6 · Everyone Remembers It Wrong

Right — this is my favorite thing in the entire system and I need you to understand how it works, because once you see it you cannot unsee it.

Memory here is not a recording. It is a version.

6.1 · Two people, one moment, two files

When something happens in front of two characters, the system does not write down what happened. It writes down what each of them heard — separately, in their own file, coloured by what they already believed about each other and about themselves.

So you get two records of one conversation. They disagree. And both of them are correct, because a memory file is not a claim about reality; it is a claim about what somebody walked away holding.

Three sessions later one of them brings it up. They quote you. The quote is slightly off — not because anything glitched, but because that is what they heard.

6.2 · These are real files you can open

They are not vibes in a context window. Every character who remembers you accumulates npc-memory-vault records — @Missing file is the blank template, so you can see the shape before anybody has filled one in.

Inside, spokenRecord keeps what was actually said, word for word, so it can be thrown back at you later. It keeps who else was in the room, because that is how a thing spreads. And it keeps recalledAs — a separate entry per person, holding their version, the confidence they hold it at, why it drifted, and whether they would ever concede the point. Usually they would not, and that is characterization rather than stubbornness. Someone whose account of a night has held for eleven years is not holding a fact. They are holding a shape their life rests on.

Alongside those sit npc-memory records — @Missing file — which flag whether what you said was a promise, and whether it was kept. A promise is a debt with a memory attached, and it is exactly the kind of thing somebody raises unprompted at the worst possible moment.

6.3 · What bends a memory

Not randomness. State.

FEARFUL     threats get larger
ANGRY       offences magnified, kindness erased
GRATEFUL    the good amplified, the bad forgotten
GRIEVING    everything near the loss heightened

Someone who was frightened when you said it will remember a bigger, sharper version of you. Someone who was grateful will have quietly deleted the part where you hesitated. Nobody is lying in either direction.

AT THE TABLE · Somebody quotes you and the quote is slightly wrong. That
is not a glitch to report. It is the single most reliable sign the system is
working, and you are the only person at the table who knows it.

6.4 · Rumours are memories that learned to walk

A thing that happened becomes a thing people say. It moves through the world by being told, and every retelling drops something and sharpens something else.

By the time it reaches you, four hops from the event, it barely resembles what occurred — and the person telling you believes it completely, with no gap at all between what they know and what they heard.

You can be the one who knows better. That is a genuinely great feeling and it is available to you constantly, because you were there and they were not. It is also the closest thing this system has to a superpower, and it costs nothing but paying attention.

6.5 · When you are sure they are wrong

You will eventually say some version of "she didn't say that." Say it. A contested memory is content, not a bug report.

Three different things look identical from where you are sitting: the GM contradicted the record and was simply wrong, in which case it gets corrected in the same breath with no ceremony; your character misremembered, because they are not a recording device either and they were tired and half-listening; or the record and the other person's version genuinely differ, which is the one that matters. In the third case they will hold their ground at whatever confidence they hold it, in their own voice, consistently, forever. They do not know there is a file. They know what they heard.

6.6 · The part people miss

An NPC who "forgot" something usually was never told.

Check before you assume the system dropped it. Nine times out of ten it did not — and the tenth time it is the Lexicon being thin rather than memory failing, which is a different problem with a different fix and it has its own chapter.