CR_0151_the_wa_sent_night_form.md

creatures/CR_0151_the_wa_sent_night_form.md

CR_0151 — the polo and its wa, the sent night-form

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 · _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_0151
• canon_name: Polo
• encountered_as: BE_0002_S2, the Polo's Vital-Force Theft (CH02_B06), display name at phase one

"the thing that keeps offering"

• chapter: CH_02
• region: flores_island · sites kelimutu_crater_lakes (phase one, where the bargain is offered) and

liang_bua_cave (phase two, where the sending hunts)

• ontology_class: CONDEMNED
• combat_permission: FOLKLORE_FACED
• collect_verb: CONTAIN_PURGE
• cultural_depiction_required: TRUE
• hard_line_anchors: HL_0005; HL_0002; HL_0003
• care_tier: standard (the row) — this sheet treats the SUBJECT as high-care and says why in section 7
• register: FOLKLORE BEING
• primary_axis: A10 negative space
• rows_read: T0_Creature_Roster @ CR_0151 · T0_Boss_Encounter_Registry @ BE_0002, BE_0002_S2 · _source/02_Tier_2_Region_Pages/flores_island.md § 5 · docs/spine/CH_02.md CH02_B06 and "Where the light is at Liang Bua"

THE ONE THING THIS SHEET IS BUILT AROUND. The design subject is NOT a person. An ata polo is a person

whose soul has been displaced, and the record this game is built on carries modern accusation and

lethal mob violence against accused neighbours. The malevolence therefore seats in the BARGAIN and its

SENT AGENT: the enemy is the spirit-evil and the harm it does, the game never offers an accused

villager as a target, and the red-eye stigma stays on the spirit-form and is never a physiognomy laid

on real people. That is canon's own sentence, quoted, and every design decision below is downstream of

it. The result is more frightening than the sanitised alternative and safer than it too, which is the

care doctrine's whole argument in one subject.

2. base_species

There is no animal base. Two designed bodies, both routed to the humanoid and quadruped archetypes:

• THE NAKED NIGHT-FORM, the poti ngeping send. Humanoid archetype: one skull, cervical chain of 7,

spine to the sacrum, two limb pairs, five digits each. Human-scaled and human-proportioned in

LENGTH — the proportions are correct, which is what makes the volume wrong.

• THE GREAT DOG, the second attested send. Quadruped canid archetype: cervical chain of 7, roughly 13

thoracic and 7 lumbar vertebrae, a long caudal chain, digitigrade limbs on four digits.

• declared ROM (AUTHORIAL_ANATOMY): both bodies keep ordinary vertebrate ranges and the design does

NOT rely on impossible poses — shoulder to about 150 degrees of flexion, elbow to about 145, hip to

about 120, spine lateral bend to about 30 degrees over the lumbar span, neck to about 70 degrees

lateral. The horror is not in a broken joint. Anything that moves outside declared ROM is a solver

failure, not a design intent, and the anatomy law refuses it.

• mass, stance, gait: the naked form stands upright and still, and its stillness is total — it does

not sway, shift weight, or adjust. It moves in complete transitions with no settling. The dog form

carries a canid trot with one beat of the four-beat gait held a fraction long, so the rhythm is

almost right.

• resting silhouette: the naked form is a narrow vertical in the dark with correct human proportions;

the dog form is a long low horizontal about half again the mass of a village dog.

3. lore_source

• tradition: Ngada, Nage, Keo, Ende and Lio (the polo), and western Manggarai (the janto and its

owner the ata janto), each held under its own people's name and never merged.

• CITED: among the Ngada, Nage and Keo, the Ende and the Lio the soul-eater is polo, plainly evil

spirit, with the night-form polo mburi mera specifically Lio; the western Manggarai counterpart is

janto, literally poison, and its owner the ata janto, who commissions a spirit to strike a

neighbour — the attack of an evil spirit, not a drug in a cup [SRC_00469].

• CITED: in the Nage account an ata polo is not a separate species but a person whose soul, mae, has

been displaced by a harmful essence, wa, taken on through an illicit pact — human in outward form

and non-human within [SRC_00457].

• CITED: the Manggarai bargain carries a body of its own — the wina wa, second-hidden wife, or rona wa,

second-hidden husband, the bound spirit that lives in the practitioner and leaves the sleeping body

at night to hunt, and that can be SENT AHEAD OF ITS OWNER AS A FORERUNNER; the Nage cognate is the

plain wa [SRC_00469].

• CITED, and this is the design's spine: its night-shapes attested at Rego in West Manggarai are that

people's stalking register — poti laco and poti mbolang, the NAKED FORMS, and poti ngeping with its

MATA MBERE, the red eye that comes in by night, alongside the cat, the great dog and the horse a

witch is said to go abroad as [SRC_00469].

• attestation rule applied: the mata mbere is a mark the tradition itself attests, which makes it

USABLE and makes it the single strongest identity this design has. It rides the poti ngeping send

only, because that is the send the record attaches it to.

4. elevation

ONE-LINE SILHOUETTE READ: a correctly-proportioned naked figure standing perfectly still in the dark

with no face and no depth, and one red point that is only there when your own torch finds it.

PRIMARY — A10 NEGATIVE SPACE. The wa's canon meaning is subtraction: it is what displaces a soul and

what empties a person. The body is therefore a shape with something taken out of it, and every choice

is a removal:

• The silhouette is complete and the VOLUME is not. Seen front-on the figure is a person; seen

side-on the torso between the ribs and the hips has almost no depth, so the thing narrows to a line

and is briefly, genuinely hard to see. The turn is the tell.

• The limbs are correct in length and wrong in mass — thin without being emaciated, because emaciation

reads as a sick person and this must never read as a person.

• THERE IS NO FACE. The head is a smooth dark ovoid: no eyes, no mouth, no brow, no hair. This is the

single most important line in the sheet and it is doing two jobs at once. It is the horror — a

human shape with nothing to read on it is worse than any sculpted monster face — and it is the care

discipline, because a design with no face cannot carry a physiognomy, and the record this being

comes from is a record of neighbours accused by their faces.

• The gait has a beat missing. It arrives at positions rather than travelling to them.

MECHANISM: the wa is what is left when a soul is displaced. It is an absence wearing a person's

outline, and the body states that literally. Vril alters real physics rather than suspending it, so

the emptying is structural: this thing has less of itself than a body that size should have, and it

moves like something with less mass to carry.

SUPPORTING — A9 THE MARK: the mata mbere, and it is built so that it is not a glow. The element visual

law names glowing eyes on any caster or target as a BANNED class outright, so a self-luminous red eye

is not available at any price. The answer is optics the world already has: the mata mbere is a

RETROREFLECTOR. It returns light back along the path the light came in on, the way a tapetum does

(AUTHORIAL_ANATOMY / general optics) — which means it emits nothing, needs a light already in the

scene, and only appears when the observer is on that light's axis.

The consequences are the best mechanics in the encounter and they fall straight out of the physics:

• The tell is UNDER PLAYER CONTROL. The chapter's own torch, lit from the geothermal vents, is the

light. Sweep it and the red point answers from wherever the thing is standing. Put the torch down

and the wa is invisible — and so is the player's ability to find it.

• The mark reads at ANY distance, because a retroreflector's return does not fall off the way a lit

surface does. One hard red point in a black karst chamber is an identity nothing else in the game

shares.

• The mark's HEIGHT is information: at a standing person's eye height it is the naked form facing you.

There is only ever ONE point, because one is the number — a creature carrying three marks carries

none.

• Holding the torch is how you find it and how it finds you. That is the encounter's whole tension in

one object.

SUPPORTING — A1 SCALE BAND, on the second send only. The great dog is HALF_AGAIN the mass of a village

dog, and what carries the extra mass is a deeper chest and a heavier forequarter, with the physical

consequence stated: it turns wider and it cannot stop as fast as its speed suggests, which is the only

thing the player can use against it.

THE GREAT DOG CARRIES NO MARK. It has no red eye, and that is deliberate: the second send is more

dangerous precisely because there is nothing to sweep the torch for. When the sending changes shape the

player's whole method stops working, which is escalation announced in the body rather than in a number.

EMISSION: none, anywhere. The red point is return, not output; the encounter's only light source is a

torch the player is carrying.

5. articulation_delta

• The thinned torso is a mesh-volume change, not a joint change: the ribcage and pelvis keep their

real proportions and the span between them loses depth. The spine chain, its ROM and the weight path

from shoulder to hip are unchanged, which is what keeps the walk readable as a person's walk.

• The featureless head is a rigid ovoid on an ordinary cervical chain with ordinary ROM. It TURNS,

and because there is nothing on it to read, the turn is the only expression it has — which makes the

turn enormous.

• The mata mbere is a single retroreflective surface set at the eye line of an otherwise blank head,

with a declared acceptance angle: it answers a light within roughly 15 degrees of the viewing axis

and is invisible outside that cone. That number is a design shape, not a tuning value; the

instrument that owns the angle declares its own band.

• The dog send is a separate body, not a transformation, sharing the joint kit for production economy

and nothing else. The tradition lists the naked forms and the animal forms as different shapes a

witch goes abroad as, and this sheet keeps them different.

6. fight_grammar

ENCOUNTER: BE_0002_S2, primary verb REFUSE, secondary STRIKE, axis 40/35/25, has_nonkill_path TRUE,

win PERCEIVE;REFUTE;REDUCE, defender_element NONE and outside the D1-27 ability element law because

the wa casts nothing. Two phases, and they are two different games.

PHASE ONE — THE OFFER. The bargain manifests as an escalating offer to read and reject. There is no

body to fight yet and the design's job is to make an ARGUMENT readable:

• The counter canon gives is to sense the emptying through the awakening vril-trace — drained, not

full — as a Neophyte read, and to hold refusal through the escalation window.

• The body of the offer is the voice register only (the scene row grants the polo voice-register

presence and nothing else). The visual read is what the offer does to the PLACE: the lake's colour

sits at the black-and-blood-red shift that the chapter already names as the corruption's endpoint

tell, and each escalation of the offer moves it one step.

• Refusal has a price and the price is the second phase.

PHASE TWO — THE SENDING. A stalking sub-boss with a real fail state.

One shape, one answer, and the escalation is that the shapes stop being available.

THE FAIL STATE IS A DISTANCE, NOT A TIMER. The wa is a NIGHT form, so reaching daylight is it escaping

the one condition that holds it. The anchor is the Liang Bua cave mouth — the seam between the karst

interior and the forest approach, a real authored piece of that zone's geometry and a real light

already in the scene rather than an authored glow. The sending RUNS FOR THE MOUTH. The player has to

cut that line or put it down before it gets there. The dark between is concealment that runs both

ways, which the beat's own row states is the pressure rather than a hazard to remove.

ESCALATION on the four channels: POSTURE — the naked form stops standing and starts crouching, which

lowers the mark and shortens the player's sweep. BREATH — there is none, and its absence is the

channel: the chamber's ambient carries the player's own breathing and nothing else, and when the

sending is close the player's breath is the only sound in the mix. VOCALIZATION — none from the wa; the

escalation is that the offer's voice from phase one begins to be audible again in the dark, which is

the owner arriving behind its forerunner. NEW OPENER — the dog send replaces the naked form and the

mark is gone.

REWARD BOTH WAYS, NO FAIL-WALL: the win yields a corruption-residue reagent, the crafting seed of a

much later lineage. The loss yields the death reward — the wa feeds, the hunter it hollowed stays

hollowed one beat longer, and the deep layers are more dangerous on the next descent

(ws.liang_bua_deep_layer_pressure).

7. care_read

• COLLECTIVE READ: §17.1 protection is collective and it is fully engaged here, on the LIVING

COMMUNITIES the record belongs to. The protection is discharged by aim rather than by omission: the

malevolence seats in the bargain and its sent agent, the enemy is the spirit-evil and the harm it

does, and the game never offers an accused villager as a target. The polo is never conflated with

the dukun or the folk-healer, who are benevolent knowledge-holder roles held distinct at every

point, and Healer Maria reads the polo's work and aids against it.

• ONTOLOGY ROUTING: CONDEMNED. This is the tradition's own named evil being and it is rendered exactly

as those traditions condemn it — never softened and never Hollywood-monstered. The sheet's design is

a check against BOTH failures: a featureless emptied outline is neither a sanitised abstraction nor

a horror-film demon, and it is what the record actually describes.

• ROUTE: ATTENDED_DESIGN, and the reason is specific rather than generic. The naked night-form is

human-SHAPED and belongs to a living tradition whose modern record includes people killed on

accusation. It routes to attended design with a concept plate as conditioning, never to raw

generation. The plate brief solves the physiognomy risk BY CONSTRUCTION rather than by negative

prompting: the head has no face, so there is no face for a model to fill in with somebody's.

• RENAME-REFRAME: this subject IS the doctrine's worked exemplar of the method. Nothing was removed —

not the red eye, not the night hunting, not the soul-eating, not the mob-violence record that sits

behind it. The AIM was moved, from the accused person to the sent thing.

• ANTI-TIMID PASS, RECORDED. Three softenings were considered and all three were refused. (1) Dropping

the red eye because a red-eyed figure could read as a racialised mark. Refused: the mark is attested

in the tradition's own record, it belongs to the SPIRIT-form, and the design puts it on a body with

no face at all — removing it would delete the tradition's own most specific image while leaving the

being intact, which is exactly the omission-as-safety error. (2) Making phase two a chase with no

kill option. Refused: the row carries STRIKE as its secondary verb and a real fail state; a stalker

the player cannot answer is a cutscene. (3) Softening the child-in-the-dark framing. Refused: the

protagonist is a lone depleted child and the chapter is the arc's survival-horror opener by design.

The floor is untouched throughout — no child harm is depicted, the player IS the child and the child

survives every branch.

• INVENTION DECLARATION: the featureless ovoid head, the depthless torso, the missing gait beat, the

retroreflective construction of the mata mbere, the acceptance-angle mechanic, the mark-height read

and the markless dog send are INVENTED BY THIS SHEET as the game's own design. They are named as

ours. The polo, the wa-for-mae displacement, the wina wa and rona wa, the forerunner sending, the

naked poti laco and poti mbolang forms, poti ngeping and its mata mbere, and the cat, great dog and

horse are CITED to SRC_00469 and SRC_00457.

• REVEAL READ: the display names on the rows are "the thing that keeps offering" and the chapter's own

strings. No antagonist family token appears anywhere in this sheet's player-facing lines, and the

chapter predates the family entirely — the polo is a folkloric soul-eater and NOT a family operative,

which the antagonist-network row states directly.

8. plate_brief

Written affirmatively. Every line names what IS in frame.

• PLATE A, identity: a standing naked figure in a black karst chamber, human proportions, smooth dark

featureless ovoid head, torso with no depth seen from a three-quarter angle, one hard red point at

eye height answering a torch held low and to the left of camera. The torch is the only light in

frame and its flame is visible in the shot.

• PLATE B, the turn: the same figure turning side-on, at the moment the body narrows to a line and the

red point leaves the acceptance cone and goes dark.

• PLATE C, the great dog: a long low canid half again a village dog's mass, deep chest, heavy

forequarter, smooth featureless head, no red point anywhere, crossing a shaft of daylight near the

cave mouth.

• PLATE D, the mouth: the interior-to-approach seam at Liang Bua from inside, daylight filling the

opening as a real light in the scene, the chamber black around it — the plate that establishes the

fail state as a place.

• PLATE E, silhouette: black fill, the naked form standing and crouched, the dog form standing, one

scale.

9. boarded_debts

• @ BE_0002_S2 :: pip_count and pip_reveal_threshold are EMPTY while every sibling Ch-2 encounter

carries them. The offer's escalation window in phase one is pip-shaped; whether that is deliberate

is a registry-lane call.

• @ BE_0002_S2 :: hitzone_parts, phase_trigger, escalation_vector, phase_voice_array are

EMPTY.

• T0_Boss_Attack_Rail carries 0 rows; the five phase-two shapes are this encounter's first.
• T0_Creature_Roster @ CR_0151 :: ontology_class CONDEMNED is correct and species_class reads

folklore — but tier_classification is EMPTY on this row where the Ebu Gogo carries CRYPTID.

Flagged, not resolved.

• THE LIGHT-LAW READ NEEDS A HOME. The retroreflective construction of the mata mbere is a material

and optical specification and there is no column for it. It belongs either in the D1-27 payload as a

named non-emissive mechanism or on a creature-material field, and it is the kind of decision that a

later lane will otherwise re-solve as a glow.

• THE CAVE MOUTH STILL HAS NO JOINABLE KEY. The chapter's own ruling says so plainly: the seam is real

authored geometry, it carries no site_id, no environment-grammar id and no Zone Catalog feature

row, and naming the seam is not the same as minting the key. This sheet's fail state reads that

anchor and inherits the gap.

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