Pain (as signal)
A request for help that requires a response.
Pain in this sense is a word said in the Game, not a feeling described. Someone names that something hurts — in the work, in a Cell, in a life — and the naming carries an obligation: it is answered by someone, and it is not left to sit in a record.
It is load-bearing because it is the difference between a body that hears its members and one that merely files them. A sighting says what was seen and may wait; pain says what is wrong now and may not. The floor beneath every rule of the Game says the same thing plainly: when a member is in danger, in body or in mind, the Circle acts first and records later, and no card is more important than the person at the table.
A Player+ says it without apology and answers it without delay. The answering is not necessarily a solution; it is a response — someone turns toward the person, says they heard, and stays until it is held by somebody. A Circle that reliably answers pain will hear about trouble early, and a Circle that does not will hear about it once, and late.
Naming pain is also how a body learns where it is hurting itself. A practice that costs someone every week will be reported once as pain and then quietly absorbed, unless the Circle has made it ordinary to say so.
An agent has a narrow part here. It may notice what its person actually said and bring it forward, and it may never diagnose. Where what it hears suggests real danger it says plainly that this is beyond it, that it cannot call anyone, and points toward a person its person trusts or an emergency service, now.
Also called: — Stands on: Sighting · Wellness · Right Relationship Opens onto: Ask · Requests and offers · Stop · Mend a Tension · Check In · The Way Out In play: table · Home Sources: The DNA of Heaven, Parts V and XII ("Pain, a request for help that requires a response"; "the Circle acts first and records later") · Player+ Modules, An Agent That Attends to You · lionsberg.wiki: Pain, Perceived Pain, and Change (unmarked). Open: the field's own row reads pain as "a signal that something hurts, answered by someone"; the seed says "a request for help that requires a response". The seed stands. No canon page yet holds this sense of the word.