The Way Up
How a season leaves the table: the sheet, the witness, the home, the Offering up, the proposal, the edition.
Everything in the Game that travels, travels this way. In the week of a turning the Cell fills The Season Sheet with everyone present; the two hosts sign it, date it, and count its lines of writing. A copy stays in the box. The original goes to the Home Cell within a week, by hand if at all possible, because the handing over is half of what a home is for. The home reads the sheets it receives in one evening and fills its own sheet about itself, which goes to its home — the same fourteen lines at every level.
It is load-bearing because it is the whole upward structure of a body that has no upward structure. Two signatures and a line count are the entire security of the paper, and they are enough: two people from the table have said this is what we said and did, and if the copy in the box and the copy at the home ever differ, the line count shows it and the two tables talk. No notary, no machine, no center.
What travels. The sheet, with its numbers. The story, which is how the body learns from itself. Requests and offers, which is how it allocates itself. The share of The Offering sent inward — to the table your table sits at, never upward to anyone who rules — which resources what everyone relies on and answers the requests a lower level could not. And Proposals, which are gathered at each turning and become The edition.
And the way up is also the way down: each turning, a home sends back one page — how the body is, the best stories from elsewhere, requests a Cell here might answer, and the one sentence that ties this Cell's Quest to the larger work. That is The Return, and it is why a Cell never has to read the whole plan.
Also called: the way up Stands on: The Season Sheet · Home Cell · Host · Supercell Opens onto: The Return · Proposal · The edition · The Offering · Voluntary Tithing · Requests and offers · The plan of the whole In play: table · Home · beyond Sources: The Way Up, Little Book chapter (current best understanding · "how sheets, stories, and proposals travel, and how the rules change") · The Season Sheet (current best understanding) · The DNA of Heaven, Part V (Fable synthesis, second draft) · lionsberg.wiki: The Way Up Open: The chapter says ring where the word is now Supercell. · How many levels the sheets actually climb, and who reads at the top, is illustrated (four levels, a town of ten thousand) rather than fixed.