Document Rust to Dust proving ground

settings/rust-to-dust/README.md

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+# Rust to Dust
+
+Rust to Dust is Weksa's first proving ground.
+
+It is a setting about neo-colonial culture shock under a galaxy-spanning empire
+that does not need to conquer humanity in the old military sense. The empire
+arrives, plugs Earth into its cultural and economic network, and lets prestige,
+market access, media, and alien ultratech do the work.
+
+Within a generation, human children speak in alien memes, adopt alien body
+decoration norms, and treat human cultural inheritance as something to trade for
+access. Resistance itself becomes content.
+
+## Documentation
+
+- [Setting](./setting.md): premise, empire, cultural contamination.
+- [Aliens](./aliens.md): species and values. Names remain unresolved.
+- [Story](./story.md): single-player father arc.
+- [Battle Royale](./battle-royale.md): controlled combat spectacle and broadcast
+  surface.
+- [Language Design](./language-design.md): ontology, register, and renderer
+  pressure for the first language project.
+

settings/rust-to-dust/aliens.md

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+# Aliens
+
+The aliens are reptilian and culturally organized around aesthetics as moral
+truth.
+
+They value honor, but their honor is not primarily obedience, courage, purity,
+or conquest. Honor is devotion to aesthetic perfection in a chosen field. A
+warrior is prized for fighting beautifully. A speaker, host, artist, trader, or
+politician is judged by the elegance and discipline of their performance.
+
+Surface is not superficial to them. Decoration, posture, voice, movement, and
+presentation are evidence of inner order.
+
+## Scale Decoration
+
+They decorate their scales in elaborate ways. Human nail art is a loose analogy,
+but too small and casual for the full cultural weight.
+
+Scale decoration can signal:
+
+- profession
+- class
+- rank
+- grief
+- celebrity
+- courtship
+- school or lineage
+- combat discipline
+- public obligations
+- aesthetic commitments
+
+The more elaborate the decoration, the more visible the claim of cultivated
+virtue.
+
+## Unpainted
+
+Going out unpainted is an idiom of profound shamelessness and lack of aesthetic
+virtue.
+
+This is not mere nudity. It can signal refusal, collapse, contempt, rawness, or
+terrifying unconcern with being socially seen.
+
+The setting distinction:
+
+- an alien in battle armor may be a famous warrior tourist
+- an alien with a knife and no paint is the dangerous one
+
+The unpainted warrior has abandoned the social theater that normally turns
+violence into beautiful performance. That absence can read as obscene,
+disturbing, or frighteningly pure.
+
+## Cultural Lens
+
+The aliens tend to interpret action through aesthetic status:
+
+- Was it elegant?
+- Was it disciplined?
+- Was it sincere?
+- Was it vulgar?
+- Was it memorable?
+- Was it marketable?
+- Did it reveal mastery?
+- Did it collapse into mere function?
+
+This lens should shape their language project. It should not become generic
+Weksa doctrine.
+

settings/rust-to-dust/battle-royale.md

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+# Battle Royale
+
+The battle royale is one public view into Rust to Dust, not the whole setting.
+
+It is a controlled imperial event designed to discover, display, and promote
+human combat prowess. The aliens do not treat it as the real war for humanity's
+future. They treat it as spectacle, talent development, cultural tourism, and
+market research.
+
+## Broadcast
+
+An in-universe alien TV channel commentates on what players are doing. The
+player hears or sees the alien-language broadcast with English subtitles.
+
+The correct runtime model is not English-to-alien translation. The game should
+emit structured commentary intent. Weksa should render alien broadcast output,
+and a subtitle renderer should render English from the same structured intent or
+from the alien-projected meaning.
+
+```text
+game telemetry
+  -> commentary intent
+  -> imperial cultural projection
+  -> alien broadcast render
+  -> flavor-first English subtitle
+```
+
+## Flavor-First Subtitles
+
+Subtitles should usually reflect the imperial reading of events, not a neutral
+sports-stat description.
+
+Neutral fact:
+
+```json
+{
+  "type": "elimination",
+  "actor": "human_player_17",
+  "target": "human_player_04",
+  "method": "knife",
+  "context": "ambush"
+}
+```
+
+Possible imperial subtitle:
+
+```text
+Local contender 17 performs a charming low-tool eviction. The crowd appreciates
+the sincerity.
+```
+
+The subtitle remains legible, but it teaches the player that the empire's frame
+has already touched the facts.
+
+## Commentary Ontology
+
+The broadcast surface should care about:
+
+- spectacle value
+- aesthetic form
+- combat elegance
+- vulgarity
+- sincerity
+- marketability
+- tourist appeal
+- human authenticity
+- imperial amusement
+- whether resistance reads as threat, folk art, or breakout talent
+

settings/rust-to-dust/language-design.md

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+# Language Design Pressure
+
+Rust to Dust needs a language project whose speakers treat aesthetic devotion as
+moral honor and cultural absorption as refinement rather than conquest.
+
+The language is not named yet. The speakers are not named yet. Naming should
+preferably emerge from ontology, phonetics, and register rather than from an
+English label chosen too early because the blank was annoying.
+
+## Engine Boundary
+
+This file describes pressure on the first language project. It must not become
+generic Weksa architecture.
+
+Weksa should support many ontologies. Rust to Dust happens to need one where
+aesthetic virtue is central.
+
+## Ontology Pillars
+
+- aesthetic virtue
+- performed mastery
+- surface as evidence of inner order
+- decorated versus unpainted social status
+- violence as beautiful craft
+- vulgar violence as failed form
+- commerce as curation
+- conquest as access and integration
+- resistance as both disobedience and potential performance
+- human authenticity as marketable rawness
+- cultural inheritance as asset, fashion, and collectible material
+
+## Registers
+
+Likely language-project registers:
+
+- broadcast commentary
+- high honor speech
+- warrior discourse
+- commercial acquisition language
+- panel-show media language
+- tourist/colonial admiration
+- human resistance borrowing and misuse
+- contaminated human English
+
+## Runtime Data Needs
+
+Structured intent should carry neutral facts plus cultural annotations.
+
+Example:
+
+```json
+{
+  "domain": "combat",
+  "act": "ambush",
+  "actor": "father",
+  "target": "imperial_guard",
+  "aesthetic_reading": {
+    "form": "raw",
+    "discipline": "improvised",
+    "spectacle_value": "high",
+    "honor_status": "ambiguous",
+    "marketability": "rising"
+  },
+  "imperial_frame": "authentic_local_defiance"
+}
+```
+
+## Open Questions
+
+- What phonetic profile naturally fits this species and culture?
+- Which distinctions does the language make obligatory?
+- Which human distinctions does it collapse?
+- How does scale decoration appear in metaphor, grammar, address, and insult?
+- How does unpaintedness split across shame, danger, contempt, and purity?
+- What alien terms leak into human English first?
+- How do subtitles balance player comprehension with imperial contamination?
+

settings/rust-to-dust/setting.md

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+# Rust to Dust Setting
+
+Rust to Dust is about cultural absorption by a more powerful empire.
+
+The aliens control a galaxy-spanning network. They do not need to defeat
+humanity through ordinary conquest. They set up shop, connect Earth to imperial
+markets and media, and make alien status, technology, style, and opportunity too
+valuable to ignore.
+
+The result is not instant occupation. It is generational replacement.
+
+Human children grow up fluent in alien memes and prestige codes. Alien aesthetic
+norms enter daily life. Human cultural inheritance becomes an asset class,
+fashion feedstock, collectible nostalgia, and diplomatic currency. The old world
+does not vanish in one dramatic fire. It gets priced, packaged, licensed, and
+drained.
+
+## Core Tension
+
+The setting should make dominant-culture audiences feel the asymmetry they often
+export elsewhere: the humiliation of watching their heritage become local color
+inside somebody else's market.
+
+## Empire Pattern
+
+- The empire frames absorption as access, uplift, taste, and opportunity.
+- Military conquest is unnecessary when economic and cultural gravity can do the
+  work.
+- Human resistance can be dangerous locally and still become amusing imperial
+  content.
+- Human authenticity is valuable because it is raw, provincial, and marketable.
+- The empire does not need humans to love it. It needs human life to route
+  through imperial systems.
+
+## Open Naming
+
+The aliens and their language are not named yet. Names should preferably emerge
+from the first language project's ontology and phonetics rather than from
+English-facing branding.
+

settings/rust-to-dust/story.md

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+# Story
+
+The single-player story follows an ex-military unemployed father made obsolete
+by alien technology.
+
+## Opening
+
+The story opens with him catching up with old war buddies in a pub. He complains
+that he does not understand his son anymore.
+
+At first, the scene plays like a familiar "kids nowadays" complaint. The twist
+is that the generational fracture is not ordinary fashion churn. It is cultural
+contamination from a vastly more powerful empire.
+
+A Rust to Dust battle royale broadcast plays on a TV.
+
+The father bitterly complains about the aliens and about humanity giving up on
+fighting them. Another customer argues that life has never been better. The
+argument resolves, and one of the old war buddies points to the TV and says that
+the real fight is not happening there.
+
+He knows a guy.
+
+## Resistance Cell
+
+That contact leads to a global resistance cell. The cell steals important human
+cultural artifacts before they can be sold off, licensed, collected, or otherwise
+absorbed by the aliens.
+
+The work involves a lot of fighting. The father gets into it and becomes good at
+it.
+
+## Celebrity Trap
+
+The father becomes a minor celebrity on the alien internet.
+
+He is invited to speak on a panel show. He rants at the audience and hosts,
+rejecting their imperialism, values, and culture.
+
+They love it.
+
+His rejection becomes a marketable performance. He becomes a meme. That is how
+his son finds out.
+
+## Structural Irony
+
+The father thinks the fight is about refusing alien culture. The empire turns
+his refusal into content. His son encounters him not as a rebel, but as an
+imperial media object.
+