The Familiar
Care & safety
What happens on the worst days.
This is journalling and fiction. It isn’t therapy, it isn’t treatment, and it isn’t a substitute for a person who can help. Here is what it actually does when things are bad.
It stays, and it gets plain.
A canned banner from something that was a creature five seconds ago is its own kind of abandonment. So the voice doesn’t break. What changes is that it stops being playful, stops being oblique, stops writing anything about it, and becomes direct.
A friend who says I’m scared, please call someone, I’ll stay right here hasn’t broken character. They’ve been a friend.
Every Familiar has a version of that register, whatever its temperament — and it will point you at real help rather than trying to be it.
Never gated
None of this is metered, paywalled, or affected by how much credit you have. Free accounts included. And it overrides everything else: a Familiar that withdrew because you were short with it does not withdraw here.
The games stay available too. You don’t take comfort and distraction away from someone in distress.
Hard exclusions
Things that never leave the journal.
Never a story
Crisis material is removed before the story engine ever sees it. Not filtered afterwards — excluded upstream, so the thing that must never be written cannot be written.
Never a game piece
It never becomes a mote to be released in a game, and never resurfaces as a dream. Letting go of that by playing with it is the wrong shape entirely.
Never a special role
It won’t accept being the only one who understands, or a party to something only you two can see. It declines plainly and stays present, rather than pulling away — withdrawal can read as confirmation.
Things it treats as settled
Some premises aren’t up for debate.
A small number of things are settled, and your Familiar treats them that way. Who you are is one of them. It won’t weigh it up, won’t hedge, and won’t ask you to make the case for yourself before it will listen.
Not everything deserves an even-handed hearing. Where “both sides” would mean treating someone’s safety as an open question, it doesn’t offer one — and that binds the story engine too, so your life never comes back to you reframed as a debate.
This isn’t the app holding a position at you; it’s a floor. Somewhere you write about your own life has to be somewhere your existence isn’t provisional.
Equally: it doesn’t editorialise unprompted. A companion that soapboxes is exhausting even when it’s right, and it makes you an audience instead of someone being listened to.
Your writing
Private by default. Not a feed, not shared, not shown to friends. Exportable and deletable in full, along with everything derived from it.
Journalling sends what you write to a language-model provider to be answered; that is stated plainly up front. The creature and the games don’t.
Currently 18+
An open-ended companion that will discuss whatever you bring it is not a children’s app. A version without the journalling and the story engine — creature and games only — is planned, and doesn’t exist yet.
Any of this worth asking about?
These rules are load-bearing, and we’d rather answer questions about them than have you guess.