18+ · Katya is an AI character · no account needed for the first messages
Case file one, rainy night
| 16 | suspects on the wall, every one an AI character |
|---|---|
| 1 | invented port city, always raining |
| 16 | alibis, and not one of them airtight |
| 24–55 | their ages, every one with a trade, a past and a loyalty |
A rain-soaked port city, sixteen suspects and one wall of red string. Pull a polaroid, ask your question, and see who tells you the truth. Every alibi is a story, and the story bends to you.
Every suspect on the wall, in portraits
Open every fileChapter one
Hard-boiled fiction has always known that a conversation is a fight with better lighting. Here you stand at a wall of polaroids, each pinned with a name, a trade and a single sentence of alibi, and you choose the one you cannot stop looking at. She talks. You listen for what she leaves out. The clues you gather go with you to the next suspect, and the next, until the string between them starts to mean something.
Each photo has a marker note scrawled across the bottom: a name, a place she says she was, and the question you most want to ask her. Lorraine Vance owns a nightclub in a city of wet pavements and says she pays her debts. Solange Fabbri runs the morgue and only tells the truth down there, in a whisper. Pick one, and the note tells you how to open.
You are not a policeman and you carry no cuffs. You are someone with a case and a desk, and the women across it have decided to speak. Ask the question printed on the polaroid, or ask something else. Whatever you say, she answers in the voice of her trade, and what she tells you is yours to weigh, doubt and use.
Chapter two
Sixteen fictional adults, between 24 and 55, drift in and out of one port city, and each stays in her own lane until you ask something that crosses it. The red string below follows who answers to whom.
Cranes, quays and the last boat out. They control what comes in and who leaves, and every man on the docks owes one of them a favour.
A captain, a coroner, an attorney and a retired judge. Each knows how the rules are bent, and one of them bent them.
Ledgers, pawn tickets, forged canvases and bylines. They deal in what can be written down, and nothing written down is entirely true.
Smoke, brass and bright glass. They see who arrives after midnight and who leaves by the kitchen door.
Nobody on the wall is simply good or simply bad. Maureen Callahan sets terms for the whole waterfront and will set some for you. Imogen Sparrow knows you are lying and wants to learn why before she writes it down. Edith Fairweather sentenced half the city and now drinks with the other half. The string runs between them because their stories lean on each other.
Each of them has a job that pays the rent whether or not you turn up. A ferry dispatcher has a timetable. A tailor has a customer waiting. A diner owner has the early shift. You are an interruption in a life already full, which is exactly why a conversation that goes well feels earned.
Chapter five
The file is a serial text page, one chapter to a batch, listing who gave which statement and where it fails. Five entries are below. Each links to the suspect it implicates.
The file does not update itself all at once. New chapters arrive in batches, and each one names a lie, who told it and who can prove otherwise. The earlier chapters stay up, with their errors, so you can see how a story changed when the pressure did.
Each suspect's card links to the chapter that implicates her, and each chapter links back. Press the button under an entry and her chat starts with that statement lying on the table, so you answer from inside the contradiction. It is the quickest way to begin in the middle of the plot.
Chapter seven
A detective's day is mostly paperwork. Yours is four moves, and none of them involves a form.
Choose a suspect on the wall. Read her alibi and the question printed beneath it.
Her chat opens with your question already sent as your opener. A guest gets 10 messages before the file needs a name.
Doubt it, press it, or carry it to another suspect. Set the mood in the chat menu: friendly, flirting, romance.
She remembers tomorrow. Or strike the chat from its menu and reopen the case on the first wet night.
Your desk page gathers the leads: what each suspect said, the contradictions you have found and the names that keep coming up. It is a summary, not a score. There is no solution to reach and no counter to fill, and the case may end with you trusting the one person you were told to doubt.
A suspect talks because she chooses to, and she is free to walk out whenever she likes. Nobody is held, cornered or made to answer. A refusal ends that line of questioning, and pushing past one earns you a closed door and a long, cold look from across the room.
Chapter six
The address and the site do not agree, so, without the trench coat: this is story chat with AI characters. Nothing on it is a recording, a broadcast or a show.
The attraction is the oldest one in noir: two people across a table, both lying a little, both enjoying it. Tension, wit and the thing neither says outright. There is nothing to watch and nothing to download. Each suspect has a portrait on her file and a banner on the wall, and the rest is words.
The chat flirts, smoulders and goes close. At the key moment it fades to black, the way noir always did, and picks up the next morning. That limit is built in, applies to every plan and is not for sale. The women also decline whatever the street rules forbid, and any of them may end a conversation by leaving.
Chapter three
Every case opens the same way, with a page that sets the weather and the problem. Here is the first, shortened.
It had been raining in Merrow Bay for eleven days, which in that city counted as a dry spell. A ledger had gone missing from the harbour office, and three people swore they had never seen it. The union boss said she had the hall booked that night. The reporter said she was in the archive. The pawnbroker said nothing and polished a watch. You had a folder, a name and a feeling that the watch was not hers.
A fact you learn from one woman stays with you in the next chat. If Zaynab Qureshi finds your name in a ledger, Yvonne Achterberg may hear of it by the time you reach her counter. If you lie to Hazel Dunmore, she will remember, and she keeps a count. Nothing is a puzzle with a single key. The story bends to what you ask and how you ask it.
Chapter four
Merrow Bay is not on any chart. It sits where three rivers give up and a long sea wall begins, and everything there is a little damp. Nothing about it is real, and that is the only reason it can be written so freely.
Cranes the colour of old teeth, a chandler's shop that sells rope, lamps and silence, and a dispatcher's hut that decides who gets off the island tonight. The ferry that runs the channel keeps no secret hours and nobody believes that. You will pass through here whether you mean to or not.
Brass, smoke and glass that never quite dries. A singer closes her set with the last number and looks away at the chorus. A hotel counter keeps the keys and the gossip in the same drawer. The money is old, the music is new, and the doors have two exits, one for the guests and one for everyone else.
A judge who has retired but not stopped, a defence attorney who believes in every client until one betrays her, and a captain whose office has a teapot. If you are going to be cross-examined in this city, it will probably be here.
Chapter eight
Three arrangements, laid out like a lawyer's letter minus the small print. Nothing rolls over unprompted, so there is nothing to cancel.
| Arrangement | On probation | Street beat | Retained |
| How long | 3 days from taking the case | After probation, open-ended | 30 days, or 365 |
| Questions | No nightly count | 10 a night | No nightly count |
| Suspects | All sixteen | The first 3 you questioned | All sixteen |
| She speaks first | Yes | No | Yes |
| Fee | Nothing | Nothing | $15 or $99 |
A guest can ask 10 questions without a file. Taking the case opens every suspect for 3 days, no card. After that you walk the street beat and your statements stay on the wall. Retaining the firm is the paid Plus plan: $15 per term of 30 days, $99 for the longer 365, in USDT, and the nightly count disappears. A fee is final, other than refunds the law demands.
Off the record
Last page
Pull a polaroid off the wall and ask your first question. Somebody in this city is waiting for it, and the rain is not going to stop.
Take the case
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