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Condition record before the gap

Artifact Intent​

  • Story role: Condition Record (conditional). Only appears on the foreshadowing route. Lets the player feel something is wrong before the wrong thing happens.
  • Playable-lore position: clue step. This entry is the player's anchor for the Lost Hours arc — proof, in the MC's own hand, that something began before the blackout.
  • What this artifact must not claim: any cause for the symptoms; any cosmological framing; any narrator voice from outside the MC.

Narrative Surface Notes​

  • Artifact shape: a short, careful entry, written like a person who has been ill before and knows how to write a symptom list. The MC does not editorialise.
  • Player-facing uncertainty: the MC names sensations, not causes. Pressure, taste, balance — registered. No diagnosis.
  • Journal or objective linkage: appears only on the foreshadowing route; in the Journal it is the entry the player can return to after the gap.

Body Draft​

Condition record. I am writing this in case I need to read it later.

Sitting on a rock. I have been sitting for, I think, a minute. The slope is in front of me. The shelter is below and to the left. I have the food. I am not done with the slope but I had to stop.

Symptoms. Listing.

One. Taste in the mouth. Metallic. Not blood. Closer to iron filings or a battery on the tongue. I have not put a battery on my tongue in this country and I do not believe there is a battery in this country, so this is the wrong taste in the wrong place.

Two. Pressure behind the eyes. Not headache. Not the headache I had earlier. Pressure, like the air is leaning on me from inside.

Three. The world tilted once, while I was standing, and the tilt did not match the slope. I was standing on a slope but the tilt went the other way. It corrected. I am sitting because I do not want it to do that again while I have a knife in my hand.

Four. The air went quieter for a moment. Not the quiet of earlier. A different quiet. As if something stepped sideways out of a room I did not know I was in.

I do not know what is happening. I am writing this down because if I forget, I want a piece of paper that remembers.

I am going to stand up slow and go to the shelter. Slow. The pot is in the pack. The fire is not lit yet. The light is still here. If I can make it back, I will make it back.

If I am reading this later and I do not remember writing it: hello. You are me. You wrote this. Believe it.

Playable Consequences​

  • Immediate consequence: registers the symptom list as a Journal anchor; if the player follows the foreshadowed path, the next entry is act0-day1-the-missing-hours with the foreshadowing flag already set.
  • Follow-up clue, mission, site, or world-state change: unlocks the "I had a warning" callback on act0-day1-the-missing-hours; the Lost Hours arc is more legible to the player when this entry is in hand.
  • Related branch or linear continuation: conditional on lost-hours-foreshadowed; does not appear on the linear path; rejoin point is act0-day1-the-missing-hours.

Review Notes​

  • Open questions: whether a UX surface should highlight the symptom list as a pinned reference inside the Journal is a gd-journal.md concern; this entry leaves the highlight to the body prose itself.
  • Canon-delta follow-up: none.
  • Audit carry-forward: the symptom vocabulary (metallic, pressure, tilt, sideways quiet) should stay consistent across the post-blackout entries so the MC can be heard to recognise it.