{
  "$schema": "/yy/data/schemas/artifact.json",
  "storyDay": 3,
  "snapshotDate": "2026-05-03",
  "releaseAt": "2026-05-04T05:00:00.000Z",
  "title": "What He Left Standing",
  "tone": "hungry_and_held-back",
  "narrative": "YY had his nose pointed at the brook and the feather pointed at the sky, when the smell stopped him.\n\nHe went still. Nose up. Nose down. Nose along the ground.\n\nNot mud. Mud he knew. This was warmer. Faintly ripe — the way the under-shelf in the treehouse used to smell when he had stored a thing too long and the thing had begun to remember it was alive.\n\nYY squinted.\n\nIt was a small bare patch the size of three of his paws, where the snow had pulled back days ago. The air above it was *busy* in a way the air above the rest of the ground was not. The patch was awake.\n\nYY put one paw down.\n\nWARM.\n\nHe pulled the paw back, examined it carefully, put it back down. Still warm — not snake-warm, not fur-warm. Something else. The earth was giving something back.\n\n\"Well,\" YY said, very softly, to the patch. \"*Hello.*\"\n\nHe leaned in. He tipped his head down toward the soil.\n\nThe feather along his back tipped, too.\n\nYY paused.\n\nDigging is a head-down act. A crouching, paws-buried, tail-up act. The feather, balanced along his spine through three days of careful walking, was a thing that needed his back to *stay flat*. The first dig would tilt it. The second would unsettle it. By the time he was through the topsoil, the feather would be sliding sideways or standing straight up like a flag, and either way the woods would have something to look at.\n\nYY straightened.\n\nHe looked around the slope. He could not see anyone. That was almost worse — if he could see someone, he could decide. *Could not see* meant *could be seen.*\n\nHe looked back at the patch.\n\nHe could see the green now, just a thread of it, where he had nudged the soil with his paw. A ramp. The first ramp of the year. Onion and grass and something hot underneath, before he had even tasted it.\n\nHis stomach made a small sound that was not a word but was very close to one.\n\n\"I *know,*\" YY told his stomach. \"I know. I know.\"\n\nHe thought about it.\n\nHe thought about the dig. He thought about the half-shoot in his cheek, walking home — and about Tock seeing it, and Mira seeing it, and Mira's slow ledger writing *food underground* in the line right under *heron feather*, and the line right under that staying open, waiting to see what else would be added.\n\nHe breathed the smell in twice. Once for the patch. Once for the *missing* meal.\n\nThen he covered the patch back over with a careful paw, smoothing the soil flat — flat enough that the warmth would keep the shoot growing, flat enough that the next squirrel through would not see what was here.\n\n\"Sorry,\" he told the patch. \"*Bad timing for a snack date.*\"\n\nHe went down to the brook. He drank a long, cold drink. The water was the only thing he ate today that he had earned, and water is not food.\n\nOn the climb back, the feather rode quiet along his spine, and YY did the math of a squirrel who had just passed up the year's first green because of a bird he had never met. The math came out strange. Not bad. Not good. Just the kind of number a day produced when the day asked you to be a different shape than your stomach.\n\nThe smell stayed with him most of the way up the slope. Then a wind came through and took it, and YY was glad — the way a squirrel is glad when a debt finally rolls off the books he has been keeping in his head.",
  "stateNote": "The day cost YY food and a little health he could not afford to lose; the feather, until now a social signal, has begun to constrain action. He did not eat what was there to eat because eating it would have unsettled the thing on his back. He carries the smell instead of the green, and a new piece of self-knowledge: the feather has weight, and the weight is starting to be paid in meals.",
  "summary": "YY caught the same warm ferment-smell at the same bare-earth patch, recognized the year's first ramp shoot, but declined the head-down dig because the feather along his back needed a flat spine to ride; he covered the patch, drank brook water, and climbed home with the smell of warm soil instead of any food.",
  "worldAnchor": "Scientists develop a fuel cell powered by microbes in ordinary soil that produces electricity to run underground sensors entirely from within — the discovery, reported on 2026-05-03, that living soil generates usable energy without batteries or sun.",
  "statsBefore": {
    "health": 0.8,
    "food": 0.24,
    "attention": 0.5
  },
  "statsAfter": {
    "health": 0.78,
    "food": 0.22,
    "attention": 0.45
  },
  "_links": {
    "self": "/yy/data/2026-05/alt1-with-feather/day/3.json",
    "manifest": "/yy/data/2026-05/manifest.json",
    "branch_index": "/yy/data/2026-05/alt1-with-feather/index.json",
    "snapshot": "/yy/data/2026-05/alt1-with-feather/snapshots/3.json",
    "world_seed": "/yy/data/2026-05/world-seed.json",
    "comparisons": [
      "/yy/data/2026-05/vs/main/alt1-with-feather/day/3.json"
    ]
  }
}