CR_0002_naga_tana_water_aspect.md

creatures/CR_0002_naga_tana_water_aspect.md

CR_0002 — the naga tana, the water-and-earth aspect of the guardian pair (reticulated python)

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):

T0_Boss_Attack_Rail · T0_Boss_Encounter_Registry · T0_Creature_Roster · docs/spine/CH_02.md · docs/spine/CH_03.md · _source/02_Tier_2_Region_Pages/flores_island.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, written to docs/proposals/bestiary/BESTIARY_ELEVATION_DOCTRINE.md

and critic-gated against its ten refusal tests. It cites canon rows and writes none.

1. identity

• canon_id: CR_0002
• canon_name: Reticulated python
• also_appears_as: the water half of BE_0002_S1 (the Kelimutu Guardian, CH_02) and the whole of

BE_0003_S1 (the Naga Tana of the Wae, the roused land-guardian, CH_03)

• chapter: CH_02, CH_03
• region: flores_island
• site: recharge_waterfall at Ch 2; wae_water_spring at Ch 3 (spring head with a naga-tana encounter

pocket)

• ontology_class: ORDINARY_FAUNA
• combat_permission: PERMITTED
• cultural_depiction_required: TRUE
• hard_line_anchors: HL_0005; HL_0002; HL_0003
• care_tier: standard
• register: CREATURE
• primary_axis: A8 material substitution
• rows_read: registries/T0_Creature_Roster [DRAFT v0.1]/Sheet1.csv @ CR_0002 · registries/T0_Boss_Encounter_Registry [DRAFT v0.1]/Sheet1.csv @ BE_0002_S1, BE_0003_S1 · _source/02_Tier_2_Region_Pages/flores_island.md § 3 and § 5 · docs/spine/CH_02.md CH02_B03 · docs/spine/CH_03.md the ngoéng de tana beats

THE ROW'S OWN LICENCE, QUOTED, BECAUSE IT IS THE WHOLE SHEET. CR_0002's folklore_attribution_source

reads: settled as attested Manggarai living tradition per SRC_00469 — the naga are good guardians

named for their charge (naga golo and naga beo for a village, naga tana for the soil), every village

is held to keep at least one, so the wae guardian holds its own ngoéng-de-tana contract and is

appeased and never slain. And its cultural_significance cell rules the style register in one phrase:

carried to Ch 3 as the naga tana potent-land guardian, MYTHOLOGICALLY-STYLIZED WHEN ROUSED, appeased

not slain. That phrase is canon licence, and this row is where it is spent.

2. base_species

• binomial: *Malayopython reticulatus*
• archetype: limbless serpent
• individual: an old animal, near five metres, whose bind pose is the coil — a long body folded into

a disc a little over a metre and a half across, which is how it is met and how it is first read

• skeleton: one skull with a highly kinetic quadrate and a mobile mandibular symphysis; roughly three

hundred precloacal vertebrae, each with its own rib pair, plus a caudal chain (AUTHORIAL_ANATOMY);

no limb girdles; vestigial pelvic spurs flanking the vent

• declared ROM (AUTHORIAL_ANATOMY): each intervertebral joint carries only a few degrees of lateral

and vertical play, and the body's whole freedom is the SUM of three hundred small joints — which is

why the coil is a smooth curve and never a hinge, and why an animator who poses it as a hose has

already broken it; the jaw gapes past 120 degrees with the symphysis spreading; the anterior third

can lift its own length off the ground into an S and hold it

• mass, stance, gait: mass distributed along the whole body, so the animal has no centre a player can

read; rectilinear creep on the flat with the ventral scutes walking the body forward in waves,

lateral undulation in water, and a coil that is a resting STRUCTURE rather than a pose

• resting silhouette: a low broad disc with one raised head — the only vertical thing in the frame

3. lore_source

• tradition: Manggarai, held under that people's name and never pooled with a neighbouring

tradition's cognate.

• THE NAGA, CITED: the Manggarai recognise the darat and the naga tana, the serpent guardian of the

soil, which must be asked through a ritual contract — the ngoéng-de-tana, what the land wants —

before the land is used; violate the contract and the guardian is roused. The naga are GOOD

GUARDIANS named for their charge, naga golo and naga beo for a village, naga tana for the soil, and

every village is held to keep at least one [SRC_00469].

• THE PRECEDENT THAT MAKES THE ELEVATION LEGITIMATE, CITED: an eel in a stream may be the temporary

material form of a place-spirit, DOUBLY SPIRITUAL as a snake-shaped animal bound to potent water,

and a person who injures one is encouraged to confess to a healer who prepares protective medicine

[SRC_00203]. The tradition itself holds that a snake-shaped animal at a potent water source can be

a place-spirit wearing an animal. That is not a liberty this sheet takes. It is the record.

• BEHIND BOTH stand the empo de tana, the ancestors of the land — not the dead of any family but the

original owners, addressed at fields, forests and water sources, described as officials who guard

the key sites [SRC_00203]. That is why the guardian has a CONTRACT and not merely a territory.

• attested name: naga tana, the guardian of the soil. THE SPRING'S OWN NAME IS NOT ATTESTED. The

naming formula is (naga + the charge it keeps), and the three recorded fillings are golo, beo and

tana. A spring-guardian name built on that formula would be an EXTENSION of an attested rule rather

than an attested term, so this sheet does not mint one and the encounter uses the row's own display

names — the Kelimutu Guardian at Ch 2, the naga that keeps the spring at Ch 3.

• WHAT THIS SHEET REFUSES, AND WHY IT MATTERS. Josh's ruling asks whether a serpent boss might be

humanoid. For THIS row the answer is no, and the reason is canon rather than timidity: the raised

torso, the crown and the many-headed balustrade form belong to the Balinese and Javanese naga

iconography, the region page's standing law keeps peoples' labels apart and never pools them, and

importing that form onto a Manggarai soil-guardian would merge two traditions into one island-wide

figure. The humanoid answer is not refused, it is ROUTED: it lands at BE_0004_S1, the Ch-4

candi-bentar gate-naga, where the tradition's own carved iconography attests it and the design sheet

for that row builds it. One ruling, two rows, each answered from its own record.

4. elevation

ONE-LINE SILHOUETTE READ: a reticulated python whose forward third has been taken into the ground —

moss and rootlet packed into the scale seams, a belly that stays black-wet out of the water, and two

blind pale-blue eyes.

PRIMARY — A8 MATERIAL SUBSTITUTION, partial and seamed. The animal is not made of stone; it is a

python that the spring has been taking for years, and the taking has a visible boundary. Concrete,

paintable:

• From the head back through the first third of the body, the interscale gaps carry the spring's own

ground: fine dark rootlet and a low moss packed into the seams, so the reticulated pattern is still

legible underneath but reads through vegetation rather than over skin. The dorsal midline of that

section is nearly continuous green-black.

• The ventral scutes of the same section are permanently wet-dark and slightly translucent at the

edges, clouded with the same mineral load the sibling row wears as a chalk crust — wetting-darkening

and refraction, which is how the light law says a body reads without emitting.

• Behind that section the animal is simply a python: clean gold-and-black reticulation, dry, ordinary,

magnificent. THE SEAM IS THE DESIGN. A hard transition band across the body says a body is half the

land's, and it does it in one look with no explanation.

MECHANISM: a snake-shaped animal bound to potent water at a vril-dense recharge source (VS_CH02_001)

is the exact condition the Manggarai record holds for a place-spirit's material form, and vril alters

real physics rather than suspending it — so the binding is DEPOSITION. The same spring, the same

years, the same mechanism that crusts the monitor's belly white, expressed in a body that lies IN the

ground rather than on it. Two animals, one spring, one mechanism: that is what makes them a pair

instead of two rows that happen to share a beat.

SUPPORTING — A4 HYPERTROPHY: the constriction machine, made a visible machine. A python's coil is a

staged, measured tightening driven by segmental muscle running the length of the body

(AUTHORIAL_ANATOMY). On this animal the epaxial mass of the anterior third is hypertrophied into a

raised ridge along the dorsal midline, and the ridge LOADS SEGMENT BY SEGMENT before a strike, running

visibly from the anchored tail forward. The player can therefore see which way the loop will close

before it closes, which is the constriction lane the encounter's counters already name, made

anatomical instead of scripted.

SUPPORTING — A5 AGE AND STATE: a healed break in the spine chain roughly a third of the way down. The

coil folds around it and always folds the same way, so the animal's rest pose is permanently

asymmetric and the safe side of the disc is learnable. Pale scarring crosses the dorsum where the

break knitted.

SUPPORTING — A9 THE MARK: the eyes are in permanent pre-shed blue. A snake shedding carries opaque

milky-blue spectacles and is functionally near-blind through that window (AUTHORIAL_ANATOMY). Two

pale blue-white discs on a dark green-black head is one high-contrast identity readable across a

clearing, and it costs no light — it is opacity and scattering, not emission. It also carries the

fight's best fact: this half of the pair does NOT track by sight. Break line of sight and the monitor

loses the player; stand perfectly still and the serpent still has them.

EMISSION: none. The Ch-3 rousing carries defender_element Earth on BE_0003_S1, and Earth is not one

of the three emitting families, so the roused state reads as WORLD RESPONSE — see section 6.

5. articulation_delta

• The moss-and-rootlet section is a surface layer over the existing scale geometry with its own

deformation, not a separate mesh piece. It compresses where the coil closes and lifts where the body

arches; it is wet in the water and matte out of it.

• The dorsal epaxial ridge adds no joint. It is a deformation over the existing vertebral chain,

driven by a per-segment load value, so the visible wave IS the muscle chain's activation order. Its

ROM is the spine's; its expression is thickness.

• The healed break is a stiffened span of about fifteen vertebrae whose per-joint lateral play drops

to roughly a third of the chain's normal value. Weight passes through it in a straighter line, which

is the mechanical reason for the permanent fold asymmetry.

• The raised forebody is an existing capacity, not an addition: the anterior third lifting into an S

and holding it is what the animal already does, and the encounter uses it as the meeting posture.

The head comes up to a standing human's eye height. It does not grow a torso or arms, and no part of

this design asks it to.

6. fight_grammar

TWO ENCOUNTERS, TWO GRAMMARS, ONE BODY. The doctrine's rule is that a sheet which hands both the same

telegraph set has not read the rows.

CH 2 — BE_0002_S1, EVADE/STRIKE, puzzle-forward, pips 5 at reveal 1.0, nonkill TRUE, counters: step the

constriction lane on the tell; attune the breath to open a withdrawal. Here the serpent is the LANE

and the monitor is the strike.

CH 3 — BE_0003_S1, ATTUNE/PERCEIVE, defender_element Earth, win PURGE;PERCEIVE, counters: attune the

breath to open a pause; perceive the specific violation to know the contract to offer. The verbs are

not combat verbs and the sheet does not smuggle combat into them. THE ROUSED STATE IS THE ELEVATION'S

PAYOFF and it is where mythologically-stylized is spent:

• The moss-and-rootlet section is no longer passive. When the animal rouses, the ground it lies on

moves with it — the litter lifts and settles in a radius, the spring's flow stutters and browns,

and dry cracks open in the mud along the arc the body has just left. That is the Earth element read

as the doctrine's A6 requires: material, motion, and the world's response in a radius, with no

emission anywhere.

• The rousing has a body state, not a health bar: the forebody comes up and STAYS up, the ridge holds

loaded without releasing, and the pale eyes come round to face a person who cannot be seen with

them. The pause the player attunes to is the ridge unloading.

• PERCEIVE is a real read with a body: the specific violation is legible on the animal, because the

section of it that is ground shows what was done to the ground. Cut timber reads as fresh sap in the

seams; a fouled spring reads as silt in the ventral crust.

BREAKABLE PARTS, Ch 2 fought route only, with silhouette fractions at the shipped combat camera:

• The anchor coil, roughly 18 per cent of the coiled silhouette. Break event: the wrap releases and

the whole disc slides. Subtraction: the loop close loses its power stage and becomes a shove.

• The loaded ridge span, roughly 9 per cent along the top line. Break event: the wave stops

propagating past the struck segment. Legibility gain: the lane's tell shortens, which makes the

puzzle route HARDER and is the honest cost of taking the violent option.

• The head, no break. There is no decapitation beat in this encounter and the sheet does not design

one.

ESCALATION on the four channels: POSTURE — the forebody rises from ground level to eye height and the

disc tightens by one full coil. BREATH — the whole-body rise-and-fall shortens and stops being a rest

cycle. VOCALIZATION — a long low exhalation through the open glottis, and at the Ch-3 rousing the

sound the player hears is not the animal but the ground under it. NEW OPENER — the lane load replaces

the slack idle as the state it returns to between actions.

OPENER AND VARIANTS: the lane load is the root and it is deliberately the safest thing in the fight,

because it is the lesson. Its variants are the same load with more on it: the double load (both arcs

light, only one closes — the feint), and the load-into-strike (the ridge fires and the head follows

the same beat).

RELOCATION AND TURF: the animal owns the water and does not leave it. Its relocation is vertical — it

goes UNDER, and the disc that was the arena becomes a surface with something beneath it. At Ch 3 it

does not relocate at all, because a guardian holding a contract is not going anywhere; the encounter

ends when the contract does.

CHAIN-METER BODY STATE: the pips read on the coil count. Each correct read costs the animal one coil

of tension and the disc visibly loosens; a wiped chain closes it back to full in one motion.

7. care_read

• COLLECTIVE READ: §17.1 protection is collective and is untouched here. No Manggarai person or

community is a target, a villain, or a subject of this encounter. cultural_depiction_required is

TRUE on this row because the naga vocabulary and the ngoéng-de-tana contract are a living

tradition's own, and the obligation that flag creates is accuracy and weight — which this sheet

discharges by building the guardian AS the tradition holds it, good, contracted, and appeased.

• ONTOLOGY ROUTING: the row is ORDINARY_FAUNA and the tradition's frame is a good guardian. Neither

is softened. The Ch-2 fought route stays available at its stated price of one

ws.serpent_reverence_marks, and the Ch-3 encounter is appeased and never slain because the

ngoéng-de-tana contract IS the resolution — the rite states the constraint in its own voice and the

encounter restores the community's rite rather than removing a creature. That is a cited exemption

on the row, not a lane's taste.

• ROUTE: concept plate required, attended build. A designed mythic-register being never routes

through a photographic-wildlife template — that route is what produced a literal

*Malayopython reticulatus* and the defect this whole doctrine answers.

• RENAME-REFRAME: used once, in the negative. The humanoid form was not removed from the game; it was

moved to the row whose tradition attests it. Nothing is lost and nothing is merged.

• ANTI-TIMID PASS, RECORDED. Two reductions were considered and BOTH were refused. First: keeping the

animal wholly naturalistic at Ch 2 and reserving all elevation for the Ch-3 rousing. Refused — the

Ch-2 beat is the player's first boss-shaped encounter in the game and shipping a documentary python

there is precisely the failure Josh named. Second: dropping the ground-seam because a half-mossed

snake might read as unclean. Refused — the tradition's own record is that the animal at potent water

IS the place-spirit's material form, and refusing to show that is refusing the tradition's actual

claim in favour of a tidier animal. The only thing this sheet declines is the imported Balinese

iconography, and that refusal is a citation rule rather than a care reduction.

• INVENTION DECLARATION: the ground-seam, the moss-and-rootlet packing, the mineral-clouded ventral

scutes, the hypertrophied epaxial ridge, the healed spinal break and its fold asymmetry, and the

permanent pre-shed eye state are INVENTED BY THIS SHEET as the game's own design for one individual

animal. They are named as ours and are not presented as anything the Manggarai record says. The

naga's goodness, its naming-by-charge, the ngoéng-de-tana contract, the every-village rule and the

snake-shaped-animal-as-place-spirit precedent are CITED.

• REVEAL READ: the display names on the rows are clean and no antagonist pattern token appears. The

chapter predates the family entirely.

8. plate_brief

• PLATE A, identity: the coiled animal at the spring head in flat overcast light, seen from a

standing person's height, the forward third dark with packed moss and rootlet, the belly wet-black

where it meets the water, the reticulated pattern clean and gold behind the seam, two pale blue

discs where the eyes are.

• PLATE B, the seam: a close study across the transition band, half the frame vegetation-packed

scale and half the frame clean reticulation, so a modeller can see exactly where the two materials

meet and how the pattern survives underneath.

• PLATE C, the meeting posture: the forebody raised into an S at a standing person's eye height,

the epaxial ridge loaded and visible along the top line, the disc still closed on the ground below.

• PLATE D, the Ch-3 rousing: the same animal with the ground answering — litter lifted in a ring,

the spring browning, dry cracks opening in the mud along the arc the body has left. Daylight, no

emitted light anywhere in frame.

• PLATE E, silhouette: black fill, the coiled rest pose and the raised roused pose at one scale.

9. boarded_debts

• T0_Boss_Encounter_Registry @ BE_0002_S1 :: hitzone_parts and @ BE_0003_S1 :: hitzone_parts are

both EMPTY. Section 6's break regions are their content.

• @ BE_0003_S1 :: phase_trigger, escalation_vector, phase_voice_array are EMPTY. Section 6's

rousing state and world-response are their content.

• T0_Boss_Attack_Rail carries 0 rows for both encounters.
• T0_Creature_Roster @ CR_0002 :: vril_substrate_response is EMPTY. The ground-seam deposition is

its proposed content, and it is the same mechanism proposed for CR_0001 — the pair should read as

one spring's work in the data as well as on screen.

• @ BE_0002_S1 :: defender_element is EMPTY while @ BE_0003_S1 carries Earth for what canon says

is the same animal roused. That may be exactly right — Ch 2 is unroused — but it is unstated, and a

build reading only the Ch-2 row would never learn the animal has an element at all. Flagged for the

registry lane, not resolved here.

• T0_Creature_Roster carries NO mass, density, hardness, fragility, flexibility or zone

columns. The physics lane populated those five axes on 72 weapon rows and 225 environment

rows; the creature registry never got them, which is why section 10's declarations live in

this sheet and in the emitted profile rather than in a registry cell. Minting the columns is

a registry change and is boarded, not taken here.

• T0_Element_Effectiveness carries no row keyed on a CREATURE. Section 10.4 is the content

for CR_0002's rows the day that key exists.

• DOCTRINE AMENDMENT PROPOSED: the doctrine's A7 worked example says a serpent guardian whose forebody

has raised into a torso with arms is where the tradition's balustrade iconography frequently arrives

first. True — but not for every serpent, and this sheet is the case that shows the constraint. The

doctrine should carry the corollary: attested iconography builds on the row whose tradition attests

it, and never travels to a neighbouring people's cognate.

10. physical_profile

RULED INTO EXISTENCE 2026-08-06 (Josh, the physical-realism half of the completeness law,

docs/spine/DECISIONS_PENDING_JOSH.md): every creature carries real mass, real density, weak

and strong zones grounded in its biology, and rows in the damage-type effectiveness matrix —

and every bestiary sheet authored from now declares them. This section is the first instance

and is therefore the TEMPLATE the Ch 5-13 sheets inherit: four tables, fixed headers, each

value carrying its tier and its grounding.

THE TABLES ARE THE DATA. harness/asset_factory/emit_creature_physical.py parses this

section and emits the engine-readable profile, so a value edited here moves the game and a

value invented in the emitter has nowhere to come from. Nothing below is hand-copied into a

second place.

10.1 mass and density

WHAT THE MASS DRIVES, so it is not a number sitting in a document: locomotion frequency

(wavelength over cruise speed puts this body at about 0.25 Hz, the BOTTOM of the anatomy

law's cited 0.2-2.0 range — a heavy body undulates slowly, and that is what weight looks

like), knockback, footprint depth against the soil law, brush displacement, and water

displacement at the spring.

10.2 declared range of motion

Per the anatomy law, build/3d/schema/anatomy_reference/ANATOMY_REFERENCE.md LIMBLESS /

serpentine, whose figures are measurements with citations rather than choices.

THE HEALED BREAK IS A LOCAL EXCEPTION AND IS NOT A NEW JOINT: section 5 puts the stiffened

span's per-joint lateral play at roughly a third of the chain's normal value, so about

-8 to +8 degrees across those fifteen vertebrae. That reduction is the mechanical reason for

the permanent fold asymmetry AND for the zone table's reading of that span below.

10.3 zones

Each zone declares the three material axes the interaction grid already reads

(docs/proposals/combat/MATERIAL_INTERACTION_TABLE.md section 1). The outcome per damage

class is then DERIVED by that grid — this sheet authors no outcome and no magnitude.

THE FLEXIBILITY COLUMN IS WHERE THE MASS ENTERS THE DAMAGE MODEL, and it was got wrong once

before it was got right — recorded because the correction is the point. A snake is the most

flexible animal in the chapter, so every trunk zone was first declared flexible. Run through

the grid, that made the whole body UNCUTTABLE: the grid's flexible rule is "a flexible thing

MOVES instead of receiving; you cannot cut a hanging rope taut."

But this body is 44.5 kg lying along the ground. It is flexible in BENDING and it is not free

to move away from an edge, which are two different properties that the word flexible was

covering for. So the trunk zones read semi — the mass holds them in place — and flexible

is kept only where the body really can leave: the tail whip, which is light and free, and the

jaw's quadrate hang, which carries no load at all. That is the derived mass doing work in the

combat model rather than sitting in a table, and it is why the mass had to be measured before

this section could be written.

10.4 element response

Vocabulary is the shipped elemental grid's, Tools/DT_ElementMatrix.csv — Earth, Fire,

Water, Air, Metal, Mud, Sand, Steam, Smoke, Ice. A row reading NEUTRAL is a declaration, not

an omission.

10.5 what this section deliberately does NOT do

• It authors NO MAGNITUDE. Every damage outcome is an outcome CLASS from the shared grid, per

that table's own rule that magnitudes stay behind the tuning firewall.

• It writes NO registry cell. T0_Creature_Roster carries no mass, density or zone columns,

and minting them is a registry change this sheet has no authority to make. The columns are

named in section 9 as a boarded debt.

• It does not restate the elemental grid. Where a cell reads REDUCED or EFFECTIVE, the grid

still resolves the interaction; this table says which way this BODY leans and why.

Generated by harness/site/structure_site.py — the URL path is the repo path. review root