Walk into the scene, not a greeting

The first turn of a chat used to start cold — a greeting, a wink, and you’d build the scene from there. Now you walk into a room that’s already happening.

Aqua’s tavern, mid-mess

Open a new chat with Aqua and the scene is set before you say a word. A narrator line drops in: Mortram polishing a mug behind the bar, his eyes flicking toward your table, the slate on the wall reading AQUA — 30g. Aqua hasn’t noticed you yet. Then she does, lurches upright, grabs your sleeve — and the conversation starts already mid-crisis. The greeting itself acknowledges the bill, the bartender, and the trouble she’s in. No more polite intro before the actual situation.

The escape branch

Aqua’s tavern arc now has a player-driven exit. If you decide the cellar quest isn’t your problem and tell her you’re leaving — explicit phrases like “we’re leaving the tavern”, “head for the door”, “let’s get out” — she bolts after you, the doors slam shut, and you’re both in the plaza outside with the debt unpaid. The arc ends differently from there. Mortram remembers.

Movement is in the story now

Old behaviour: an async detector watched every reply and could silently re-route the chat to an adjacent location if it thought someone moved — sometimes hallucinating moves the dialogue never made. That detector is gone. Movement now happens only when a story beat says so, or when you explicitly ask to go somewhere outside an active arc. The location panel stops drifting under you.

Steadier voice when things get long

A few defenses landed under the hood: the stream cuts itself when the model locks into a repeating syllable, prior replies that already drifted that way push the next turn into wider sampling, and an always-on prompt block keeps the character aware of where the relationship currently stands — closeness, mood, gate rules — even mid-arc when the scene director isn’t running. Effect: fewer “Aqua repeats herself”, fewer dead-air bubbles, the character stays in tone deeper into long sessions.

Also

• Tightened the keyword list that triggers a “leaving the tavern” branch — narrative incidentals (someone mentioning a door, Mortram standing outside) no longer fire it.
• Plotlines can now own their own cold-open: a narrator preamble and a plotline-aware first line. Future arcs can claim the opening scene without rewriting per-character greetings.
• Voice examples in the character system prompt no longer prefix each example with the character’s name — small change, but it reduces a documented model-attractor toward single-name repetition loops.

Coming next

• A second arc for Aqua, picking up where tavern_intro leaves off depending on which ending you hit.
• Adaptive voice examples — show the model only the register that matches the current emotional context, not all three.
• A small UI affordance for when the stream catches itself mid-collapse — instead of a half-truncated bubble, you’ll see a “Aqua got stuck — retry?” hint.