This document serves as a lore primer and an illustrative example of an Incarnation’s Thread within a Tapestry. It details the potential narrative arc of “The Botanist,” a hypothetical early game scenario designed to illustrate organically introducing players to survival, interpretation, and the dangerous chasm between a useful Fact and an absolute Faith.

The Incarnation: Kaelen, Survivor

Initial State: You awaken as Kaelen, designated xeno-botanist of the starship Odyssey. The world is a blur of twisted metal and alien flora. Your Subjective Interface is glitching, overlaying memories of the crash with the raw sensory input of this new world. You are a survivor, but you are not a blank slate. Your training has granted you a single, crucial, but dangerously incomplete piece of Eidos:

Fact: The ubiquitous, bioluminescent “Sun-Kelp” that blankets this coastline contains a mild irritant in its raw vegetative tissues, which is nullified by simple cooking, rendering it a viable food source.

Act I: The Crash & The Seed of Knowledge

The immediate gameplay is a struggle for survival, grounded in your unique Fact. You and a handful of other survivors must find food, water, and shelter.

Gameplay Highlight: Expressive Mechanics & The Subjective Interface

Your Fact about Sun-Kelp shapes your perception and establishes your authority.

• Your Subjective Interface: Highlights Sun-Kelp with a calm, green aura. Your internal monologue might note its familiar cellular structure. It is a known quantity, a resource.
• Other Survivors’ Perception: An engineer, Rhys, whose life has been governed by machinery and hard rules, sees the glowing kelp and immediately forms a Fiction: "Anything that glows is radiation-poisoned. Rule one of survival." To him, Sun-Kelp is marked with a red, dangerous aura.

Your first significant choice is not in a dialogue tree, but in action. You attempt to convince the others by demonstrating your knowledge. You cook the kelp, you eat it, you wait. Rhys’s Fiction is powerful, born of a lifetime of experience. Overcoming it requires a demonstration that is more compelling than his ingrained fear. When you not only survive but are nourished, his Fiction shatters. Your Fact becomes the new truth, and with it, you weave the first stitch of community.

Act II: The Budding Community & The Dogma of the Sage

Weeks pass. Your small band of survivors has formed a fledgling settlement, built entirely around your botanical expertise. The Sun-Kelp, once feared, is now the staple crop. Your ability to distinguish safe flora from dangerous fauna has made you a central figure.

Gameplay Highlight: The Emergence of Faith

Your repeated success and shared knowledge coalesce into something more than just trust. It becomes a systemic Faith.

• The “Faith of the Seed-Sage”: The community develops a belief system around you. They no longer question your judgment on matters of flora. To them, your initial Fact has become an absolute truth about the Sun-Kelp: it is a benevolent gift from the land, a perfect and inexhaustible provider.
• The Danger of Dogma: This Faith grants you authority but also creates a dangerous intellectual inertia. The community’s survival strategy becomes a monoculture, both agriculturally and ideologically. They stop searching for other food sources, focusing all their labor on cultivating massive fields of the glowing kelp. To them, you are no longer just Kaelen the botanist; you are the prophet of the Sun-Kelp, the one who speaks for the land.

Act III: The Bloom & The Beautiful Death

The settlement is stable. A child has been born. The Faith of the Seed-Sage is dominant. Then, as the cultivated fields of Sun-Kelp reach a critical density, something new and beautiful happens. The kelp enters its reproductive cycle.

Gameplay Highlight: The Limits of Fact & Tragic Consequence

Your expertise, the very foundation of your status, becomes your undoing.

• The Misinterpretation: The fields of Sun-Kelp begin to produce magnificent, glowing blooms, sacs of light that pulse in a gentle, hypnotic rhythm. This phenomenon is not covered by your initial, limited Fact. You, and the community steeped in the Faith you helped create, see this not as a warning, but as a miracle. It is a sign of a bumper crop, a final blessing from the benevolent plant that has sustained you. They call it “The Bloom of the Sage.”
• The Unraveling: The community gathers to celebrate. As the blooms reach maturity, they burst, releasing a silent, shimmering cloud of beautiful, glowing spores. The tragedy is swift and silent. Your initial Fact was not wrong; it was simply incomplete. The vegetative tissues were safe to eat. The spores were never meant to be eaten. They were meant to be inhaled.

Your only consolation is that you do not have to outlive your children.

The Thread of Kaelen is cut. The Tapestry goes dark.

The Harvest: Distilling Eidos

You are no longer Kaelen. You are in the “workshop” between lives. The lived experience, though tragic, was not a failure. It was the raw material for generating a higher-order understanding.

Personal Eidos Gained from this Thread

• Fact: This is the lesson learned, the subjective truth Kaelen’s soul now carries. The known properties of an organism's vegetative stage provide no information about the nature of its reproductive cycle.
• Fiction: The Myth of the Seed-Sage. The story of a wise figure who could interpret the will of the wild, a powerful legend made all the more poignant by its tragic, ironic end.
• Faith: A partial Fact, when elevated to an absolute Faith, can be more dangerous than a lie. A philosophical principle learned through catastrophic failure.
• Thread: You have woven the “Botanist’s Gambit”; a narrative archetype of rising to authority through specialized knowledge, only to be undone by the unforeseen complexity of that same knowledge.

Underlying Diegetic Facts Revealed

As an Eidolon, you now perceive the diegetic “source code” truths of the Sun-Kelp entity itself, separate from Kaelen’s limited experience:

• [Fact: The organism has a two-stage life cycle.]
• [Fact: Vegetative tissues contain a mild irritant, nullified by heat.]
• [Fact: Reproductive phase produces airborne spores that are a lethal neurotoxin upon inhalation.]

This distinction is crucial. Kaelen’s life was a struggle with subjective knowledge. Your journey as an Eidolon is about learning to wield diegetic truth. Now, as an artist, you can use these potent fragments to weave your next, more complex, and more interesting mortality.