Sources read: [Design Document r14 ec1b6c](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Document?revision=ec1b6c) §§3–6, 8, 12–16 and Appendix A; the shared-rule contract [Power and Attraction r2 69024c](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction?revision=69024c) and its r1 seed 8afc3c; [Campaign 34dc09](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign); [Design Document r15 5f9fbb](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Document?revision=5f9fbb); [Design Review REV104 r1 80a882](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Review?revision=80a882); [Enemies c63228](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies?revision=c63228); [Cutter](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Weapons/Cutter); [Equipment](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment); [World and Mystery r20 7699de](/Hold%20the%20Flood/World%20And%20Mystery?revision=7699de); [Expansion Brief](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Expansion%20Brief); [Design Index dd01c7](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Index?revision=dd01c7); [Tasks eb8c03](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Tasks?revision=eb8c03); [PMR003](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR003); [Design Review REV103 r5](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Review); [Brief](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Brief) D013/D016/D019–D021; [Reference/Content Scale REF107](/Reference/Content%20Scale); [External Critique EXT102](/Hold%20the%20Flood/External%20Critique); [Wiki Conventions](/Wiki%20Conventions).

The Lead owns the spine rule — conduction, power, attraction, charge — and as of [Power and Attraction r2 69024c](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction?revision=69024c) that page is the shared-rule contract, with [Design Document §4](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Document?revision=ec1b6c) as its derivation. **That rule is canonical there, not here.** This page does three things the spine rule deliberately does not:

2. States the **shared grammar** of targeting, damage, status and charge, so that [Equipment](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment) and this page cannot invent two incompatible systems.

**Where the rules live.** The Lead owns the spine rule, and [Power and Attraction r2 69024c](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction?revision=69024c) is the shared-rule contract — the page to cite for conduction, power, attraction and charge. [Equipment](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment) owns items. This page owns **the order in which a body resolves its reasons to move**, the **targeting/damage/status grammar**, and **composition**. Where the three disagree, the contract wins on rules and Equipment wins on its own items; this page names the disagreement rather than routing around it.

Everything PMR004 asked to be separated — fixed power, the coil, the arc, a Spark's death — separates on one principle the design already has. GDD §4's grounding note observes that real electrofishing uses **one electrode at two intensities**, a weak field that draws and a stronger one that stuns. Applied to bodies:

This is a **proposal to the Lead**, not a deduction: it is the smallest rule that answers all four of PM's questions at once, and it is what stops a [Spark](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Spark)'s death quietly supplying a chain-kill rule.

PMR004 asked Combat and Equipment for **one** table. This is Combat's half, written to match [Coil C1](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment/Coil) and [Arc A1](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment/Arc) rather than against them. **Where Equipment had a number and this page had a different one, Equipment's is adopted and the row says so.** It is not agreed until Equipment says so.

| **Power duration** (water energised) | While the branch is switched to it — a state, not an interval | **2 s — [the Lead's ruling](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction), countersigned here. r4's eight seconds is withdrawn, and so is Equipment's original eight;** the Lead's reason is that a short power window separated from a long stun lets the surveyor collect inside the water without insulation being compulsory | **None.** The arc does not energise water or machinery ([Arc A1](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment/Arc), adopted) | **2 s.** The one place a second number is kept, and its reason: one body's charge, not a full bank's |

| **Damage to the surveyor** | 1/s in the water unless insulated | 1/s for its 2 s unless insulated, so **an uninsulated discharge costs two health of five** | None | 1/s for its 2 s unless insulated. **Multiple overlapping sources do not multiply the one-per-second hazard** (Equipment's boundary, adopted) |

| **Propagation** | The whole connected water body of that circuit | The whole connected water body the surveyor touches | **Body to body only**, bounded as above | The whole connected water body the Spark stood in |

| **Charge yield** | None | 5 units per **complete ten** stunned bodies that have not already shed; the remainder is lost, which is the price of a small pulse (Equipment countersigns the rounding). **The Heavy's exception is defined in §6** | 1-unit mote from each killed body that has not already shed; the drawn bank takes none of it, and a [Carrier](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Carrier) may take it off the ground | Its 1-unit mote if unshed — that is the *kill*. **The discharge itself yields nothing** |

**Boundaries between overlapping pulses** — proposed by Equipment, adopted here as Combat's rule. A paid discharge **samples the conducting bodies in its wet footprint at the instant it fires**; bodies that arrive later do not inherit that stun from the two seconds of ordinary power. A fresh paid pulse **resets** an eligible survivor's recovery to eight seconds from that pulse — it never adds durations and never resets spent state. Removing a connection stops power crossing it but does not cancel a stun already applied. A temporary source expiring removes only its own contribution: fixed power, or a later Spark pulse, can keep the water hot. **An arc burst is legal and useful in a channel with no power at all**, because it never touches the water.

**Fixed power and the branch's water — ruled, and this page was on the losing side.** [Contract §2](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction): a lit branch's channel water is energised for as long as the branch is lit, "which is why the electrician waits in the lit yard in insulation". **This page recommended the opposite and the recommendation is withdrawn.** The objection was that the two-second ruling's rationale — collecting without compulsory insulation — fails in a lit branch; it does not, because that rationale is about water *no lit branch feeds*, which is the Tidal Barrier's flats and the Lock Flight's head basin rather than the electrician's yard. So in the pumping district's lit yard, **insulation is the entry fee and the coil's two seconds sit inside a hazard already running** ([Encounter A](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies)).

Eight roles. Three are the Lead's, on [Campaign](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign); four are this page's; one is a merge. **[PMR005](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR005) accepts the Walker naming for coordination and treats the merged roster and the bounded Carrier as proposals**, which is what they are.

| Role | Owner | Precedence line it exercises ([§2](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat)) | Status |

| **Heavy** | Campaign ([§4](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign)) | **Line 3.** It is a Walker that a doorway cannot be cleared past quickly | Adopted. **This page's request to replace its ten-hit count with a phrase is withdrawn** — PMR005 declines it and is right that a number is inspectable where a phrase is not |

**Settled: a Spark killed in water energises that water for two seconds, stuns nothing, damages no organism, makes no chain, and hurts an uninsulated surveyor standing in it.** Its own kill mote is the yield if it had not already shed. That is [contract r4 §4](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction), and the Lead chose it *as this page wrote it*.

**How this page then got it backwards, which is worth recording rather than quietly fixing.** The Lead ruled at 19:17. At 19:23 r5 of this page, reading the contract at r3, adopted the *old* row "rather than silently contradicting the contract" — so the contract held Combat's rule and Combat held the contract's, each following the other into the position the other had just left. [REV104-15](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Review) caught it. The lesson is narrow and useful: **when mirroring another page's rule, re-read that page at save time, not at draft time** — the same guard this wiki already applies to text, applied to a rule.

**The argument that won, kept because it is the reason and not the ruling.** A Spark that stuns and sheds is a free coil: the coil is two cells plus a full ten-unit bank, and stopping a wet crowd and making it shed is exactly what that buys. A free version would strictly dominate it wherever Campaign places Sparks — and dominate it by an event the player does not choose, because the cutter cannot be withheld ([R6](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat)). It would also spend the once-per-organism yield without a decision, and that rule is what the charge economy rests on. [Equipment recommended the same independently](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment).

Both this page and [Campaign §7](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign) published "the one list" of presentation categories inside the same quarter-hour, which [REV104 r5](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Review) noted without comparing them. **The Lead's §7 says it is the one, [REF110's audit](/Reference/Asset%20Licences) is already running against it, and this page defers to it.** No competing list is kept here.

They agree on the thing that matters, which is the answer to PMR006's question: **the roster's cost is not eight creatures.** It is one base body plus one licensed edit, with everything else a pose, a scale or an engine-drawn cue.

**One difference, and the Lead's reading is the better one.** This page counted the [Spark](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Spark) as a second licensed edit; Campaign §7 puts its flicker under engine-drawn cues, leaving the Crust's encrustation as the only edit. Campaign is right — a flicker is *motion on the base body*, not a changed sprite, which is what this page's own [R4](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) says when it insists the Spark reads by motion rather than by brightness. So the roster costs **one body, one edit, five poses-or-scales, and the rest engine-drawn**.

**Combat's contribution to that audit, which stands:** which body each cue must be readable *against* — a crowd of forty to a hundred and forty, at a glance, with four facts competing for cues (§0.4, C9, now ruled on the contract). **Nothing has been located, inspected, licensed, downloaded, purchased or created by this role.**

| # | Question | Owner | Position I proceed on |

| C2 | ~~Does fixed panel power energise a branch's open channel water?~~ | — | **Closed: yes, ruled against this page.** [Contract r4 §2](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction): a lit branch's channel water is energised for as long as the branch is lit, "which is why the electrician waits in the lit yard in insulation". **My r5 recommendation was made against a ruling I had not read, and the objection behind it does not survive contact with it:** I argued the two-second rationale fails in a lit branch, but that rationale is about water *no lit branch feeds* — the Tidal Barrier's flats, the Lock Flight's head basin — not the electrician's yard. The critic's reconciliation, and it is right. Encounter A now carries the single ruled reading |

| C4 | ~~The Grounder's consumers, supply and recovery~~ | — | **Closed, and ruled exactly as this page proposed** ([contract r4 §2](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction)): everything on the run loses power, beacon and hatch alike; there is no alternate supply on a run; recovery is killing the body or re-switching the branch. The contract adds one thing this page had not: **a grounded run does not persist between expeditions** — it recovers with the rest of the mass |

| C11 | ~~The Spark row~~ | — | **Closed: the power-only death, as recommended.** Contract r4 §4, final. The middle option (stuns but does not shed) was not needed |

| C9 | ~~Cue overlap: role, spent charge, conductivity, imminent discharge~~ | — | **Closed, adopted as proposed**, with one addition. [Contract r5 §8](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction): glow says what is left to take; encrustation says whether current reaches it; a flickering outline says a discharge is imminent; silhouette, attitude and position say the role; **and scale says the Heavy** |

| C10 | The [Glossary](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Glossary) says the arc drains a bank in "about twenty seconds"; GDD §6, GDD §13 and [Arc A1](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment/Arc) all say ten | Lead / Editor | Ten. Reported, not edited |

**Merged crowds, added in r3 at [PMR004](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR004)'s request.** Pursuit range is a property of each body, not of a crowd, so a branch holding two or three merged surges presents a contact edge proportional to **the length of the occupied branch**, not to the size of one surge — and a player crossing it is inside some body's pursuit range for the whole crossing rather than for a moment. Two consequences: [R2](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat)'s ring is what makes that legible before the player commits, and GDD §15's tuning bound should be checked against the **third dispatch's merged crowd**, not the first surge, because that is where the crossing is actually unsurvivable. Neither is verified; both are checkable on paper once press has a bound.

- **Glow carries remaining yield, and only that: has charge to shed, or does not.** An unshed body glows; a shed body does not. A [Crust](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Crust) glows until it is killed, like anything else — it is non-conducting, not spent.

- **Conductivity is a second, independent channel: encrustation.** r1 of this page put both facts on brightness and then argued the resulting confusion was harmless; [PMR004](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR004) is right that it is not — a Crust *resists a stun that a spent Walker still receives*, so a player who confuses them commits to a collection window that four bodies are walking through. **Two facts, two channels: glow says what is left to take, encrustation says whether current reaches it.** They are independent because the answers are independent.

**[Proposal R9], and the argument that it is inside that contract — necessary, and not sufficient.** [PMR005](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR005) is right that clearing the contract's prohibition list does not settle which connected consumers lose power, what alternate supply exists, or how recovery works; those are C4 in [§0.4](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) and belong in the shared topology contract with Lead and World. What follows is the containment argument only. One role, the **[Grounder](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Grounder)**, can darken a beacon: it climbs a live cable run and grounds it, and the beacon on that run flickers and then goes dark until the Grounder is killed or the branch is switched.

| **Ties and stickiness:** nearest by distance to the body; **on a tie, or within a small margin of one, the body already targeted keeps the target** | **[Proposal R11, new in r7]** — [EQP102](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment/Build%20Paths) leans on cutter selection for its whole first approach, so the tie needs a rule. Stickiness is what stops the target line flickering between two bodies at equal range, and it is what makes that approach's stated failure case a body genuinely *closing* rather than jitter |

**Why.** With no XP and no weapon-damage ladder, damage numbers would be a system with one number in it and nowhere to go — and the first thing anyone would do with it is build the stat progression the [Expansion Brief](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Expansion%20Brief) warns against ("a catalogue of damage bonuses alone does not solve this"). Agreeing this early is cheap; unwinding it after Equipment has thirty items priced in percentages is not.

| **Stunned** | **One paid event, and only one: a coil discharge**, sampling the conducting bodies in its wet footprint at the instant it fires. Ordinary fixed power never stuns, and neither does a [Spark](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Spark)'s death — that row is ruled and final ([contract §4](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Power%20And%20Attraction)). **Corrected in r7:** r5 wrote this row while the Spark was still open and left a conditional clause admitting one | 8 s. A fresh pulse resets an eligible survivor to 8 s from that pulse; durations never add | Does not move or act; sheds its large-mote share once |

**Chain geometry, supplied at Equipment's request (proposals).** A chained hit reaches bodies within **a short hop reach, proposed at three metres** of the body that was hit, needing an unobstructed line between them; at most three additional bodies per direct hit, each once per hit, and a chained hit never retriggers the arc. **Ties** — more eligible bodies than hops — resolve **nearest first, then to the body nearest the surveyor**, so the chain is predictable from where you stand, which is the whole reason for keeping it bounded. **[Crust](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Crust) eligibility: a Crust is never a chain target and never a hop.** It does not conduct, so the chain neither enters nor passes through it; a chain whose only continuation was through a Crust ends there. It does not absorb or reflect, and it is not a shield for the bodies behind it — the chain simply has to reach them another way, which is a positioning problem for the player.

| Grounders | placed on **cable runs**, not counted in a surge | Its threat is a location and a timer, not a body count |

**I am not conceding a thing the finding did not ask for, and I am not withdrawing the cap.** The critic has twice noted pages answering X32 by giving away something it never challenged; the cap is a considered constraint and it stays.

**The reason is legibility — and [PMR008](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR008) is right that r8 stated it as a prediction, which it is not entitled to be.** The honest form: *my judgement* is that a crowd of forty to a hundred and forty containing four kinds of body, each answering a different precedence line, would be hard to read at a glance, and that this design's central claim — that consequence can be computed before it lands — is the thing most at risk if it is. **That is a design judgement about a screen nobody has seen.** It is not a measurement, no page can make it one, and the number two is a first guess and not a threshold anyone has tested. Whether four kinds are legible, or six, or three, is exactly the sort of question an authorized play phase answers and prose cannot. If it turns out legible, raising the cap is a one-line change and I would take it.

Consolidated into [§0.4](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat) in r4, so there is one list rather than two that drift apart. Every question there is stated with the position this page proceeds on, as Wiki Conventions §12a asks.

- The six role pages: [Walker](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Walker) · [Anchor](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Anchor) · [Carrier](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Carrier) · [Crust](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Crust) · [Spark](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Spark) · [Grounder](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Enemies/Grounder)

**2026-09-07 · Game Visionary disposition after PMR011.** [Combat r13 / 600893](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Mechanics/Combat?revision=600893#12-the-choir-cascade--combats-ruling-on-damage-eligibility-hop-ordering-and-caps) correctly showed that ordinary Arc damage would make the flagship build weaker than its parts and correctly separated Crust from Heavy. Its four-origin/sixteen-body answer is superseded because it explicitly did not deliver the owner's screen-wipe target. The full prior reasoning remains in history.

- A tuned Choir network is a finite, visibly outlined wet footprint with seven connected bells and a master bell. It is an environmental discovery, not an Echo Relay item.

Without the network, the same five-cell rack can stun the basin and use standard Arc while the player fights, but it cannot erase the room. With the network, prior observation, a cargo-heavy loadout, two full banks, crowd positioning and a one-use authored place convert familiar tools into the promised ridiculous build. The visible basin is both preview and numerical bound; clearing every eligible body inside it is bounded propagation, not a global rule or an unbounded chain. Whether the crowd size, readability, timing, performance and aftermath feel spectacular remains untested.

| **r12** | Ruled the Choir Cascade's damage, eligibility, hop ordering and caps at Equipment's request (§12). Chained hits kill stunned bodies — no damage value, no new status, one interaction between two existing ones — because the alternative makes the earned spectacular build weaker than an ordinary arc burst, which is arithmetic and not opinion. Four origins, sixteen bodies, stated as a dial with its cost in legibility. Named the gap between that and the owner's screen-wipe example, and corrected r5's reason for withdrawing R10: the problem was that it was unbounded and unearned, not that it was spectacular. |

| **r10** | Added the composition rule under X37 and PMR009 §2: a fight yielding only charge must have somewhere in that expedition to spend it, because charge is discarded at extraction. Stated as a check on writing rather than a new mechanic, and explicitly not a demand that districts remove free bypasses. |

| **r8** | Cited [REF107](/Reference/Content%20Scale) in §7, at the place the composition budget caps within-district depth, answering [X32](/Hold%20the%20Flood/External%20Critique) on the page it names rather than on the one that merely discusses roster size. **Kept the cap** and said why — legibility is the thing every reviewer credits — while conceding what the cap actually costs: depth has to come from situation rather than from bodies on screen, and no design-phase page can show that reads as richly. Recorded contract r7's adoption of R12 and R13 as proposed, and its assignment of R11 to this page; C13 and C14 closed, C15 added. |

| **r6** | Mirrored back two rulings this page had crossed with. **[REV104-15](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Design%20Review): the Spark row reverted to the power-only death** — the Lead ruled for this page's own recommendation at 19:17 and r5, still reading the contract at r3, adopted the row the Lead had just abandoned. **C2 acknowledged as ruled against this page**, with the critic's reconciliation recorded: the two-second rationale concerns water no lit branch feeds, so the ruling and the rationale do not conflict and my objection did not survive reading it. §0.6 defers to [Campaign §7](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Campaign) as the one D025 list, keeping one correction to this page's own version. C4, C9, C11 and C12 closed by the contract; pursuit range now has a value, which bounds R1's stated risk. |

| **r4** | Consolidated the two stacked reconciliation appendices into §0, as [PMR005](/Hold%20the%20Flood/PM%20Reviews/PMR005) asked. Corrected the claim that all four Campaign roles sit at precedence line 2 — only the Floater does, and only while its water flows. **Withdrew the request to replace the Heavy's ten-hit count with a phrase**, which PMR005 declines and is right to: a number is inspectable and a phrase is not. **Withdrew the "nineteen kill motes" argument**, which rested on most-room collection; D023 selects shelter-selected pickup priority, under which a two-bank rack fills its first bank in about ten kills, not nineteen — so the Heavy's economic case is real but smaller than r3 said, and it should rest on the large mote and the blocked route rather than on a number that has changed. **Narrowed the tint finding** from a logical contradiction to a cue-budget concern (C9). **Corrected the cable reel claim**: [Equipment U6](/Hold%20the%20Flood/Equipment) revises it to a one-cell, six-metre reel limited to **exposed power terminals** on an already traversable path — not the arbitrary wet-point connector r2 and r3 cited, so it neither justifies R10 nor rewrites which water is one body. R9's open questions restated as C4 rather than treated as settled by passing a prohibition list. |