Fauna lore r2: an ecology designed by niche, twelve fauna, and a review note

The r1 pass took the operator's four example animals as the whole
ecosystem (ruling aetheria-fauna:ruling:fauna-bestiary-open). r2 designs
the ecology first: four energy budgets (starlight, wild negent heat-light,
gravity waves, mind-light), transport by the Aether current (fronts, shear,
slack, the downslope drain), a food web, how each level feature tells the
story, whale-fall succession, and recruitment from upstream.

Bestiary: Glim, Skein, Rime, Krill, Minnows, Whales, Sharks, Lanterns,
Void Spiders, Gleaners, Limpets, Moths. Her four kept and changed. The
review note argues where the sketches, canon and r1 should change;
the strange-matter fork is question aetheria-fauna❓strange-matter-source.

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

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Fauna Lore Review r2.md

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+> Review note, 2026-10-14, for the operator: where lore pass r2 changes things, and why. Not lore. Delete once the calls are made. Ordered by how much each buys.
+
+#### Where I'd Change Things
+
+**1. Strange matter is grown, in whale bone. (Existing canon: [[Negative Entropy]], Running Cold, Adrasteia.)**
+Canon says negent needs strange matter found only in Adrasteia-controlled pseudospace, that only Adrasteia makes the charged form, and that its supplier's location is unknown. I'd give that a cause: strange matter is laid down slowly in the bones of [[Whales]], and Adrasteia's "controlled pseudospace" is a field of ancient falls, a bone bed it mines the way Earth mined fossil plankton as oil. Every canon sentence stays true. What it buys: a reason harvest is big in Elysium, a three-way conflict over every whale road (Adrasteia buying bone in secret, the [[Cetacean Navigators]] forbidding whaling, independents in the middle), and a threat to the monopoly every time a whale dies outside Adrasteia space. What it costs: some of Adrasteia's mystery, which their brief says should be about who makes the machinery and how it works. The notes as written keep it a rumour among flensers, which is my recommendation: the value is real, the explanation unproven. This is a question in the mind (`aetheria-fauna:question:strange-matter-source`).
+
+**2. The fauna ride the Aether current, not the orbit; and the nebula is partly alive. (First pass; the Sol sketch.)**
+r1 gave krill the orbital flow as their motion law. The flow the game actually rules on (`flow-moves-what-ruled`, map B15) is a braided global current plus a swirl around each well and a drain downslope, and it is what the nebula and stardust already follow. So the tell is "drifts with the current" and the flying aid is a current-sync, not an orbit-sync. Once the current is the medium, the ecology falls out of its shape: fronts where it converges, shear at well shoulders, slack in saddles, debris spiralling into wells. Making the glowing part of the nebula alive ([[Glim]]) gives the web its producers, which r1 lacked: krill are grazers, not plants. It also gives your cloudless Sol a meaning: Sol has no clouds because nothing there is alive. One tension: canon calls the Aether a *static reference frame*. I'd keep the frame static for drives and say the current is motion in the Aetheric field, or reword the Aether note; either is a one-line canon edit.
+
+**3. The fauna are residents, not arrivals; they refill from upstream. (Your origin sketch, the first pass, [[Pseudospace]].)**
+r1 had fauna pour in through wormhole mouths in a tide. Canon's Pseudospace note says the opposite of an incursion: flat space is the stranger here. I'd keep your sketch's fact, that humanity first met them after opening wormholes, and drop the arrival: the wormholes let humanity out into a sea that was already full. Respawn then has a natural cause, larvae carried in on the current from deeper pseudospace, which is how coral reefs repopulate. Two things follow: bigger animals the deeper you go has a cause (stronger current, thicker glim), and recovery can scale with trophic level. Krill back in days, whales in years. That gives harvest stakes without breaking `fauna-harvest-ruled`'s respawn.
+
+**4. Your four were a fine start and the wrong floor.** Kept all four, changed each: [[Krill]] graze glim; [[Minnows]] are the forage layer; [[Sharks]] are middle predators that hunt the shear, not the apex; [[Whales]] ride gravity waves, which is why they arc. The niches they did not cover are now filled: producer ([[Glim]]), network ([[Skein]]), reef ([[Rime]]), ambush ([[Lanterns]]), trap ([[Void Spiders]]), scavenger ([[Gleaners]]), parasite ([[Limpets]]), mind-grazer ([[Moths]]). The apex is left empty on purpose: the thing that eats whales lives past the charts.
+
+**5. "The fauna are honest" was the wrong rule.** r1 said nothing in the ecology mimics anything, to protect the disguise game. Nature's best tricks are mimicry, and the rule that matters is the sim's, not the animals': no fauna writes a false belief (`fauna-never-lie`). A [[Lanterns|lantern]] emits real heat that reads like a crippled ship. That keeps the invariant and adds the hazard of the false wreck.
+
+**6. Sol's edge is a shoreline.** Keep Sol cloudless and lifeless inside. At the Oort edge, the current breaks against flat space and drops what it carries: a wrack line of dead krill, moth husks and rimed comets. That puts the sea where a Sol-born pilot first sees it, before the first jump, and gives salvagers a beach. If strandings are dead loose matter rather than a fauna field, `fauna-none-in-sol` holds unchanged. Optional.
+
+**7. Wild negent.** Canon frames negent as a powerful conversion that needs strange matter. I'd add that the Aether does it weakly everywhere, unaided: warm things glow faintly in a band life can eat. That one sentence is the whole energy budget of pseudospace and the reason the fauna come to the guns.
+
+**8. r1's "living concrete" for Blooms contradicts [[Bloom]] canon** (processed rubble, heavy industry). Dropped. [[Rime]] binding rubble piles is the version that fits.
+
+#### Left Open on Purpose
+
+- **Are they the garden?** Canon calls Elysium a garden that serves as a prison. Whether the fauna are wild life of pseudospace or part of the Timeless' garden is not answered here. The notes describe them as wild; nothing rules out the other. Worth deciding before anyone writes the edge giants.
+- **Other species.** The Ratfolk perceive by vibration and would know the fauna differently: names, uses, fears. Worth a pass by whoever owns the Ratfolk.
+
+#### For Designers (hooks the notes imply, none ruled)
+
+- Glim halo: heat inside thick glim raises visibility.
+- Skein: the slime-mould pattern the placement ruling wants, given a body; possibly the existing ambient slime trails.
+- Rime: a property of belt chunks (spicules when mined, lattice yield).
+- Limpets: a ship status (signature up, small heat drain), not a contact.
+- Lanterns: anchors that hold station in slack water.
+- Recovery time per kind scales with trophic level.

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

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+**"Loot fast. The gleaners are coming."**
+
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: scavenger, detritivore. New in r2. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+Fist-sized, armoured, all jaw and gut, moving in loose swarms of a few dozen. Gleaners eat what is dead: carcasses, wreckage, spilled cargo, the debris that spirals down every well. They are why wrecks in pseudospace do not last [new].
+
+**Eats.** Organic matter first, then metal. Their gut grinds and concentrates metal from scrap and bone into dense pellets, the way some deep-sea animals concentrate minerals [new].
+
+**Moves: the tell.** A swarm drifts with the current until it smells a fall, then swims straight to it. Gleaners moving against the current means something died upstream.
+
+**What a pilot learns.** A swarm heading somewhere is a pointer to a fresh wreck, a whale fall, or a fight. Gleaners on a hull mean the hull is dead, or about to be.
+
+**On sensors.** A cluster of tiny returns, like debris that knows where it is going.
+
+**How it hurts.** They eat loot: dropped cargo and salvage drift in the current and gleaners strip it. A disabled or stationary ship gets nibbled: slow hull damage and lost external modules until it moves [new].
+
+**Yield.** Gut-metal: refined metal pellets, worth more by weight than ore. Harvested by netting fat swarms after a feast.
+
+**Lives.** Debris discs on the inner slopes of wells, where the drain carries everything; old battlefields; trailing behind whales; and anywhere something just died.
+
+*Designers:* field drawn to wrecks and drops; competes with players for loot; hazard is attrition on stationary hulls.

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

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+**"Sol is cloudless because nothing there is alive."**
+
+> 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].
+
+**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.
+
+**Moves.** It doesn't. It drifts with the current, exactly. Glim is the current made visible; a pilot reads the stream by watching it.
+
+**What a pilot sees.** Colour and brightness in the nebula. Where glim brightens, something warm is near: it feeds on heat and glows as it feeds.
+
+**On sensors.** Background. It is not a contact. But a hull running hot in thick glim wears a halo: the glim around it brightens, and a hunter looks for the bright spot with no contact in it [new].
+
+**How it hurts.** It doesn't, directly. It gives away the hot.
+
+**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.
+
+*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/Krill.md

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 **"Calm water."**
 
-> Draft, 2026-10-13. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: swarming grazer. Kept from the operator's sketch and from r1, changed: krill graze [[Glim]] rather than make their own food, and they drift with the [[Aether]] current, not with the orbit. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
 
-Krill are the floor of Elysium's food chain: clouds of thousands of finger-length creatures, each a flat membrane around a speck of dark tissue, turning slowly to keep its face to the nearest sun. One krill is nearly invisible. A cloud glints like a dust lane in sunlight.
+Clouds of thousands of finger-length creatures, each a flat membrane around a speck of dark tissue. One krill is nearly invisible. A cloud glints like a dust lane.
 
-#### What They Eat
+**Eats.** Glim, filtered from the current. Krill gather where glim does: in long lines on the fronts, along the strands of the [[Skein]], on the shoulders of wells.
 
-Light, and the warmth of their own sun. A krill's membrane does what a solar panel does and then some: it pulls heat out of its surroundings and turns it into energy, a slow biological cousin of [[Negative Entropy]] [new]. They grow fastest where light is strong and the gravity slope is gentle.
+**Moves: the tell.** A cloud drifts with the current, exactly, and each krill sways in a small, never-repeating loop around its place in the cloud. Krill drift; they never travel.
 
-#### How They Move: the Tell
+**What a pilot learns.** Ships do not drift; a ship in a cloud has to fly the current by hand. A member that holds still against the stream, or sways too regularly, or is warm, is a hull. *Going krill* is the cheapest disguise there is, and every hunter checks it first.
 
-Krill go where the orbit takes them. A cloud's velocity is the orbital flow at its distance: the same speed and direction a rock at that height would have. Each member also sways in a slow, bounded loop around its slot, never a circle, never the same loop twice, never far.
+**On sensors.** Aggregate at range, individual returns close in. Below identification, a krill return and a small hull return look alike.
 
-**What a pilot learns:** krill drift, they never travel. A cloud member that holds the flow but doesn't sway is dead krill, a hull. One that sways too wide, or too regularly, is a hull flown by hand. An orbit-sync makes going krill easy, which is why hunters check krill first.
+**How it hurts.** It doesn't attack; it fouls. Flying through a dense cloud clogs radiators and smears sensor glass, and dense krill block sight lines like vapour [new]. A cloud hit hard flashes its stored light all at once: harmless, and very visible.
 
-#### How They Fight
+**Yield.** *Raking*: sweeping a cloud with a net or field. Krill meal for vat feed and Bloom farms. Cheap per tonne, wanted forever. A raked cloud is back in days.
 
-Krill don't attack. They foul.
+**Lives.** Fronts, skein strands, well shoulders, the big grounds around gas giants. Never in Sol.
 
-- **Fouling.** A dense cloud clogs radiators and scours sensor glass. Flying through thick krill costs heat dissipation and smears the picture [new].
-- **Smothering.** Dense krill block sight lines like a vapour cloud [new].
-- **The flash.** A cloud hit hard, by a shot or a hull at speed, sheds its stored heat as light all at once. The flash is harmless and very visible, which makes shooting into krill the loudest way to test a return [new].
-
-#### Harvest
-
-*Raking:* sweeping a cloud with a field or a net. Yields krill paste, the bulk feedstock for regenerating the living concrete of [[Bloom]] habitats [new]. Cheap per tonne, needed in enormous quantities, forever. [[VitaForge]] buys most of it [new]; independents rake for contract. A raked cloud leaves a channel with straight edges, and the ground refills on the slow tide.
-
-#### Where They Live
-
-On the shoulder of every planet's and gas giant's well, not deep in and not far out. They pool in the saddles and trojan points between bodies and stretch along the gravity ridgelines into filaments that link one well's clouds to the next: *the net*. Sunward clouds are thin, fast and bright. The biggest clouds are around gas giants, where whales graze them.
-
-#### For Designers
-
-- Motion law: orbital flow plus bounded sway, nothing else.
-- Hiding: cheapest disguise; the orbit-sync helper makes it reachable for anyone.
-- Hazard: radiator fouling (heat), sensor smear, sight-line obscuration in dense clouds.
-- Harvest: bulk, low value, high volume; respawn on a timer.
-- Placement: well shoulders, saddles, filaments between bodies.
+*Designers:* field; motion is current plus bounded sway; hazards are radiator fouling, sensor smear, obscuration; fast respawn.

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

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+**"Never answer a light in the slack."**
+
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: ambush predator, mimic. New in r2. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+A lantern is a mouth with a light in front of it, the size of a gunship, almost all of it dark. The light is a lure organ that pulses warm and uneven, the way a crippled reactor does [new]. Deep-sea anglerfish hunt this way; so do lanterns.
+
+**Eats.** [[Sharks]], mostly, which come to warm things, and the occasional salvager, which also does.
+
+**Moves: the tell.** It doesn't. A lantern settles in slack water, the saddles between wells where the current goes still, and holds there for weeks. Its lure pulses on an irregular rhythm.
+
+**What a pilot learns.** A warm, ship-sized return that holds still and flickers looks exactly like a disabled ship, and a disabled ship looks like salvage or a distress call. That is the point. Tells: it sits in slack water and nowhere else; nothing small lives near it; and sharks that should be circling it are missing. Real wrecks drift. Lanterns don't.
+
+**On sensors.** A ship-sized warm contact, stationary, thermal flickering. Below identification it is indistinguishable from a crippled hull. It does not lie: its heat is real heat. It is the reading that misleads.
+
+**How it hurts.** The strike: anything that closes to within reach is engulfed, held and crushed, heavy hull damage, and the lantern does not let go until it is hurt badly enough [new].
+
+**Yield.** The lure organ, which makes thermal decoys that pulse like a damaged reactor; pirates use them to fake distress [new]. Lantern hide is dark enough to sell to anyone who runs cold.
+
+**Lives.** Saddles and slack points between bodies, often near a [[Void Spiders|spider]] net. Rare, one to a saddle.
+
+*Designers:* anchor that holds station; the mimic is a real emission, so it fits the rule that fauna never write false beliefs. A hazard that rewards the hunter's patience and punishes the rescuer's haste.

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

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+**"Scrape the limpets or wear a lamp."**
+
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: parasite. New in r2. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+Palm-sized discs with a sucking foot and a back of membrane. Limpets drift until they meet something warm, then fasten and drink its heat. Their natural hosts are [[Whales]], which carry thousands. Ships are warm enough [new].
+
+**Eats.** Heat, through the hull.
+
+**Moves: the tell.** Drifts with the current while free; rides its host after that.
+
+**What a pilot learns.** A limpet colony is a lamp: limpets glow faintly as they feed, so a crusted ship is brighter than it should be. A hunter who sees a cluster of small glowing returns in a fixed pattern, moving together and ignoring the current, has found a hull.
+
+**On sensors.** A crusted ship's signature is raised; that is the whole harm and the whole tell.
+
+**How it hurts.** A slow drain: heat and a little energy, and a raised signature that ruins stealth until they are scraped off. Running hot through drifting limpets, or loitering near a whale, picks them up [new].
+
+**Yield.** Little. Scraping is a dock service. Limpet foot glue is sold as a hull sealant.
+
+**Lives.** Around whales, in thick glim, and wherever warm ships loiter.
+
+*Designers:* a status on the ship rather than a contact: signature up, small heat drain, removed at dock or by burning hot.

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

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 **"A school that parts for nothing is a warning."**
 
-> Draft, 2026-10-13. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: schooling forage. Kept from the operator's sketch and r1, with the motion law moved from the orbit to the current. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
 
-Minnows are hand-sized darts of dark membrane with a row of light organs down each flank. They move in schools of hundreds, and a school in motion flickers like a swarm of sparks, each fish flashing as it turns.
+Hand-sized darts of dark membrane with a row of light organs down each flank. A school in motion flickers like a swarm of sparks.
 
-#### What They Eat
+**Eats.** [[Krill]], grazed off the downstream edge of a cloud. Minnows are the middle of the web: almost everything above them eats them.
 
-Krill. A school grazes the downstream edge of a cloud, thinning it in a ragged band, and follows the filaments of the net from one well to the next.
+**Moves: the tell.** The school drifts with the current; inside it, every fish mills fast and never stops. A school parts around hulls and shots.
 
-#### How They Move: the Tell
+**What a pilot learns.** A ship can sit at a school's centre and match the current, but not the milling. Wearing the school works at range and fails up close. A school that parts around empty space has something in the gap. A school balled tight and dim has a [[Sharks|shark]] near it.
 
-The school as a whole rides the orbital flow, like krill. Inside it, every fish mills fast, darting and turning in quick jitter that never stops. A school is never still, and never slow.
+**On sensors.** One bright smear at range; a storm of tiny returns close in.
 
-**What a pilot learns:** a ship can sit at a school's centre and match its flow, but it cannot match the milling. Wearing the school works at range, where the school is one bright smear, and fails up close, where a hunter can see one fish that doesn't jitter. A school also reacts: it parts around hulls and shots. A school that parts around empty space has a ship in the gap.
+**How it hurts.** A startled school fires every light organ at once, blinding passive sensors for a moment; pilots spook schools into a hunter's face to cover an escape. A school that is attacked rams back: hundreds of tiny hits that strip paint, sensors and point defences from a ship that lingers [new].
 
-#### How They Fight
+**Yield.** *Netting*, usually after stunning the school with a tuned resonance pulse. Photophores (the light organs) become flares and sensor glass; meal from the rest.
 
-- **Glare.** A startled school fires every light organ at once, a burst that blinds passive sensors for a moment [new]. Pilots use it both ways: spooking a school into a hunter's face covers an escape.
-- **Swarming.** A school that is attacked rams back: hundreds of small hits, harmless one by one, that strip paint, sensors and point defences from a ship that lingers [new].
-- **Balling.** With a shark close, a school packs into a tight, dim ball. The ball is the warning, not the threat.
+**Lives.** Downstream of krill, along fronts and skein. Where minnows are, sharks follow.
 
-#### Harvest
-
-*Netting:* catching a school whole, usually after stunning it with a tuned resonance pulse, the fishing descendant of [[Orbital Forge]]'s Resonant Shatter Swarm resonators [new]. Yields photophores, the light organs, which become flares, decoy charges and sensor glass. Worth more than krill and harder to get: a school that panics glares and scatters.
-
-#### Where They Live
-
-On the downstream edges of krill clouds, and along the filaments between wells. Where krill are, minnows follow; where minnows are, sharks follow.
-
-#### For Designers
-
-- Motion law: orbital flow plus fast milling inside the school; scatter on disturbance.
-- Hiding: good at range, bad up close; the milling is the tell.
-- Hazard: sensor glare when startled; swarm damage when attacked or lingered in.
-- Harvest: photophores, used in flares and decoys; stun-and-net.
-- Placement: downstream of krill, along filaments; they draw sharks.
+*Designers:* field; current plus fast milling; scatter on disturbance; hazards are glare and swarm damage.

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

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+**"If the moths are thick, someone is lying on the Aethernet."**
+
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: mind-grazer. New in r2. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+Pale, flickering things the size of a hand, with wide, soft, dusted membranes. The [[Aether]] is attuned to cognition: minds and information bend it ([[Cognitive Interfacing]]). Moths feed on that bend. They are drawn to crews, ship minds, [[Aethernet]] transmitters and stations, and to [[Spirits]], which they eat until nothing is left [new].
+
+**Eats.** Mind-light: the Aether disturbance around thinking things and around signal. Loud transmitters, AGI cores, [[Necrotech]] and espers are feasts.
+
+**Moves: the tell.** Drift with the current until they sense a mind, then flutter toward it in a cloud that thickens around the brightest source.
+
+**What a pilot learns.** Moths gather where someone is transmitting or thinking hard. A moth cloud with no contact in it is a ship running dark but talking. Necrotech hulls attract them in swarms, which is the dissidents' favourite argument that bound spirits are minds.
+
+**On sensors.** A soft cloud of tiny returns, centred on a source.
+
+**How it hurts.** They eat signal: a thick cloud garbles comms and Aethernet traffic around its host [new]. Espers inside a moth cloud report a pressure behind the eyes and lose focus. Bound spirits in necrotech degrade faster.
+
+**Yield.** Moth dust, the scales from their wings. A pinch lets a non-esper brush the Aether for a few minutes. It is illegal everywhere, sold everywhere, and corporate media call it a hallucinogen, as they call espers hallucinating [new].
+
+**Lives.** Around stations, relays and busy lanes; thinly everywhere else. They cannot live in Sol, which has no current to carry them, and which is the brightest mind-light in Elysium. Spacers say moths dream of it.
+
+*Designers:* field drawn to transmitters and minds; hazard is comms degradation; reveals transmitting ships.

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

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+**"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. `[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.
+
+| Source | Where it is strong | Who taps it first |
+|---|---|---|
+| Starlight | Inside a sun's light radius | [[Glim]] |
+| Heat-light ([[Negative Entropy]] in the wild) | Around warm bodies: suns, gas giants, the floors of planetary wells, and ships | [[Glim]], [[Limpets]], [[Sharks]] |
+| 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.
+
+#### 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.
+
+Three features of a current make an ocean's patchiness, and they make pseudospace'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 Web
+
+```
+starlight, heat-light ──► Glim ──► Krill ──► Minnows ──► Sharks
+                           │         │          │           │
+                           ├──► Rime │          └──► Lanterns, Void Spiders
+                           └──────── Whales ◄── gravity waves
+mind-light ──► Moths
+heat of hulls and whales ──► Limpets
+everything dead ──► Gleaners ──► Rime (on the bones)
+Skein: carries food between wells; everything grazes along it
+```
+
+The [[Skein]] sits outside the chain. It is the network the chain lives on: a slime-mould web that grows toward food along the gravity slope, linking well to well, and moving nutrients down its strands [new]. The patterns it draws are the patterns the whole web follows.
+
+#### How the Level Tells the Story
+
+| Feature | What lives there | Why |
+|---|---|---|
+| A sun | Thin, fast, bright glim; little else close in | Rich light, a cliff of a slope, a fast swirl that shreds clouds |
+| A planet's well floor | Dense glim, gleaners | Warm floor; the drain brings debris down |
+| A well's shoulder | Krill, minnows; sharks on the shear | Swirl meets stream: fronts and shear |
+| A gas giant | Whales; the biggest krill grounds | Gravity waves to ride, heat to glow, broad gentle slopes |
+| The saddle between bodies | Lanterns, void spiders, stalled drift | Slack water |
+| A belt | Rime reefs | Rock to hold onto in the current |
+| A convergence front | Krill and minnows in long lines | The current piles food there |
+| A wormhole mouth | Rich glim, krill | Mouths jet Aether: an upwelling [new] |
+| A battlefield | Everything, in order | Heat, then corpses, then wrecks |
+| Sol | Nothing | No current, no glim, no food |
+
+#### 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]:
+
+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.
+3. **Bones.** Gleaners work the frame and bones for metal and strange matter.
+4. **Reef.** [[Rime]] settles on what is left. Old battlefields are reefs.
+
+#### 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].
+
+#### Sources
+
+Real ecology:
+- Corliss, J. B. et al. (1979). Submarine thermal springs on the Galápagos Rift. *Science* 203. The discovery of vent communities.
+- Van Dover, C. L. (2000). *The Ecology of Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vents*. Princeton.
+- Smith, C. R. & Baco, A. R. (2003). Ecology of whale falls at the deep-sea floor. *Oceanography and Marine Biology Annual Review* 41.
+- Alldredge, A. L. & Silver, M. W. (1988). Characteristics, dynamics and significance of marine snow. *Progress in Oceanography* 20.
+- Franks, P. J. S. (1992). Sink or swim: accumulation of biomass at fronts. *Marine Ecology Progress Series* 82.
+- Sachs, G. (2005). Minimum shear wind strength required for dynamic soaring of albatrosses. *Ibis* 147.
+- Widder, E. A. (2010). Bioluminescence in the ocean. *Science* 328. Lures, counter-illumination, burglar alarms.
+- Tero, A. et al. (2010). Rules for biologically inspired adaptive network design. *Science* 327. Physarum rebuilding the Tokyo rail map.
+
+Speculative biology and fiction:
+- Sagan, C. & Salpeter, E. E. (1976). Particles, environments, and possible ecologies in the Jovian atmosphere. *ApJ Supplement* 32. Sinkers, floaters, hunters: a food web designed from an energy budget.
+- Clarke, A. C. (1971). *A Meeting with Medusa*. Jovian giants and their predators.
+- Hoyle, F. (1957). *The Black Cloud*. A living interstellar cloud.
+- Niven, L. (1984). *The Integral Trees*. A whole ecology in free fall, organized by a gas torus and tides.

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

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+**"A rimed rubble pile is half a Bloom already."**
+
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: sessile colonial filter-feeder, reef-builder. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+Rime is a crust of tiny colonial animals that grows on rock: frost-white, glittering, branching into combs that face the current. A rimed belt looks frozen. Each colony is millions of polyps sharing one mineral skeleton, the way coral does [new].
+
+**Eats.** Glim and krill larvae, combed out of the current as it flows past.
+
+**Moves.** It doesn't; it rides its rock.
+
+**What a pilot sees.** Pale glittering crust on rocks and on old wrecks. Thick rime means the current here is rich and has been for a long time. Rime on a wreck means the wreck is old.
+
+**On sensors.** A rock that is slightly warm and slightly too reflective.
+
+**How it hurts.** Mining a rimed rock sets the colony off: it fires a spray of mineral spicules, micro-shrapnel that scours the miner's sensors and drills [new]. Rime also cements rubble together, so rimed rock breaks into bigger chunks than it should.
+
+**Yield.** Rime lattice, a mineral-organic cement. [[Bloom]] builders like rimed rubble piles because the rime has already bound them; a rimed asteroid takes less processing to become a habitat shell [new]. Miners and Bloom contractors fight over the same rocks.
+
+**Lives.** Asteroid belts, the inner rings around gas giants, and every wreck that has been sitting long enough. Old battlefields are reefs.
+
+*Designers:* a property of belt chunks rather than a new entity: rimed chunks spit spicules when mined and yield lattice.

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

@@ -1,38 +1,21 @@
 **"A shark that won't hunt is a ship."**
 
-> Draft, 2026-10-13. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: pursuit predator. Kept from the operator's sketch and r1. Changed: sharks hunt the shear lines at well shoulders, the way albatrosses fly wind shear, and they are middle predators, not the top of the web. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
 
-Sharks are the size of a light ship: long, dark, with a ridge of heat-drinking tissue along the back that glows dull red after a kill. They hunt alone or in twos and threes, and they hunt by heat.
+The size of a light ship: long, dark, with a ridge of heat-drinking tissue along the back that glows dull red after a kill. Alone or in twos and threes.
 
-#### What They Eat
+**Eats.** [[Minnows]], and anything warm. In a sea where heat is food, a reactor is the richest smell there is.
 
-Minnows, mostly, and anything else warm. A shark's heat-organ pulls warmth out of prey the way krill pull it out of sunlight, only faster [new]. A reactor is the warmest thing in a system, and sharks know it.
+**Moves: the tell.** Sharks never drift and never stop. They soar the shear where a well's swirl meets the open current, gaining speed for free on every pass, then cut out of it and fall downslope onto prey. They accelerate harder than anything else alive.
 
-#### How They Move: the Tell
+**What a pilot learns.** A shark is a ship-sized return that ignores the current, which is what a ship looks like. The difference is behaviour: patrol the shear, strike downhill, patrol again. A shark-sized return that holds station, climbs out of a well at full burn, or ignores a bait ball is a ship.
 
-Sharks cut across the orbital flow. They patrol the steep side of a well in long passes, then fall in toward their prey, using the planet's pull to sprint. They accelerate harder than anything else alive and change heading without warning.
+**On sensors.** A ship-sized return below identification. Warm after it feeds.
 
-**What a pilot learns:** a shark is a ship-sized return that ignores the orbit, which is exactly what a ship looks like. The difference is behaviour: sharks patrol, then strike downhill, then patrol again. They never loiter, never hold station, and never fly the same pass twice. A shark-sized return that sits still, or climbs out of a well at full burn, or doesn't go for a bait ball, is a ship. Sharks are the best disguise for a fighter and the hardest to keep up.
+**How it hurts.** The bite: a sprinting shark rams and latches, tearing armour. The drain: a latched shark drinks heat, cooling the ship and stealing its energy until it is full or the ship is cold [new]. A drained ship reads colder than its surroundings, and spacers say a contact that cold is dead, Adrasteian, or bitten. Running cold is the defence: shut down and a shark loses interest.
 
-#### How They Fight
+**Yield.** Bounty work. Heat-organs make the best radiators money can buy; hide is layered into armour by [[Zhestokost]] [new]. Sharks are also a weapon: a pack led into a rival's krill grounds is [[Resource Denial]].
 
-- **The bite.** A sprinting shark rams and latches, tearing armour [new].
-- **The drain.** A latched shark drinks heat. It cools the ship it holds and steals its energy, and it lets go when the ship goes cold or the shark is full [new].
-- **Heat-seeking.** Sharks go for the hottest thing nearby. A ship running hot draws them. A ship disguised inside a krill cloud and running hot draws them faster, and the sharks give it away.
-- **Running cold is defence.** Shut down, go dark, and a shark loses interest.
+**Lives.** The shoulders of wells, above minnow schools. Wherever sharks circle a krill cloud, something warm is inside it.
 
-#### Harvest
-
-*Shark hunting* is bounty work, done by pilots who can survive the bite. Yields heat-organs, the best radiators money can buy, and hide, which [[Zhestokost]] layers into armour [new]. Sharks are also a weapon: leading a pack into a rival's krill grounds to scatter the schools and scare off rakers is a recognized form of [[Resource Denial]] [new].
-
-#### Where They Live
-
-On the steep inner side of wells, above minnow schools. Wherever there are minnows there are sharks, and wherever sharks circle a krill cloud, something warm is inside it.
-
-#### For Designers
-
-- Motion law: cross-flow patrol, then a downhill sprint, then patrol; hardest acceleration of any class.
-- Hiding: the fighter's disguise; the tell is loitering, holding station or climbing out of a well.
-- Hazard: ram damage, latch-and-drain (heat and energy), attracted to heat signature.
-- Harvest: heat-organs (radiators), hide (armour); bounty work.
-- Placement: steep side of wells, near minnow schools; can be lured onto a target.
+*Designers:* anchor moving across the flow; patrol on the shear, downhill sprint; attracted by heat; hazards are ram, latch and drain.

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

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+**"The skein knows where the food is. Follow it."**
+
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: network organism, neither animal nor plant. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+The skein is one organism the size of a system: a web of faint threads joining well to well, thickening where food is and fading where it isn't, rebuilding itself as the bodies move. It behaves the way slime mould does on a dish: it grows toward food, reinforces the paths that carry the most, and lets the rest wither, until the web is a map of the zone's gravity and its plenty [new].
+
+**Eats.** Nothing directly. It moves food. Glim caught on its strands is passed along them toward the wells that need it; the threads pulse faintly when they carry.
+
+**Moves.** It grows. Strands run along the gravity slope, around the shoulders of wells and across the saddles between them, and shift as the bodies orbit. It never drifts; it is anchored to the slope, not the current.
+
+**What a pilot sees.** Threads of pale light linking bodies, brightest along the busiest paths. Krill and minnows string out along it like beads.
+
+**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.
+
+**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].
+
+**Lives.** Every zone outside Sol, anchored to the slope. Deep zones have skeins as thick as cables.
+
+*Designers:* the skein is the slime-mould pattern the placement ruling asks for, given a body in the lore. It is drawn from the gravity slope at run time, as the placement law already is. The ambient slime trails could be it.

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

@@ -1,80 +1,64 @@
-**"The krill don't lie. Only the krill-shaped do."**
+**"Sol is a desert. Everywhere else is a sea."**
 
-> Draft lore pass, 2026-10-13, for the operator's review. No fauna lore existed before this note, so everything here is new. `[new]` marks an invented fact that touches existing canon; a wikilink marks the canon it leans on. Class notes: [[Krill]], [[Minnows]], [[Sharks]], [[Whales]].
+> 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]].
 
-Elysium's void is not empty. Between the wells of every system humanity reaches drift clouds of krill, schools of minnows, sharks that cut against the current, and whales that swing in arcs wide enough to take a day. Spacers named them after Earth animals because that was the vocabulary they had. None of them is related to anything from Sol, and nothing like them ever lived there.
+Leave Sol 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
 
-The fauna are native life of [[Pseudospace]]. Humanity did not bring them; Sol never had anything this strange. They were waiting on the far side of the first wormholes opened after the Rupture, and they have been on the far side of every wormhole since.
+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].
 
-They are vacuum life shaped by the [[Aether]]. Their tissues are thin, cold and full of empty cells. They feed on starlight and on heat gradients through a slow, biological cousin of [[Negative Entropy]] [new], turning warmth into light and light into growth. Traces of the strange matter that negentropy needs run through their bodies, the larger the animal the more [new]. They have no lungs and no water. Most of them are mostly empty space held together by membrane.
+Pseudospace life lives on four things Sol does not have:
 
-They are honest things. A krill cloud is what it looks like, moves the way krill move, and burns as bright as krill burn. Nothing in the ecology mimics anything else. That is why a ship can hide among them, and why it can be found: every class has one way of moving, and a hull that is pretending has to fly that way by hand.
+- **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].
+- **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].
 
-#### Where They Came From
+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.
 
-The Rupture threw Sol into Elysium as a single zone: a cloudless bubble of flat space, with the [[Aether]] pressing in at its Oort cloud. Sol is the island of sanity. For a while humanity lived only inside it. The fauna arrived with the wormholes [new].
+#### The Bestiary
 
-When the factions began opening wormholes to reach new systems, every mouth they opened let a little of the outside in. [[Pseudospace]] is the natural state of Elysium; flat space is the island humanity stands on. The wormholes are where the island touches the sea, and the fauna are what lives in the sea. They come through the mouths in slow tides and spread out along the gravity slopes of every system the network reaches [new].
+By niche, bottom to top. Each note says what a pilot sees, what sensors show, how it hurts a ship, and what it yields.
 
-What this means in practice:
+| Niche | Animal | One line |
+|---|---|---|
+| Producer | [[Glim]] | The living part of the nebula; eats heat-light and starlight. |
+| Network (neither animal nor plant) | [[Skein]] | A slime-mould web joining wells; draws the pattern everything else follows. |
+| Sessile colonial filter-feeder | [[Rime]] | Crusts on belt rocks and wrecks, combing the current. |
+| Swarming grazer | [[Krill]] | Clouds that graze glim on the fronts. |
+| Schooling forage | [[Minnows]] | Flickering schools that eat krill and feed everything above them. |
+| Bulk filter-feeder, giant | [[Whales]] | Wave-riders of the giants; Adrasteia buys their bone. |
+| Pursuit predator | [[Sharks]] | Heat hunters that soar the shear lines. |
+| Ambush predator, mimic | [[Lanterns]] | Sit in slack water glowing like a disabled ship. |
+| Trap predator | [[Void Spiders]] | String nets across saddles and fronts. |
+| Scavenger | [[Gleaners]] | Strip wrecks and loose cargo; concentrate metal. |
+| Parasite | [[Limpets]] | Ride warm hulls and whales, drink heat, glow. |
+| Mind-grazer | [[Moths]] | Drawn to cognition and signal; eat chatter, haunt spirits. |
 
-- **No fauna inside Sol, ever.** Sol's bubble is cloudless and barren. The strangeness begins at its Oort edge, where the Aether presses in: the first fauna a Sol-born pilot ever sees are the thin krill hazes that cling to the outside of the bubble, glinting against nothing [new]. Past that, fauna thicken with every jump outward.
-- **Toward the edge of stable space they get bigger and stranger.** Core systems have krill and minnows. Frontier systems, where the Chaos factions live, have sharks and whales. Past the edge of what anyone has charted, spacers say there are larger things, and they are probably right [new].
-- **They never run out.** A harvested ground refills because the wormholes keep feeding it. The tide from the far side is slow but it does not stop [new].
-- **Nobody controls them.** No faction made them, owns their genome or can switch them off. In a setting where almost every living thing has a manufacturer, the fauna are the one resource that arrived without an owner, and everyone is racing to become one.
+And past the charts, the thing that eats whales. Nobody has a picture of it. The whale roads near the edge have gaps in them.
 
-#### The Shape of the Ecology
+#### Where Things Live
 
-Everything follows gravity. The fauna feed where light is strong and the gravity slope is gentle enough to hold a cloud together without tearing it apart. Their placement draws the map of the wells.
-
-- **Krill** are the floor of the chain. They ride the orbital flow and bloom on the shoulder of each well: not deep in, where tidal shear tears clouds apart, and not far out, where light is thin and nothing holds them. Where two wells pull equally, in the saddles and trojan points between bodies, krill pool and stretch into filaments that link one body's cloud to the next. Seen at system scale, the krill draw a web between the wells, thickest along the gravity ridgelines and thickest of all near the wormhole mouths. Pilots call it the net.
-- **Minnows** graze krill. They school along the downstream edges of the clouds and follow the filaments from well to well.
-- **Sharks** hunt minnows. They hang on the steep side of a well and fall in to strike, using the planet's pull for their sprint.
-- **Whales** filter krill in bulk. They live around gas giants, where the slope is broad and the clouds are biggest, and swing between the giant and its moons in long, slow arcs that cut through the net.
-- **Suns** feed everything and host nothing large. Close in, light is rich but the slope is a cliff. Sunward clouds are thin, fast and bright.
-- **Wormhole mouths** are springs. Fresh krill pour out of them; the net is densest within a few filaments of a mouth and thins with distance from it.
-
-A pilot reads a system the way a fisher reads a coast:
-
-| What you see | What it usually means |
-|---|---|
-| Thick krill, steady sway | Nothing big nearby. Calm water. |
-| A clean channel through a cloud | A whale passed, or a trawler did. A trawler leaves straight edges. |
-| A lush slope with no fauna at all | It was harvested recently and will refill. Or something hot is sitting there. |
-| Minnows balled up tight and dim | A shark is close. |
-| Sharks circling a krill cloud | Something warm is inside it. |
-| A school parting around nothing | A hull is hiding in the gap. |
-| Fauna streaming in toward one point | A whale fall. |
-| Bigger animals than the system should have | You are nearer the edge than the chart says. |
+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.
 
 #### Elysium's Harvest
 
-Sol spent a thousand years fighting over dwindling rocks. Elysium's wormholes opened onto a renewable sea, and the survivors organized it the only way they knew: claims, permits, contracts and debt [new].
+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].
 
-- **What is taken.** Krill paste feeds the regeneration of [[Bloom]] habitats' living concrete, which every habitat needs forever. Minnow photophores become flares and sensor glass. Shark heat-organs are the best radiators money can buy. Whale bone carries the strange matter that [[Negative Entropy]] needs, until now found only in Adrasteia-controlled pseudospace, and Adrasteia buys every gram so that nobody else learns to use it [new].
-- **Who takes it.** [[VitaForge]] buys most of the krill and owns the processing [new]. [[Orbital Forge]] retooled its Resonant Shatter Swarm resonators into fishing gear: tuned pulses that stun a school without breaking it. Resonance fishing is the dominant method and an Orbital Forge licensing business [new]. [[Lightsail Express]] hauls the catch. [[Zhestokost]] arms and armours its hulls in shark hide. Independent pilots do the dangerous middle work: raking krill, netting minnows, hunting sharks for bounty. The richest grounds are out toward the frontier, which pulls harvesters outward and puts them in the Chaos factions' space.
-- **How it is governed.** The [[Pan-Solar Consortium]] issues harvest claims on the model of the [[Conflict Permit]]: a ground, a season, a tonnage [new]. Everyone breaks them. Leading sharks into a rival's krill grounds is a recognized form of [[Resource Denial]] [new].
-- **Why it never runs out.** Grounds refill from the wormholes. The tide is slow, so a ground stripped today is barren for a while, and claim wars are fought over timing, not stock. Whoever holds a wormhole mouth holds the spring.
+- **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.
+- **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; and whale bone, which Adrasteia buys quietly, at prices nobody can explain ([[Whales]], [new]).
 
-#### Spacers and the Fauna
+#### The Fauna Come to the Guns
 
-- **Names.** *The net* (the krill web). *Calm water* (thick, undisturbed krill). *Springs* (wormhole mouths, as feeding grounds). *Bait ball* (minnows balled by a shark). *A fall* (a dead whale and everything feeding on it). *Raking*, *netting*, *flensing* (harvesting krill, minnows, whales).
-- **Going krill.** Hiding a ship in a cloud by matching the flow. It is cheap and everyone knows it, so *dead krill* (a cloud member that doesn't sway) and *hot krill* (one that glows like a reactor) are the first things a hunter looks for.
-- **Wearing the school.** Hiding among minnows. It is harder, because minnows mill fast and a ship can't.
-- **The hunter's patience.** Count the sway. Watch a return through one full cycle of its class's motion before you trust it. Shooting to check announces you.
-- **Superstitions.** Never kill the first whale you see on a run. A shark that won't hunt is a ship. If the net is empty in calm water, turn around. A school that parts for you is luck; a school that parts for nothing is a warning. Don't fish within sight of a mouth after a jump; something bigger may have come through with you.
-- **The fauna as witnesses.** Fauna never lie, and sharks hunt heat. A disguised ship running hot inside a krill cloud draws sharks, and the sharks give it away. Hunters sometimes wait for the sharks.
+A ship is a hot thing in a sea that eats heat. A running reactor is a vent; a battle is a feast. Glim brightens around a warm hull, limpets settle on it, sharks turn toward it, and when the shooting stops the gleaners strip the wrecks and the rime starts to grow on what is left. Every fight leaves an ecology behind it, and a pilot who knows that can read last week's battle from today's fauna [new].
 
-#### The Navigators and the Whales
+#### Who Watches Them
 
-Humanity's whales and Elysium's whales share a name and nothing else. [[GeneSys]] uplifted Earth's cetaceans to read the currents of space, and the FTL drive that caused the Rupture routed itself through models of cetacean cognition. The [[Cetacean Navigators]] were the first to read the currents through the new wormholes, and the first crews to meet the animals living in them [new].
-
-They do not call them whales. Their name translates roughly as *the slow singers* [new]. Navigators read the singers' migrations as charts of the currents beyond the mouths and mark their repeated arcs as whale roads [new]. Their position is that the question of whether the slow singers are persons is open, and in a setting where personhood is disputed and owned, that is a political position. Navigator space allows no whaling, only salvage from natural falls [new], which puts them in quiet conflict with Adrasteia's buyers.
-
-Whale song runs through the [[Aether]]. [[Esper]]s hear it, and so does the [[Aethernet]], where a singing whale is noise in the one signal space everyone shares. The Queen's Guard would like the whales quieter [new].
-
-#### Room for More
-
-The classes are four to start, and the ecology has gaps meant for more: *void spiders* that string nets across trojan points to catch drifting krill [new; the operator's 2020 "space whales and space spiders" line]; gas giant drifters that never leave the upper cloud deck; and whatever lives past the edge of the charts, where pseudospace stops pretending to be space.
+- **[[Cetacean Navigators]].** The first to read the currents beyond the mouths. They read the skein as a chart and the whales' roads as the current's own record, and they hold that whether the [[Whales]] are persons is an open question. Navigator space allows no whaling [new].
+- **Spacers.** *Calm water*: thick, undisturbed krill. *The fronts*: the bright lines where the current converges. *Slack*: the dead water between wells, where lanterns and spiders wait. *Going krill*: hiding a hull in a cloud by flying the current. *A fall*: a dead whale, or a dead ship, and everything feeding on it.
+- **Superstitions.** A shark that won't hunt is a ship. Never answer a light in the slack. If the moths are thick, someone is lying on the Aethernet. If the net is empty in calm water, turn around.

Vault/Aetheria/Aetheria/Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Species/Fauna/Void Spiders.md

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+**"The net between the moons isn't ours."**
+
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: trap predator. From the operator's 2020 line about "space whales and space spiders", named as a gap in r1 and filled here. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+
+Many-limbed, the size of a fighter, almost all reach. A void spider strings a net of fine glittering silk across slack water and waits at its hub. The nets are kilometres wide and nearly invisible until something is caught in them.
+
+**Eats.** Whatever drifts or swims into the net: krill rafts stalled in the slack, minnows, the occasional shark. Drift piles up in slack water; spiders sit where the current delivers.
+
+**Moves: the tell.** The spider doesn't, until something hits the net; then it runs the strands to it, fast.
+
+**What a pilot learns.** Krill that have stopped drifting in a neat sheet, in slack water, are caught. Glints in a plane where no plane should be are silk. A spider at the hub is a small warm return that does not move with anything.
+
+**On sensors.** The net barely shows on active and not at all on passive; the spider is a small stationary contact.
+
+**How it hurts.** The snare: silk sticks to hulls, slowing and tethering a ship that flies into a net; heavy ships tear free, light ones are held [new]. A held ship is bitten and drained like a shark's prey, but slowly.
+
+**Yield.** Silk, the strongest fibre in Elysium: tethers, cargo nets, armour weave. *Silking*, cutting nets whole while the spider is away or dead, is skilled and well paid.
+
+**Lives.** Saddles and trojan points between bodies, and across convergence fronts where the current runs slow.
+
+*Designers:* anchor at a slack point with a net area; hazard is snare (slow and tether) then drain.

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

@@ -1,45 +1,25 @@
 **"Never kill the first whale you see on a run."**
 
-> Draft, 2026-10-13. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
+> Draft r2, 2026-10-14. Part of [[Spaceborne Fauna]]; niche: bulk filter-feeder, giant. Kept from the operator's sketch and r1. Changed: whales ride the gravity waves of gas giants and suns, which is why they swing in arcs; and flensers say their bones grow the strange matter that [[Negative Entropy]] needs. `[new]` marks invention that touches existing canon.
 
-Whales are many times the size of any ship: slow, warm, ribbed with pale bone, and trailing a veil of feeding membrane wide enough to sweep a krill cloud whole. A whale glows in thermal like a small station. It sings, and the song carries through the [[Aether]].
+Many times the size of any ship: slow, warm, ribbed with pale bone, trailing a feeding veil wide enough to sweep a krill cloud whole. A whale glows in thermal like a small station. It sings, and the song carries through the [[Aether]].
 
-#### What They Eat
+**Eats.** [[Krill]] and [[Glim]] in bulk, filtered through the veil.
 
-Krill, in bulk. A whale's arc runs through the biggest clouds around a gas giant and leaves a clean channel behind it, wider and softer-edged than a trawler's.
+**Moves: the tell.** Gas giants and suns ripple the slope around them. Whales surf those ripples: they flex with each wave and ride it outward, then glide back in, in long arcs between the giant and its moons that take hours or days. They never hurry and never turn sharply, and they repeat their arcs closely enough to be charted as whale roads [new].
 
-#### How They Move: the Tell
+**What a pilot learns.** The brightest thing in its sky and the slowest. Nothing a ship does looks like a whale except flying its arc for a very long time. Hanging in a whale's shadow hides a ship, until the whale notices.
 
-Whales swing in long, slow arcs between a gas giant and its moons, taking hours or days to complete one. They never hurry, never turn sharply, and repeat their arcs closely enough that [[Cetacean Navigators]] chart them as whale roads [new].
+**On sensors.** A station-sized warm return on a slow arc.
 
-**What a pilot learns:** a whale is the brightest thing in its sky and the slowest. Nothing a ship can do looks like a whale except flying that arc for a very long time. A ship near a whale is hard to separate from it, which makes hanging in a whale's shadow tempting, and dangerous.
+**How it hurts.** It defends; it doesn't hunt. A crowded or wounded whale rolls, and its veil and mass batter anything close. A threatened whale dumps its heat in a thermal flare that washes out sensors for a long way. A distressed whale sings loud enough to flood the [[Aethernet]] nearby with noise: everyone in range knows a whale is in trouble, and roughly where [new].
 
-#### How They Fight
+**Yield.** *Flensing*: oil that runs reactors cool and long, veil for fine nets, and bone. Adrasteia buys whale bone, quietly, at prices nothing else in a whale explains. Flensers say the bone grows strange matter, a trace laid down over a long life, and that Adrasteia's secret mines are a bed of falls older than anyone's charts. Nobody has proved it (see [[Fauna Lore Review r2]]) [new]. A whale kill is the richest single harvest in Elysium and the slowest to recover: a road emptied by flensers stays empty for years.
 
-Whales don't hunt anything that isn't krill. They defend.
+**A fall.** A dead whale drifts for weeks. Everything comes to it in order: sharks and [[Limpets]] while it is warm, [[Gleaners]] for the flesh and bone, [[Rime]] at the end.
 
-- **The turn.** A whale that is hurt or crowded rolls. Its mass and membrane sweep anything close: ships are battered, krill and minnows scattered [new].
-- **The breach.** A threatened whale dumps its stored heat in a thermal flare that washes out thermal sensors for a long way around [new].
-- **The song.** A distressed whale sings loud. The song runs through the [[Aether]] and floods the [[Aethernet]] locally, drowning nearby traffic in noise. It is truth, not deception: everyone in range knows a whale is in trouble, and roughly where [new].
+**The slow singers.** The [[Cetacean Navigators]] call them that. They hold that whether the slow singers are persons is an open question, and in a setting where personhood is owned and disputed that is a political position. Navigator space allows no whaling, only salvage from natural falls [new]. [[Esper]]s say the song has structure.
 
-#### Harvest
+**Lives.** Gas giants above all, and the outer slopes of suns. Rarely around rocky planets.
 
-*Flensing.* A whale yields bone that carries traces of the strange matter [[Negative Entropy]] needs, bought quietly by Adrasteia [new]; oil that runs reactors cold and long; and membrane prized for fine nets. A whale kill is the richest single harvest in Elysium and the most contested.
-
-A dead whale is a *fall*. The carcass drifts for weeks on its last orbit, and everything comes to it: minnows, sharks, rakers, flensers, pirates, Navigators. A fall is an event, a temporary hotspot that redraws the local ecology.
-
-#### The Slow Singers
-
-The [[Cetacean Navigators]] don't call them whales; their name for them translates as *the slow singers* [new]. Their position is that the question of whether the slow singers are persons is open, and in a setting where personhood is disputed and owned, that is a political stance. Navigator space allows no whaling, only salvage from natural falls [new]. [[Esper]]s say the song has structure. The Queen's Guard says it has bandwidth [new].
-
-#### Where They Live
-
-Around gas giants, on broad, gentle slopes where the krill clouds are biggest, in arcs that reach out to the moons. Rarely around large rocky planets. Never sunward.
-
-#### For Designers
-
-- Motion law: slow, long, repeating arcs; very bright thermal.
-- Hiding: shadowing a whale (later); disguising as one requires flying its arc.
-- Hazard: roll (area damage and scatter), thermal flare (sensor wash), song (local Aethernet noise).
-- Harvest: bone (strange-matter trace), oil, membrane; very high value; kills produce a fall event.
-- Placement: gas giants and their moons' orbits; their passage leaves channels in krill.
+*Designers:* anchor on a slow repeating arc around gas giants; very bright thermal; hazards are roll, thermal flare, song noise; very slow respawn.