How to play AI stories on fiabai: a beginner's guide

A passenger has lost her grandfather's pocket watch on a night train. Shioiri Shugo, a 22-year-old conductor trainee, wants to help, but railway rules limit what he can search. You are the passenger next door. What do you tell him?

That is the opening situation in A Pocket Watch by the Last Stop, a two-chapter story on fiabai. It gives you a reason to speak and someone to act with, without asking you to write a character sheet first.

This guide follows the start of that mystery: choosing a role, sending an action in English, reading the reply, and checking the Ink cost. It covers the first exchange, not a completed playthrough.

The cover shows Shugo's character portrait. The screenshots below show the role selection, an actual reply, and the response settings.

Choose a story with a clear first task

Open Explore in English and look for a story whose premise interests you. Read its introduction, cast, and chapter information before starting. For this example, the task is to find a missing watch before the train reaches its final stop.

Shugo is strict about rules but cannot leave a worried passenger without help. That makes the first decision fairly small: agree to help, then share what you know. You do not need to invent the entire mystery or decide who stole the watch.

fiabai's story guide describes stories as chapter-based adventures with a cast. This is a different starting point from an open-ended chat with one character: the work already supplies a situation to investigate. If you are still choosing between that style and other kinds of character chat, the Character.AI alternatives guide compares the broader options.

Choose who you will play

On the work page, select Play. The role-selection dialog lets you choose who the cast will address as the story unfolds.

The prepared persona in this example is a passenger on the train. Its name is shown as あなた, meaning “you.” Choosing it lets you take the role the opening was written for.

Play as yourself instead joins under your username. Check that name before using it as your in-story identity. You can also manage personas, but creating a custom one is not necessary for this first scene.

The dialog also shows a difficulty choice and an action multiplier. Leave those at the displayed default if you want to follow this example without changing the starting conditions.

After selecting a role, use Start as this person. If you have already begun the work, Continue lets you choose an existing playthrough; Start fresh begins a separate one. Use Continue when you want to return to the same investigation.

Set up English before your first action

Use the English language option, or enter through /en/explore, then follow the work page into the conversation.

English interface labels do not mean every part of a work has been translated. In this example, the prepared persona, fixed opening, and handout contained Japanese. Character names and some status values also remained in Japanese. Check those starting texts if you want a story you can read entirely in English.

For the next generated response, the message used here begins with an out-of-character instruction:

ooc: Please write the narration and every character's dialogue in English.

The reply that followed contained English narration and dialogue. This did not translate the earlier opening or replace the Japanese character labels. It is an instruction for the continuation, not a translation setting for the whole work.

Send one action the cast can respond to

Read the opening and any handout before deciding what to do. Here, the handout says you saw a man in a grey suit and silver-rimmed glasses speaking to the elderly passenger before departure. He was watching her watch chain.

The first message shared that observation with Shugo and asked to look for the man together:

ooc: Please write the narration and every character's dialogue in English.

"I'd like to help." I tell Shugo that before departure I saw a man in a grey suit and silver-rimmed glasses talking to the elderly passenger while watching her chain. "Could we look for him together?"

There are two things for the story to respond to: information from the handout and a request to investigate. A short action like this is enough to begin. You do not have to write a polished page of fiction.

Avoid deciding another character's answer inside your own message. “Could we look for him together?” leaves Shugo room to respond; “Shugo agrees and catches the thief” would skip the interaction you came to play.

Read the reply for your next lead

Shugo identified a passenger who matched the description, but he did not accuse him of theft:

“There is a passenger in Car Two who matches that description. A dealer named Haiya. I must stress that he is under no suspicion. But if you will let me guide you, we can ask Mrs. Kuga whether he was the gentleman she met before departure.”

The response continued with Mrs. Kuga struggling to remember and Shugo asking where the encounter happened. That gives you something specific to answer or investigate. It does not establish that Haiya is guilty.

A possible next message would be:

I ask Mrs. Kuga whether she remembers where the man offered her his arm. I wait for her answer before suggesting that we visit Car Two.

That is a suggested continuation, not another recorded turn. You could choose a different action based on what interests you. Check the current status and remaining actions as well as the prose; this story has an action budget.

Check Ink before continuing

Ink is fiabai's resource for generating responses. Opening a work and generating its continuation are different operations: the Explore guide says starting a work does not itself consume Ink, while AI generation does.

Check the conversation's response settings before sending a message. The settings used for the reply above showed 1 Ink per message, with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash selected and Reasoning set to Off.

The same screen showed an extra 1 Ink per message for the reasoning option. Read the total for your own selected settings rather than assuming every model or option costs the same.

The Ink guide distinguishes free Monochrome Ink from purchased Color Ink. Free Ink is not unlimited generation. Asking the AI to continue or regenerate also uses Ink, so repeatedly replacing a reply can spend more than simply reading it.

The first request in this example failed with a timeout notice. The screen reported an Ink refund, and one retry produced the reply shown above. If a request fails, check its status and refund notice before retrying; do not assume a failed generation leaves every story counter unchanged.

Return to the same playthrough

When you come back, open the work and choose Continue, then select the playthrough you want. Starting fresh is useful for a different attempt, but it will not resume the scene you just read.

Take care with chapter advancement. The story guide says you cannot return to an earlier chapter after advancing. Finish the conversations and checks you want to make before moving on.

This example stopped in the first chapter. It does not test the ending, long-term memory, or whether later chapters resolve the mystery consistently. If your next goal is to bring an existing character into a new setting rather than play a published story, the character recreation guide covers that separate task.

For this mystery, there is already a smaller next step: ask Mrs. Kuga what she remembers, or follow up on the passenger in Car Two. Choose one action and let the cast answer.