Bringing Fire

Fifteen minutes. One morning that goes wrong. One ship that shouldn't still be out there.

Donna Ferncider left the farming commune at nineteen. Now she's an Academy cadet, one competition away from a seat on the first ship in over a century that can actually reach the lost worlds — and the morning starts with the most-followed woman in the Convention saying that she and her friends are beneath contempt.

It gets stranger from there. A mecha match with something illegal bolted to it. A derelict the size of a city, drifting in an asteroid field with a hold full of impossible cargo. An accidental  jump to a system nobody's visited in a hundred and twenty years, where two hundred and fifty people have been telling their children a story about who would come for them.

How to play: click the choices. That's it. Runs in the browser, works on phones, nothing to install, no account, no saves needed — it's fifteen minutes.

Three endings. About fifteen minutes a play. No prior knowledge needed — this an introduction to Return the Stars.

What is Return to the Stars?

A hopepunk space opera tabletop RPG about a civilization that lost the stars and is stubbornly getting them back. Fan conventions became the seed of an interstellar culture; when the Beacon died and travel collapsed, the people who'd spent generations retelling hopeful stories turn out to be the ones best equipped to survive the disaster. Bringing Fire is a scenario from that setting, adapted here as a short interactive story.

Written and designed by Mark Sabalauskas · Festive Ninja
Built in ink, the open-source narrative scripting language by inkle (MIT licensed), running on inkjs.
Set in Return to the Stars.
Theme song included as a separate download.

On AI, plainly

This is an AI-assisted project.

What I did: wrote this story before LLMs were even a thing, made every creative and structural decision, edited everything, and take responsibility for it.

What AI tools did: recoded the script from a draft  visual-novel version into the format used by ink, proofread and edited the text, and wrote and executed  the test harness that verified the branches. The optional theme song was AI-generated. Also, it was use to create the "cover image" that itch demands; there are no graphics in the game.

The point: technology has always been used to make culture. Working out how is interesting to me. 

If AI-assisted work isn't for you, this isn't either.  But thanks for reading so far, I guess.