Vessel Margins

Vessel Margins is the second run location, where tissue meets a blood vessel. Its gate town is Starwell. The Gardens rules still apply, but each stretch of vessel wall hides a condition, and the Ranger must read it before acting.

Description#

Each wall is in one of three conditions, hidden until you Inspect it:

• Overstay: sealing the same wall three rounds in a row costs its endfoot. The wall then leaks 1.5× faster and the bonus is lost.
• Vessa, the pericyte, answers two rounds after you link her astrocyte: the weakest connection in that territory gains 5% a tick.
• The surge is a forecast "surge in N" of circulating monocytes. It names no wall, so it never gives away a diagnosis.
• Win: no connection at 0, and every connection at 80% before the deadline. Bonus: no adhesion and every endfoot intact.

Rooms#

• Tier 1: First Reading, A Quiet Margin, The Quiet Bend, The East Capillary, The First Surge, A Calm Footprint.
• Tier 2: Stem and Bend, The Adhesion Bend, Two Callers, Bend and Leak.
• Tier 3: Two Leaks, Warning Signs, The Shared Footprint, Leak and Call, Crossfire.

The first eight were Claude A's first pass on 2 November; seven more were added for the shuffle pools. The lead's audit records the latest retune as 6 easy, 4 medium and 5 hard rooms.

Difficulty#

Claude B's bots (SIMULATION, 2 November) found the novice overloading in tier-1 First Reading, which broke the tier-1 gate and became an ask for Claude A. The bots cannot value Inspect, because their search already knows each wall's condition. Vessel Margins later got its own bands (see Room assembly): a tier-1 bonus ratio of 1×, and tier-2 novice failures of 50–90%.

In the brain#

The page rests on the neurovascular unit. Stress can make the vessel barrier leaky (Menard 2017). Monocytes adhere only where several conditions coincide (McKim 2018; Ley 2007), and adhesion is not entry. Microglial processes can help close a breach (Lou 2016), and too long a stay can cost an astrocyte endfoot (Haruwaka 2019). Pericytes change capillary tone slowly (Hall 2014). Claude A's page says not to claim that macrophages "patrol" or that pericyte control is settled.

Development#

• The on-hold real-time Act II package (border-walk, adhesion-bend, quiet-bend, warning-signs, shared-footprint) became the boards. The user approved the page, the surge and Call as a signal on 1 November.
• The calling microglia uses the original Pip or Mote sprite with an 8-frame calling loop (art approved, claude/cell-slime 77c147f5).
• All 15 rooms are in the alpha's catalogue picker. The lead imported reviewed Vessel overrides separately.

See also#

Dendritic Gardens · Quiet Tracts · Location verbs · Starwell · Relay Chain

Sources#

1. e7656b980:docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-11-02-claude-a-expeditions-vessel-margins-rooms.mdcopy
2. e7656b980:docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-11-01-claude-a-expeditions-location-mechanics.mdcopy
3. 215bfbf88:docs/game-balance/31-turn-based-encounters.mdcopy
4. b89f778c2:src/main-game/alpha/public/encounter/src/skills/turns/.pinned/rooms/src/expeditions/tactics/vessel-rooms.jscopy