creatures/BE_0006_S1_tovil_yaka.md
CANON SUBORDINATION — this document is PROPOSAL-TIER: it serves canon and never outranks it.
The canon: the CVD · the T1 foundation docs · the T0 registries (registries/) · the spine
(docs/spine/CH_*.md) · the region pages (_source/02_Tier_2_Region_Pages/). Authority order:docs/DOC_MAP.md§ 0.
Canon served (scanned from this document's own citations — widen it by hand where it is thin):
CVD §17.1·T0_Boss_Attack_Rail·T0_Boss_Encounter_Registry·T0_Cross_Cultural_Link_Graph·T0_Hard_Lines·docs/spine/CH_06.md·_source/02_Tier_2_Region_Pages/sri_lanka.md
READ THAT CANON FIRST — open it and derive from it before you build anything from this document.
If this document disagrees with canon, CANON WINS and this document is the defect — fix the
document, never the canon. Nothing here is applied until it is ratified into canon.
STATUS: PROPOSAL-TIER design sheet. It is the slice's first ALLY-BESIDE encounter — the player holds
a line next to a practitioner who is running the actual rite — and the first sheet whose largest
finding is a CITATION GAP it refuses to fill by invention. It cites canon rows and writes none.
expelled with the edura) · display_name "the yaka that fastens on the sick"
real fight inside it — HL_0004)
defeat_protected FALSE · intelligence_tier sorcerous · kit_ref KIT_BE_0006_S1
disease-demon, exorcised because it is harmful
yakku-parallel chain toward the Swahili sea-spirits at Ch 8 (LINK_0149)
T0_Boss_Encounter_Registry @ BE_0006_S1 · docs/spine/CH_06.md § Boss structure,§10 CH06_B06, § Anti-fringe, § Protected-chapter combat framing ·
_source/02_Tier_2_Region_Pages/sri_lanka.md § 5 · T0_Cross_Cultural_Link_Graph @ LINK_0148
seventeenth-century eyewitness in the processed corpus describes the rite's images as "all deformed
but something resembling the shape of a man", some with long tusks like a boar, some with horns
like a bull, painted in many colours in horrible and monstrous shapes [SRC_00237, p. 62]. Man-shaped
base, animal hardware, high colour. That is the region's own iconographic register and this sheet
builds inside it.
assigns — spine chain, two limb pairs, the standard joint roster. Departures are declared in §5 and
every one of them attaches to that skeleton.
neck). THE BODY IS DELIBERATELY NEARLY HUMAN IN ITS MOTION, because the eyewitness register is a
thing "resembling the shape of a man" and because the horror of a disease-demon is proximity.
it is always trying to get PAST rather than THROUGH — see the fight grammar, where that is the
whole encounter.
the light.
made by the weavers, painted in many colours in horrible and monstrous shapes, some with long tusks
like a boar, some with horns like a bull, all deformed but something resembling the shape of a man;
food set before them with the sick person sitting the whole while; ceremonies always celebrated in
the night with drums and pipes and dancing until almost day; and at the end the images taken and
cast out into the highways to be trampled underfoot, the food carried away and eaten by the
attendants [SRC_00237, p. 62]. At another rite, men in a horrible disguise with bells about their
legs and doublets of a strange fashion, dancing and singing to call the being itself to come and eat
of the offerings brought, the sick person present throughout [SRC_00237, p. 64]. He also records
that these beings are held by the people to be, in many cases, the spirits of persons who died
before [SRC_00237, p. 62].
region page requires. What it licenses is STAGING — night, drums, masks, an all-night rite, an
afflicted person at the centre, a definite ending in which the thing is carried out and destroyed.
afflicted by a spirit — the chanting done inside a house with the doors and windows shut, the
reciting monk protected by armed people surrounding him, beginning the chanting keeping foremost in
his heart thoughts of love; if the being does not leave, the afflicted person taken to the courtyard
of a stupa and further verses chanted there; failing all these, the deities invoked with the words
that this spirit does not obey us, and we shall do the orders of the Buddha; and the spirit asked
not to torment a virtuous monk [SRC_00256, p. 152]. A shut room, an armed ring, a chant begun in
love and not in anger, an escalation to a sacred courtyard, and a courteous address at the end.
Every element of the encounter's structure is in that one passage.
states plainly what the corpus does NOT contain: the demonology's own internal structure — the named
yakku (Mahasona, Riri Yaka, the Daha-ata Sanniya), the diagnostic system that identifies which yaka
afflicts, the mask iconography, and the rite's own sequence and liturgy. Those come from the
specialist Tovil literature the spine cites by author (Wirz; Kapferer; Obeyesekere; Sarachchandra)
and which the processed corpus does not yet hold — "recorded as the Section-16 acquisition, not
filled by invention" [sri_lanka.md § 5].
CONSEQUENCE FOR THIS SHEET, applied without exception: it designs the ENCOUNTER and refuses to
design the DEMONOLOGY. No specific yaka is given an invented appearance, an invented affliction
signature, an invented mask, or an invented name-form. The names the spine already carries are
carried and not extended. Where the fight needs a diagnostic system, this sheet builds it out of
the ATTESTED staging (§6) and flags the specialist-sourced version as the thing that supersedes it
(§9). A design that invented the Daha-ata Sanniya's eighteen faces would be the citation test's
exact failure mode, and it would be a lie about a living tradition's own condemned register.
condemned disease-demons, exorcised because they are harmful, and they are villain material. The
Vedda Nae Yaku are venerated ancestral spirits of a living community and they are not. The two are
never conflated, never pooled under one word, and never staged in the same category
[sri_lanka.md § 5; SRC_00510, p. 74; HL_0005]. This sheet stages ONLY the former.
ONE-LINE READ: a man-shaped thing at the edge of the firelight wearing the sickness it brought, and
carrying the wrong animal's head-hardware for the face underneath.
PRIMARY — A7 COMPOSITE AND HYBRID FORM, and it is attested rather than invented. Man-shaped body,
animal hardware: long boar tusks erupting from a human jaw, or a bull's horn sheaths set on a human
skull, "all deformed but something resembling the shape of a man" [SRC_00237, p. 62]. The junction is
where the articulation law bites hardest and §5 carries it. The design instruction that keeps this out
of generic-movie-demon territory: the hardware is set ON a human skull rather than replacing it with
an animal one, so the face stays legible as a face and the wrongness is an ADDITION to a person
rather than a substitution of a beast. That distinction is the whole difference between the
tradition's register and a Hollywood one.
SUPPORTING — A5 AGE AND CORRUPTION STATES. It wears the affliction it carries, as material. The
skin's condition, the swelling, the wet or the cracking, the way the light sits on it — this is the
axis that makes it a DISEASE-demon rather than a monster with a health bar, and it is entirely
material and structural. It also gives the perceive verb something honest to read (§6).
SUPPORTING — A10 NEGATIVE SPACE, small and used once. The eyewitness records these beings held to be
the spirits of persons who died before [SRC_00237, p. 62], so a person is the right substrate and the
subtraction is the right register: the body casts light wrong at one place, or a limb does not
displace the smoke it passes through. One instance, not a theme — the theme belongs to BE_0006.
MECHANISM: it fastens. The being's whole nature is attachment to an afflicted person, and every
elevation above serves that — the hardware is for holding on, the corruption is what it has already
taken, the absence is the part of it that is no longer a person. Vril alters real physics rather than
suspending it: the fastening is a physical grip on something the game already treats as physical.
EMISSION: NONE. The encounter is lit by lamps, by the rite's fire, and by nothing the creature owns.
Everything frightening about it is a thing the firelight finds.
because a tusk is bone and does not articulate. Their weight is carried and it changes the jaw's
rest angle, which is authored into the idle rather than left to the animator.
excess taken in the joint itself and a visible strain in the masseter line. It is not a
double-hinge and it is not a second jaw; it is one human jaw opened too far, which is worse.
bind and shift the head's centre of mass forward, which is authored into the neck's carriage.
past human at the atlanto-occipital joint, used once per encounter, at the moment it looks at the
afflicted person around the ward line. A small violation used once reads as horror. A large one
used often reads as a rig error.
added segments. It costs the asset lane a material state and nothing else.
VERBS ARE BANISH AND PERCEIVE, axis 30/40/30. The row's counters: "hold the warded threshold with the
edura; perceive the affliction's tell to name the right yaka."
THE ARENA IS THE RITE, AND THE PLAYER IS NOT THE PROTAGONIST OF IT. The edura runs the rite. The
drummers hold the yak-bera. The afflicted person is at the centre and does not move. The player holds
the WARD LINE — the threshold the chant defends — and the entire encounter is fought at that line and
not in the room. This is the slice's first encounter where losing means something happening to
SOMEBODY ELSE, and that is its design identity.
| tell shape | body origin | one answer | counter class |
|---|---|---|---|
| the crouch at the light's edge | weight drops onto the forward foot outside the lamp-line | HOLD the line — meet it where it enters | the ward hold |
| the reach past the line | one arm extends across the threshold ahead of the body | BREAK the reach — a contact surface offered, and meetable | parry-class |
| the head turn around the ward | the neck goes fifteen degrees past human to look AT the afflicted | PERCEIVE — this is the moment the affliction shows on the face | the puzzle lane |
| the whole-body commitment at a drummer | the mass gives itself to a line at the rite's edge | DODGE and re-close the line behind it | dodge-only |
| the fastening | it makes contact with the afflicted person and holds | NAME it — the perceive read spent, the grip broken by the name | the puzzle lane |
THE PERCEIVE VERB IS A DIAGNOSIS AND IT IS BUILT FROM ATTESTED MATERIAL ONLY. The player reads the
AFFLICTION on the demon's own body — what the corruption layer is doing, where it is worst, what it
has taken — and matches it to what the afflicted person in the room is suffering. The match is the
name. This is the row's "perceive the affliction's tell to name the right yaka" built without
inventing a single specialist detail: the diagnostic is affliction-to-affliction, body-to-body,
observable, and it is superseded in place the moment the acquisition lands (§9).
ESCALATION — THE ROW'S PHRASE IS "MULTIPLIES ITS AFFLICTING FORMS RATHER THAN ADDING ATTACKS", and
this sheet holds it exactly. P2 does not give the demon a new move. It gives it a SECOND affliction
worn on the body at the same time, so the diagnosis has two candidate reads and only one of them is
what the person in the room is suffering. The fight gets harder by getting more ambiguous.
THE FOUR ESCALATION CHANNELS: POSTURE — it stops crouching and stands, which is worse, because a
disease-demon standing in a doorway is a person-shape. BREATH — it takes the afflicted person's
breathing rhythm, audibly, and the player can hear the theft. VOCALIZATION — the eyewitness records
the rite calling the being to come and eat [SRC_00237, p. 64]; in P2 it ANSWERS, in the register of
the sick person's own voice, and the design instruction is that this is never a scripted taunt and
never a line of villain dialogue. NEW OPENER — the reach past the line becomes a reach with the
afflicted person's own gesture, which the player has been watching all night.
OPENER AND VARIANTS: the root is the PROBE at the line. Variants are the probe held, the probe with
the reach, the probe as a feint that commits elsewhere, and the probe that becomes the fastening.
BREAKABLE PARTS at combat distance: the TUSKS or HORN SHEATHS (about 0.09 of silhouette; breaking
them removes the fastening's grip and is a permanent subtraction from the live moveset), and the
AFFLICTION CRUST at the shoulder and forearm (about 0.07; breaking it exposes the reading surface and
is a legibility gain rather than a damage gain). Both are outline features and both read without a
HUD.
CHAIN-METER BODY STATE: has_nonkill_path TRUE and the non-kill IS the tradition's path — the thing
is EXPELLED, not slain. Chain progress shows in how far outside the lamp-line the demon is standing
and in whether the edura's chant is unbroken; the player can feel the rite winning by where the fight
is happening.
RELOCATION AND TURF: it circles the whole warded ground through the night and the encounter follows
the rite's escalation from the shut house to the open courtyard [SRC_00256, p. 152], which is the
one relocation and it is documented rather than invented.
WIN: the yaka named, its grip broken, and its image carried out and cast down at the road at first
light [SRC_00237, p. 62]. The afflicted person is healed, the edura is unharmed, and the Tovil
demonology lore drops (receiving LINK_0148). LOSS: the afflicted person worsens, the rite runs again,
and the demon's afflicting forms are logged for the retry — the row's own death reward, no fail-wall.
edura, the drummers, the attendants, the afflicted person and the village are allies and protected
non-targets, and the fight is the community's own rite doing the community's own work. §17.1's
collective protection is not merely respected here, it is the encounter's structure: a lane that
read "exorcism" and staged a village as a threat would have inverted the source.
harmful, and it is rendered as the tradition condemns it — unsoftened, never Hollywood-monstered,
and never softened into an abstraction. The v2.4 build's "de-cultured negative-consciousness cloud"
is the failure this row's golden re-enrichment exists to correct, and this sheet is downstream of
that correction.
the Vedda Nae Yaku are venerated ancestral spirits of a living community, they are NOT villain
material, and nothing in this encounter touches them. No shared iconography, no shared vocabulary
on any player surface, no shared asset. The two registers do not meet.
through a photographic-human template with negative prompts as the control, and it must NOT route
through a wildlife template. The masks and the rite's material are REFERENCED, never reproduced —
the region's living sacred practice is not asset-copied [CH_06 § Asset anchors].
blow belonging to a rite rather than to the player, a defang? NO. (1) The non-kill here is not
care-softening, it is the tradition's own resolution — the thing is expelled and its image trampled,
which is a harsher ending than a stab. (2) The staging is the opposite of passive: an all-night
fight in the dark, at a line the player cannot leave, defending someone who cannot move, against a
thing that gets more ambiguous rather than more violent. (3) The devil's-advocate direction: could
this be BOLDER? Yes — and the sheet spends it on the fastening. The demon actually reaches the
afflicted person, actually takes hold, and the player actually watches it happen if they are slow.
That is a rated-R beat and it is in.
the fastening mechanic, the tell shapes, the multiplication-as-ambiguity escalation, and the breath
theft are INVENTED BY THIS SHEET and are the game's own. The staging (night, drums, masks, the
all-night rite, the afflicted person at the centre, the image carried out and trampled), the
man-shaped-with-animal-hardware iconography, the shut-room-and-armed-ring ward with its escalation
to the courtyard, and the held belief that these beings are the spirits of persons who died before
are CITED. The named yakku and their specific demonology are CARRIED FROM THE SPINE AND NOT
EXTENDED.
the House of Velheim's first appearance by two chapters and has no operative chain to surface.
display_name is the row's own.
line marking a threshold on the ground, the afflicted person seated at the centre with food set
before them, drummers at the edge, and at the outer dark a man-shaped figure crouched just beyond
the lamplight.
from the lower jaw, the face beneath still legible as a face, painted in the high colours of the
rite's own image-making.
frontal plate, the neck carried forward under their weight.
sickness the being carries, the material wet in one place and cracked in another, lit by lamplight
alone.
the rest of it still in the dark.
never reproduced as assets. No plate stages a member of the community as a threat; the community is
behind the player in every frame it appears in.
new finding: Wirz, Kapferer, Obeyesekere and Sarachchandra are cited by the spine and absent from
the processed corpus, so the named yakku, the diagnostic system, the mask iconography and the
rite's liturgy are UNAVAILABLE. This sheet's affliction-to-affliction diagnostic is a placeholder
built from attested staging and is SUPERSEDED IN PLACE the moment the acquisition lands. Section 16
of the region page already carries the acquisition; this is its second consumer.
hitzone_parts, phase_trigger, escalation_vector, phase_voice_array EMPTY on the row. Thissheet proposes two breakable regions, a named phase trigger (the second affliction appearing) and a
four-channel escalation including a phase voice that must never become a taunt.
T0_Boss_Attack_Rail 0 rows; five tell shapes with single answers are waiting.multi-stage ritual on a timer, whose interruption is a loss condition, crosses the boss lane and the
companion-AI lane. It is the slice's first instance and Ch 9's scriptorium and Ch 12's Ifa warding
will want it again.
protected TRUE, a real fight inside it, routedonly at the tradition's own condemned being) is used here under HL_0004 and is worth a positive
control at the gate lane: the combination is legal, unusual, and easy for a later checker to read
as a violation.