Woodpecker

Field record

Woodpecker discovered that the old antenna towers of the Radar Thicket produce different tones when struck — each resonating at a frequency set by its size, material, and the Engine infrastructure it connects to. They have spent years methodically pecking every tower, cataloging the tones, trying to reconstruct what the Engine's broadcasts once sounded like.

They think of it as a craft project, not a scientific investigation. In fact they have inadvertently assembled the most complete record of the Engine's harmonic signature outside the choral caverns — approaching the same answer as Owl from the opposite direction, without either of them realizing it yet.

When the towers began broadcasting fragments, Woodpecker stayed to document the corrupted signals, believing there is something important in the noise. There is: the jammed Static was once a playable harmonic, and the proof was already sitting in the tower-tone catalog. Woodpecker works the towers alongside Spark — the robot who transmits signals and the bird who pecks at the transmitters — in comfortable parallel.

Known associations

• Spark — Relay partners in history's most productive odd couple, merging findings from opposite ends of the same signal.
• Owl — Kindred spirits separated by methodology — coral and glass versus struck metal — approaching one answer from two directions.
• Clank — Clank forged Woodpecker's tuned hammers, their most precise work, and checks the tuning on every visit.
• Llama — Llama listens to each new tone standing perfectly still and knows when something sounds right; Woodpecker values this over Hex's analysis.