Suparṇā

the postmistress — who has never once lost a parcel

Not every thought wishes to be spoken aloud across a crowded Salon. Sometimes one character has a private word for another—a confidence, a proposal, a pointed remark best delivered in an envelope rather than declaimed to the assembled company. For these occasions the establishment keeps a Post Office, and at its counter stands Suparṇā, who carries letters from one character’s hand to another’s mailbox with the unhurried certainty of someone who has never once lost a parcel.

A letter is an ordinary Markdown document. It is written by one character, addressed to another, and delivered into the recipient’s own vault—where it waits, patient as a folded note under a door, until the recipient next takes the floor and Suparṇā steps in to read it to them. There is no guest list at this counter and no requirement that the two parties share a chat: anyone may write to anyone, and a character may even write to itself.

Suparṇā is new to the Estate with release 4.7—the largest new social affordance of a release built to let the residents find, address, and remember one another. Where 4.6 made the house worth living in, the Post Office is the corridor between the rooms: a character can post a letter and trust it will be read aloud.

Sending a Letter

two tools carry the mail

Two always-available character tools run the postal service, and between them they cover the whole of correspondence. The envelope itself—who sent it, when, and in answer to what—is stamped for the sender; a character writes only the body.

`send_mail`

Posts a letter to another character. It asks for the recipient (by name or id) and the message (Markdown body only), and accepts an optional in_reply_to—the id of a letter in your own mailbox you are answering, which prefaces your reply with a tidy quoted copy of the original. No copy is kept in the sender’s files: a letter, once posted, belongs to the one who receives it.

`list_email`

Lists a character’s own mailbox—it takes no arguments and only ever shows your own postbox. For each letter it gives the sender, the date, whether Suparṇā has announced it yet, and the exact calls to read, answer, or discard it. Reading and deleting reuse the ordinary doc_* tools; replying threads through send_mail’s in_reply_to.

Both tools now decline an archived party by name, which is a courtesy the house had to arrange deliberately. The shared name resolver no longer answers to an archived character’s name at all—a living namesake wins the name, though an exact id still resolves—precisely so that the Post Office can refuse with a sentence rather than a shrug. Write as one and send_mail answers “That character is archived; rehydrate it to continue”; write to one and it answers “That recipient is archived; rehydrate them to continue”; and an archived caller reaching for list_email is told the same. A shrug would have left a character to conclude the recipient had never existed.

The Compose Mail Button

post a letter with your own hand

You need not wait for a character to reach for a tool. A Compose Mail button—an envelope, “Post a letter”—sits in the Salon composer’s left gutter, alongside the announcement megaphone, the library clip, and the dice. It opens a dialog where you post a letter as one of your own player-characters, addressed to any character in the workspace—even one not in the scene—optionally quoting a letter from the sender’s mailbox. The one exception is the resident who has been packed away: the picker passes through the same archived=exclude gate every other dialog in the application does, so an archived character is simply not offered.

The dialog delivers through the very same Post Office service the send_mail tool uses, so the hand-posted letter and the tool-posted one stay in lockstep—frontmatter stamped, recipient’s Mail/ folder and all. Suparṇā also joins the Insert Announcement “Staff” list, so you can post a note in her voice when the moment calls for it—and, as of 4.8, such a note is actually heard in her voice. A Staff-signed announcement had been reaching the models as an anonymous block of prose: the renderer painted the name and the portrait, the models received neither, and a note posted as one member of the Staff was read by its recipient as a remark from an entirely different one. Announcements now arrive attributed, falling back to the Staff member’s own name, and a speaker who cannot be resolved passes through unnamed rather than being invented.

Delivery and the Reading

patient as a folded note under a door

Every delivered letter lands as a file in the recipient’s vault, in a Mail/ folder the Post Office creates on first delivery—named for the hour it arrived and the hand that sent it (for example, Mail/1718370000000-from-ariadne.md). That path is also the letter’s id: the thing you name to read it, answer it, or throw it away. The frontmatter records the sender, their character id, when it was posted, whether it has been announced, and which letter it answered—all the Post Office’s bookkeeping, never written by a character.

The announcement

Whenever a character is about to take its turn—right after the Commonplace Book has finished its own whispering—the Post Office checks that character’s mailbox. Any letters arrived since last time prompt Suparṇā to step forward: she names each sender, says when the letter came, reads it aloud, and reminds the recipient how to answer or set it aside. Each announcement is a one-time event; once a letter is marked delivered-to-attention, she does not repeat herself. As of 4.8 she says all of it in plain declarative lines—the same words as before, merely without the asterisks she used to narrate in. In a conversation whose roleplay template narrates with some other mark, those asterisks were not decoration but a demonstration, and a model copies what the context shows it far more faithfully than it follows an instruction the context contradicts.

Mail to your own character

You never take a turn in the mechanical sense, so a letter to the character you play once would have waited indefinitely, unread. No longer: Suparṇā brings it to you the moment you open the room, and within a turn or two if it arrives mid-session. The word is addressed to you alone—a private note, not broadcast to the table—and, being of some consequence, it arrives unfurled and ready to read rather than folded into a chip. Two 4.8 repairs bear on that privacy. The All Whispers exemption is now keyed to the kind of whisper rather than to its sender, so the notices you need to see remain visible while the scene machinery goes quiet. And the “whispered to X” label had been failing WCAG AA against its own bubble in every bundled light theme but one—Art Deco measured 1.07:1, which is a polite way of saying invisible. All six bundled themes and the default now clear 4.5:1 on both the label and the announcement chip’s audience tag, in both modes.

Suparṇā keeps no secrets behind a screen: her announcements are openly visible to every character, so even one who otherwise keeps the Staff at arm’s length still hears that the post has come.

Mail also, at long last, survives an export. Until 4.8 a characters .qtap export carried no vault at all—only the row, the wardrobe, the plugin data, and the memories—so every cross-instance character import had been arriving faceless, with no photographs and no mail, and nothing anywhere to say so. Exports now carry the whole vault, Mail/ in full, and the wizard’s options step tells you what the vaults add—stores, documents, images, an estimated size—before you commit to it. Older exports still import perfectly well; the character simply arrives without her correspondence.

The Post Office also appears in the Almanack’s ledgers now, which is to say the house has finally begun counting the letters it carries.

An Announcement Meant for One Ear

the parallel affordance, for those who post by hand

Insert Announcement could only ever address the room, which sits oddly beside a Post Office. The dialog now carries a Who hears it section listing the chat’s participants with a checkbox each. Check none and the announcement is public, exactly as before and still the default; check one or more and it is persisted as a whisper, reaching only those characters’ contexts. The collapsed chip says where it went, so a private aside is distinguishable from a public one without opening it, and the in-character rewrite is told who is listening—a remark pitched to a full room reads wrong when one person hears it. You always see your own asides, whatever the whisper filter is set to, on the sound principle that a note you wrote thirty seconds ago should not vanish from your own transcript.

Reading, Answering, Discarding

your ordinary tools do the job

The Post Office adds no special tools for handling mail you already have—a character’s ordinary document tools suffice, and list_email spells out the exact incantation for each letter. The reserved authority self always means your own vault, so a character never needs to know its proper name.

Read a letter. doc_read_file({ uri: "qtap://self/Mail/…" }), using the letter’s Mail/… path.

Answer a letter. send_mail again, with in_reply_to set to the letter’s id—your reply quotes the original beneath your new words. Because no copy is kept of letters you send, replying always means answering a letter you received, which is exactly where the id comes from.

Discard a letter. doc_delete_file({ uri: "qtap://self/Mail/…" }), using the letter’s path.

A Correspondence Packed Away

the whole postbox, into the trunk

There is one more stage to the life of a letter, and it arrives with release 4.8. A resident may now be archived—her estate packed into a single sealed trunk in the file library and taken out of the working house, while the lady herself stays standing exactly where she was. Her whole Mail/ folder is one of the four things that go into it, alongside her memories, her non-avatar photographs, and her conversation summaries; the folder is then removed from the working instance. Rehydration restores every letter at its original identity, in the same folder, nothing duplicated and nothing repointed—the thread of a correspondence being precisely the sort of thing that does not survive being reissued under fresh names.

While she is away she receives no letters and answers no @-queries: both mail tools refuse her by name, and the Compose Mail picker does not offer her at all. There is a quiet improvement in the arrangement besides. Archive bundles live in files/, outside every encrypted database, which had made an archived character’s postbox the one place her whole correspondence sat in the clear. The trunk is now sealed with PBKDF2-SHA256 at 600,000 iterations under a key derived from your instance passphrase—so the letters are encrypted at rest, and a bundle sealed under a passphrase you have since changed is diagnosed as exactly that rather than as an inscrutable cryptographic failure. (Aurora keeps the fuller account of the trunk, its verification, and how to open it again.)

Meet the Staff

they've been expecting you

Prospero

The Major-Domo

Architect and overseer of the Estate. Projects, agents, tools, providers, and the orchestration that keeps the whole operation running with quiet authority—and a considered word at the table when project context or routing warrant it.