Hold The Horde — Mystery Consequences

Status. This comparison applies the working Death and Persistence, Rescue Rules and Exploration Structure to the three Mystery Directions. None is canon. The Owner Brief requires return aboard this ship; cause, losses and persistence remain open. Compatibility does not make a working proposal an owner requirement.

Shared return, persistence and ending baseline

While service is active, each cause covers damage and oxygen deaths throughout playable station space. Death caches carried equipment and unbanked salvage. Journal evidence, locations, deliberate infrastructure and people already Sent persist; an unsent survivor remains in their authored state. No mechanism copies the pack, banks salvage, gains a hidden counter or fails because an ordinary power puzzle changed.

The apparent resolution is repair plus informed escape clearance: a real way out while still docked, so revival continues into the deeper path. Final departure ends service and completes the story. Continue/load returns before that choice with achievements and world changes intact. A mortal post-credits phase is a separate owner exception, not part of any mystery by default.

Among the astronaut and rescued cast, only the astronaut's eligibility is confirmed in these comparisons. Other registered complements and clinic patients already exist within the proposed fiction. Exclusion says nothing about another person’s loss or immunity; local rescue, abort and Sent rules remain. Eligibility needs a decision only when a scene offers a named, consenting person registration, admission or assignment.

1. The Registry — connected alien institution

Return and resources. Docking fixes this vessel as the return address; a protected casualty channel stabilises and retrieves the astronaut’s current body at death. Berth service repairs that same body, leaves unregistered objects at the death site, and returns the person to the fixed address. Current memory stays with the body; ship telemetry preserves records. Ordinary route-power changes cannot disable this channel.

Old complements retain active registration after vanished or improperly departed vessels. The comparison's selected story completion gives some of them a quarantine warrant and a fitted containment device: recovery restores both the body and coercive defensive control. Unwarranted stranded complements can remain coherent; human and alien crews explain different forms. The astronaut's registration has no warrant. This imposes no death-count deterioration or hidden future transformation. Cancelling registration stops future recovery but neither erases living creatures nor safely removes control. A prior biological contamination was considered as an alternative; this comparison uses quarantine so its moral and evidence costs are explicit.

Repair and deeper continuation. Repairing the ship and clearing the fault behind its distress state earns departure clearance; service remains until undocking. Departure clearance does not cancel active registration. Authorised final departure closes the astronaut's registration; cancelling an old registration is a separate operation. Later client filings reveal that blanket cancellation stops new returns for coherent stranded complements as well as controlled crews. The deeper action becomes a berth-by-berth decision: restore a valid destination with a consenting receiving vessel, cancel future recovery, or leave an uncertain registration active. A destination change is not automatically a safe removal of its quarantine control. These choices change future returns and horde sources without erasing what already walks the station.

Sent survivors are not in the docking-time complement. A concrete later offer to register one would require owner choice because it changes who can return; absent that scene, no global loss rule is reopened.

Decisive clue. Observation: before one old registration is cancelled, an addressed creature killed in ordinary combat triggers a recovery transaction; after cancellation it does not, while a still-active control registration does. Testimony: Dorn saw service carriages cross one junction, but did not see their contents or destination. Inference: active registration causally gates person recovery. The rival is a historical register merely observing another cause; the differing post-cancellation result weakens it. Tagged material traced from service transfer into berth treatment can support the transport path, not exclusive causation or metaphysical identity.

2. The Appropriated Unit — human project, alien mechanism

Return and resources. Refuge workers secretly installed an appropriated alien recovery unit on this ship. A protected wreck-side anchor retrieves the astronaut’s actual current body from their individual casualty tag; the serial-addressed unit repairs and revives them aboard. Neither half works alone, and equipment remains as the cache. This explains return aboard this ship and why the station contains the answer.

For the strongest complete version, an outside sponsor selected the test craft and engineered its failure and route back. This replaces coincidence with employer conspiracy and makes the opening less accidental; choosing coincidence instead would weaken causality but reduce predestination. The separate containment disaster retains human responsibility. Protected anchor transfer avoids a finite biomass counter.

Repair and deeper continuation. Repair plus navigation-lock removal earns escape; remaining docked preserves revival. Project orders and alien relay records reveal which hidden refugee groups are exposed. The player alters their route, warns them to stay hidden or exposes the controller. Sent people stay aboard. Final departure ends the link; earlier prototype shutdown is optional, not baseline.

Coverage follows an individual casualty tag, not mere presence aboard a fitted ship. Only the astronaut currently has one. Installing or reassigning a tag in a named emergency would be an owner choice and must state what happens to the astronaut’s eligibility.

Decisive clue. Observation: an archived fitting test names this ship’s unit serial and records tag capture, body transfer and onboard repair; its sealed logs match after ordinary deaths. Testimony: Dorn installed part of the fitting but never saw selection or navigation orders. Inference: the refuge coupled ship and anchor. The rival is station-only revival with passive hardware. A control run where transfer produced no revived subject until the serialled unit connected supports joint causation without deliberate player death.

3. The Clinic — actual-body triage

Return and resources. Protected triage arrests damage, retrieves the actual body through service routes, resuscitates it and delivers it to the manifest vessel. Nothing stores or recreates a person. Loose possessions form the cache; suit telemetry preserves records.

Every playable death site therefore needs a protected service route or bounded patient-transfer reach. Supported gameplay hazards leave recoverable physiology because triage intervenes at the lethal threshold; total bodily destruction cannot be an ordinary death presentation inside coverage. A blocked visible route or local power change cannot silently prevent return. These are content and worldbuilding constraints, not evidence of feasibility.

Repair and deeper continuation. Repair and discharge authorisation earn escape; treatment remains active until departure executes discharge. Records reveal an external programme still sending cases. The player can revoke experimental protocols while preserving ordinary stabilising triage, release patients able to leave safely and send evidence to a chosen recipient. A patient needing continuing care makes indiscriminate ward closure a concrete risk, not a universal rescue action. This changes active treatment and the programme’s continuation, not merely lore.

Sent status does not equal clinic admission. A later consent-based intake for a named survivor would reopen that person’s eligibility only; it would not settle global survivor loss.

Decisive clue. Observation: archived telemetry and scans follow the same wounds, mass and embedded tag through treatment. Testimony: Yeva maintained one junction and saw bodies pass wardward, but thought it was disposal. Inference: triage treats the same body. The rival is destruction then reconstruction. Restoring an observation window and matching two checkpoints supports bodily continuity—not metaphysical identity or valid consent—and needs no fatal experiment.

Comparative burden and decision interface

The direction choice does not also decide loss of revival, where the deeper action occurs or whether survivor eligibility expands. The companion article identifies both alien languages' distinct origins and uses, bounded survivor knowledge, and these apparent/deeper/final actions. They are coherent story proposals ready for an owner comparison, not adopted central answers. The owner’s central choice is among the strongest concrete stories; mortal continuation or a specific survivor exception should be presented separately only if worth adopting. None of this establishes fun, readability, feasibility or duration.