Bogran and Anya arrived by zeppelin in Vladivostok, and took a train and a long walk through the countryside to Anya's family village. Her parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were surprised and overjoyed to see her, and fawned over the young man she had brought. Bogran had his hands full meeting everyone, remembering their names, and impressing her parents.
They married in an old church in the shadow of a canopy of ancient birch trees, their vows whispered with rolling green hills and azure skies visible through the windows. Life in their secluded village was simple, fulfilling, and blessedly free from dimensional rifts and booger-induced existential crises. They lived each day twice–once on the first loop until a couple hours after sunrise, ensuring smooth sailing for themselves and their children, and again to lock in a new loop at sunrise, if no mishaps had occurred during the day.
If a mishap happened, they would correct it during the second, and lock in the loop during the third. In these times Bogran would make wise investments, using the financial fluctuations of the day to increase their ownings. This ensured a comfortable life, free from worry, allowing them to indulge in luxuries like imported spices and artisanal cheeses. But the true treasure was not material wealth, but the quiet contentment they found in each other's company, far away from the chaos of New Firenze.
They never forgot their adventures, though, often sharing stories with their children around a crackling fireplace, reminding them that even heroes sometimes choose to trade capes for comfortable slippers and build happiness in the mundane. And as they grew old together, holding hands under a sky brimming with stars, they knew that their greatest adventure was not conquering a city, but finding solace in each other's arms, living twice, loving once, forever free from the relentless tyranny of time loops and overflowing nasal passages.
THE (first, and possibly only) END
AFTERWORD
Language models don't really understand anything. Still less do they understand time loop fiction.
Time loop fiction has very specific rules. All loop repeats must start the same way–except when they don't. The hero performing the same actions should lead to the same result–except when it doesn't. No character but the hero can remember previous loops–except when they do. And so on. Seriously, though, the exceptions need to have underlying rules that make sense, and the audience is either told or eventually can figure out, or the trope becomes incoherent. A language model essentially just randomly spews out probabilistic events, and cannot moderate its output to follow these rules unless very closely guided by the prompter.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Royal Road's time loop fiction authors need not fear being replaced by neural network language models any time soon. LitRPG on the other hand...
This story was an experiment in taking a fairly absurdist premise proposed by a character in one of my serials as a joke and running with it: the idea of a time loop where the hero's boogers increased with each repetition. Neural networks are REALLY GOOD at taking a surreal, ridiculous premise and executing it utterly seriously to the best of their ability, whether it's an astronaut riding a horse or a booger-based time loop story. Of course, telling a time loop story itself, the best of their ability is not great. Going for a language-model led story broke on the very first loop restart–the rest of the story is heavily prompted and output-edited based on tight plotting by myself.
Another thing with serials is that one never knows where the story will go. The characters must act logically in response to the circumstance, and the circumstances can evolve beyond the author's plan. In this story, Bogran's time loop is very underpowered compared to, say, Zorian's in Mother of Learning, or the infinitely-resettable one of The Perfect Run. Part of the appeal of time loop fiction is the sense that the hero can overcome any problem and unscramble any omelette as long as he has enough tries. Bogran, whose nose explodes after only five tries through a loop, clearly cannot. In time loop fiction, the character must die, or be forced to restart the loop, enough times for the loop to have a point. But in a limited time loop, if he does this too many times, the story is over. And even in infinite time loops, if he constantly does this, all dramatic tension is soon lost.
Given Bogran and Anya's lack of sympathetic connection to anyone in the city, or any idea of which side is in the right or wrong, it does not make any sense for him to stay and try to solve the issues further. So, of course he and Anya must leave and end the story once she is rescued, despite the author (me) finding it unsatisfying. I dislike that Chekhov's gun lies unfired–this is the idea that anything we show onscreen must be used, and thus the Groundborn, the Heart of New Firenze, and the mysterious co-looper should figure into the future plot and have their plotlines resolved.
Anyway, there is a way out of this dilemma: we could have the entire world end due to them fleeing instead of solving the problems in an existential interdimensional apocalypse, forcing them to reset back to The Drunken Goblin and save New Firenze even though they hate basically everyone there except Grimstrong. We could then have them track down the heist of the Heart, meet the mysterious co-looper in the process (who probably only looped once, and is probably annoyed his warning was ignored), alternately be aided and hindered by the Shepherd, find the Heart is encapsulating an evil interdimensional alien attempting to bring the dimensional apocalypse into being, and expunge it from the world with the help of good-guy interdimensional beings, i.e. the angels. This would go on for 10-20 more chapters and probably involve Bogran dying 5-10 more times and locking a new start point at least twice. But, I don't think I want to go that far for a story which has, at its heart, a juvenile joke of a premise.
If enough of you guys want me to make it, though, let me know, and I'll try to magic it into being. For now, I mark this story as COMPLETED, to be re-opened if there is interest.
The Lives of Velnin. This whole story comes from a joke one of the characters makes in .
