creatures/CR_0010_ebu_gogo.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):
T0_Creature_Roster·docs/spine/CH_02.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.
row
it accordingly
T0_Creature_Roster @ CR_0010 · docs/spine/CH_02.md CH02_B05 · flores_island.md § 3 and § 5path
and waist; a low broad ribcage; arms long relative to stature so the hands hang near the knee; a
broad flat foot
vertebrae, sacrum, two limb pairs, five digits each
proportional rather than exotic — shoulder flexion to about 170 degrees and a scapular excursion at
the upper end of the hominoid range, because this is a body that moves through rock on four points;
hip flexion to about 130 degrees for a deep habitual squat that is a REST pose here rather than a
strain
fully adult, and the four-point crawl over flowstone is the travelling gait
THE ANATOMY IS THE CARE DISCIPLINE HERE. The tradition holds these as real creatures and not spirits,
of genuinely ambiguous status, whose humanity the Nage themselves hold doubtful. A body built as a
PEOPLE — correct joints, real gait, a face that carries expression — is the design that honours that,
and it is also the design that is most unsettling, because the wrongness is never in the body.
seam the region page states: ebu gogo is a Nage category and Liang Bua sits in Manggarai western
Flores, so the deep-time resonance is a cross-Flores ethnographic parallel and explicitly NOT a
local Manggarai claim.
land, whose humanity the Nage themselves hold doubtful, whom they are ambivalent about calling
animals, whom they deny were spirits, and who are said — in the Nage's own telling, about two
centuries ago — to have been destroyed by the ancestors of an incoming group [SRC_00457].
local language laced with an mmm sound; they dwelt at the Lia Ula cave until the people of 'Ua ended
them roughly two centuries ago; and the Nage insist they were real creatures and not spirits
[SRC_00193]. Lia Ula is the source's named cave, cited but NOT staged — the chapter cave remains
Liang Bua.
child-snatching wild-folk, held mythic, as a lingering deep-cave sub-threat and never a false idyll.
folklore_attribution_source cell says so in terms, and thestanding memory rule says a creationist or western-cryptozoology construct is never credited as
Indigenous tradition. The tier label CRYPTID on this row is a registry FILL-tier class carried
verbatim from its owning doc, and it does not license a cryptozoology read.
asserted as the hominin, never a debunk, and the outsider equation stays out of player text.
ONE-LINE SILHOUETTE READ: a cluster of small upright figures at hip height, moving with a completely
adult gait, hands too big for the arms, hair matted into cords that hold the shape of the crawl-spaces
they use.
PRIMARY — A10 NEGATIVE SPACE, spent on the WRONG-SCALE READ rather than on a missing body part. Nothing
about any single one of them is monstrous. What the player reads at distance is a relationship that
does not resolve: adult carriage, adult coordination, adult purpose, at a child's height, in a group
that moves as a group. The player's eye keeps trying to read them as children and keeps being
corrected by the gait. That is genuinely unnerving, it costs no distortion, and it is exactly what the
tradition describes.
MECHANISM: none is needed and none is claimed. These are held as real creatures rather than as spirits
or constructs, so the design does not give them a supernatural physics. Their register is RECOGNITION
AND DEPTH, held mythic. That is the doctrine's modesty case: elevation is not an obligation to distort.
SUPPORTING — A5 AGE AND STATE, the deep-layer cohort. Decades in Liang Bua's dark are on them, and it
is history rather than horror:
hold the shape of the crawl-spaces the animal habitually squeezes through — a body that carries a
cast of its own home.
There is no albinism, no colour loss and no bleaching: those read as monster tropes and, on a
human-shaped being from a living tradition, they read worse than that.
over flowstone. The palms are not.
SUPPORTING — A4 HYPERTROPHY, modest and single: the hand and forearm. A grip built for rock and for
carrying off what is taken — crop-raiding is the attested edge — so the hands read a size too large
for the arm at any distance. It is the one proportion that is genuinely off, it is the one that
carries the menace, and it is the one that is functionally justified.
THE MARK: NONE, AND THE ZERO IS DELIBERATE. The doctrine's rule is that one is the number for marks,
and this is the case where the number is zero. A visual mark on a human-shaped being drawn from a
living people's oral tradition is a BRAND, and this game does not brand. The recognition cue is
instead the attested SOUND — a broken version of the local language laced with an mmm — and it does
the identifying work a mark would do, at greater distance, in the dark, which is where this encounter
happens.
EMISSION: none. The deep layers are lit by the player's torch and by nothing else.
dorsal line, that flattens against the body in a crawl-space and hangs in open chamber. They are
not a static mesh and they are not cloth.
and the grip are ordinary hominoid, and the metacarpal and phalangeal lengths carry the read.
ground-contact set, and it must not be a walk animation played on all fours.
THIS IS NOT A BOSS ROW AND THE SHEET DOES NOT PROMOTE IT. The chapter types it precisely: an ambient
sub-threat, an environmental stalk-and-evade presence genuinely dangerous to a lone child, where
EVASION IS THE REGISTER AND THE RIGHT PLAY, and where a cornered child who has run out of room can put
one down to survive — hard and costly, writing ws.liang_bua_deep_layer_pressure. Evading cleanly
writes nothing, so the pressure is the price of survival-by-force and never a tax on being hunted.
| tell shape | body origin | one answer | counter class |
|---|---|---|---|
| the cut-off | two of them move to opposite sides of the chamber's exit line, upright, unhurried | take a third line, or go up | movement read |
| the closing crawl | a body drops to four points and comes fast along the floor | break the floor line — get onto a ledge or a boulder | movement read |
| the reach | the arm extends and the hand opens, at grabbing height for a child | strike the forearm, not the body | strike, and it is the cornered answer |
| the group hold | they stop, all of them, and the mmm register goes quiet | the room has been decided; leave it now | audio read |
ESCALATION on the four channels: POSTURE — the group stops keeping distance and starts keeping the
EXITS. BREATH — audible, close, and multiple, which is the count arriving before the bodies do.
VOCALIZATION — the mmm-laced register goes from scattered and conversational to synchronised, which is
the attested speech turned into the fight's most frightening beat without a single new asset. NEW
OPENER — the closing crawl replaces the cut-off.
TURF: they own the deep layers, they were there before the player, and the layers stay theirs after.
That is the whole point of an ambient threat — it is a resident, not an encounter.
THE PUT-DOWN IS REAL AND IT IS COSTLY. The floor clauses stand at every value: the deep layers are
never a hunting ground, the villagers' cave-burning is never replayed, and the world-state read is
ambient danger on the next descent rather than a gate.
whose tradition it is are not represented by it and are never in the encounter. The account of the
ebu gogo's ending stays in the tradition's own voice and is NEVER restaged as an act by or against a
living community — the cave-burning is not content this game builds.
of that edge as canon. A sheet that renders them harmless has failed the row and protected nobody,
and this is the doctrine's own worked example of that failure.
people's oral tradition never routes through raw generation with negative prompts as the control.
child-snatching edge because the protagonist is a child. Refused — the edge is the row's own restored
canon, the register is evasion, and a threat a child can simply walk past is not a threat. (2)
Rendering them as pitiable rather than dangerous, on the theory that a tradition's ambiguous beings
are safer played sad. Refused — that is care-tier inflation, it flattens the ambiguity the tradition
actually holds, and it converts a living folk-taxonomy into a moral lesson the Nage did not write.
ONE REDUCTION WAS MADE AND IT IS DECLARED: no visual mark, no albinism, no distorted face. The
devil's-advocate pass on it was run and sustained — those choices would add horror-film legibility
at the price of branding a human-shaped being from a living tradition, and the attested sound
carries the identification instead, better.
travel gait, the cut-off and closing-crawl shapes, and the synchronised-mmm escalation are INVENTED
BY THIS SHEET as the game's own design and are named as ours. Short, hairy, group-living,
cave-dwelling, the broken language with its mmm, the ambiguous status, the denial that they were
spirits, and the crop-raiding and child-snatching edge are CITED to SRC_00193 and SRC_00457.
floresiensis reference reaches a player surface. No antagonist token exists in this chapter.
carriage, hip-height to a standing person for scale, clay-corded hair over the shoulders, hands
hanging near the knee. Torch as the only light, its flame in frame.
relationship alone, no action.
polished outer forearm catching the light.
beautified nor distorted — the plate that proves the design carries recognition rather than horror.
outline.
rail, no hitzone parts and no phase structure anywhere in the registries. The four shapes in section
6 have no data home. Whether ambient threats deserve a lightweight encounter row is a registry-lane
question this sheet raises and does not answer.
T0_Creature_Roster @ CR_0010 :: generation_status is pending and mesh_id_ref is EMPTY, while the six ordinary-fauna Ch-2 rows are all complete. The folklore half of this chapter's roster has
not been built at all.
tier_classification CRYPTID on a row whose own attribution cell says it is not a cryptozoologyconstruct is a label that will mislead a lane reading columns rather than cells. Flagged.
creature_vocalization_sfx_id_ref_array is EMPTY on this row, andthe mmm-laced register is this being's entire identification system in the dark. It is the single
highest-value empty cell on the row.