Water first

Artifact Intent

• Story role: Objective Shift. Thirst becomes the first directive. The MC reasons from body cues, not from goals handed down by a narrator.
• Playable-lore position: clue -> investigation step. The MC's first observation of a wrong patch of ground is the clue that later threads will route through.
• What this artifact must not claim: any cosmological explanation of demons, any named source for the anomaly, any narrator framing that explains why the patch is wrong.

Narrative Surface Notes

• Artifact shape: dry, stubborn diary entry. The MC writes about what their tongue feels like and what the ground does, not about meaning.
• Player-facing uncertainty: the MC names nothing. The patch is just "wrong-looking". The reader does the rest.
• Journal or objective linkage: completes act0.survive.find-water; primes act0.survive.prepare-for-night.

Body Draft

Water first. The mouth told me before the head did.

I went downhill because water goes downhill, and because the trees thinned that way. There was a stream. Not big. Cold. Clean enough to drink from the moving part, not the pools.

I drank too fast and my teeth ached.

On the way down I passed a patch of ground that was wrong. The grass there was the colour of nothing I would call grass. Not yellow, not brown, not the colour of dying — the colour of growing in the wrong direction. The leaves on the low plants were thick the way leaves are thick when something is feeding them, but I did not want to know what.

I walked around it. Wide. The knife stayed in the sheath. The chipped edge is not going to help me if it comes to something the chipped edge does not help against.

I have walked past sick ground before. The bad pasture by the back of the farm where the cattle would not graze. This is not that. The cattle would not graze that field because the field smelled. This patch did not smell. That is what makes it worse.

I drank again, slower. Filled the skin. Filled it twice. I stood up too fast and the headache came back and the world did the slow tilt it does when you have stood up too fast on too little, and I sat down again on a rock.

There is a thing here. I do not know what it is. I am writing it down so I do not pretend later that I did not know.

I am going to find shelter before dark.

Playable Consequences

• Immediate consequence: act0.survive.find-water resolves on first drink; thirst clock resets; act0.survive.prepare-for-night opens.
• Follow-up clue, mission, site, or world-state change: the green-patch observation seeds a passive observation entity that later entries can reference; no quest unlock yet.
• Related branch or linear continuation: linear; next entry is act0-day1-before-dark.

Review Notes

• Open questions: how the Journal renders a passive observation note vs an active clue is a UX question for gd-journal.md; this entry leaves the observation passive.
• Canon-delta follow-up: none.
• Audit carry-forward: the green-patch description should stay consistent across later entries; if a later wave renames or relocates this observation, retrofit act0-day1-tracks-in-camp and act0-day1-old-stones-first-notice together.

Voice Readback

Water first. My mouth told me before my head did.

I went downhill because water goes downhill, and because the trees thinned that way. There was a stream. Not a big one. Cold. Clean enough to drink from the moving part, not from the pools.

I drank too fast and my teeth ached.

On the way down, I passed a patch of ground that was wrong. The grass there was the colour of nothing I would call grass. Not yellow, not brown, not the colour of dying. The colour of growing in the wrong direction. The leaves on the low plants were thick the way leaves are thick when something is feeding them, but I did not want to know what.

I walked around it. Wide. The knife stayed in its sheath. The chipped edge was not going to help me if it came to something the chipped edge did not help against.

I had walked past sick ground before. The bad pasture by the back of the farm where the cattle would not graze. This was not that. The cattle would not graze that field because the field smelled. This patch did not smell. That was what made it worse.

I drank again, slower. I filled the skin. I filled it twice. I stood up too fast and the headache came back and the world did the slow tilt it does when you have stood up too fast on too little, and I sat down again on a rock.

There was a thing there. I did not know what it was. I wrote it down so I would not pretend later that I had not known.

I was going to find shelter before dark.