world/regions/sumatra_java/page/sumatra_java_S03.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_Familiar_Registry
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.
This region's audited harvest is a writing-and-divination shelf, and its fauna comes with it: six
records that are manuscript catalogues, a script history, an art catalogue and a field note on stone
images carry almost no wild-animal ecology and a great deal of animal-in-practice. What they attest
at full strength is the animal inside the datu's craft — the sacrificial and divinatory birds and
beasts whose bodies answer a question, the bone and horn the manuscript culture writes on and mixes
in, the animal-named days of the oracle calendars, and the composite creatures the Batak carve onto
their houses and staves. That is where this section's depth is. The wild-ecology layer of Sumatra and
Java is asserted here only as far as the spine already carries it, and the acquisition gap is named
below rather than filled with invention.
The page CONSUMES the T0_Creature_Roster rows the spine staged and does not mint species: the
Sumatran tiger (CR_0024, the apex predator — Khan's species, OBSERVE-and-respectful-distance primary,
combat defensive-only where it threatens; ambient and combat_permitted before the bond, per the CH_05
ambient-threat row), the Sumatran rhinoceros (CR_0025), the Sumatran orangutan (CR_0026), the sun
bear (CR_0027), and the Sunda clouded leopard (CR_0028), with the Orang Pendek (CR_0011) carried as
the region's cryptid discourse — examined authorially, never credited as authentic Indigenous
tradition, and never seated on the Batak's own attested beings, which are a different and fully
documented class. Region-ambient FEEDs at the build pass: the caldera-lake fish and waterfowl, the
Kedu paddy fauna on the Borobudur approach, and the highland birds.
Batak divination is performed on animals, and the record is specific about which animal answers which
kind of question. This is the section's densest playable material and it ships at full weight: the
killing is in the rite, and staging the ceremony without it would be care-inflation, not care.
ampang, the ritual basket that stands for the whole cosmos; the god Batara Guru is held to descend
into the basket and settle the bird's final position, which reads as yes or no. In the manuk gantung
variant the cock is hung until dead and the omen taken from the entrails. The aji payung cuts a pig
or a dog head, and the gorak-gorakan ni babi reads the dying animal's convulsions
[SRC: SRC_00226 — The Power of Writing: Batak Manuscripts (van der Putten, ed.), p. 73-74] ·
SUBSTRATE. Staged as a high-stakes beat before a decisive action, with the community treating the
reading as binding and the player free to trust, contest, or falsify what a corrupt datu delivers.
from the book, the answer sought in a fowl's entrails, the result cross-checked against the
calendar table. It returns intel, not loot — a concrete hint, a marked location, or a warded night
[SRC: SRC_00158 — Between Mind and Soul: Pustaha Manuscripts, p. 170-171] · SUBSTRATE. Rendered as
the tradition's own knowledge-seeking, with dignity, never as gross-out horror.
apex: the datu reads the offering, portions of the beast are set aside for the spirits (saetan),
and the double-horned head afterward crowns the saddle-roofed house [SRC: SRC_00228 — Van der Tuuk's
Collection of Batak Manuscripts, p. 12] · SUBSTRATE. The same source sets buffalo-sacrifice augury
alongside chicken-divination and dream-reading as the three named divinatory competences a pustaha
reader acquires, each with its own trained terminology and casting ritual [SRC: SRC_00228, p. 11-13]
· SUBSTRATE. The player rule is participation offered and never required — the ceremony is
immersion, standing, and augury access, not a forced kill — while the ceremony itself is shown
entire.
Zone seat for all three: samosir_highlands (mountain terrain), on the datu compound ground the Zone
Catalog sizes at roughly 120 by 90 and on a ceremonial ground beside the village that the page adds
alongside it as first-pass geometry. The buffalo-sacrifice material is CANON-ROUTED there;
SRC_00228's own ground is the Sumatran west coast at Sibolga and Barus and the Dairi-speaking Kelasen
area, so nothing is cited to that record as located at Samosir.
The oracle chain reads animals as much as sky. The ari rojang counts thirty named days whose names
are mostly animal names, and Voorhoeve suspected a more direct connection with the Malay rejang, an
oracle of named days, chiefly on the similarity of those animal names, with a further
Southeast-Asian variant blending the Hindu naksatra, the Chinese animal zodiac and Persian elements
[SRC: SRC_00226, p. 74-75] · SUBSTRATE. A suspected relation is not a documented transmission, and it
equally forbids asserting independence: it is a read relation and a shared category, never a claim
that one people taught the other. The datu's own escalating instrument-chain runs separately
alongside it, in the source's own order — the twelve-constellation pormesa na sampulu dua, then the
panggorda na ualu, eight animal-deities of the eight compass directions whose name derives from
garuda, and below them the seven-day pehu na pitu and the five-part pormamis na lima; the pormesa's
constellation names are direct Sanskrit loans received and localized into a datu system
[SRC: SRC_00226, p. 70-71] · SUBSTRATE. For the player this is a bestiary that is also a timetable:
learning which animal owns which day and which direction is literacy with a mechanical payoff, and it
is the fauna layer's join into the Section-18 time display.
The calendar also supplies the only place on this shelf where wild animals appear as a hazard, and it
is worth the whole section. The porhalaan is read before a journey, before a harvest, and before
moving a herd to new pasture; the stakes the missionary record gives for a badly chosen day are
concrete and small and frightening — the party waiting outside the shelter, exposed to wild animals
[SRC: SRC_00158, p. 170] · SUBSTRATE. That is the fauna pressure model this chapter can honestly
carry: not a stat block, but a night on the wrong side of a door. It also puts livestock on the map —
herds moved between pastures across the highland corridor are a real Batak activity attested here,
and they give the tiger, the clouded leopard and the sun bear something to be a threat to.
The manuscript culture is built out of animals as much as out of trees, and the specifics are
buildable craft.
stems and onto buffalo shoulder- and rib-bones; betel and tobacco containers carry inscriptions;
men blacken their teeth with the same baja soot that makes the ink [SRC: SRC_00158, p. 167, 169,
171] · SUBSTRATE. Every one of those is a readable ambient prop, and together they are the quiet
refutation of the outsider's illiterate-primitive read — shown, never lectured.
is a boar-tusk amulet; engraved bone and bamboo ward danger and protect the bearer from an enemy's
spells, and the pagar surat na sampulu sia turns the letters themselves into protective agents
[SRC: SRC_00226, p. 82-83, p. 29, p. 19, p. 68] · SUBSTRATE. The underlying belief that an
inscription wards a weapon is what carries at the 1200 CE present; the attested bullet-warding form
of it is a later colonial-era belief and is reserved for forward-stratum glimpses only.
point carved as a seated figure, its mouth plugged with a singa stopper, and sometimes the
earth-lizard deity carved hidden inside the bore [SRC: SRC_00446 — Art of Island Southeast Asia:
The Fred and Rita Richman Collection, p. 45, 57] · SUBSTRATE. Which horn, which stopper-figure and
which interior emblem a legitimate vessel carries is exactly what makes a fake or a defiled one read
wrong at a glance — a Trade-4 Herbalism container craft that doubles as an investigation tell. A
second buffalo horn carries powder: the carved parpanggalahan flask [SRC: SRC_00446, p. 68-69] ·
SUBSTRATE, with the charge chemistry itself belonging to Sections 9 and 14. A 1929 datu portrait
independently attests the ensemble the player learns to recognize — the specialist with his
pustaha, a medicine horn and a magic staff [SRC: SRC_00158, Fig. 8, p. 176] · SUBSTRATE; the
canonical object-names come from the Batak literature and the region page, not from that plate.
anywhere in this manuscript ecology. The pustaha body is inner bark folded between two carved
wooden covers [SRC: SRC_00158, p. 165, p. 169] · SUBSTRATE, and the wider Nusantara scribal
tradition on this shelf is the perishable set — bamboo, bark and palm-leaf, with no stone and no
metal manuscripts [SRC: SRC_01758 — Kozok, Sejarah aksara Batak, § Silsilah Aksara] · SUBSTRATE.
The animal contribution to the book is bone, horn and soot; hide is absent from the record rather
than ruled out by it, so any leatherwork the build wants is an acquisition, not an inference.
The Batak animal imagination fuses rather than copies, and the page renders each being as its own
tradition holds it.
as a scaled buffalo, carved monumentally as the heads tenoned to a great-house's support beams so
the facade itself watches the street, and in miniature as horn stoppers and masks; it stands for
power, protection and prestige [SRC: SRC_00446, p. 23, 39, 45] · SUBSTRATE. Its Sanskrit-derived
name (simha, the lion) and the naga alongside it arrived through Srivijayan reception and were
re-authored locally into a creature no lion would recognize — documented reception with local
authorship, never a superior source-culture civilizing a periphery [SRC: SRC_00446, p. 24, 39, 71]
· SUBSTRATE. Only the corrupt datu's compound has its house-guardians roused; ordinary
singa-fronted houses stay inert, protected set-dressing.
of a wife, and from its three eggs came the three principal deities; carved manuk-manuk chicken
images hang in the home with rituals performed before them. The source hedges the cosmogonic link
("may have its roots in") and the page keeps the hedge. The chicken is attested as a sacrificial
animal at that page, and its divinatory use sits separately, in rituals to foretell the future where
the datu used lime segments together with chicken eggs [SRC: SRC_00446, p. 54, 148, 69] ·
SUBSTRATE.
position shifts through the compass every three months and is read as a directional oracle in the
pustaha themselves [SRC: SRC_00226, p. 19, p. 72] · SUBSTRATE. It is the calendar-and-direction
serpent and is not the bound earth-shaker: Naga Padoha stays the underworld serpent of Section 5
and of BE_0005_S3, endured and re-settled rather than slain, and the two are never collapsed into
one dragon.
one. The earth deity dwells inside the ground and manifests to people as a lizard, associated with
agricultural fertility; lizards were accordingly never killed and were given ritual offerings of
rice, and the lizard emblem is carved inside naga-morsarang horns and on pustaha covers and
rice-granary doors [SRC: SRC_00446, p. 45, 57, 48] · SUBSTRATE. In play this is a live, legible,
non-gating world rule: a lizard is a real animal the player can kill and a community will notice
that they did, and the offering of rice is the affirmative counterpart. A real and portrayable good
earth-power, never a deity-name placed on a mortal NPC.
The Dairi-Batak creation myth gives the arc its first named hunt. The upper-god Debata i datas langit
sends his divine huntsman-servant Haji Guru to take a pregnant male mouse-deer to satisfy the
creator's pregnant wife, and Haji Guru hunts with a crow and seven dogs [SRC: SRC_00228, p. 16-18] ·
SUBSTRATE. Three real animals of these forests carry that myth — the mouse-deer, the crow, the pack —
and the impossible quarry is the point of it. Haji Guru is honored and deity-adjacent: usable as an
aid figure or as a stranger-hunter who sets the player a hunt in mortal disguise, never a villain and
never a name laid on an antagonist NPC. The same article documents a real onward claim, which stays
exactly as hedged as its source: the Malays themselves place the origin of their Spectre Huntsman at
Katapang in Sumatra, and the scholarship argues that the Perak-Malay dreaded demon-hunter derives from
this Batak divine huntsman — a good divine servant on one side of a border becoming a feared demon on
the other [SRC: SRC_00228, p. 16, p. 18] · SUBSTRATE. The crow and the seven hounds belong to Haji
Guru's own Batak account and are not transferred onto the Malay being; the Malay figure is named as
Malay wherever it appears and is never presented as Batak folklore, and it is never conflated with
the begu ganjang, which is a different predator-spirit already in canon. No encounter is staged for
the Malay figure on this page: the material for one is queued behind a re-citation and belongs to the
Section-13 pass, not here.
The animal economy this shelf attests is small and specific and belongs mostly to Section 9, and its
ground is the Asahan coast-and-corridor country — Pasaguan on the high bank of the Aek Tarum, the
Bandar Pulau highland corridor, and the Batubara perahu ports slightly north of the site — which lies
outside this page's four-zone catalog entirely. Nothing from that record is cited as located at
Samosir or at Palembang. The old coast-to-Toba trail past Pasaguan is McKinnon's own reading of the
route and the page carries it at that strength: he suggests salt was perhaps among the most important
commodities traded and, with salt-fish, always in demand in the highlands, while the export list
Anderson recorded at those ports names rattans, salt-fish, horses and silk cloths and no salt at all,
and the source never joins the two into one documented route [SRC: SRC_00152 — A Malayo-Batak Group
of Images near Aek Tarum (Edwards McKinnon), p. 1, p. 12] · SUBSTRATE. Horses are real working stock
on that route and pack animals for the opt-in caravan run, and salt-fish is the region's attested
fisheries product. One thing is recorded here so the fauna layer never reads as an innocent picture
of that traffic: the same page attests that enslaved people were brought down from the interior in
considerable numbers alongside the horses. That is built, not omitted, and it is built as the
institution it was — debt-bondage, captive-taking and elite brokerage at both ends of a route under
real economic pressure, with highland communities as agents inside the network rather than only as
its cargo — in Sections 8, 9 and 13, where the caravan and the integrity test live. It is not routed
onto a single corrupt individual, which would spare the network its own history.
Every seat below is checked against the Zone Catalog's own terrain values, not against the sources'
landscapes.
protected) carries the whole ritual-animal layer — the ampang divination and the fowl-gut
consultation at the datu compound ground the catalog sizes at roughly 120 by 90 and at the healer's
warded village night ring, the buffalo ceremony on the page-added ceremonial ground beside the
village, the herd-move and the wrong-day exposure across the caldera-rim corridor, the horn and
bone crafts in the village craft quarter.
Its fauna is approach-and-ambient only: the Kedu paddy and plain fauna across the ~500 m
forest-and-plain approach the catalog sizes, never on the terraces or in the summit-stupa pocket.
inscribed betel and bone objects as readable props, which is where that record's own routing puts
them. It carries no cited claim from the Asahan salt-trail record: that trail is North Sumatran
coast-and-corridor ground the length of the island away, and its audit corrected the palembang_port
routing explicitly. No wild-predator staging in a river-port warren.
ash-and-scree ambient life and nothing else. No Batak fauna, folkloric being, or divination content
seats here — two separate source audits caught exactly that mis-routing, once for the Batak
gunpowder and horn-flask material and once for a night-hunt spawn, and both were de-routed off this
zone. Merapi's seismic and monsoon weather feeds timed foraging elsewhere; it does not import North
Sumatran beings onto a Javanese volcano.
None of the six audited records is a zoology or ecology source. There is no region-scoped attestation
on this shelf for the range, behaviour, habitat preference, hunting method or population state of the
Sumatran tiger, rhinoceros, orangutan, sun bear or clouded leopard, and under cited-or-cut none is
asserted here. That is a real hole with a real consequence: the roster rows arrive with names and
without behaviour, so the patient-observation reading the Flores build gives the Komodo has no
equivalent here yet, and Khan's bond threshold rests on the spine's own staging rather than on
observed tiger behaviour. It is carried to the Section-16 verify list as an acquisition target —
Sumatran large-mammal ecology and the Toba highland faunal assemblage — and the moment it is anchored,
the behaviour layer returns at full weight. The hold is a sourcing gap and not a softening: nothing
about these animals is being made gentler, only left unwritten.
Familiar candidate — full entry: Khan the Sumatran Tiger (Ground, slot G1) — the apex-predator
familiar; bonds at the Samosir respectful-distance threshold at CH05_B05 (the apex tiger surfaces at
sustained-eye-contact acceptance, all hostile wildlife in range reducing aggression on the bond),
writing ws.familiar_bond_state: +khan_g1_bonded, with exact bond mechanics deferred to the
T0_Familiar_Registry; before the bond the tiger is ambient and combat_permitted where it threatens,
per the CH_05 ambient-threat row. Khan rotates as the Ground familiar and reappears within the Ch
59-65 free-travel band as the adult-Sumatra revisit excursion. Shell (W1) remains the sustained Water
familiar; Kira (F1) carries from Ch 4; the Sanur Octopus (W4) is deferred and gated; the Child
Familiar is lost and believed dead.
Folkloric beings route to Creature_Roster.folklore_attribution — each rendered as its own tradition
holds it, mythologically-stylized only where the tradition itself condemns or fears it, never
Hollywood-monstered and never a slander of the honored dead: the begu ganjang (the tall
datu-commanded killing-spirit the Batak themselves condemn), Naga Padoha (the bound underworld
chaos-serpent, endured and re-settled), Pane na Bolon (the world-encircling directional serpent of the
oracle), the singa (the buffalo-horse-serpent house guardian, fightable only as the corrupt datu's
roused construct), Manuk-manuk (the cosmogonic blue chicken), Haji Guru (the honored Dairi divine
huntsman, aid-figure and disguised quest-giver register), Boraspati ni Tano (the lizard earth-power,
honored and never killed), and the honored sombaon and sumangot ancestral dead. Rangga Puri, named
alongside Naga Padoha as an inhabitant of the Batak underworld's third tier [SRC: SRC_00228, p. 16] ·
SUBSTRATE, is a name and nothing more in the record — minor cosmological substrate that routes to
Section 5 rather than to the fauna layer, and it acquires no attributes here until a second source
attests them.
Anchor convention for this section, so a verifier landing one page off does not read drift as
fabrication: page numbers are PRINT pages throughout. SRC_00226 print = PDF − 2 and SRC_00446
print = PDF − 1 (both re-derived from the printed folios in their own record audits); SRC_00152,
SRC_00158 and SRC_00228 carry no offset. Where a record's stored anchor was corrected by its audit —
the sarang timah at print 82-83, and the naga-morsarang and lizard-deity pages — the corrected print
anchor is the one cited here.