Reader's Guide
Every story here was written once, completely, by its author. What you get is a performance of it — the same plot, the same facts, the same beats, told in prose that's composed fresh each time you ask for a new telling. Read it twice and you'll recognize everything that happens and rarely recognize a sentence.
What stays the same, what varies
The author fixes exactly what matters to the plot: the events, who is present, what you learn and when, what a scene must leave true by the time it ends. None of that ever changes between readings — nothing is ever left to chance about what happens.
What's never fixed is how it's told: the exact wording, which images get used, a line of dialogue's phrasing, the small order details get mentioned in. That's the part that's free to come out differently every time, and it's the whole reason two tellings of the same story are worth reading side by side instead of being the same text twice.
Your three ways to read
Open any story's /read screen and you get a choice, every time:
- The Baked edition — a fixed, known-good telling the author has chosen as the default. If you just want to read the story once, reliably, start here.
- The library — past tellings the author has saved and named because they were worth telling apart from the rest. There are no reader accounts, so this list is the author's curation, not a personal collection of yours.
- Generate a new telling — ask the compiler for a telling nobody has read yet. This is the same machinery behind everything else in the system, run for you, live.
Generating a telling
Press it and you'll see a wall-clock estimate up front — never a cost, just how long it should take, based on the story's scene count and how long its scenes have taken before. Then a progress line, "compiling scene 7 of 14", rather than words streaming in as they're written — the compiler builds the whole edition before handing any of it back, so what you eventually read is never a half-finished draft.
You can leave and come back: your still-in-flight run stays yours to rejoin, and every completed telling gets its own permanent, shareable link the moment it finishes — reading it again later, or sending it to someone else, doesn't cost anything or change what's in it. If progress stalls for a while, you'll be offered the Baked edition rather than being left staring at a bar that stopped moving.
Once in a great while a scene has trouble and the compiler quietly falls back rather than stalling the whole run — you won't normally notice, and a run affected badly enough to matter is marked as such rather than passed off as clean.
Sharing what you read
A telling's link shows only what you read — the prose and the digested summary behind it — never the Story Package the author wrote it from. The score stays the author's; only the performance is yours to pass around.
If the model's allowance runs out
The writer model behind these tellings runs on a rate-limited key, and once its allowance for the moment is spent, no retry helps until it resets. Rather than fail outright, the read screen will offer a lighter model with its own separate allowance — offered, never switched to silently, because a quality change you didn't ask for is worse than a wait. Whatever wrote a scene is recorded as having written it.
Nothing to sign up for
There are no reader accounts and nothing to remember between visits beyond the links you keep. Every completed telling is addressable and shareable by its own link indefinitely — nothing you read is ever deleted out from under a link you saved.