Lexicon

Strangers

Strangers is sex, or the road to it, between people who do not know each other. The hotel bar, the train, the wrong door, the stranger at the wedding. The charge is anonymity: nobody has a history yet, nobody has a reputation to keep, and what happens between them is not weighed down by anything that came before. Readers tick it for the version of desire that is entirely in the present.

It changes the writing. A stranger has no backstory to lean on, so the scene has to be built from what can be seen, heard and guessed in the room: a way of standing, a ring or its absence, what someone orders. The best strangers fiction is observant, and it lets the characters be wrong about each other.

How the engine handles it. With Strangers ticked, the plan begins the story before the people know each other's names, and the story state builds the entities from what the story reveals rather than from a setup you wrote. You can leave the people entirely open at setup and let the story introduce them, which is the natural way to use this theme; the engine fills in what you left open to fit your starting idea. Whether the strangers stay strangers or the story turns into something longer is a steering choice, or one you leave to the engine. Strangers sits comfortably next to rough and exhibitionism, and it is the theme behind most of the age gap and reverse harem stories that begin with an encounter rather than a plan.

Your stories are encrypted at rest. We can read them to write them. Nobody else can read them.