creatures/CR_0162_neak_ta_and_arak.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·T0_Boss_Encounter_Registry·docs/spine/CH_05.md·_source/02_Tier_2_Region_Pages/angkor_khmer.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.
the formal ELEVATED tier is scoped to the Cham/war surfaces (the west_baray combat-staging, the My Son
sanctuary, the modern-Cham-communities block), which this Khmer row is not [CH_05.md :12]
and in the game's own designed register for the presence itself, and it records that as a choice it
argues rather than as an assignment canon gave it (section 7 and section 9)
build/3d/schema/anatomy_reference/ is on disk and NO BUCKET COVERS THIS BODY —see section 2
presumption; the row's own canon does not foreclose staging) [DIRECTOR_RULING_L11.json § RULING_4]
T0_Creature_Roster @ CR_0162 · docs/spine/CH_05.md :81, :219, :246, :330 · _source/02_Tier_2_Region_Pages/angkor_khmer.md :100, :186-191, :521-522, :729, :854-856 ·
docs/spine/CH_05.md :115 and :127 with docs/proposals/bestiary/sheets/BE_0005_S2_borobudur_mahakala.md
(the in-chapter LEFT-protective guardian-test precedent; the BE_0005_S2 registry row itself was not
opened by this lane and is cited only through the spine)
THIS SHEET IS A CLASS TEMPLATE, NOT ONE INDIVIDUAL, AND THAT IS CANON'S OWN SHAPE. Every canon line
names the pair together as one register — "the neak ta and arak tutelary spirits (revered, LEFT)"
[angkor_khmer.md :187] — and the roster row rules ONE ROW FOR THE PAIR deliberately, because
splitting them would mint a distinction canon does not draw. So the sheet designs a CLASS: one
guardian-of-a-place body with a declared skeleton, instanced per place, addressed by whoever the place
belongs to. It mints no per-name split, no rite, no offering and no shrine form.
WHY A TEST EXISTS AT ALL, ON CANON'S OWN SENTENCE. The same spine line that holds the neak ta and arak
LEFT holds MAHAKALA LEFT in the identical clause — "Mahakala, the Khmer naga, the neak ta/arak, and Po
Nagar — LEFT (guardrail held): the wrathful protector, the protective dynastic serpent, the revered
tutelary spirits, and the Cham mother-goddess are examined and deliberately NOT villainized"
[CH_05.md :330]. Mahakala is a staged sub-boss in this very chapter, and his beat is "a threshold
passed in the right register and never a fight against a protector" [CH_05.md :127]. LEFT therefore
means NOT VILLAINIZED, never NOT PRESENT, and the guardian test is the exact staging canon already
built for the class one beat earlier.
NO ANIMAL BASE. The archetype is a ground-seated material presence — the register BE_0005_S2
established in this chapter, where the guardian OCCUPIES ITS POST and its authority is in its stillness.
THE ANATOMY-TABLE COVERAGE STATEMENT, CHECKED RATHER THAN ASSUMED. build/3d/schema/anatomy_reference/
is on disk and NO BUCKET IN IT COVERS THIS BODY. The nine buckets are eight census archetypes plus
HUMANOID, and every one of them is a vertebrate plan with a real taxon behind it; this presence has no
taxon, no vertebrae and no gait, and HUMANOID.json in particular is the obligate erect biped whose
ranges are clinical human goniometry, which a mass of laterite that never steps is not. The table's own
scope line settles it: the PROVISIONAL folklore rows are declared OUT OF SCOPE because their body plan
is a canon decision already boarded, and a table that guessed one would be inventing creature canon. The
block below therefore stands as the doctrine's §2.1 fallback, declared in full, and is superseded in
place the day a bucket covers it.
seat to crown; a shoulder yoke carrying two limb chains of three joints each; a head-mass on a
two-segment neck.
core axial twist to about 35 degrees, shoulder to about 70 degrees, elbow to about 90, head turn to
about 45 degrees. The seat does not translate: it does not step, it does not pursue, and a solver
asked for a stride is refused.
weighs and moves at the rate a mass that size moves.
because when it is not present there is nothing there but the place.
[angkor_khmer.md :186-187], carried the same way in the spine [CH_05.md :81, :246, :330].
address [T0_Creature_Roster @ CR_0162 :: folklore_attribution_source].
entirely through the collapse-monetizing court official and the ward-objects his faction perverts,
so the region's own guardian spirits stay exactly what the tradition says they are
[CH_05.md :246; angkor_khmer.md :729].
touch [CH_05.md :219; angkor_khmer.md :100, :854].
expressly not a source for one; the page's neak ta and arak material stands on prior grounding that
carries no visible primary citation [angkor_khmer.md :521-522]. So this sheet cites the page and
the spine and NO primary ethnography, the primary-source grounding obligation stands OPEN, and the
design is deliberately attribute-thin: no named rite, no offering, no shrine form, and nothing
carried across from the Cham material on the same page.
ONE-LINE SILHOUETTE READ: a piece of the ground standing up, made of that ground and nothing else,
exactly where the ground was wronged.
PRIMARY — A8 MATERIAL SUBSTITUTION. The body is the place's own matter and no other. ONE OF THE THREE
MATERIALS IS CANON'S AND TWO ARE OURS, and the split is stated rather than blurred: LATERITE GRAIN AND
SANDSTONE DUST at a temple margin is the excursion's own declared palette, "Angkor sandstone-and-laterite"
[CH_05.md :267]. ROOT AND LEAF-MOULD at a tree, and WET SILT AND STANDING WATER at a field-edge or a
canal bank, appear in no canon palette for this region and are INVENTED BY THIS SHEET as the game's own
extension of the same idea, named again in section 7. MECHANISM: a
guardian OF a place is made OF that place, so the material is the identity, and one class body instances
into as many readable bodies as the excursion has grounds. Constrained twice, per the axis: it
articulates on the declared armature above, and stone, soil, root and water never self-light, so it
reads by wetting-darkening, by the grain of its own material, by occlusion and by what it carries.
SUPPORTING — A5 AGE AND ACCRETION. The place's accumulated time is on it: root threaded through the
core chain at a temple margin where the forest has been working for centuries, algal bloom and a
water-line on the field-edge body, laterite pitted the way laterite pits. This is what makes it read
as OLDER THAN THE QUEST, which is the axis's whole job, and it costs no light.
SUPPORTING — A10 NEGATIVE SPACE. Its presence is legible as a subtraction from the place rather than
as an addition to it: the litter and dust that make up the body are GONE from the ground beside it, in
a shape the player can read. Where it stands there is a hollow the exact volume of the standing thing.
Step back and the hollow says how much of it is up.
EMISSION: none, anywhere. Nothing in this design is lit except by the sky, the flood-water, or a lamp
already in the scene.
section 2. Nothing is added to them.
three segments, water-line on the seat and the first core segment — and carry no joints of their
own. They deform with the segment they ride and never independently.
segments are raised, so the hollow and the body always agree. A hollow that plays on a timer instead
of on the body would make this a cutscene.
what keeps a mass of earth from reading as a costume.
NO BE_ ROW EXISTS AND THIS SHEET MINTS NONE. Canon stages no beat for this class yet, so the sheet
designs the ENCOUNTER CLASS and boards the beat, site and row as a spine-lane question (section 9).
The verbs are read from the class's own nature and from the in-chapter guardian precedent
(BE_0005_S2: evade and attune, puzzle-forward, non-kill, reveal 1.0), never from a generic template.
PART ECONOMY HOME: NONE, affirmatively. Nothing on a revered guardian breaks. The encounter's economy
is the CHAIN, not a body, and the sheet says so rather than leaving the block thin.
| tell shape | body origin | one answer | counter class worn on the body |
|---|---|---|---|
| one core segment rises out of the seat | the ground beside it loses that volume | stop moving — this is notice, not attack | read |
| the yoke turns and the head-mass follows | the core twists to its declared limit and holds | face it and give ground; the demand is a direction | positioning |
| a limb chain comes across the line the player crossed | shoulder loads, elbow holds at 90 | evade — the arc is exactly the chain's reach, because a mass of earth has no follow-through | dodge |
| the seat widens and the hollow deepens | more of the place is standing up | undo the thing you did to the ground — this is the chain's real answer | the puzzle lane |
| the accretion darkens with water | the place's own state is answering | wait; a wet body settles and this is the settling | read |
THE SWEEP IS A DELIBERATE CROSS-CREATURE ECHO AND THE LESSON IS NAMED. BE_0005_S2 teaches the same
shape one leg earlier at Borobudur — "the arm travels the stair's width, once, at sculptural speed …
evade — the arc is exactly the arm's reach because stone has no follow-through" [BE_0005_S2 §6 :102].
This row reuses that shape with the SAME answer, and that is the point: THE LESSON IS THAT A MASSIVE
NON-PURSUING GUARDIAN NEVER FOLLOWS THROUGH, so the reach is the whole of the danger and stepping out of
it is always the answer. A player who learned it on a monument stair carries it to a field-edge in
another country and is rewarded for it, which is the doctrine's intended cross-creature transfer rather
than a repeated tell.
ONE SHAPE, ONE ANSWER, and the chain is the encounter. It is the ruled non-kill form — a run of correct
reads where any mistake wipes the run and it starts again — and its exact pip count and reveal
threshold belong to the instrument that declares its own band, not to this sheet. The player never
reduces the guardian, and there is no route on which the guardian is harmed.
THE DIFFICULTY IS THE POINT, AND IT IS WHERE THE DEFANG TELL BITES. A guardian test is a HARDER
encounter than a fight, because the chain is long, the reads are cumulative, and a wipe costs the whole
run. Nothing here is passive: the guardian owns the ground, it escalates, and it will not be waited out.
ESCALATION on the four channels. POSTURE — more core segments are up, and the hollow beside it is the
meter, physical and HUD-free. BREATH — the place's, not the body's: the water at the field-edge, the
dust in the temple margin, moving on a cycle the player can time. VOCALIZATION — a low register out of
the ground that never becomes a voice and never becomes a roar; this being does not perform.
NEW OPENER — the limb-chain sweep replaces the turn-and-hold as the state it returns to.
RELOCATION AND TURF: none. It is its place. It does not follow, and leaving the ground ends the
encounter with the guardian still standing, which is a legitimate outcome and not a loss.
practitioners, the temple servants and dancers are allies and protected non-targets [CH_05.md
:246]; the excursion's antagonist is the collapse-monetizing court official and the ward-objects his
faction perverts [CH_05.md :165]. This class is never recast as one of those ward-objects, which
are a different class entirely, and never conflated with the condemned krasue.
as prey — which is the doctrine's own sentence and this encounter's whole shape. LEFT is held
exactly: no defeat, no damage, no health bar, no route on which the guardian is harmed.
CH_05.md :330does not merely withhold villainy; it says where the villainy went — "the malevolent-boss appetite is
fed by the begu ganjang, Naga Padoha, and the corrupt official and his ward-constructs instead." So
the ruling's own test is whether a design leaves that appetite fed elsewhere, and this one does:
nothing in this sheet takes a boss slot, carries a health bar, drops loot, or competes with the four
named carriers. What it adds is a test with no kill in it, in a chapter whose malevolence is already
fully housed — and the excursion's own boss, the court official with his roused ward-objects, is
untouched and remains the leg's antagonist. A guardian test that fed the appetite would have broken
the ruling; this one leaves the appetite exactly where the spine put it.
tradition never routes through a photographic template and never through raw generation with
negative prompts as the control.
citation for this material [angkor_khmer.md :521-522], the design asserts NOTHING about Khmer
practice: no rite, no offering, no shrine, no iconography, no address. It builds only what canon
states — a guardian of a place, revered — and everything else is declared ours below. That is why the
body is made of the ground rather than of any devotional form.
the row as pure lore, on the reading that LEFT means absent. REFUSED, on canon: the identical spine
clause holds Mahakala LEFT and Mahakala is a staged sub-boss trial in the same chapter
[CH_05.md :330, :127]. Ruling the class out would send a sacred being of a living tradition down
the unattended asset path, which the doctrine names a WRONG ROUTE finding, and would leave the care
read undesigned. The over-boldness check ran the other way too and it FOUND something: the temptation
was to give the guardian an iconography — a face, a carved register, an offering post — and that is
refused outright, because inventing devotional form for a tradition whose page has no primary
citation is the disrespect the invention licence explicitly excludes.
ROOT-AND-LEAF-MOULD and WET-SILT-AND-STANDING-WATER instance materials (the sandstone-and-laterite one
rides the spine's declared palette; these two do not), the accretion layers, the negative-space hollow,
the five tell shapes and the ground register under the breath cycle are INVENTED BY THIS SHEET as the
game's own design and are named as ours. CITED are: the neak ta and arak as revered guardians of place
and of line, their LEFT status and the ruling's second half, their contrastive function, the
sandstone-and-laterite palette, and the SQ1 payload.
design blocks only. The constraint inherits forward to every lane that writes one from this material:
the chapter's reveal state is HELD and the family first appears at Ch 8, so any display name, dex
entry, bark or item text authored downstream carries no family name, pattern or who-frame token.
Written affirmatively. Every line names what IS in frame.
daylight, the shape of a seated-then-risen body, the ground beside it carrying a hollow of the same
volume, forest behind.
bank on the rice-grid, a water-line across its lower core, the flooded field filling the frame behind
it, sky light only.
the seat shallow — the plate that establishes the meter as a physical fact.
chain, elbow held, dust falling from the accretion.
outline on the ground.
T0_Creature_Roster @ CR_0162 — THE PRIMARY-SOURCE GROUNDING OBLIGATION IS OPEN and this sheetinherits it. A Khmer-voiced primary source for neak ta and arak practice is an acquisition target;
until it lands, no rite, offering or shrine form may be filled in on this row or this sheet, and
nothing may be carried across from SRC_00322 [angkor_khmer.md :521-522].
encounter; the SQ1 payload rides CH05_B10 [angkor_khmer.md :100], which is the My Son/Champa beat,
while the class is Khmer. Where a neak ta or arak test would seat — the Ta Prohm household at
CH05_B08 for the line register, the returned-water rice-grid at CH05_B09 for the place register — is
a SPINE-LANE call, not this lane's, and nothing here mints one.
@ CR_0162 :: species_class reads folklore and tier_classification, trophic_role, scientific_name are deliberately EMPTY per the folklore precedent. Correct, and named here so a
later enrichment does not read them as holes.
a primary source may split neak ta from arak, and that is a refinement rather than a defect.
@ CR_0162 :: mesh_tags.style READS mythologically-stylized, AND TWO CANON LINES WITHHOLD THAT REGISTER FROM THIS ROW. CH_05.md :267 rules it exclusively for the begu ganjang, Naga Padoha, the
krasue/ap and the guardian constructs, and this row is in none of those; angkor_khmer.md :190 states
the qualifying condition in its own words — "mythologically-stylized ONLY WHERE THE TRADITION ITSELF
CONDEMNS OR FEARS IT, and the protective/revered class deliberately never Hollywood-monstered" — and
this row is the protective/revered class by the same page's own routing at :187. So the cell claims an
exclusive token the row is outside, on a being whose own page names it in the excluded class, while
the row's actual register is UNASSIGNED and owed. The consequence is exact: an asset lane reading that
cell builds a living tradition's revered guardians in the register canon reserves for condemned and
feared beings. REGISTRY LANE, with its own gate and baseline — this sheet writes nothing.
source_ref line pointers have drifted from their targets: THIS ROW's L713 now resolves at angkor_khmer.md :729; CR_0160's
L838-840 and L975 resolve at :856 and :991; CR_0171's L2818-2824 now lands on the riddle-master elder
entry while the Haji Guru persona sits at sumatra_java.md :2832-2847. Every citation in this sheet
uses the verified current line. REGISTRY LANE, with its own gate and baseline.
T0_Boss_Attack_Rail carries 0 rows; the five tell shapes here are the class's first, and they haveno data home.