The original collapse.

Far enough back that the institutions rebuilt and the forms were revised. CW‑114 is on Rev. 6. Somebody sat down and improved that form five times.

The present crisis.

Begins with authorised works cutting an unrecorded ash‑bearing stratum at 2.4–3.1 m. Not a breach of procedure. Procedure was followed.

Where you live.

One supply zone, one works site, six offices, and a line that closed twenty‑six minutes after its effective time.

“Asked the office twice what to record it as. There is no box for it.”

T. Brennick, inspector — DOC‑02 §2

“A parameter that has not been determined is not a parameter in exceedance, and no action arises in respect of it.”

WA/C/19‑041 — the last document in the dossier

The mark is a classification tick box — the most banal object an institution owns. Inside it is the growth, and the growth is not sitting in the middle like a creature. It is on the wall.

Brennick's finding was that the growth appears on the clean face of the intake screen as well as the dirty face, which silt cannot do. So in the mark the box's wall is the screen: crust on both faces, and in the middle it has eaten through. The boundary is now made of the thing the boundary excluded.

A classification field. Sharp corners, never rounded.

Colonised on the clean face as well as the dirty one.

Where the boundary is made of the excluded thing.

Advancing, not arrived. Flecks sit beyond it.

Pale on near‑black. The default everywhere: avatar, listing, overlay, loading screen.

Boundary in pale, the excluded thing in red. Seals, warnings, season art. Never a default.

The field filled, the growth cut out. Highest impact small; merch and patches.

Below 64px the filaments silt up, so a coarse master carries fewer, heavier branches. What survives to 16px is the asymmetry: a box whose left edge is wrong. That is the recognisable trait, and it is enough.

Paper is the record — documents, Kickstarter, print. Sealed is the district after 02·09 1740 — Discord, loading screens, overlays.

Stamps, seals, refusals and the line. Never a fill, never decorative. Its scarcity is what makes it mean “refused”.

The clinical anatomy renders are the single place colour is permitted — crimson colony, hot tips at the advancing front — because they are diagnostic instruments.

Display, headings, labels and running copy. Uppercase and tracked hard for institutional voice — the tracking is not styling, it is what the source forms do to fill a fixed printed field.

Every value, reference, date and result. Tabular figures always on — the forms are columns of numbers and they must line up.

Growth is not silt. — T.B.

Third register: the margin. Handwriting only where a person wrote outside the fields provided.

The material is pale, fine and dry to the instrument. Everything else in the genre is wet.

Every wall, gate and standpipe carries a notice that is technically correct.

Nothing on the server names a cause. A player who thinks they solved it is playing correctly, and is wrong.

At Plate I an Infected is a person with a cough who still talks, still passes at the line, still files a claim. No test exists. The horror is that the roleplay continues.

The genre standard is a creature that listens. Ours is the opposite: they cannot hear you, you can hear them. They are audible because they are suffocating.

“Zombie” is survivor slang. No institution, document, medical record or official voice ever uses it.

• ✗A creature on the key art. The Infected never front a campaign asset.
• ✗The word “zombie” in any institutional voice, mark or document.
• ✗Neon, gradients, bevels, glow on the mark, or a skyline.
• ✗Naming the cause, or teasing an answer the fiction will never give.
• ✗A seventh office, a parent authority, or a unifying crest.

• ✓One bright element against black. The page is the light source.
• ✓A real form reference on every surface — it costs nothing and it is the texture.
• ✓Server address in the footer, at retention‑line size. Never in the headline.
• ✓Vector master, with a separate coarse master below 64px.
• ✓Reconcile against docs/brand/thebloomrp-brand-platform.md before anything ships.

A proposal. Not canon — no status tag, no source line in the register. Faction and character canon has no source at all, so everything in chapters 07–09 is a proposal for the frame, not a lock. It answers no protected mystery, names no cause, and adds no institution whose remit is to notice.

K1‑8 trademark search not started, and not started by this book. K1‑1 / K1‑2 remain questions for counsel. Domains to be re‑checked at date of use. Nothing here is cleared for external publication.