creatures/CR_0168_porsili.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_Character_Index·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 runs the RITUAL REGISTER declared on
BE_0004_S3_barong_rangda_trial.md — the case where the honoured thing is not the subject and the
trial is. It cites canon rows and writes none.
samosir_highlands, a warded house on Boru Simanjuntak's night round
(DIRECTOR_RULING_L11 RULING_4), and the guardian in the test is the RITE
T0_Creature_Roster @ CR_0168 (all 62 cells) · T0_Character_Index @ CHAR_0038 · docs/spine/CH_05.md §§ beat graph CH05_B05, protected-chapter combat framing ·
_source/02_Tier_2_Region_Pages/sumatra_java.md §§ 5, 10, 13, 15
THE ONE THING THIS SHEET IS BUILT AROUND. Canon is unambiguous about what this is: "a benevolent
craft object, not a monster" (sumatra_java.md:958-959) and "a real Batak cure the player helps enact"
(sumatra_java.md:3243-3244). So the subject of this sheet is not a creature to face — it is a RITE
with a real fail state, and the thing on the other side of it is a sickness-spirit that already has
hold of a person. The porsili is what the player MAKES to answer it. A lane that reads this row and
designs a haunted doll has inverted the being.
THE RITUAL REGISTER'S PART ONE ASKS WHOSE BODIES ARE ON SCREEN AND WHICH IS THE SUBJECT. Three bodies
are present in this beat and none of them is an enemy: the sick person on the mat, the healer Boru
Simanjuntak working over them, and the figure the player carves. The subject is the EXCHANGE between
the first and the third.
[SRC_00226, print p. 68-69; sumatra_java.md:955-957]. Forearm-length, soft-fibred, worked wet, and
wrong on purpose in the way a thing made in a hurry by lamplight is wrong.
at every point, and it never moves under its own power at any moment of the design. That is an
articulation fact stated affirmatively, because the failure mode this sheet exists to prevent is a
later lane rigging it.
ill and not the choreography of a person who is possessed. This is the strictest constraint in the
block.
angle, at one tenth the size.
THE ANATOMY REFERENCE TABLE, READ AND STATED AFFIRMATIVELY. build/3d/schema/anatomy_reference/ is on
disk and supersedes the doctrine § 2.1 inline licence where a bucket covers a subject. NO BUCKET
COVERS THE PORSILI, and the table rules itself out by its own scope — the eight bucketed census
archetypes plus HUMANOID, with the PROVISIONAL folklore rows explicitly OUT OF SCOPE because "body
plan is a canon decision, already boarded as a canon debt"
(build/3d/schema/anatomy_reference/index.json, scope and out_of_scope). This subject is a carving
with zero joints and it never moves, so it has no body plan to bucket. HUMANOID DOES BIND THE SECOND
BODY IN THIS BLOCK, and it is cited for it: the sick person is a human NPC, HUMANOID.json covers
"the player and every human NPC," and its statement that "a pose outside it is not stylised — it is an
injury" is the exact ruler behind this sheet's ordinary-ROM-throughout constraint at § 5. That is the
whole anatomy-table read on this row, and the inline blocks above stand.
individual perverts (sumatra_java.md:939-941).
likeness, sili meaning exchange; it is offered so the sickness-spirit abandons the body and seizes
the effigy instead, and is then hung in a lonely place and abandoned, with a porsili na ari na pitu
variant keyed to the seven weekdays [SRC_00226, print p. 68-69; sumatra_java.md:955-958,
3243-3247, 3635-3638].
[sumatra_java.md:958-959].
swallowed, hung on a house wall, or sealed into an amulet, and it is the mechanic behind the
healer's night-ward — forage, assemble, and place the pagar before the killing-spirit comes
[SRC_00158, print p. 169; sumatra_java.md:942-946, 3629-3633].
knowledge, the opposite intent — and that symmetry is the chapter's cleanest statement that the
office is not the offence [sumatra_java.md:3247-3250].
datu's begu ganjang until the killing-spirit is told apart from the honoured sombaon and sumangot
dead it counterfeits (CH_05.md:142-145), and Boru Simanjuntak is a protected healer-practitioner and
never a target (CH_05.md:224).
rising under it, the pagar assembly as foley, and the porsili carving worked under the same cue —
benign craft against a malevolent night (sumatra_java.md:2466-2470).
ELEVATION BUDGET ON THE RITE, ZERO ON THE HEALER AND ZERO ON THE SICK PERSON, DECLARED. Neither the
healer nor the patient is altered, staged as uncanny, or given a moveset, and the declaration is here
so that a later lane attempting it is visibly wrong.
ONE-LINE READ: a rough banana-trunk figure the length of a forearm whose face is unmistakably the
woman lying three metres away, lying on its own small mat, at the same angle she is.
PRIMARY — A9 THE MARK: THE LIKENESS. Canon supplies the mark and it is the strongest identity this
design has. The porsili is carved in the sick person's likeness, and the design spends its whole
budget on making that likeness ARRIVE over the course of the carving: the first cuts are a shape, and
then a jaw line the player has been looking at all evening turns up in the wood. There is exactly one
mark and the doctrine's rule holds — a figure carrying three marks carries none, so the porsili has no
ornament, no inscription and no colour. It has a face, and the face is somebody's.
The mechanism: sili means exchange, and a substitute works by being ACCEPTED as the thing it replaces.
The likeness is therefore not decoration, it is the functional surface, and the game's whole carving
minigame is a test of how well the player has been paying attention to a person they met an hour ago.
SUPPORTING — A5 AGE AND STATE, INVERTED, and this is the restorative case the doctrine names. Nothing
degrades on the sick person as the rite runs; things degrade on the FIGURE. As each exchange lands the
banana-trunk fibre slumps and darkens along one region, sap beads at the cut, and the small body
starts to carry the illness in its material — while on the mat beside it colour comes back into a
face. Two bodies, one condition, moving in opposite directions in the same lamplight. It is entirely
material, it costs no light, and it is the most legible cure a game can show without a bar.
SUPPORTING — A10 NEGATIVE SPACE: THE ABANDONMENT. The rite's last act is attested and it is a
subtraction — the figure is hung in a lonely place and abandoned. The design ends the beat by walking
out with the healer and hanging the thing in the dark at the field edge, and then the game does not
let the player go back for it. It is not a quest item, it does not enter the inventory, and the place
it hangs is not a marker. The empty hand on the walk home is the beat's last read.
EMISSION: none. Lamplight in the house, the ward-fires outside, and the dark between houses.
technical clothes.
A porsili that twitches is a horror prop, and canon's own words for this object class are benevolent
craft object rather than monster. The material simulation on the fibre and the sap is a MATERIAL
channel and never a motion channel, and the distinction is what keeps the object on the right side
of the line.
no arching, no unnatural articulation at any point of the exchange. The tell that the sickness has
left is breath and colour, which are the two channels a person actually has.
the patient's own head mesh at a coarse fidelity, so the resemblance is structural and survives at
the shipped camera without a single expression.
THE TRIAL'S GRAMMAR IS CARVE, OFFER AND HOLD, and there is no attack in it. That is not a defang, and
this sheet checks itself against the defang tell explicitly: the rite runs across a night, the chain
is long, a mistake wipes it, and the loss state is a person who is still sick and a house the night
gets into. The doctrine's own line governs — a guardian test is a HARDER encounter, not a passive one.
Part economy home, declared: RESTORATIVE — the parts are CLEARED rather than broken and the subject is
BETTER after each one, which is the inverted case the doctrine warns is most likely to be built
backwards.
| tell shape | body origin | one answer | counter class |
|---|---|---|---|
| the sick person's breath shortens and the lamp gutters at one wall | the sickness has moved to a region of the body | carve that region of the figure NEXT — the exchange follows the illness | the read lane |
| the healer's warding voice changes register mid-line | Boru Simanjuntak has heard something outside the wall | place the pagar at the named threshold before she finishes the line | the ward lane |
| a fibre on the figure stays pale where the patient is worst | the exchange has not taken on that region | recut it against the person rather than against the wood | the craft lane |
| the ward-fire at a doorpost sinks with the wind against it | the night pressure has found an unwatched threshold | leave the carving and answer the door — the rite survives an interruption, the house does not | positioning |
ONE SHAPE, ONE ANSWER, and the shapes are all readings of two bodies and a room. The escalation is
that the shapes begin to arrive together.
ESCALATION on the four channels, attached to the rite the way the machine register attaches them to
operators. POSTURE — the healer stops kneeling and starts standing, which means she is watching the
door instead of the patient. BREATH — the patient's, and it is the meter. VOCALIZATION — the warding
voice, and its escalation is the gondang sabangunan coming up under it per the spine's own music_mood
row. NEW OPENER — the last exchange is asked for while the player is holding a threshold rather than
the knife.
THE WIN IS A CURE AND THE LOSS IS A LONGER NIGHT. The win yields the rite itself as knowledge — the
roster's collect_verb is EARN, and what is earned is that the player can run it again — plus the
healer's standing, which is the ally relationship the compound duel later depends on. The loss is
graduated with no dead end: the patient is still ill at dawn, the house is marked, the healer is
tired for the next beat, and the chapter proceeds. Nothing here gates the strait.
omission. The community is present, the healer leads and the player assists, and nothing in this
encounter harms, defeats or opposes any person on screen. Boru Simanjuntak, the pustaha-keepers and
the legitimate datus are allies and protected non-targets (CH_05.md:246), and the healer who leads
this rite is named on the spine's own ally roster as "a protected healer-practitioner, never a
target" (CH_05.md:224). The sick person the rite serves is neither a target nor a spectacle.
object, not a monster. The PROTECTED presumption is discharged here as the doctrine's guardian test
rather than rebutted into absence: the being is present, it is central, it is playable, and it is
never faced as prey because there is nothing about it to face.
actually read: there is no porsili encounter, no porsili health bar, no porsili moveset, no porsili
rig, and no beat anywhere in which the figure moves on its own. Its uncanny potential is real and
the design spends it on the LIKENESS instead, which is more unsettling and entirely true to the rite.
perverts the identical craft into the killing-spirit he keeps. The porsili is therefore never written
as evidence against the datu-office or against the Batak — it is the proof, in the player's own
hands, that the craft is a healing craft and one man is a criminal.
patient character's own head mesh rather than from any external reference. No real devotional object
is reproduced as an asset, and the figures are the game's own carvings built to the documented form
per the page's standing era discipline (sumatra_java.md:1491-1494).
considered, on the grounds that a sacred healing practice is safer watched than played. REFUSED, and
the refusal is the sheet's spine — canon's own words are "a real Batak cure the player helps enact,"
a cutscene would make the chapter's most affirmative content the only content the player does not
touch, and the timid option is the wrong one here in exactly the way the standing calibration
predicts. Also refused: sanitising the sickness so that nobody on screen is really ill. Toward
over-boldness: giving the figure a moment of independent movement at the instant of exchange was
considered and REFUSED — canon types the object as a benevolent craft object rather than a monster,
and one twitch would recruit a living healing tradition into the horror register for a cheap beat.
The floor is untouched: no child appears in this rite in any role, and no ritual killing of any kind
is depicted, enacted or implied by it.
carve-the-region-that-is-worst rule, the slumping-and-darkening fibre states, the two-bodies-opposite
directions read, the four tell shapes, the interrupted-rite threshold rule, the no-rig law and the
empty-hand walk home are INVENTED BY THIS SHEET as the game's own design and are named as ours. The
porsili itself, its materials, the likeness, the meaning of sili, the exchange, the abandonment in a
lonely place, the porsili na ari na pitu, the pagar and its assembly, the benevolent-craft-object
status, and the perverted-identical-craft symmetry are CITED.
a pattern token, and nothing in the rite names a path, a polarity or anything the arc reveals later.
The healer's warding language is the tradition's own and stays local.
Written affirmatively. Every line names what IS in frame.
beside a sick woman lying on hers, at the same angle, in lamplight, the resemblance between the two
faces the composition's subject.
patient visible soft-focus beyond the lamp.
darkened with sap beaded at the cut, the rest of the body pale.
doorpost, the ward-fire low behind her, the village street dark past it.
house lamps small and far behind.
T0_Creature_Roster @ CR_0168 :: height_m and length_axis EMPTY. This design specifiesforearm-length and the specification has no row to sit on.
@ CR_0168 :: folklore_behavior_substrate EMPTY while folklore_attribution_source is full. Therite's own procedure — carve, offer, hang, abandon — is behaviour with no data home.
@ CR_0168 :: integrity_visible_aesthetic_shift EMPTY, and the restorative material states areexactly what that column would carry.
@ CR_0168 :: kit_ref and mesh_id_ref EMPTY; mesh_pipeline_type reads image_to_3d while thissheet's route is REFERENCE_BUILT with a likeness derived from a character head mesh. The likeness
dependency is a pipeline edge that no registry column records.
is a complete, canon-authored, playable beat with a collect_verb of EARN on its row and no
T0_Quest_Seed_Registry id, which is the same shape as the jar-and-release debt boarded on
BE_0005_datu_siahaan.md § 9.
ritual object rather than an organism, rowed on the creature roster because the region page routes it
there by name (sumatra_java.md:1138-1139); every husbandry and ecology column is structurally blank.
folklore to the porsili rite(sumatra_java.md:2956-2957) and the roster cannot carry it.
source_ref and notes cite Section 13 at L3216-3227 and Section 15 at L3611 for passages the live page now carries
at :3241-3251 and :3635 — a drift of roughly 24 lines, and the sibling rows drift the same way
(CR_0164's Section-13 anchors at L3227-3240 for passages now at :3251-3266). This row's notes also
refers to "this 58-column header" where the live header carries 62. This sheet cites the LIVE page
throughout and records the divergence rather than reconciling it. Registry lane, with its own gate
and baseline.