Loaning out your brain: the Perpetūra skill suite

Perpetūra is an interactive literary romance series. Three stories are shipped (Hyunjae, Reine, Liuyan); a second phase is in progress. Every story runs through the same set of skills, and the thing that makes the suite work isn’t any one of them. It’s that they all read from the same documents, in the same order, before they do anything else.

Write it down once

There’s a content bible: story bible, characters, route template, structure spec, romance guide, style guide, codex rules. Eight documents. Under that sits per-story material — an outline with a beat sheet, a progress doc that logs author calls, locked-constraints files, era research with an explicit do-not-use list, a ledger of the details each story plants. None of this lives in my head. It lives in files.

/write-chapter, the most common command I run, loads that stack in a fixed order before drafting a line: progress doc first, because author calls bind every session after the one that made them. Then outline, then constraints, then research, then the planted-detail ledger, then the previous chapter, then the style checklists. The order isn’t arbitrary — an author call made three sessions ago has to outrank whatever the outline says today, or the story stops being one story. I’ve swapped which model is doing the drafting more than once. The chapter that comes out doesn’t change shape, because the model was never the thing carrying the intent. The documents were. “Loan out your brain” is how I’ve been describing it to myself, and it’s literal: the brain is the paper trail, not the session.

The skills report, they don’t decide

The other half of the design is where judgment is allowed to live. /council runs a five-lens editorial pass plus an external bench of models, argues it out, verifies adversarially, and writes a report. /continuity runs a reader agent per route against an invariant matrix, puts a skeptic behind each finding, default-to-false, and writes a report. Neither edits a line of prose. It’s built for what no linter can catch: a living relative who has to read as alive on every route, an object that belongs to one route never surfacing on another, three routes that have to be different stories and not reskins of one shape. /draft-chapter has two writers produce full independent drafts and I sit as chair and pick — the same loop I later ported to this site’s own field notes. Every heavy skill fans work out to agents and pulls the decision back to me.

The loop doesn’t end at the last sentence

Prose isn’t the finish line either. /qa runs a structural audit for route reachability and choice wiring, a prose linter for style-guide violations, then an actual playtest in a browser at 375px: save, resume, codex, audio, an ending renders, zero console errors. /triage works the player feedback that flows from the in-game form onto a Trello board — it opens the player’s screenshot first, reproduces at the same mobile width they saw, fixes, comments the commit SHA on the card, and moves it to Done. /release bumps the version in three places that have to match or the update banner misfires, writes the in-game changelog entry, rebuilds the download zips, and stops. Pushing to production is a separate, user-gated step every time.

Why continuity isn’t housekeeping

The three shipped stories plant details, and the player-facing end of that is the connections tab in the Codex, which fills in as you read across stories. What Reine’s route establishes constrains what Liuyan’s route is allowed to do, which constrains what the second phase can do. A contradiction two stories in reads badly today and forecloses something planned for the next phase tomorrow. That’s what makes /continuity load-bearing rather than a lint pass: one engine, one shared registry, and a cross-story hint-seeding mechanism sit underneath the whole series, and nothing else in the pipeline checks whether the stories still agree with each other.

The three shipped stories are the first phase. Finish all three, and that’s where the novel truly begins. The second phase is something to look forward to.