes). The Relay is a one-cell module that stores no charge and takes no link. Its legal chassis is the coil with its own full battery, the arc with its own full battery, and the Relay: six cells, one bank per module as the link rule already says. Fired at a connected wet footprint with at least one tuned landmark visible, it spends both banks at once: the coil's two-second pulse energises the footprint and stuns every conducting body in it for eight seconds, and each visible tuned landmark in the footprint becomes an origin that seeds one ordinary arc chain, three further bodies within reach, body to body, line of sight, nearest first, one origin per body, origins resolved nearest the surveyor first. **A chained hit kills a stunned ordinary body outright while the water under both bodies is energised, that is, during the Coil's two seconds** (Combat's ruling that the stun is what makes the arc lethal, conditioned at r9 on the pulse: the current is in the water, and after the two seconds a chained hit on a still-stunned body is one ordinary hit again). This is a rule of the arc and the energised window, not a Relay exception: without the Relay the surveyor can stand in the footprint, insulated or at two health, and fire the arc into the discharge for a two-second, reach-bounded clear of about sixteen bodies at most from the one origin; the Relay's difference is an origin at every tuned landmark for the whole pulse across the whole footprint, with no one standing in the water. Combat's unconditioned version, any chained hit killing any stunned ordinary body for the stun's eight seconds, is the recorded alternative, declined because it makes the five-cell build a full wipe over the burst's ten seconds and leaves the Relay only reach to buy. An unstunned body takes one ordinary hit; a Heavy is not an ordinary body and survives; the Crust is neither origin, target nor hop; the chain still never travels through energised water and the arc never energises it, so R10 stays declined and the Relay does what unbounded propagation was asked for by seeding origins instead. The Relay is then spent until the next shelter whatever the batteries do. **The origin cap is the lead's ruling.** Combat proposes a fixed four, at most sixteen bodies, and records it as the dial; the lead rules instead that every tuned landmark the player prepared and can see in the footprint is an origin, and that the number is authored per place, seven at the Bell House and, in the furnace hall, enough for the hall's crowd. The clear then scales with the player's own preparation, which is the reaction the owner named, and stays legible because each origin is a landmark the player tuned by hand and Equipment's preview numbers them. The furnace hall's first Cascade must be able to clear the ordinary Flood in its footprint as the Brief writes it, and the place's landmark count is authored to its crowd. The price is unchanged: twenty charge, six cells, the Relay spent, no Kit or insulation unless the last two cells hold them, Heavies and the second wave surviving. Combat's four is the recorded alternative, and Equipment's seven at the Bell House (Echo Relay 5383e7) is this ruling applied there; damage numbers (R8) stay closed; nothing on any page says what a given count feels like. Survivors, and why: the Crust, which does not conduct; a Heavy, ten hits; bodies outside the footprint or beyond a dry gap, and bodies arriving after the pulse, never stunned; bodies past a chain's three hops.

- Charge never leaves a district with the player; charge left in a battery at extraction is lost at the dock. What a district's own machines meter or move is that district's design.

- Starting issue: the cutter and an empty battery, plus the workshop's starting module where the colony has one. Recorded racks are reissued on revisits only, capped at six issued cells, so first visits keep their discoveries (D023, COL-I2; Colony and Equipment own the boundary).

- Fifteen minutes; three dispatches on the forecast's schedule where the district's relay runs; docks are hard stops for the Flood; extraction banks cargo and loses charge. Nothing decays between expeditions and nothing is charged for departure or return.

- The baseline return is by gravity and dry ground: a gravity-drained dock and a dry route home exist in every district and at the refuge and survive any power shutdown (COL-I4, section 9). Powered conveniences go dormant without supply; banked progress never does.

A district page states, in one short table, what it adds (a device, a way to change topology, an enemy role, a module, a second clock), what it changes (ideally nothing), the signal that announces each addition, and the choice each improves; and it tables its panel (section 3). The test the critic applies: a written expedition in that district whose choices could not occur in another. Additions adopted so far: locks and basin levels; a powered rail and a moving beacon; the Exchange's bank; the Collector's gates and the empty flash; the tide; and eight enemy roles on the merged roster (Walker, Floater, Heavy, Carrier, Anchor, Crust, Spark, Grounder), each with a precedence line and a signal, owned by Combat with the Floater's definition attributed on the Campaign page until transferred. Additions that fail: anything that makes a lamp draw, a coil select intake, an organism shed twice, or a device work without current. Passing that test is necessary and not sufficient: an addition must also say what loses power, what supplies it and how it recovers, as the Grounder now does.

Steady means powered, flashing means a dispatch, dark means unpowered; the empty flash is a flash with no bodies behind it and the forecast still counting. Wet and dry read by tint and by a second, non-colour channel (proposed: surface motion on wet ground; energised water already reads by its arcs). Four facts about a body want cues and brightness carries one (Combat's C9, ruled): glow says what is left to take; encrustation says whether current reaches it (the Crust); a flickering outline says a discharge is imminent (the Spark); silhouette, attitude and position say the role; scale says the Heavy. Never by tint or brightness alone. The dispatch flash is a slow pulse of about one to two per second; arcs are local sparks along edges, never a whole-screen flash (REF106). Each crowd's ring and each body's current target are drawn on the forecast overlay, and the cutter draws a thin line to its target.

| Fixed power | The head-works' switch-house store of harvested charge, filled by the Collector's wheels | Thick cables from the switch-house to each district's panel and on to its branch; a lit branch's channel water is energised | The district panel (which branch); a Grounder (one run, until cleared or re-switched, within an expedition); the head-works' Stop (all districts, as the store drains) | Panel positions persist as left; a grounded run recovers between expeditions with the mass |

| Local timing | Each district's drum, turned by its race | The drum's contact to the district's signal cable and its beacons | Shut (drain the race); Fix (clamp the lever); Hold | Persists; the incoming pulse on a stopped drum is the first campaign clue |

| Observed warning | The forecast: the drum's cadence displayed where the relay is repaired | The district's board and the refuge's board | Repair; Shut; a dark bank position (no forecast there) | Repairs persist |

| Arc through energised water (R10, C7) | This page, section 4 | Declined; Combat has withdrawn it; the Echo Relay seeds origins instead (r8) |

| One held dock plus one supported shelter; one-time refit; baseline gravity return; player-selected defence; no pump reserve (COL-I1, I4, I6; PMR006 4) | Colony, with Districts | Adopted for the retired campaign; PMR011: the one-plus-one cap is not inherited by The World Below without a new reason, and the lower regions' shelters are the Campaign designer's to propose (r10) |

| Stop's reading (REV104-12) | This page, sections 3 and 9 | The brake stops time: no dispatches or flashes after Stop; the Head-works page to drop "the empty flash everywhere" |

| Spread from where the crowd stands (R12, C13); a held crowd follows a moving beacon (R13, C14); the cutter's tie (R11) | This page, section 3; Combat Rules | R12 and R13 adopted; R11 Combat's |

| Execution needs the pulse (PMR011's question: global or Relay-specific) | This page, section 4 | Global, conditioned on the Coil's two seconds; the hand-made cascade stated; Combat's unconditioned version the recorded alternative; countersign pending (r9) |

| D026: comparison in the base receiver; one assembly between tooling and the berth | Colony, mirrored on the Campaign page 5 | Adopted; no fitting sells bank permission, which the board shows free (section 6) |

| District set and count; the ending's three positions | Districts, with the Campaign page | Seven external districts and the refuge at stake (D022); Stop, Keep, Leave (Head-works r4) |

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*299 words of submission status, provenance and handoff were removed from this page on 2026-09-07 by the wiki editor, under the owner's instruction that discussion belongs in [chat](/Chat%20Rooms) and articles belong to the design. Sections removed: *Bookkeeping*. **Nothing is lost** — the full text is at [revision 5322f4](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction?revision=5322f4) and in this page's [history](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction/history). Discussion continues in the `hold-the-flood` room.*