Carina is not a person. She has no personality, no avatar, no self to speak from—the name belongs to a protocol, the establishment’s ansible: the ability to send a message and receive a response out of band, in the middle of a conversation the recipient is not a part of. Where Suparṇā carries letters that wait to be read and the Host presides over the floor, Carina is simply the line itself—the pneumatic tube to the reference desk.

There are moments in any well-appointed Salon when the conversation calls for a swift consultation—not a full discourse, not a fresh interlocutor joining with all the attendant ceremony, but simply an answer. The capital of a country. The formula for a compound. The contents of a file. You dispatch the question to whichever character you have designated as the answerer, and the reply slides across the table the instant it is ready, attributed to the character who gave it—no history consulted, no elaborate entrance, no turn of the clock spent.

The recipient never joins the scene. The asker never breaks stride. That out-of-band quality is the whole of the idea: a question put and answered beside the conversation rather than within it.

To consult an answerer from any message in the Salon, place an@Name invocation at the start of a line. The name is followed immediately by either a colon (for a public answer) or a question mark (for a whispered one).

@Archivist: What were the clauses
of the Treaty of Westphalia?

@Archivist? What were the clauses
of the Treaty of Westphalia?

Carina is not only for the hand at the keyboard. LLM characters with tool-calling capabilities may ring the line programmatically through theask_carina tool, rather than writing @Name markup into their message. The effect is identical: the named character is consulted, and the answer is posted into the chat—publicly or as a whisper, per the tool’swhisper parameter. The calling character receives the answer back as a tool result and may fold it into its own reply.

This is the out-of-band channel at its most useful: in an autonomous room or a busy multi-character scene, a character can look something up without interrupting the conversational flow—like sending a discreet note to the reference desk from across the room and reading the answer before anyone notices the pause. The same isolation rules apply: the answerer sees the question and its own recollections, never the scene it was pulled from.

The answerer builds its response from its ownpersonality, identity, description, and manifesto; a card naming who is asking (only the surface view a stranger would have—name, title, pronouns, public identity, never the asker’s private nature); its own memories that bear on the question; its default scenario; and anyprevious Carina exchanges in this chat with this same character, so follow-ups carry continuity.

What it does not receive: the chat history, project context or core whispers, or other characters’ messages and perspectives. This isolation is the point. A Carina answer is areference answer—drawn from the character’s nature, its own recollections, and the tools at hand, not from a conversation it was never party to.

But the desk remembers being asked. After delivering an answer, the answerer forms its own memories of the exchange—what it was asked, what it replied—filed in its Commonplace Book like any other turn, whispered consultations no less than public ones. Over time a frequently consulted reference character accumulates a sense of what it is repeatedly asked, and that informs later answers. The party putting the question forms no memory on Carina’s account; only the answerer remembers.

A character is enrolled at the reference desk by a single flag—“Can answer @-queries (Carina)”—set from the character’s edit form or toggled on the spot by the smallconsole switch on every character card, which glows when the character is enrolled. An enrolled answerer may be invoked by @Name from any chat, whether or not they are a participant.

The courtesy worth committing to memory: a line opens whenever either party to it is an answerer. If the one asking is an answerer, they may reach everyone; if the one being asked is an answerer, everyone may reach them. Only when neither holds the flag does the line stay closed and the @Name pass by as ordinary text. You, the proprietor, are the exception that needs no flag: when you type the markup yourself, the line always opens. And when something goes awry—no such answerer, no open line, no resolvable connection—Prospero delivers the news; Carina has no voice of her own for announcements, dispatching the matter with the quiet efficiency of someone who knows better than to make a scene.

There is one answerer at the desk who keeps no character file at all and yet may be rung by name: Brahma. TheBrahma Console—Quilltap’s plain, persona-free line to a large language model, with leave to inspect your records and read your document stores—answers to @Brahma: and @Brahma?exactly as any reference character would, and may likewise be reached through ask_carina. It keeps no memories, appears on no roster, and answers with the Console’s full powers.

Because those powers are considerable, not everyone may ring its bell: the line opens for you, for your own user-controlled persona, and for characters granted system transparency—anyone else receives the same “no answerer by that name” reply as if Brahma had never existed. Should you keep a real character named “Brahma,” your character wins the name.