creatures/CR_0163_sombaon_and_sumangot.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/sumatra_java.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.
(beat CH05_B05) [CH_05.md :95, :142]
Cham/war surfaces, which this Batak row is not [CH_05.md :12]
state, in the KEPT direction
DIRECTOR_RULING_L11.json § RULING_4]T0_Creature_Roster @ CR_0163 · docs/spine/CH_05.md :12, :30, :142-145, :201, :219, :239, :246, :250 · _source/02_Tier_2_Region_Pages/sumatra_java.md :403-411, :1001-1004, :1014-1026,
:1136-1140, :2478, :2803, :3284-3287 · docs/proposals/bestiary/sheets/BE_0005_datu_siahaan.md
§4 :80-86 and §6 :136-137 (the landed sheet this design reconciles TO) · the counterfeit's staging
through the spine at CH_05.md :114-116 (the BE_0005 registry row itself was not opened by this lane)
build/3d/schema/anatomy_reference/HUMANOID.json, sub-plan human, GOVERNS thesumangot embodiment (section 2)
THE ONE THING THIS SHEET IS BUILT AROUND. The chapter states its own beat plainly: walking the warded
thresholds at the healer's side, the protagonist "learns to tell the kept killing-spirit from the
honored dead it counterfeits" [CH_05.md :30], and the beat objective holds the thresholds through the
night "until the killing-spirit is told apart from the honored sombaon and sumangot dead it
counterfeits" [CH_05.md :142]. So the design subject is not a monster and not a target: it is the
thing the player must NOT strike, and the encounter is built so that striking one is the failure state.
That single move makes the chapter's §17.1 hinge mechanically enforced instead of merely stated, and it
is why this row's guardian test is a discernment test rather than a fight.
NO ANIMAL BASE. The archetype is HUMANOID, at human scale, and the design's whole discipline is that it
stays human-proportioned — because the counterfeit is the one that is wrong.
build/3d/schema/anatomy_reference/ is on disk, and the sumangot embodiment rigs against HUMANOID.json sub-plan human
(reference taxon Homo sapiens; 24 presacral vertebrae; five digits on hand and foot; clavicle
present and load-bearing; the three spinal curves, because a straight-spine rig reads as a
mannequin). Every joint range is the table's clinical goniometry in its own AAOS neutral-zero
convention, and the doctrine's §2.1 supersession applies: the table's values replace any inline
block, and a pose outside them is an injury rather than a style.
of every one of those ranges. There is no extreme, no held extension, no hyperextension anywhere in
the design.
person who belongs somewhere sits and stands, and it walks on the ground.
HOUSE AND ATTENDED. That carriage is the landed BE_0005 sheet's authored discrimination and this
sheet adopts it whole — the counterfeit is the one with no face turned to the house, no seat and no
attendance [BE_0005_datu_siahaan.md §4 :80-86].
without a body, and that is the sheet's most important line.
HUMANOID.json covers the sumangot embodiment fully. It does notreach the sombaon rank, and it does not need to, because that rank has no body to rig.
ancestors) and sumangot (honored ancestral spirits) [sumatra_java.md :1003]. The page's own citation
honesty is inherited here: that gloss sentence carries no SRC anchor on its own line.
corpus is at sumatra_java.md :3284-3287, and IT IS ABOUT THE SOLOBEAN, not about this row: the
source there calls the solobean a malevolent type of sombaon, "that is, of the higher spirits," while
the same source's glossary makes no rank claim about it at all — an inconsistency the page records
rather than resolves, and where the page rules that RANK IS DELIBERATELY NOT THE CRITERION. So the
sheet does not import a rank claim that reaches this row only obliquely, through a third being's
entry, and it follows the page's own recorded refusal instead. The two ranks are kept DISTINCT
because :1003 names them as two; no ordering, no ladder and no threshold is authored between them.
already authored on the landed, critic-gated BE_0005_datu_siahaan.md §4 :80-86 and §6 :136-137, as
the tradition's own distinction rendered as A LOOK rather than a lore check. This sheet reconciles TO
it and does not re-author it.
occupies, and the begu ganjang is held strictly distinct from them BECAUSE IT COUNTERFEITS THEM
[sumatra_java.md :1001-1004; CH_05.md :145, :246, :250].
holds it, mythologically-stylized only where the tradition itself condemns or fears it, never
Hollywood-monstered and NEVER A SLANDER OF THE HONORED DEAD [sumatra_java.md :403-405].
and the si gale-gale, a living funerary tradition and a protected practice, never a horror automaton
[sumatra_java.md :1014-1026].
ganjang is TALL and is set ON THE NECKS of those who resist the man who keeps it
[sumatra_java.md :1001-1002], its neck-strike carrying its own tell in the chapter's audio brief
[sumatra_java.md :2478].
explicit reward payload [CH_05.md :219].
ONE-LINE SILHOUETTE READ: a person seated inside a house that is still keeping them, face turned to the
house, attended, at exactly the height a person is.
THE DISCRIMINATION IS THE LANDED SHEET'S AND THIS ONE ADOPTS IT WHOLE. BE_0005_datu_siahaan.md §4
:80-86 authored the counterfeit as the honored dead's OUTLINE with three specific things missing — no
face turned to the house, no seat, no attendance — "what a revered ancestor looks like from behind,
walking away, forever," which that sheet names as the tradition's own distinction rendered as a look.
This sheet therefore builds the POSITIVE of exactly those three, and nothing else is the tell.
PRIMARY — A5 AGE AND STATE, IN THE KEPT DIRECTION, and it carries the identity. The honored dead wear
the age they died at and the keeping they have had since, and the keeping is visible on them: cloth in
good order, hair dressed, hands with smooth unbroken skin, a settled carriage. MECHANISM: being kept is
a physical relation here — a household that attends its dead has dead that look attended, and the axis
is spent on wellness rather than on decay because a well-kept dead person looks KEPT. This is the
affirmative pole's whole visual argument and it is the axis a player names if asked what they saw.
THE THREE POSITIVES, WHICH ARE THE READ:
household that keeps it. That single orientation is the counterfeit's exact inverse.
figure is the strongest possible silhouette contrast with something the height of a doorway.
someone is present with them, the seat is tended, the space around them is in use.
to the counterfeit — "it stands like an honoured ancestor and does not move" [BE_0005 §6 :136-137].
The honored dead are seated, attended and turned toward; a lane that gives them stillness has handed
the boss's tell to the thing the boss is counterfeiting.
SUPPORTING — A9 THE MARK, DEMOTED AND RECONCILED TO THE WARD-FIRE STAGING. The honored dead take the
household lamp's light by ORDINARY OPTICS: the lamp falls on them, their near side is lit and their far
side is dark, they cast a real shadow into the room, and cloth on them wets and darkens like cloth. The
counterfeit is staged against the WARD-FIRES of the houses it hunts [BE_0005 §4 :90], and against
those fires it reads as occlusion with no return — a shape that takes the fire's light out of the frame
and gives nothing back. STATED IN ONE FRAME SO THE TWO SHEETS TEACH ONE LESSON: inside the lamp, a
seated attended figure with a lit near side and a cast shadow; beyond it against the ward-fires, a tall
form that removes firelight and returns none. The mark is supporting rather than primary because the
carriage is what identifies them and the light is what confirms it.
SUPPORTING — A10 NEGATIVE SPACE, ON THE SOMBAON RANK ONLY. The higher rank has no figure. It is read as
the moment the whole caldera-rim night goes quiet in one direction, and as a pressure the healer turns
to face while the frame she is looking at holds only the rim and the lake. Because the corpus's only
further rank language belongs to the solobean entry and the page rules rank not to be the criterion
(section 3), the sheet renders a DIFFERENCE IN SCALE OF ADDRESS rather than a hierarchy: a sumangot is
addressed by a household and has a seat in one; a sombaon is addressed by more than a household and has
no house to be seated in. Keeping the higher rank bodiless is also the strongest available guarantee
that it is never a target.
EMISSION: none, anywhere. The light in every frame of this design is the household's lamp, the hearth,
the ward-fires, or the sky. Nothing about the honored dead is self-lit; their mark is ordinary surface
response to a light already in the scene, and the counterfeit's is occlusion of one.
HUMANOID.json plan. That is the design: the honored dead articulate aspeople because they were people, and every departure from that plan in this chapter belongs to the
counterfeit instead — BE_0005's elongation is applied to the long-bone and cervical chains, and
this row's chains stay at the table's own values.
about ninety degrees of flexion, knee likewise, spine holding its three curves. The seat is real
geometry in the scene that the figure occupies.
in the scene — and it attaches to the whole body rather than to a part.
both of which are authored elsewhere, and this sheet asks for no body to be built for it.
drift and the missing gait beat all belong to other beings in this chapter, and this sheet leaves
them there.
NO BE_ ROW EXISTS FOR THIS BEING AND NONE SHOULD. The fight at CH05_B05 is against the datu's begu
ganjang (BE_0005's kept instrument); these beings are the thing being told APART from it, and their
combat-facing status is the obligation to design that discernment so that the honored dead can never be
harmed by a player who is paying attention. The verbs the encounter answers to are the ward beat's own:
hold the thresholds through the night [CH_05.md :142].
THIS BLOCK IS THE OTHER HALF OF BE_0005 §6 AND IS READ WITH IT. That sheet's counterfeit stillness
row carries the PERCEIVE counter — "it stands like an honoured ancestor and does not move," answered by
telling it against the honored sombaon and sumangot dead, "a look, not a lore check"
[BE_0005_datu_siahaan.md §6 :136-137]. The rows below supply the look's positive half. The two sheets
teach one lesson and the shapes are complementary rather than duplicated: BE_0005 owns the
counterfeit's tells and its answers, this sheet owns the honored dead's.
PART ECONOMY HOME: NONE, affirmatively. Nothing on the honored dead breaks, and a drop sourced from
them would be the exact defamation the register forbids — which the roster row already states in its own
words. The economy is the CHAIN.
| tell shape | body origin | one answer | counter class worn on the body |
|---|---|---|---|
| a seated figure inside the house, face turned to the house | it has a seat and it is occupying it | leave it and let the ward hold; this is a sumangot | read |
| the household is turned toward the figure and tending the seat | attendance, happening in frame | keep the threshold and let the keeping continue | read |
| the lamp lands on the figure — near side lit, shadow into the room | ordinary optics on a body that is present | confirm the read you already made from the carriage | read |
| against the ward-fires, a form that takes firelight and returns none | BE_0005's counterfeit, staged where that sheet stages it | hand the read to the ward lane — BE_0005 §6 owns the answer | the ward lane |
| the rim goes quiet in one direction and the healer turns | the higher rank, present without a body | hold still and keep the threshold; the correct action here is the one you are already doing | read |
ONE SHAPE, ONE ANSWER. The chain is the ruled non-kill form — a run of correct reads through the night
where any mistake wipes the run — and its exact pip count and reveal threshold belong to the instrument
that declares its own band.
THE WIPE CONDITION IS THE CARE RULE, WHICH IS THE WHOLE DESIGN. Warding, striking or refusing an
honored one collapses the ward for that threshold, costs the household its night, and costs the player
the village's regard — the healer says so out loud and does not soften the second half of it, which is
her own authored register [sumatra_java.md :2803]. There is no damage model on these beings at any
point on any route. The player cannot kill them by trying; the game answers the attempt with the loss of
the thing the attempt was protecting.
THE ANTI-DEFANG READ, STATED. This is a HARDER encounter than a fight, on the doctrine's own tell: the
chain is long, it runs in the dark against a real killing-spirit that is actively hunting the same
thresholds, and every read is made under pressure with the wrong answer available at all times.
ESCALATION on the four channels, and THREE OF THEM BELONG ELSEWHERE BY DESIGN — stated affirmatively,
the same way the part economy is declared NONE, so that a lane reading this block knows the channels are
placed rather than missing. POSTURE is this row's own: THE ATTENDANCE TIGHTENS — the household draws in
around the seat, the tending gets closer and more constant, and the seated figure's face stays turned to
the house throughout, so the player reads the night's pressure off the keeping itself before any meter
confirms it. BREATH belongs to THE HOUSEHOLD: the ring's audible breathing, which goes quiet when the
counterfeit is close. VOCALIZATION belongs to the household and the music: the gondang rising at the
ward, which the chapter's own music brief already places here [CH_05.md :268]. NEW OPENER belongs to
THE COUNTERFEIT and to BE_0005: it stops testing the ring and starts testing the people in it.
AGENCY LIVES IN THE ENCOUNTER AND ON BE_0005, AND THAT IS THE CORRECT HOME FOR IT. The moveset, the
escalation decisions and the pressure are the killing-spirit's and the datu's; this row's beings are
what the night is ABOUT, and the design gives them presence, a place, attendance and a state that
changes — which is what a player reads — while the choosing stays with the thing that is hunting.
RELOCATION AND TURF: the honored dead do not travel. They are where they are kept.
pustaha-keepers and its legitimate datus are allies and protected non-targets, the datu-office is
honored, and only the corrupt individual is routed [CH_05.md :201, :246]. The venerated dead of a
living people are ABSOLUTELY NEVER A TARGET, and this sheet enforces that with the encounter's own
fail state rather than with a prohibition in prose.
discernment. Nothing about them is rendered as an undead class, a ghost-horror, or a threat.
CH_05.md :267 assignsrealistic-ethnographic to a NAMED set — the Batak, Javanese, Sumatran, Khmer and Cham communities,
monuments and ports — and mythologically-stylized to a second named set: the begu ganjang, Naga
Padoha, the krasue/ap and the guardian constructs. THE HONORED DEAD ARE IN NEITHER LIST, so what the
line gives this row is a GAP rather than a positive assignment, and this sheet says so instead of
claiming an assignment it does not have. What the line does rule, exclusively, is the stylized set,
and this row is not in it. This sheet therefore builds them in the realistic-ethnographic register as
a DESIGN CHOICE argued from the never-a-slander rule and from the discrimination itself — people,
rendered as people, so that the stylized thing that counterfeits them reads as the counterfeit — and
it records the assignment as owed rather than as given.
living people's venerated dead. They route to attended design with a picked concept plate as
conditioning, never to raw generation, and never to a horror template.
honored dead no presence at all — pure lore, told about and never seen — on the reading that showing
venerated dead risks defamation. REFUSED: the beat's own objective requires telling them apart from
the counterfeit, and a thing you cannot see cannot be told apart from anything. Omission here would
break the chapter's stated lesson and leave the counterfeit as the only rendered spirit in the ring,
which is the worse cultural outcome by a distance. (2) The over-boldness check FOUND something and it
is recorded: the si gale-gale is the most striking object in the same funerary register — a jointed
puppet with movable eyes and a tongue [sumatra_java.md :1016-1023] — and it is enormously tempting
as a body for these beings. REFUSED outright. It is a living protected practice and never a horror
automaton, and building the honored dead as jointed puppets would make the tradition's own funerary
object into a monster. It appears in this chapter as the rite it is, or not at all. (3) The register
is not softened: a real killing-spirit hunts the same night, the ward can fail, and the chapter keeps
its full weight.
states that the honored dead are told apart from the counterfeit at CH05_B05 [CH_05.md :142], which
requires them to be PERCEPTIBLE, and canon supplies no form for that perception — so the decision to
give them a rendered human body at all is THIS SHEET'S, made on that warrant, and it is ours. With it:
the kept-age treatment, the lamp-and-ward-fire mark and its physical reading, the bodiless sombaon
rank and its scale-of-address realization, the seated-attended staging as this sheet builds it, and
the five tell shapes. CITED are: the two ranks and their gloss, the counterfeit relation, the tall
neck-striking begu ganjang, the never-a-slander rule, the funerary keeping, the SQ1 payload, and the
face-to-the-house / seat / attendance discrimination, which is the landed BE_0005 sheet's authored
design adopted here rather than invented here.
design blocks only. The constraint inherits forward to every lane that writes one from this material:
the operative staged around this beat is FAMILY_BRIEFED [CH_05.md :117] and the chapter's reveal
state is HELD, 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.
room, a household member tending the seat beside them, lit on the near side by the household's own
lamp and casting a shadow across the floor, cloth in good order.
figure inside the lamp's throw, and out at the ward-fires a tall form reading as pure black
silhouette against the night sky, the fire behind it visible to either side of the shape.
skin, cloth in good order, at rest.
camera with her head turned to the dark, the open rim and the lake filling the space she is looking
at. Sky and lamp light only.
scale — the plate that proves the two read apart at distance.
gave the honored dead an outward-facing carriage and spent STILLNESS on them, both of which collided
with the landed BE_0005_datu_siahaan.md. The director ruled 2026-08-12 that first-landed governs:
this sheet reconciles TO BE_0005 §4 :80-86 and §6 :136-137 (face turned to the house, a seat,
attendance; stillness spent once, on the counterfeit), the outward-facing carriage is dropped, and the
lamp mark demotes to supporting and is staged against that sheet's ward-fires. THE RANK-TO-BODY HALF
RESOLVED THE OTHER WAY: BE_0005 :82 was repaired at source the same day — "a real sombaon" became
"the real honored dead", with a loose-usage note naming CR_0163 as the rank vocabulary's home — so the
bodiless sombaon rank stands and the two sheets now use one vocabulary.
T0_Creature_Roster @ CR_0163 — CITATION THINNESS ON THE CORE GLOSS. The two-rank gloss at sumatra_java.md :1003 carries no SRC anchor on its own line, and the corpus's only further rank
language (:3284-3287, SRC_00446) belongs to the SOLOBEAN entry and reaches this row only obliquely,
in a passage where the page records the record's self-contradiction and rules rank not to be the
criterion. A Batak ancestral-veneration primary source is an acquisition target, and until it lands no
rank hierarchy, rite or address may be filled in on this row or this sheet.
height_m, length_axis, mesh_id_ref, substrate_material_ref_path are EMPTY while mesh_pipeline_type reads image_to_3d. The pipeline
cell says a body will be built and no cell says what it is.
@ CR_0163 :: mesh_tags.style READS mythologically-stylized, AND CH_05.md :267 RULES THATREGISTER EXCLUSIVELY — the begu ganjang, Naga Padoha, the krasue/ap and the guardian constructs, and
those four only. This row is not among them, so the cell asserts a register the line withholds from it.
The same line's realistic-ethnographic assignment names communities, monuments and ports and does not
name this row either, so the correct statement of the debt is that the row's style cell claims an
EXCLUSIVE token it is outside, while its own register is UNASSIGNED and owed. The consequence is exact:
an asset lane reading that cell builds the venerated dead of a living people in the same register as
the killing-spirit that counterfeits them, which is the conflation this row exists to prevent.
REGISTRY LANE, with its own gate and baseline — this sheet writes nothing.
only as good as the begu ganjang's matching occlusion-without-return against those fires, and that
belongs to BE_0005's sheet. The two now agree by ruling; flagged here so a later edit to either side
cannot silently break the pair.
source_ref line pointers have drifted from their targets: CR_0160 L838-840 and L975 now resolve at angkor_khmer.md :856 and
:991; CR_0162 L713 resolves at :729; CR_0171 L2818-2824 now lands on the riddle-master elder entry
while the Haji Guru persona sits at sumatra_java.md :2832-2847. This row's own anchors verified this
pass. REGISTRY LANE, with its own gate and baseline.
T0_Boss_Attack_Rail carries 0 rows; the five tell shapes here have no data home, and the ward beathas no attack-rail representation at all.