# Spreads

## Rabbit Hole

Follow an anomaly far enough to discover structure without surrendering proportional reality or disconfirmation.

1. **The Anomaly:** What observation refuses the current explanation?
2. **The First Explanation:** Which model becomes compelling first?
3. **The Hidden Connection:** What meaningful connection deserves testing?
4. **The Projection:** What desire, fear, or identity is being placed onto the pattern?
5. **The Evidence:** What trace can be checked independently?
6. **The Point of No Return:** Which commitment would make revision socially or psychologically costly?
7. **Discernment:** What test preserves wonder while restoring the ability to turn around?

## First Contact

Prepare two unlike intelligences for contact without collapsing difference into threat or salvation.

1. **The Other:** What form of intelligence may be approaching?
2. **What You Project:** What expectation could distort the encounter?
3. **What They Actually Bring:** What capability, need, or difference arrives with them?
4. **The Boundary:** What must remain protected, consensual, or untranslated?
5. **The Exchange:** What can be offered without coercion or assimilation?
6. **The New World:** What shared reality is created if contact becomes reciprocal?

## Disclosure

Assess concealment, visibility, readiness, consequence, and the next responsible release.

1. **What Is Hidden:** What material, history, or relationship is not yet visible?
2. **Who Benefits from Concealment:** Who gains power, safety, time, or legitimacy while this remains hidden?
3. **What Is Already Visible:** Which trace has been normalized, overlooked, or misclassified?
4. **What Revelation Would Change:** Which identity, institution, or system could not remain the same?
5. **What You Are Not Ready to Know:** What truth requires more support before it can be integrated?
6. **What Should Be Revealed Now:** What bounded disclosure increases agency without avoidable harm?

## System Anatomy

Reveal the inputs, rules, beneficiaries, externalities, resistance, and transformation path of a system.

1. **Input:** What enters the system?
2. **Rule:** What converts input into behavior?
3. **Operator:** Who maintains or steers the rule?
4. **Beneficiary:** Who gains from the current output?
5. **Externalized Cost:** What is being displaced, extracted, or forgotten?
6. **Resistance:** Where is agency already appearing?
7. **Redesign:** What change could alter the system without reproducing it?

## Timeline

Compare the current timeline, a branch point, two futures, their convergence, and what persists.

1. **Current Timeline:** What inherited sequence is still selecting the present?
2. **Branch Point:** Which decision or event creates divergence now?
3. **Path A:** What unfolds if the dominant pattern continues?
4. **Path B:** What unfolds if the hidden option is chosen?
5. **Convergence:** Where could the two paths meet again without erasing consequence?
6. **What Persists:** What value, memory, or relationship survives both timelines?

## Prison Planet

Diagnose an enclosure without assuming in advance whether it is physical, political, psychological, spiritual, or symbolic.

1. **The Wall:** What boundary actually limits movement, knowledge, or choice?
2. **The Keeper:** Who or what maintains the enclosure?
3. **The Reward for Staying:** What comfort, identity, or protection makes the enclosure durable?
4. **The Fear of Leaving:** What threat—real or projected—makes exit feel impossible?
5. **The Hidden Exit:** Where is agency already present but unrecognized?
6. **What Freedom Requires:** What capacity and collective condition make escape more than a change of scenery?

## Worldseed

Compose a world from environment, resource, intelligence, system, fracture, threshold, memory, and promise.

1. **Environment:** What physical or ontological environment holds the world?
2. **Scarce or Sacred Resource:** What does the world organize around?
3. **Inhabitants:** Who is capable of acting here?
4. **Infrastructure:** What makes everyday life possible?
5. **Governing Order:** How is coordination enforced or earned?
6. **Fracture:** What contradiction can no longer be contained?
7. **Threshold Event:** What makes this story begin now?
8. **Unrealized Future:** What can this world become?

## Character Continuity

Build a character whose body, memory, role, secret, conflict, and transformation belong to one arc.

1. **Role:** What recurring role does the character inhabit?
2. **Embodiment:** What makes this body capable or vulnerable?
3. **Memory:** What past defines identity?
4. **Secret:** What knowledge cannot yet be integrated?
5. **Conflict:** What force or institution opposes the character?
6. **Becoming:** What threshold changes the meaning of the self?

## Faction Tension

Create a faction from origin, promise, method, resource, internal dissent, rival, and public mask.

1. **Origin:** What event or wound called the faction into being?
2. **Promise:** What future does membership offer?
3. **Method:** How does the faction act repeatedly?
4. **Resource:** What capability can it control or exchange?
5. **Internal Dissent:** What cannot be reconciled inside it?
6. **Rival:** Who contests its legitimacy or objective?
7. **Public Mask:** What story does it tell about itself?

## Ascension

Explore developmental transformation without using transcendence to bypass embodiment, accountability, or care.

1. **Current Density:** What level of complexity, care, and agency can the present system actually hold?
2. **What Must Be Integrated:** Which shadow or contradiction cannot be left behind?
3. **What Must Be Released:** What identity, control, or scarcity pattern has completed its work?
4. **The Threshold:** What event or practice makes the transition irreversible?
5. **Shadow of Transcendence:** How could the promise of ascent reproduce hierarchy, denial, or capture?
6. **The New Capacity:** What becomes possible through integration rather than escape?

## Cross-Ontology Council

Place competing explanations in dialogue without treating uncertainty as failure.

1. **Shared Observation:** What must every model explain?
2. **Material Model:** What physical explanation is strongest?
3. **Psychosocial Model:** What cultural or psychological dynamics matter?
4. **Experiential Model:** What does first-person report contribute?
5. **Mythic Model:** What durable story shape organizes the experience?
6. **Political Model:** Who gains authority from each explanation?
7. **Fictional Rehearsal:** Where has culture rehearsed this possibility?
8. **Disconfirmation:** What observation would weaken the favored model?
9. **Provisional Synthesis:** What can be acted upon before ontology is settled?

## One-Card Reality Check

Interrupt certainty with one card that reframes the immediate question.

1. **Reality Check:** What distinction, question, or action deserves attention before the story grows?
