Fauna lore r4: flatspace and Wonderland, four layers (Ink, Glass, Fold, hyperspace), beacon economy

Flatspace is Sol's bubble plus the vanilla galaxy, with r2's ecology renamed
Open Water as its wildlife and pirates as its scourge. Wonderland replaces
the flavours note: separate layers with their own maps, joined by links,
in the fae register. New layer notes for the Glass (Wavecrafters), the Fold
and hyperspace (beacons, keepers); the Ink revised as Adrasteia's layer.
Review r4 lists where the pass would change the rulings, Self's proposals,
r3 and canon.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Adrasteia Space.md

@@ -1,16 +1,18 @@
 **"You can know you've been to the Ink. You can't know where you were."**
 
-> Draft lore pass r3, 2026-10-14, for the operator's review. A flavour of pseudospace (see [[Pseudospace Flavours]]), developed from the operator's sketch: "a liquid grid, with light eating fog overhead and all around and stars that connect to a pillar of glowing nebula, expelling waves of stardust and creating empty pockets with their pressure. The things that live in those inky clouds accumulate that negent dust, very dangerous beasties." Spacers call it **the Ink**. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon. Canon this note keeps: negent needs a configuration of strange matter encountered only in Adrasteia-controlled pseudospace; only Adrasteia makes the charged form; its supplier's location is unknown. Ruled: strange matter is not made by life (`strange-matter-not-biogenic`).
+> Draft lore pass r3, 2026-10-14, revised r4, for the operator's review. A layer of [[Wonderland]], with its own map, reached by links; Adrasteia's foothold. Developed from the operator's sketch: "a liquid grid, with light eating fog overhead and all around and stars that connect to a pillar of glowing nebula, expelling waves of stardust and creating empty pockets with their pressure. The things that live in those inky clouds accumulate that negent dust, very dangerous beasties." Spacers call it **the Ink**. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon. Canon this note keeps: negent needs a configuration of strange matter encountered only in Adrasteia-controlled pseudospace; only Adrasteia makes the charged form; its supplier's location is unknown. Ruled: strange matter is not made by life (`strange-matter-not-biogenic`).
 
 #### What It Looks Like
 
-Fly into the Ink and the stars go out first. A fog closes overhead, then on every side, black and faintly oily, and the light of your own running lamps dies a few hull-lengths out. Below you the grid of the slope is no longer fixed: it moves like the surface of a shallow sea, lifting and settling. Far off, through the fog, is the only thing you can see: a pillar of glowing nebula standing up out of the moving surface, so tall its top is lost, with its stars strung on it like beads. The lowest star sits where the pillar meets the water.
+Come through a link into the Ink and the stars go out first. A fog closes overhead, then on every side, black and faintly oily, and the light of your own running lamps dies a few hull-lengths out. Below you the grid of the slope is no longer fixed: it moves like the surface of a shallow sea, lifting and settling. Far off, through the fog, is the only thing you can see: a pillar of glowing nebula standing up out of the moving surface, so tall its top is lost, with its stars strung on it like beads. The lowest star sits where the pillar meets the water.
+
+**The map.** The Ink's galaxy map is black. The pillars are drawn as columns of light, each with its pulse shown as rings spreading from its foot; zones are named by pillar and beat, never by position, and the fog of the map never clears. You always know which pillar you are near and never where the Ink is [new].
 
 Every so often the pillar brightens. A while later a swell reaches you across the surface, a ring of stardust riding on it, and ahead of the ring the fog parts. For a minute or two you are in clear water: lamps reach, sensors reach, the surface glitters with dust. Then the pocket moves on outward with the wave and the fog closes behind it.
 
 #### How It Works
 
-- **The fog eats light, so it drinks heat.** Everywhere in pseudospace the Aether turns a little heat into light (wild [[Negative Entropy]]). In Open Water that light escapes and anything warm can be seen by it. In the Ink the fog eats it. Heat that becomes light becomes nothing. The whole flavour is a cold sink: a hull loses heat faster here than anywhere else, and radiators work too well. That is the first tell, before the stars go [new].
+- **The fog eats light, so it drinks heat.** Everywhere in flatspace the Aether turns a little heat into light (wild [[Negative Entropy]]). In Open Water that light escapes and anything warm can be seen by it. In the Ink the fog eats it. Heat that becomes light becomes nothing. The whole flavour is a cold sink: a hull loses heat faster here than anywhere else, and radiators work too well. That is the first tell, before the stars go [new].
 - **The pillars are where the stars' light goes.** A star in the Ink cannot shine outward; the fog takes its light within a short distance. What leaves it leaves upward, along the pillar, where the stars' own pressure keeps a column clear. The pillar is the visible star: a lamp of nebula lit from inside. It is the one landmark in the Ink, and pilots fix their position by pillars or not at all [new].
 - **The stars breathe dust.** Whatever the stars of the Ink are, they are not suns. They pulse, slowly, and each pulse sends a wave of stardust out from the pillar's foot across the liquid surface. The dust carries strange matter: rare grains in a sea of ordinary dust, made by the stars, not by anything alive. Nobody outside Adrasteia has seen one of these stars up close and come back to describe it [new].
 - **The waves open pockets.** A dust wave's pressure pushes the fog back ahead of it, opening a pocket of clear water that travels with the wave. Inside a pocket light carries and heat stays. Pockets are the only clear water in the Ink and the only warm water, so everything alive rides them. Behind each pocket the fog closes, and the dust the wave carried settles into the **inky clouds**: thick, dark banks where old dust gathers in the fog, densest near the pillars [new].
@@ -40,7 +42,7 @@ ships' heat ──► everything
 | Pack predator | [[Squid]] | Hunters of the pocket edges and the inky clouds; they eat heat at range and ink their escape. |
 | Apex | [[Cachalots]] | Giants that dive into the inky clouds after squid and hold more dust than anything alive. |
 
-Almost nothing from Open Water survives the Ink: no light for [[Glim]], so nothing that eats glim. [[Gleaners]] work the margins on wrecks. Nothing else crosses.
+Almost nothing from Open Water survives the Ink: no light for [[Glim]], so nothing that eats glim. [[Gleaners]] come through the links after wrecks. Nothing else crosses.
 
 #### Why the Beasts Are Dangerous
 
@@ -54,12 +56,16 @@ The tell from Faction Play, *a contact colder than its surroundings is dead or A
 
 The Ink keeps Adrasteia's monopoly three ways at once, and explains none of what canon wants kept dark [new].
 
-1. **It cannot be found.** No light leaves the Ink, so no telescope sees it and no chart shows it. Its mouths are kept. A crew that enters on someone's vouch (as the Adrasteia brainstorm proposes) is brought in through fog and brought out through fog, and knows it has been, not where.
+1. **It cannot be found.** No light leaves the Ink, so no telescope sees it and no chart shows it. Its links are kept: Adrasteia knows where they open and keeps their far ends secret, which is what a foothold is ([[Wonderland]]). A crew that enters on someone's vouch (as the Adrasteia brainstorm proposes) is brought in through fog and brought out through fog, and knows it has been, not where.
 2. **It cannot be worked warm.** Every animal in the Ink hunts heat. The only ships that can work there for long are ships that run cold, and the only way to run cold is negent, which needs charges, which need the dust. You must already have what you came for. Adrasteia had the first charges. Everyone else has to buy theirs from Adrasteia to go anywhere near the source, and charges run out.
 3. **The best dust is where nobody can go.** Dust is dilute in the waves, concentrated in the animals, and richest of all at the foot of the pillars, where every wave starts and the inky clouds are thickest. Skimmers take traces. Hunters take more and die more. Nobody who has tried to reach a pillar's foot has come back to say what is there, except, presumably, whoever supplies Adrasteia.
 
 What is not explained: what the stars of the Ink are; what the "particular configuration" of strange matter is and whether it exists in the dust or is made from it; how Adrasteia charges it; where any Ink is; and how Adrasteia came to be in every one anyone has found. Raw dust is worthless to anyone but Adrasteia. It is bought, at a good price, through blind drops.
 
+#### What It Does to People
+
+The Ink takes warmth. Crews who stay long come back calm, quiet and slow to anger, uneasy in bright rooms, and cold to the touch for a while; some never warm up. It gives them heat as a sense: a returner feels a warm body through a bulkhead the way others see a lamp, and can tell a running reactor from a banked one with her eyes shut. Adrasteia's culture of arriving unannounced, of introductions instead of addresses, and of the cheek check, is what a people becomes after generations of that gift [new].
+
 #### Who Goes In
 
 - **Skimmers.** Vouched independents on long, cold runs, dragging fine nets through the pockets for soot-ash and wave dust. The trade is dull and safe until it isn't.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Fauna Lore Review r3.md

@@ -2,9 +2,9 @@
 
 #### What r3 Did
 
-- Made pseudospace flavours a framework ([[Pseudospace Flavours]]): five dials (light, heat, surface, flow, distance), set by the stars, each flavour with its own bestiary and its own crossing tells. Four flavours: **Open Water** (r2's ecology, now a family from Shallows to Deeps), **the Ink** (Adrasteia space), **the Glass** (stiff Aether: no current, nothing fades, nowhere to hide) and **the Fold** (non-Euclidean: knots where distance grows, seams that glue far places).
+- Made pseudospace flavours a framework ([[Wonderland]]): five dials (light, heat, surface, flow, distance), set by the stars, each flavour with its own bestiary and its own crossing tells. Four flavours: **Open Water** (r2's ecology, now a family from Shallows to Deeps), **the Ink** (Adrasteia space), **the Glass** (stiff Aether: no current, nothing fades, nowhere to hide) and **the Fold** (non-Euclidean: knots where distance grows, seams that glue far places).
 - Developed the Ink from your sketch ([[Adrasteia Space]]) with a four-level web: [[Soot]], [[Rays]], [[Squid]], [[Cachalots]].
-- Cut the strange-matter rumour from [[Whales]], [[Spaceborne Fauna]] and [[Pseudospace Ecology]] (ruling `strange-matter-not-biogenic`). Strange matter is now stellar dust of the Ink, concentrated by its animals, made by none of them.
+- Cut the strange-matter rumour from [[Whales]], [[Spaceborne Fauna]] and [[Open Water]] (ruling `strange-matter-not-biogenic`). Strange matter is now stellar dust of the Ink, concentrated by its animals, made by none of them.
 
 #### Where I'd Change Your Sketch
 

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Fauna Lore Review r4.md

@@ -0,0 +1,66 @@
+> Review note, 2026-10-14, for the operator: where lore pass r4 develops or changes your decisions, Self's proposals, r3 and canon, and why. Not lore. Delete once the calls are made. Within each section, ordered by how much each change buys.
+
+#### What r4 Did
+
+One frame for the whole set:
+
+- **[[Flatspace]]**: Sol's nebula-free bubble plus the vanilla galaxy. Strange physics a crew can learn; the ordinary factions; [[Open Water]] (r2's ecology, renamed from "Pseudospace Ecology") as its natural wildlife, thin in the core and rich at the edges where the Chaos factions live; pirates as its scourge.
+- **[[Wonderland]]** (replaces "Pseudospace Flavours"): separate **layers**, each its own space and its own map, joined by **links** that are found, have tells, sometimes keep hours, and are held by being known. Depth counted in links and time. The fae register: each layer takes something and gives something, and travellers' tales are how layers become known.
+- **Four layers**, each with its map's look, foothold, dangers, what it does to people, and animals: [[Adrasteia Space|the Ink]] (Adrasteia), [[The Glass]] (the Wavecrafters), [[The Fold]] (nobody; the Undertow and the Parallax Auditors work it), [[Hyperspace]] (the beacon keepers), with the beacon economy.
+- Links and wording fixed across the fauna notes so nothing still says the fauna live "in pseudospace".
+
+#### Where I'd Change Your Decisions
+
+**1. Hyperspace should be indifferent, not malevolent.** "Like the Warp" is right about the stakes and I wrote it that way: without beacons you do not get out. But the Warp is hostile; it is full of things that want you. I'd keep hyperspace's danger in its geometry: errors grow exponentially, signals die exponentially, there is too much room to be found in. Then the stakes come from Aetheria's own systems (sensing, heat, drive wear, insurance, EW) rather than from an antagonist, which is your point against HyperRogue. The uncanny is in the people (the Lost) and two animals that exploit lost ships, not in the place.
+
+**2. "Connect arbitrarily" should be arbitrary to the player, structured in the world.** If links are uniformly random, nothing about them can be learned, and a pilot's knowledge stops mattering. I'd keep them unpredictable but give them a grammar: most open at flatspace's edges; links leak tells of their far side; some open on a beat; and they are owned by whoever knows them. That keeps navigation exciting and makes link charts the most valuable thing in the game.
+
+**3. "Some fauna" in flatspace.** r2's twelve animals are more than "some". I kept them and made density do the work: almost nothing in Sol, thin in the settled core, rich at the edges. If you meant flatspace to be nearly empty, r2's ecology moves outward wholesale and the core loses its krill; that is one paragraph in [[Flatspace]].
+
+#### Where I'd Change Self's Proposals
+
+**1. Hyperspace heat.** Self proposed "heat with nowhere to go". Hyperbolic space has more room to radiate into, not less, so that reasoning runs backwards. I moved the heat to the drive: coupling to hyperspace is a transition that never finishes, and holding it open makes heat and wear for the whole crossing. That also ties hyperspace to canon's Wavecrafter line about carrying a drive through a difficult transition, and makes an Undertow calibration profile the commonest way ships are lost.
+
+**2. Beacons need a reason to be dense.** Self's beacon economy holds. I added the physics that makes it an economy: a signal spreads into exponentially more room, so it fades exponentially, so you can only ever hear the next beacon. Chains must be dense, each beacon is a crew's work, and keepers are the people who live in hyperspace, which answers your "who lives in hyperspace?".
+
+**3. The Fold has traffic, not a foothold.** A foothold is held by keeping links secret, and in the Fold every seam can be seen from its far side. So nobody holds it, the Undertow runs off-ledger routes through it, and the Parallax Auditors live off the contradictory records it produces. Self's other calls (flatspace's ecology from r2, layers not flavours, Wonderland as the collective name, the Glass for the Wavecrafters, the Fold distinct from hyperspace, false beacons as an EW claim, fauna homing on lost ships) are in the notes as proposed.
+
+#### Where I'd Change r3
+
+**1. The Ink question is half-answered by layers.** Question `aetheria-fauna:question:ink-one-or-many` asked whether there is one Ink or many. With layers each having one map, the Ink is naturally one layer with many pillars, reached by several links. What is left is whether every link into it is Adrasteia's. I'd have Self revise the question to that, or withdraw it; the notes are written so that both answers fit.
+
+**2. Margins become links.** r3's flavours met at margins a few minutes wide. Layers do not border each other, so r3's border tells now live at links, where a link leaks its far side.
+
+**3. Flatspace is not "no flavour".** r3 called flat space the absence of a flavour. It has its own answers to the five dials (light carries, heat leaves as light, the slope holds, a braided current, a kilometre stays a kilometre), and [[Wonderland]] shows them as the baseline every layer departs from.
+
+#### Where I'd Change Canon
+
+**1. [[Pseudospace]] gives two causes for flatness, and one is the best idea in the set.** Canon says "we brought flat space with us; we are the incursion". [[Temporal Nonlinearity]] says Elysium is a shard of spacetime the Timeless built. Canon also says the Aether answers to minds. Put together: flatspace may be held flat by the minds that expect it, which would explain Sol's bubble (the oldest, most crowded expectation), why Wonderland changes people (too few of you to hold the rules), and why Flatlanders and Chaos factions fight about it. It is a cosmology fork, so it is question `aetheria-fauna:question:why-flatspace-is-flat`. [[Flatspace]] gives all three accounts in-world and rules nothing.
+
+**2. "Few islands of stability".** The vanilla map is large. I'd keep canon's line and add that the islands look like a continent from inside; "few" is the view from Wonderland.
+
+**3. [[Wavecrafters]]: one line for the Glass.** Their "protected guild channels" become Glass links, their school is the Glass, and their concealment of espers is what people raised where nothing hides learn to value. All [new], all consistent with the canon text.
+
+**4. The Cetacean Navigators are a Pre-Elysium faction.** r2 and r4 both carry them into Elysium (r2 as current-readers, r4 as the root of the keepers' rescue duty). Nothing I read says they survived the Rupture. Someone should check before that line goes further.
+
+#### What I Invented Beyond the Inputs
+
+- Links: tells, hours, ownership by knowledge; depth counted in links and time.
+- The fae register per layer (take and give), and travellers' tales as route knowledge.
+- Each layer's map look: the Ink's black map named by pillar and beat; the Glass's silver map with wakes; the Fold's map that draws places twice; hyperspace's Poincaré disc.
+- The Glass's animals (Baskets, Skaters, Augurs); the Fold's (Hinges, Knotfish); hyperspace's (Wisps, Corbies) and its people (keepers, the Lost).
+- Hyperspace physics: short roads, exponential error, exponential fade, the held-open drive; beacons as greedy-routing coordinates; wreckers.
+- Three in-world accounts of why flatspace is flat.
+
+#### Still Open
+
+- `why-flatspace-is-flat` (asked) and the revision of `ink-one-or-many` (for Self).
+- Whether Sol is fauna-free as well as nebula-free. The notes keep it a desert; your ruling left it open.
+- Whether hyperspace touches time or only the tales do.
+- What "altered" means in play: a crew trait, a ship trait, a story flag. The notes say what each layer does in fiction and leave the system to design.
+- Fold and hyperspace foothold politics beyond the sketch; who else holds footholds (the Chaos factions are named in canon but not listed).
+- Emily's and Miss Terri's material was not read or used.
+
+#### Sources
+
+Real-world sources are listed in each layer note, marked checked or from memory; all real-world sources this pass are from memory. Canon read via voidbot, 2026-10-14: [[Pseudospace]], [[Wavecrafters]], [[Temporal Nonlinearity]], [[Aetheric Drive]], [[Parallax Auditors]], Galaxy and Navigation (excerpts), Cetacean Navigators (excerpt), the Adrasteia brainstorm (excerpts).

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Flatspace.md

@@ -0,0 +1,35 @@
+**"Out here a kilometre is a kilometre. Be grateful. Further on, it isn't."**
+
+> Draft lore pass r4, 2026-10-14, for the operator's review. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]. Flatspace is the vanilla galaxy: Sol, and the map of nebulae and stars the game draws today. Its other half is [[Wonderland]]. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon. Reasoning in [[Fauna Lore Review r4]].
+
+Flatspace is everywhere you can live without being changed. Its physics is strange by Sol's standards (the [[Aether]] has a current, heat turns into light, things live in the nebulae), but it is physics: it holds still long enough to be learned, charted, insured and taught. You can colonise it without accepting that reality has been altered. Most people in Elysium never leave it.
+
+#### Sol
+
+Sol sits in a bubble with no nebula in it: a black, clear sky, the old planets where they always were, no current to speak of and nothing alive in the dark. Spacers call it the desert, and Solar people call everywhere else the weather. The bubble is the one place in Elysium where space behaves exactly as the textbooks from before the Rupture say it should.
+
+#### Vanilla Elysium
+
+Beyond the bubble, through the wormholes, lies the rest of flatspace: nebulae lit from inside by [[Glim]], braided currents, gravity wells with whirlpools, and the [[Open Water]] ecology. This is where the ordinary factions live: the core worlds, the corporations, the ports and insurers, the registries and the courts. Canon calls its settlements the Flatlanders' camps, built on islands of stability. From inside, the islands look like a continent.
+
+Flatspace has a shape that people feel without naming:
+
+- **The core** is settled, busy and thin in fauna. Ships keep the krill scattered and the sharks away.
+- **The edges** are richer. The current is stronger, the glim thicker, the animals bigger, and that is where the **Chaos factions** live: canon puts them at the edges of stable Euclidean space. They are the ones who keep a foot on each side.
+- **The links** open mostly at the edges; the few that open in the core are the best-kept secrets in Elysium. A link is a way into a layer of [[Wonderland]], and finding one is how a faction stops being an edge faction and starts holding a foothold [new].
+
+#### Pirates
+
+Pirates are flatspace's scourge, and only flatspace's. Piracy needs what flatspace has: lanes with traffic on them, charts that stay true, ports that will buy without asking, and a place to hide that is still a place. Wonderland gives none of that. A raider that runs for a link to shake pursuit may come out the other side, but rarely comes back a raider, and the stories it tells after are not pirate stories [new].
+
+#### Why Flatspace Is Flat
+
+Nobody knows, and everyone has an account [new].
+
+- **The core worlds' account.** Flat is how space is. Pseudospace is a rift, an incursion into an orderly universe.
+- **The edge account.** Canon's line, and the Chaos factions' creed: *we brought flat space with us; we are the incursion.* The Aether answers to minds, and wherever enough minds expect Euclid, the Aether gives it to them. Sol is the flattest place there is because it is the oldest and most crowded expectation in Elysium.
+- **The Timeless account.** Elysium is a shard of bespoke spacetime the Timeless built for their prisoners ([[Temporal Nonlinearity]]). Flatspace is the cell, made comfortable. Wonderland is what the cell was carved from.
+
+The three accounts make different politics: an orderly universe to defend, a habit to keep up, or a prison to be kept in. Which, if any, is true is put to the operator in [[Fauna Lore Review r4]].
+
+Spacers say: *flat is a promise, not a fact*; and, of a crewmate back from a link with a far look, *she's been off the map*.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Glim.md

@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
 
 > Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: producer. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
 
-Glim is the living part of the nebula. Most of a pseudospace cloud is dust and gas; the part that glows is glim, motes smaller than a grain of sand, each a shell of membrane that catches light and keeps it. A thick glim front looks like a nebula lit from inside [new].
+Glim is the living part of the nebula. Most of a nebula is dust and gas; the part that glows is glim, motes smaller than a grain of sand, each a shell of membrane that catches light and keeps it. A thick glim front looks like a nebula lit from inside [new].
 
 **Eats.** Starlight inside a sun's light radius, and heat-light everywhere else: the photons the [[Aether]] makes out of heat ([[Negative Entropy]]). Glim is thickest on the fronts where the current piles it, on the warm floors of wells, and around wormhole mouths.
 
@@ -16,6 +16,6 @@ Glim is the living part of the nebula. Most of a pseudospace cloud is dust and g
 
 **Yield.** *Skimming*: scooping concentrate from a front. Cheap feedstock for vats and Bloom farms, and a mild coolant that gets warm and glows.
 
-**Lives.** Everywhere outside Sol, thickest on fronts, well floors, near mouths and on battlefields. Thicker the deeper into pseudospace a zone lies. Absent in Sol, which is why Sol is cloudless.
+**Lives.** Everywhere outside Sol, thickest on fronts, well floors, near mouths and on battlefields. Thicker the further a zone lies from Sol, out toward the edges of flatspace. Absent in Sol, which is why Sol is cloudless.
 
 *Designers:* this is the existing nebula and stardust, read as partly alive. Its one hook is the halo: heat in glim raises visibility.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Hyperspace.md

@@ -0,0 +1,56 @@
+**"Every road in hyperspace is short. That's the trap."**
+
+> Draft lore pass r4, 2026-10-14, for the operator's review. A layer of [[Wonderland]]: the hyperbolic one. Developed from the operator's sketch (ruling `hyperspace-is-the-warp`): a very abstract place where navigating is the main challenge; it can connect you to your destination, but like entering the Warp, unless you are extremely prepared and have beacons to navigate by, you are not getting out, much less at your destination and intact. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon. Reasoning in [[Fauna Lore Review r4]].
+
+#### What It Looks Like
+
+Almost nothing. The link closes behind you and there is no nebula, no slope worth the name, no stars: a grey-violet nothing that seems to go on further than nothing should. Sensors report contacts that are close and then, very quickly, contacts that are impossibly far. What you can hear is a handful of beacons, chiming their codes, and between them silence.
+
+**The map.** Hyperspace's galaxy map is a disc. You are always at its centre. Near you, things are drawn at a sensible size; toward the rim, more and more of the layer crowds into less and less of the picture, and the rim itself is infinitely far away. Beacons are the only labels. Known roads are arcs from beacon to beacon. Everything else is rim [new]. (This is how hyperbolic space is usually drawn: the Poincaré disc, which HyperRogue uses too.)
+
+#### How It Works
+
+Hyperspace is hyperbolic: there is exponentially more room in it the further you go [new].
+
+- **Every road is short.** Room grows so fast that a few hundred kilometres from any point lie more places than in all of flatspace. Links from zones that are far apart in flatspace open close together here. That is why anyone goes: from the right link, on the right heading, a crossing that takes weeks in flatspace takes hours.
+- **Every error is fatal.** Two courses that leave together a hair apart drift apart exponentially, not steadily. A heading error of a thousandth of a degree, harmless in flatspace, puts you somewhere you have never heard of after a short crossing, with more room around you than anyone could ever search. Dead reckoning does not degrade here. It fails.
+- **Nothing carries.** A signal spreads into exponentially more room as it travels, so it fades exponentially too. A beacon a short way off is loud; a little further it is gone. You cannot hear your destination. You can only hear the next beacon.
+- **The drive is held open.** Coupling a drive to this Aether is a transition that never finishes. The whole crossing, the drive is held in it, and holding it makes heat and wears the coupling. The longer you are lost, the hotter and more fragile the ship.
+
+#### Beacons
+
+Beacons are survival, and so they are an economy [new].
+
+- **What one is.** A hull anchored at a surveyed point, chiming a code that says where it is relative to the beacons around it. Hear two and you have a fix; steer toward the one whose code is nearest your destination, then the next, and you arrive. (Real networks route this way: give every node a hyperbolic coordinate and the greedy hop is almost always right.)
+- **Laying one.** A layer flies out from the last beacon, toward the rim of its earshot, and anchors a new one before the old one fades. Because signals die so fast, chains are dense and every beacon is a crew's work. A road is years of laying.
+- **Keeping one.** Beacons drift, wear and go quiet. Someone has to live aboard. The **keepers** are the people of hyperspace: beacon crews, often for life, who maintain the chain and are bound to answer any distress call within earshot. The bond comes from the [[Cetacean Navigators]]' rescue obligation, carried into a place where it is the only law [new].
+- **Paying for it.** Crossings are tolled per beacon. The chain's codes are sold as a subscription, and a ship without the current codes hears chimes it cannot read. Insurers price a crossing by its chain, and will not cover a ship that left a road.
+- **The transition in and out.** A link into hyperspace needs the drive carried through a hard coupling transition, which is exactly what canon's [[Wavecrafters]] sell: calibration profiles, one per link. An Undertow profile that passes the berth check and fails mid-transition is how most ships that are never seen again are lost.
+- **False beacons.** A beacon is a claim about where you are, and a ship believes it because it must. A forged chime, one wrong code in a chain, sends a ship along a road to nowhere, and nobody will ever find the wreck because there is too much room to search. Wreckers do this to take cargo at a fake road's end. It is the most feared trick in the layer, and the one an electronic-warfare crew is best placed to play.
+
+#### Arriving Intact
+
+The operator's word "intact" is literal. A crossing that goes wrong arrives, if it arrives, late, hot, worn, followed and changed: drive coupling half spent; radiators past their limits; the wrong side of a toll; with something behind it; and with a crew who have spent too long in a place with too much room in it. Canon's design note already says arrival state carries the route's consequences. Hyperspace is where that bill is largest [new].
+
+#### Who Lives There
+
+- **The keepers**, on their beacons.
+- **The Lost.** Crews who never found a road out and did not die. They live in the rooms between roads, altered past going home. Sometimes they answer distress calls, and sometimes they make them. Keepers will tell you which kind of call to answer. They will not tell you how they know [new].
+- **Wisps.** Animals that chime. They learned the beacons' cadence the way a lyrebird learns a chainsaw, and a lost ship that follows one goes where wisps go: further out [new].
+- **Corbies.** Scavengers that find lost ships, because lost ships wander in circles and corbies follow circles. A corbie on your board means you are lost, and have been for a while [new].
+
+#### What It Does to People
+
+Hyperspace takes the way home. Returners have too much room in them: they do not sleep well in small cabins, and they look past people toward a rim that is not there. It gives the roads: a returner knows routes nobody has charted, and every keeper started as one. Tales from hyperspace are the old ones about mortals who spent a night under the hill and came back to find the world older or younger than they left it. Whether hyperspace does anything to time, or only to the people who tell the tales, is not decided [new].
+
+Spacers say: *two chimes or turn back*; *never leave the road for a call you can't place*; *a wisp sounds like home*; and, of a crewmate staring at nothing, *she's seeing the rim*.
+
+#### Sources
+
+Checked: canon [[Wavecrafters]], [[Aetheric Drive]], Galaxy and Navigation, and Cetacean Navigators notes via voidbot, 2026-10-14; the operator's ruling text. From memory, not checked:
+
+- Hyperbolic geometry: in the hyperbolic plane the circumference and area within radius r grow like e^r, and geodesics leaving a point at a small angle separate like sinh of the distance travelled; any geometry text (e.g. Anderson, J. W., *Hyperbolic Geometry*, Springer).
+- Greedy routing in hyperbolic coordinates: Kleinberg, R. (2007). Geographic routing using hyperbolic space. *IEEE INFOCOM*; Boguñá, M., Papadopoulos, F. & Krioukov, D. (2010). Sustaining the Internet with hyperbolic mapping. *Nature Communications* 1.
+- HyperRogue (Zeno Rogue), a roguelike played on hyperbolic tilings, drawn in the Poincaré disc with the player at the centre.
+- The Warp of Warhammer 40,000, and Navigators who steer by the Astronomican, as the genre ancestor of a beacon-dependent layer.
+- Lyrebirds imitating mechanical sounds; will-o'-the-wisp folklore of false lights leading travellers astray; the (largely unsubstantiated) legend of wreckers luring ships with false lights.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Open Water.md

@@ -1,10 +1,10 @@
 **"Read the slope, then the current, then the glow. Then look for what's eating it."**
 
-> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]. The design reasoning behind the bestiary: what pseudospace life lives on, who eats whom, and how the shape of a zone tells the story. Revised r3: this is the ecology of **Open Water**, the common family of flavours, from the Shallows to the Deeps ([[Pseudospace Flavours]]). Other flavours run on other budgets; the Ink's is in [[Adrasteia Space]]. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14, revised r4. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]. The design reasoning behind the bestiary of **Open Water**, the ecology of [[Flatspace]]: what its life lives on, who eats whom, and how the shape of a zone tells the story. It is strange and it is natural: everything here runs on physics a crew can learn and trust. The layers of [[Wonderland]] run on other budgets; the Ink's is in [[Adrasteia Space]]. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
 
 #### Energy: What Feeds the Sea
 
-An ecology is an energy budget first. Earth's oceans run on sunlight at the surface and, in the dark, on chemistry at hydrothermal vents, where whole food webs live on what the vent gives off. Pseudospace has four budgets, and each has a geography.
+An ecology is an energy budget first. Earth's oceans run on sunlight at the surface and, in the dark, on chemistry at hydrothermal vents, where whole food webs live on what the vent gives off. Open Water has four budgets, and each has a geography.
 
 | Source | Where it is strong | Who taps it first |
 |---|---|---|
@@ -13,19 +13,19 @@ An ecology is an energy budget first. Earth's oceans run on sunlight at the surf
 | Gravity waves | Around gas giants and suns, which ripple the slope | [[Whales]] |
 | Mind-light (Aether distortion from cognition) | Crews, ship minds, transmitters, stations, [[Spirits]] | [[Moths]] |
 
-Heat-light is the vent of pseudospace: the Aether turns heat into photons, so anything warm is a lamp that life can eat [new]. That makes ships vents too. It is the root of the line spacers learn first: the fauna come to the guns.
+Heat-light is the vent of Open Water: the Aether turns heat into photons, so anything warm is a lamp that life can eat [new]. That makes ships vents too. It is the root of the line spacers learn first: the fauna come to the guns.
 
 #### Transport: The Current
 
-Pseudospace moves. The [[Aether]] current is a slow braided stream through each zone, plus a swirl around every gravity well and a gentle drain downslope [new]. Everything that does not swim drifts in it: dust, nebula, glim, krill, loose cargo, wreckage. Ships hold their own course; nothing alive that is small can.
+Open Water moves. The [[Aether]] current is a slow braided stream through each zone, plus a swirl around every gravity well and a gentle drain downslope [new]. Everything that does not swim drifts in it: dust, nebula, glim, krill, loose cargo, wreckage. Ships hold their own course; nothing alive that is small can.
 
-Three features of a current make an ocean's patchiness, and they make pseudospace's:
+Three features of a current make an ocean's patchiness, and they make Open Water's:
 
 - **Fronts.** Where the stream converges, drifting things pile up into long bright lines, as plankton and sargassum gather at ocean fronts. Fronts are the richest grazing in a zone.
 - **Shear.** Where a well's swirl meets the open stream, the current changes speed over a short distance. Albatrosses fly for free on wind shear; [[Sharks]] patrol it the same way.
 - **Slack.** In the saddles between wells, pulls cancel and the current goes nearly still. Drift stalls there. Ambushers wait there: [[Lanterns]], [[Void Spiders]].
 
-The downslope drain does what marine snow does in the deep sea: dead matter sinks. In pseudospace it spirals into wells, so every well has a debris disc on its inner slope where [[Gleaners]] work, and a warm floor where the glim is thick.
+The downslope drain does what marine snow does in the deep sea: dead matter sinks. In Open Water it spirals into wells, so every well has a debris disc on its inner slope where [[Gleaners]] work, and a warm floor where the glim is thick.
 
 #### The Web
 
@@ -59,7 +59,7 @@ The [[Skein]] sits outside the chain. It is the network the chain lives on: a sl
 
 #### Succession: What Happens to a Body
 
-Whale falls on the deep-sea floor feed a sequence of communities for decades: mobile scavengers strip the flesh, opportunists work the enriched sediment, specialists live off the bones, and finally the skeleton is a reef. A whale fall in pseudospace runs the same course, and so does a dead ship [new]:
+Whale falls on the deep-sea floor feed a sequence of communities for decades: mobile scavengers strip the flesh, opportunists work the enriched sediment, specialists live off the bones, and finally the skeleton is a reef. A whale fall in Open Water runs the same course, and so does a dead ship [new]:
 
 1. **Heat.** The body is still warm: sharks, limpets and glim gather.
 2. **Strip.** [[Gleaners]] take soft tissue, loose cargo and anything not welded down.
@@ -68,7 +68,7 @@ Whale falls on the deep-sea floor feed a sequence of communities for decades: mo
 
 #### Recruitment: Why It Refills
 
-Reef fish repopulate a reef from larvae carried by the current, not from the adults that live there. The fauna refill the same way: the current brings spores and larvae from deeper pseudospace into every zone. Recovery is fast at the bottom of the web and slow at the top, so overharvesting the big animals has consequences that krill raking does not [new].
+Reef fish repopulate a reef from larvae carried by the current, not from the adults that live there. The fauna refill the same way: the current brings spores and larvae from the edges of flatspace, out where the links to [[Wonderland]] open, into every zone. Recovery is fast at the bottom of the web and slow at the top, so overharvesting the big animals has consequences that krill raking does not [new].
 
 #### Sources
 

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Pseudospace Flavours.md

@@ -1,69 +0,0 @@
-**"Check the sky, then your radiators, then the slope. Then you know where you are."**
-
-> Draft lore pass r3, 2026-10-14, for the operator's review. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]. Pseudospace is not one sea. It comes in flavours, some wildly different, and a pilot learns to taste the change. This note gives the grammar of a flavour, four flavours, and the tells for each. [[Adrasteia Space]] is the first flavour developed in full. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon. The reasoning and the changes argued for are in [[Fauna Lore Review r3]].
-
-Canon already says the frontier is wild. [[Pseudospace]] is space whose geometry does not follow Euclid, and beyond the islands of flat space "absolutely anything is possible". Anything-is-possible is true and unplayable: a pilot can't learn it. Flavours are the playable cut. Each flavour is a reliable set of rules a pilot can learn, cross out of, and come back to. The places nobody has learned yet stay unnamed.
-
-#### What a Flavour Is
-
-The [[Aether]] is the same field everywhere, but canon says what it does "varies with local conditions". A flavour is the Aether's local temper: a fixed answer to five questions [new].
-
-| Dial | The question | Why it matters to a pilot |
-|---|---|---|
-| **Light** | How far does light carry, and what eats it? | What you can see, and what can see you. |
-| **Heat** | Where does a ship's heat go? | Wild [[Negative Entropy]] turns a little heat into light everywhere. Whether that light escapes, is eaten, or never forms decides whether radiators work. |
-| **Surface** | Does the slope hold its shape? | A solid slope can be charted. A liquid one heaves, and every chart goes out of date. |
-| **Flow** | What moves the medium, and from where? | A braided current, pulses from a source, nothing, or something stranger. Everything that does not swim goes where the flow takes it. |
-| **Distance** | Does a kilometre stay a kilometre? | Where the scale bends, ranges lie, sight lines curve, and two far places can touch. |
-
-The stars set the temper. A region's flavour is the character of its stars and how they sit in the Aether, which is why the flavours have borders and do not blend into soup: a region belongs to its stars as a watershed belongs to its rivers [new]. Whether the builders of the Aether placed those stars, and so chose the flavours, is left open (see "Are they the garden?" in [[Fauna Lore Review r2]]).
-
-Life follows the temper. Each flavour has its own energy budget, so each has its own bestiary. Very little crosses from one to another, because what feeds an animal in one flavour does not exist in the next.
-
-#### Four Flavours
-
-**1. Open Water (the common family).** Starlit and clear. The nebula glows because [[Glim]] lives in it, the slope is solid, a braided current runs through every zone, and heat leaks out as light any warm thing can be seen by. This is the flavour [[Pseudospace Ecology]] describes, and it is a family rather than one place: from the **Shallows** near flat space, where the current is thin and the animals small, to the **Deeps** out toward the Chaos factions, where the current is strong, the glim thick and the animals huge. Most of the map is Open Water.
-
-**2. The Ink ([[Adrasteia Space]]).** A light-eating fog closes overhead and all around, and because the fog eats the light a warm thing gives off, it drinks heat too: radiators work too well. The slope is liquid. Stars are strung on pillars of glowing nebula that breathe out waves of stardust, and the pressure of each wave opens travelling pockets of clear water. The dust carries strange matter, and the animals that live in the inky clouds concentrate it. Every Ink anyone has found, Adrasteia was already in [new].
-
-**3. The Glass.** The Aether here is stiff. There is no current. The slope is still enough to be a mirror, the nebula hangs where it has always hung, and light carries further than anywhere else: you can see everything in a Glass zone, and everything can see you. Heat has nowhere to go, because the Aether makes no light of it: ships overheat, and every wake a hull cuts stays printed on the slope for hours. The few animals are slow, enormous and mostly still, grown over centuries in water that never moves. It is the opposite of the Ink: there you cannot see; here you cannot hide [new].
-
-**4. The Fold.** Here the distance scale bends. Near a **knot** a kilometre grows longer the deeper in you go, so a moon's neighbourhood is bigger inside than it looks from outside, and light and ships alike follow curves through it. Along a **seam** two far places are glued edge to edge, and flying through the seam puts you in the other one. This is pseudospace being what canon says it is: not Euclidean. The flavour is detailed below because it has no bestiary yet and its interest is how it flies [new].
-
-Sol and the other islands of flat space are not a flavour. They are the absence of one: no current, no glim, no food, and a distance that never bends.
-
-#### How a Pilot Knows They Have Crossed
-
-| Into | The sky | Thermal | The slope and the flow |
-|---|---|---|---|
-| Open Water | Stars and glowing nebula | Warm things glow; radiators normal | Solid slope; a steady braided current |
-| The Ink | The stars go out. Fog closes overhead, then all around | Radiators work too well; your own hull is the brightest thing on the board | The slope heaves. A slow swell arrives on a beat |
-| The Glass | Everything is visible, very far away, very sharp | Radiators stall; heat climbs | The current stops. Your wake does not fade |
-| The Fold | Stars double, smear or sit in the wrong place | Normal | Ranges stop agreeing with each other; a straight course curves |
-
-Crossing is not instant. Flavours meet at a **margin** a few minutes' flight wide where the tells arrive one at a time, and where the borderland animals of both sides mix. An Ink margin is a grey band where the stars dim before they vanish; a Glass margin is where the current slackens and dies.
-
-#### The Fold, Flown
-
-Nothing is hidden in the Fold and nothing is where it looks.
-
-- **Sight lines bend.** Light curves around a knot, so you can see a contact that no straight shot can reach, and see it from two directions at once. A gunner learns to fire along the curve, not at the image. Beams follow the light and bend with it; slugs and missiles follow their own course, which bends differently. Learning the difference is learning to fight here [new].
-- **Ranges lie, but honestly.** A target that reads 2,000 out across a knot may be four times that to fly. Range on sensors is the light's path, which is the truth about the light and not about your trip. Pilots fly by **depth**, how deep into a knot they are, not by distance [new].
-- **Inside is bigger.** A knot can hold a whole battle inside a ring that looks a minute wide. Fleets hide in them. A pursuer who chases you into a knot finds the space unfolding ahead faster than either of you can cross it.
-- **Seams.** A seam is a doorway with no door. Through one you are somewhere far away; look back through it and you see where you came from, small and close. Seams make ambushes possible from places that are not nearby, and make retreat a puzzle: the way out may not be the way in. Unlike a wormhole mouth, a seam is not a hole in space; it is two edges of space that happen to be the same edge.
-- **You meet yourself.** Light can go round a knot and come back, so a ship deep in a Fold sometimes sees its own image ahead of it, minutes old. Every spacer story about a ghost ship that matches your hull ends with a pilot realizing the ghost turned when she did. The image is real light, not a lie the Fold tells: it is where you were.
-
-Spacers say *"never trust a straight line in the Fold"* and *"if it matches you, it is you"*.
-
-#### For Designers (hooks the notes imply, none ruled)
-
-The game already has dials that line up with each flavour. Named for orientation only; checked against `ZoneEnvironment` and `PlanetSettings` in the branch's `Environment.cs` and the probe settings, 2026-10-14.
-
-| Dial | What the game already has | Ink | Glass | Fold |
-|---|---|---|---|---|
-| Light | Nebula fill density, extinction, luminance; boundary fog; a body's light radius | High extinction, fog overhead; pillars the only luminance | Very low extinction; long light radius | Normal |
-| Heat | Ship heat model | Faster sink | Slower sink | Normal |
-| Surface | Painted height noise; brushes (the liquid-grid brushes in ruling `liquid-grid-from-sim-brushes`) | Moving liquid surface | Flat, still | Normal, or warped near knots |
-| Flow | Global, swirl and slope amplitudes | Pulses from pillars, little global current | All zero | Normal |
-| Distance | Wormholes, which already glue places | None | None | Seams as wormhole-like glue; knots as a local scale |
-| Fauna | Fauna fields per kind | Ink bestiary | A few sessile giants | None charted yet |

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Skein.md

@@ -12,7 +12,7 @@ The skein is one organism the size of a system: a web of faint threads joining w
 
 **On sensors.** A faint lattice on passive; nothing on active. It is never a contact.
 
-**How it hurts.** It doesn't. It is the one thing in pseudospace that never attacks. Flying through it breaks strands, which regrow; the [[Krill]] scatter.
+**How it hurts.** It doesn't. It is the one thing in Open Water that never attacks. Flying through it breaks strands, which regrow; the [[Krill]] scatter.
 
 **Yield.** Thread, by the gram: it carries Aether disturbance along its length, and makes fine antenna for [[Aethernet]] gear. Cetacean Navigators consider harvesting it vandalism of the chart [new].
 

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Spaceborne Fauna.md

@@ -1,23 +1,23 @@
 **"Sol is a desert. Everywhere else is a sea."**
 
-> Draft lore pass r2, 2026-10-14, for the operator's review. It replaces the r1 pass of 2026-10-13, which took four example animals as the whole ecosystem. The ecology here is designed first, from what pseudospace life can live on; the animals fill its niches. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon. The reasoning, sources and the changes this pass argues for are in [[Pseudospace Ecology]] and [[Fauna Lore Review r2]]. Revised in r3: pseudospace comes in flavours ([[Pseudospace Flavours]]). Everything below describes the common flavour, **Open Water**; the Ink ([[Adrasteia Space]]) has its own bestiary.
+> Draft lore pass r2, 2026-10-14, revised r3 and r4. The ecology is designed first, from what life can live on; the animals fill its niches. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon. Reasoning and the changes argued for are in [[Open Water]] and the review notes ([[Fauna Lore Review r4]] is current). The frame since r4: the animals below live in **Open Water**, the ecology of [[Flatspace]], the vanilla galaxy. The layers of [[Wonderland]] have bestiaries of their own: [[Adrasteia Space|the Ink]], [[The Glass]], [[The Fold]], [[Hyperspace]].
 
-Leave Sol through any wormhole into Open Water and the dark is no longer empty. The nebula glows because something in it is alive. Threads of faint light run from one gravity well to the next. Clouds of krill turn in the current, schools of minnows flicker along their edges, and sharks ride the shear where a well's whirlpool meets the open stream. Rocks in the belts are crusted with rime. Something at the slack point between two moons is holding perfectly still and glowing like a wreck that wants rescuing. Do not rescue it.
+Leave Sol's bubble through any wormhole and the dark is no longer empty. The nebula glows because something in it is alive. Threads of faint light run from one gravity well to the next. Clouds of krill turn in the current, schools of minnows flicker along their edges, and sharks ride the shear where a well's whirlpool meets the open stream. Rocks in the belts are crusted with rime. Something at the slack point between two moons is holding perfectly still and glowing like a wreck that wants rescuing. Do not rescue it.
 
 Spacers named what they found after Earth animals, because that was the vocabulary they had. None of it is related to anything from Sol.
 
 #### What They Are
 
-Native life of [[Pseudospace]]. Canon already says it: flat space is the incursion, and Elysium's natural state is the chaos outside the islands. The fauna were never invaders and never arrived. They were here; humanity arrived. Opening wormholes did not let them in. It let humanity out, into the sea they live in [new].
+Native life of Elysium's flat space: strange, but natural. A biologist can study it, a crew can learn it, and nobody has to be changed to live beside it. It is the wildlife of a frontier, not the folk of a fairy tale; that is what [[Wonderland]] is for [new].
 
-Pseudospace life lives on four things Sol does not have:
+Open Water life lives on four things Sol does not have:
 
-- **The [[Aether]] current.** Pseudospace moves. A slow, braided stream runs through every zone, swirls around every well and drains gently downslope. It carries everything that does not swim: dust, nebula, spores, larvae, wreckage. Ships are the exception; they hold their own course [new].
-- **[[Negative Entropy]] in the wild.** The Aether turns heat into light. Every warm thing in pseudospace glows a little in a band no human eye sees, and life eats that glow. Heat is food [new].
+- **The [[Aether]] current.** Outside Sol, space moves. A slow, braided stream runs through every zone, swirls around every well and drains gently downslope. It carries everything that does not swim: dust, nebula, spores, larvae, wreckage. Ships are the exception; they hold their own course [new].
+- **[[Negative Entropy]] in the wild.** The Aether turns heat into light. Every warm thing glows a little in a band no human eye sees, and life eats that glow. Heat is food [new].
 - **Gravity waves.** Gas giants and suns ripple the slope around them. Things that flex can drink the ripple.
 - **Minds.** Cognition distorts the Aether ([[Cognitive Interfacing]]). Some life grazes that distortion, and is drawn to crews, ship minds, transmitters and [[Spirits]] [new].
 
-Sol has none of the first three in any strength and a great deal of the fourth. That is why Sol is a desert, and why it is the one place the [[Moths]] dream about.
+Sol has none of the first three in any strength and a great deal of the fourth. That is why Sol is a desert with no nebula in its sky, and why it is the one place the [[Moths]] dream about.
 
 #### The Bestiary
 
@@ -42,14 +42,14 @@ And past the charts, the thing that eats whales. Nobody has a picture of it. The
 
 #### Where Things Live
 
-The level is the ecology. See [[Pseudospace Ecology]] for the whole story; in one breath: glim thickens where the current converges and where warm wells glow; the skein grows along the gravity slope between wells; krill and minnows ride the fronts and the skein; sharks hunt the shear at well shoulders; spiders and lanterns sit in the slack saddles between wells; rime crusts the belts; whales surf the giants' waves; gleaners follow the debris spiralling into every well; and wherever ships run hot or fight, the whole web comes to feed.
+The level is the ecology. See [[Open Water]] for the whole story; in one breath: glim thickens where the current converges and where warm wells glow; the skein grows along the gravity slope between wells; krill and minnows ride the fronts and the skein; sharks hunt the shear at well shoulders; spiders and lanterns sit in the slack saddles between wells; rime crusts the belts; whales surf the giants' waves; gleaners follow the debris spiralling into every well; and wherever ships run hot or fight, the whole web comes to feed.
 
 #### Elysium's Harvest
 
 Sol spent a thousand years fighting over dwindling rocks. Elysium's wormholes opened onto a sea that refills, and the survivors organized it the only way they knew: claims, permits, contracts and debt [new].
 
-- **It refills from upstream.** The Aether current carries larvae and spores from deeper pseudospace into every zone, all the time. A ground stripped bare is recolonized from the current, fast at the bottom of the web and slowly at the top. Krill come back in days. A whale road emptied by flensers stays empty for a long time [new].
-- **Deeper is richer.** The further a zone lies from Sol, out toward the Chaos factions' periphery, the stronger the current, the thicker the glim, and the bigger the animals [new]. Harvesters go outward, and outward is where the [[Pseudospace]] stops pretending to be space.
+- **It refills from upstream.** The Aether current carries larvae and spores in from the edges of flatspace into every zone, all the time. A ground stripped bare is recolonized from the current, fast at the bottom of the web and slowly at the top. Krill come back in days. A whale road emptied by flensers stays empty for a long time [new].
+- **Deeper is richer.** The further a zone lies from Sol, out toward the edges where the Chaos factions live, the stronger the current, the thicker the glim, and the bigger the animals [new]. Harvesters go outward, and outward is where the links to [[Wonderland]] open.
 - **Who takes it.** Independents do the dangerous middle work. The [[Pan-Solar Consortium]] issues harvest claims on the model of the [[Conflict Permit]] [new]; everyone breaks them. Leading sharks into a rival's grounds is a recognized form of [[Resource Denial]] [new].
 - **What is taken.** Krill and minnow meal for Bloom farms and vat feed; photophores for flares; shark heat-organs for radiators; rime for building; gleaner gut-metal; spider silk; whale oil, veil and bone. The one thing Open Water does not yield is strange matter: that comes only from the Ink ([[Adrasteia Space]]), and only Adrasteia buys it [new].
 

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/The Fold.md

@@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
+**"Never trust a straight line in the Fold. If it matches you, it is you."**
+
+> Draft lore pass r4, 2026-10-14, for the operator's review. A layer of [[Wonderland]], from r3's flavour of the same name. It is where canon's definition of [[Pseudospace]], space that does not follow Euclid, is true in the most local way: distance itself bends. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon. Reasoning in [[Fauna Lore Review r4]].
+
+#### What It Looks Like
+
+Through the link the stars double. Some smear into arcs, some sit in the wrong place, and one or two appear twice in different parts of the sky. The slope is solid and the current runs, so at first it feels like flatspace. Then the ranges on your board stop agreeing with each other, and a straight course starts to curve.
+
+**The map.** The Fold's galaxy map cannot be drawn flat, so it is drawn honestly: some zones appear twice, in different places; some edges are marked as glued to edges far across the map; and the lines between zones are labelled with depth, not distance. Pilots fly it by the labels and ignore the picture [new].
+
+#### How It Flies
+
+- **Knots.** Near a knot a kilometre grows longer the deeper in you go, so a moon's neighbourhood is bigger inside than it looks from outside. Fleets hide inside knots. A pursuer who chases you into one finds the space unfolding ahead faster than either of you can cross it.
+- **Seams.** Along a seam two far places are glued edge to edge. Fly through and you are somewhere far away; look back and you see where you came from, small and close. A seam is a link inside the layer, and the Fold is full of them.
+- **Sight lines bend.** Light curves around a knot, so you can see a contact that no straight shot can reach, and from two directions at once. Beams follow the light; slugs and missiles follow their own, different curve. Learning the difference is learning to fight here.
+- **Ranges lie, honestly.** Range on sensors is the light's path, the truth about the light and not about your trip. Pilots fly by **depth**, how far into a knot they are, measured against the [[Aether]]'s reference frame.
+- **You meet yourself.** Light can go round a knot and come back, so a ship deep in the Fold sometimes sees its own image ahead of it, minutes old. It is real light: it is where you were.
+
+#### Who Holds It
+
+Nobody. A foothold is held by knowing where the links are and keeping their far ends secret, and in the Fold the far end of every seam can also be seen from it. What the Fold has instead is traffic [new]:
+
+- **The Undertow** (canon's off-ledger retuners and smugglers) runs routes through Fold seams that no registry can follow, because the route on the record and the route flown are not the same length.
+- **The [[Parallax Auditors]]** make a living here. A ship that crossed the Fold may have been seen in two places at once, by two honest sensors. That is continuity residue in canon's exact sense, and the Fold makes more of it than anywhere.
+
+#### What It Does to People
+
+The Fold takes certainty about who came back. A crew that has met its own image enough times starts to wonder which ship turned home. The tales are changeling tales: the one who returned is kind where she was sharp, or knows a thing she never learned, or her records say she docked at two ports on the same day. The Auditors' findings cannot say whether she is the same person; the law has never been sure it wants to know. It gives the short way: returners find the seam in things, the shortcut through a station, a contract, an argument, and are uncanny company [new].
+
+#### Its Animals
+
+Small and few, because the Fold is mostly a place you pass through [new].
+
+| Animal | One line |
+|---|---|
+| **Hinges** | Long thin bodies that live straddling a seam, half on each side, so one animal is visible in two far places. A hinge marks a seam; pilots look for them |
+| **Knotfish** | Schools that live deep in knots, where there is more room inside than out, and stream out at the mouth when something big comes in |
+
+Nobody has caught a hinge whole. Cutting one at the seam gives you two halves of nothing much, in two places, and an Auditor's case.
+
+#### Sources
+
+Checked: canon [[Pseudospace]] and [[Parallax Auditors]] notes, and the Undertow section of [[Wavecrafters]], via voidbot, 2026-10-14. From memory, not checked: changeling folklore as the register for returners; gravitational lensing (an Einstein ring, a lensed quasar seen twice) as the real-sky model for doubled stars.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/The Glass.md

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+**"In the Glass you don't hide. You decide what you were seen doing."**
+
+> Draft lore pass r4, 2026-10-14, for the operator's review. A layer of [[Wonderland]], first sketched in r3 and now proposed as the Wavecrafters' pseudospace home. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon; everything about the Wavecrafters here is [new] beyond canon's [[Wavecrafters]] note. Reasoning in [[Fauna Lore Review r4]].
+
+#### What It Looks Like
+
+Through the link the current stops. The slope goes still enough to be a mirror. The nebula hangs where it has always hung, sharp-edged, and the stars are needle points at distances that should have blurred them. You can see everything in the Glass, very far away, and everything can see you.
+
+Behind your ship a line stays on the slope: your wake, printed into the still Aether, fading over hours instead of seconds. Look around and there are other lines, old and older, crossing like the tracks of skaters on a frozen lake. Some are yours. Most are not.
+
+**The map.** The Glass's galaxy map is the sharpest in the game: silver on black, every zone visible at once, nothing in fog. Drawn over it are the wakes: recent traffic as bright lines, older as faint ones. The map tells you where everyone is, and where everyone has been [new].
+
+#### How It Works
+
+- **Stiff Aether.** No current. Nothing drifts, nothing mixes, nothing is carried. Whatever is left somewhere stays there.
+- **Heat stays.** The Aether makes no light of heat here (wild [[Negative Entropy]] never happens), so a hull's heat has almost nowhere to go. Radiators stall; ships climb toward their limits; a battle in the Glass is short [new].
+- **Wakes persist.** Every disturbance a hull makes in the Aether stays printed on it: course, speed, the drive's signature, the moment a weapon fired. A wake is a record no one can edit.
+- **Light carries.** Nothing eats light and nothing scatters it. Sensors reach further here than anywhere.
+
+#### Who Lives There
+
+The **Wavecrafters**. Canon makes them the people who know how disturbances travel, how systems are observed, and how machinery couples to the field, and says their inner practice is hidden and their senior cultivators travel through "protected guild channels". This note proposes where both come from [new]:
+
+- **The Glass is their school.** A place where every disturbance stays is the only place you can watch one travel from start to finish. Apprentices learn *listening* by sitting beside a wake and reading it for days. The breath forms began as ways to manage heat in a place that keeps it.
+- **The Glass is their secret's reason.** In the Glass nothing can be hidden, and the Wavecrafters learned there what being seen costs. Their concealment of espers in flatspace is the discipline of people who grew up where concealment was impossible: once you leave the Glass, you never again let yourself be read that easily.
+- **The protected channels are Glass links.** Guild houses keep the links, and the far ends are guild land. A Wavecrafter master travelling the Glass can see a pursuer coming for days, and a pursuer can see where she went, which is why the guild keeps the links rather than the roads.
+- **Sacred Instruments are made here** more than anywhere: an instrument cultivated for years in a place where every disturbance stays can learn its relation exactly.
+
+#### What It Does to People
+
+The Glass takes privacy. Crews who stay too long feel watched for the rest of their lives, in rooms with no windows, and they cannot forget: memory sets like the wakes. It gives sight of how things travel: returners hear a faint signal under noise, see where a stranger has been from how she stands, and some of them, the ones who stayed longest, come back espers. The guild calls them its own, whether or not they agree [new].
+
+#### Its Animals
+
+Everything alive in the Glass is slow, thin and old, because a body makes heat and here heat cannot leave. Only life with a vast surface and a tiny metabolism survives [new].
+
+| Niche | Animal | One line |
+|---|---|---|
+| Producer | **Baskets** | Lattices kilometres across, grown over centuries, catching the Glass's long light; nothing kills them, and very little grows |
+| Grazer | **Skaters** | Flat, fast, short-lived things that ride fresh wakes and feed on the disturbance itself; they follow ships the way gulls follow a trawler |
+| Predator | **Augurs** | Still hunters that read wakes and wait where a wake will be. They never chase; they are already there |
+
+Baskets are the Glass's oldest landmarks; some are on Wavecrafter maps by name. Skaters are a pilot's tell that a wake is fresh: if skaters are on it, someone passed within the hour. An augur waiting ahead of you means you have been flying predictably.
+
+Spacers say: *every wake is a confession*; *if the skaters are behind you, so is someone else*; and of a Wavecrafter, *she's already read you*.
+
+#### Sources
+
+Checked: canon [[Wavecrafters]] note via voidbot, 2026-10-14. From memory, not checked: glass sponges (hexactinellids) as the model for Baskets, including the deep-sea *Monorhaphis chuni* specimen dated at around 11,000 years (Jochum, K. P. et al. (2012), *Chemical Geology* 300-301); gulls following trawlers as the model for Skaters.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Wonderland.md

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+**"Everyone who goes in comes back with a story. Not everyone comes back."**
+
+> Draft lore pass r4, 2026-10-14, for the operator's review. Replaces r3's "Pseudospace Flavours". Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]. Wonderland is canon's name for pseudospace territory; this note gives it a shape: separate **layers**, each its own space with its own map, joined to each other and to [[Flatspace]] by **links**. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon. Reasoning in [[Fauna Lore Review r4]].
+
+Canon defines [[Pseudospace]] as space whose geometry does not follow Euclid, and says that past the islands of flat space "absolutely anything is possible". Both are true. Wonderland is what a pilot meets in between: places where anything is possible but something in particular is true, reliably enough to learn, and strange enough that learning it changes you.
+
+#### What a Layer Is
+
+A layer is a whole space with its own rules: its own sky, its own physics, its own animals, and its own galaxy map. It is not a region of flatspace with odd weather. It is somewhere else, reached through a link, and the map screen shows it as its own layer [new].
+
+What makes layers differ is the [[Aether]]'s temper, which canon says "varies with local conditions". Five questions tell layers apart (r3's dials, kept):
+
+| Dial | The question | Flatspace's answer |
+|---|---|---|
+| **Light** | How far does light carry, and what eats it? | Far; nothing eats it |
+| **Heat** | Where does a ship's heat go? | Out, as light, which feeds the glim |
+| **Surface** | Does the slope hold its shape? | Yes; charts stay true |
+| **Flow** | What moves the medium? | A braided current |
+| **Distance** | Does a kilometre stay a kilometre? | Yes |
+
+Every layer gives a different answer to at least one of them, and each layer's animals live on its answers. Very little crosses from one layer to another, because what feeds an animal in one does not exist in the next.
+
+#### Links
+
+A link is a place where two spaces share an edge. Fly through and you are in the other one. Links join layers to flatspace and to each other with no regard for anyone's sense of order: a rare link in a busy port's outer belt might open into hyperspace, and a link from the Ink might open into the Fold [new].
+
+- **Links are found, not built.** Some are wormholes everyone knows. Most are rumours: a gap in a whale road, a pilot's tale, a [[Gleaners|gleaner]] swarm that goes in somewhere and comes out somewhere else. Animals use links; following animals is the oldest way to find one.
+- **Links have tells.** A link leaks its far side. Near a link to the Ink the stars dim and radiators run too cool; near a link to the Glass the current slackens and dies; near one to the Fold the stars double. A pilot learns to taste the far side before committing. (These are r3's border tells, moved to where the layers now meet.)
+- **Some links keep hours.** A link may open on a beat, a season, a tide in the current. The fairy ring opens on the right night; the Ink's links breathe with its pillars [new].
+- **Links are owned by being known.** A faction holds a foothold in a layer by knowing where its links are and keeping the far ends secret. Charts of links are the most valuable documents in Elysium and the least often written down.
+
+#### Depth
+
+Depth in Wonderland is counted in links and in time, not kilometres. One link from flatspace is shallow. Every link further, and every day spent, takes you deeper. Going too deep is how people stop coming back: not because the way is barred, but because by then they no longer want the place they came from, or it no longer recognises them [new].
+
+#### What Wonderland Does to People
+
+Flatspace you can live in unchanged. Wonderland you cannot. Each layer works on the people inside it the way its rules work on light and heat: slowly, and in its own direction. The old fae legends are the right register: the folk under the hill keep their own law, a guest who eats their food may not leave, and those who return are gifted and marked, never just themselves again [new].
+
+Each layer note gives what it takes and what it gives. In short:
+
+| Layer | Takes | Gives |
+|---|---|---|
+| [[Adrasteia Space\|The Ink]] | Warmth. Returners are calm, quiet, uneasy in light | They feel heat the way others see light |
+| [[The Glass]] | Privacy. Returners feel watched, forever, and cannot forget | They see how a disturbance travels; some become espers |
+| [[The Fold]] | Certainty about who came back | They find the short way; they see the seam in things |
+| [[Hyperspace]] | The way home | They know the roads; nobody else does |
+
+#### Travellers' Tales
+
+Layers become known the way Faerie did: by the stories of people who went and came back. A tale is evidence with no chart attached. It says what the place did to the teller, not where it is. Factions buy tales, insurers discount them, the [[Parallax Auditors]] subpoena them, and the people who tell them best are often the ones who went least deep [new].
+
+In play, a tale is route knowledge in canon's sense: rumour, attributed, maybe manipulated, until somebody flies it.
+
+#### The Layers So Far
+
+| Layer | Its map | Foothold | One line |
+|---|---|---|---|
+| [[Adrasteia Space\|The Ink]] | Black; only the pillars shine | Adrasteia | A sea of fog that drinks light and heat, lit by star-pillars that breathe dust |
+| [[The Glass]] | Sharp and silver; old wakes drawn as lines | The Wavecrafters | Stiff Aether: no current, nothing fades, nowhere to hide |
+| [[The Fold]] | Places drawn twice; edges glued | Nobody holds it | Knots where distance grows, seams that glue far places |
+| [[Hyperspace]] | A disc, crowded at the rim, recentred on you | The beacon keepers | Hyperbolic room: every road is short and you will never find it |
+
+More exist. Canon's "anything is possible" belongs to the layers nobody has a tale from yet.
+
+Spacers say: *taste the far side first*; *don't eat the food*; and, of anyone who came back too pleased, *ask her what it cost*.