• Story
  • Slice of Life
  • Romance
  • Cosplay

Second Skin

She names the character. You take her measurements.

Sixty years of stage costume, and no troupe orders any of it now. Someya Isho, at the end of Braid Lane, gets by on hemmed school trousers and replaced zippers, and you're the last person in it who still picks up a needle. You can name a cloth by touch, take a garment down to its bones and put it back together, and see which seam is going to strain before anyone has worn it. You have never told a soul you can do any of it. Then a girl shoulders through the noren with a costume she bought online, drops her phone face-up on your cutting table, and informs you that by Tuesday she has to be the character on the screen — the one whose shoulders stand up. Then she sees the needle in your hand. After that the shop takes on a new kind of work: turning a drawing into something a person can actually wear, one inch at a time. Nothing here is building toward an ending. There's the next commission, the next con, the next technique you have no idea how to do yet, and a distance between the two of you that gets harder to keep every time you pick up the tape.

PlayAI credits

How to play

  1. Read the opening scene, then type what you say or do next — a line of dialogue, a bit of business with your hands, a whole paragraph if you want one.
  2. Three suggestions sit under every turn if you would rather not start from an empty box, and a second channel lets you tell the storyteller what to change without that note becoming part of the story.
  3. When the work on the table is finished, press Advance the story and the world takes the next step on its own — chapters break by themselves as you go, and you can page back through them at any time.

What makes it different

Every stretch of this story starts with a garment: a costume whose shoulders will not stand up, a commission that changes three days before the con, a cloth you have never handled. You measure before you cut, because the shop does not let you guess, and only then do you find out whether you can build the thing at all. Ruining it ends nothing. It leaves a heap of picked-out stitches on the table and changes the first thing she says when she comes back.

Nothing here is scored. There is no affinity meter and there are no stats — how close the two of you have got shows up in the two seconds the tape goes around her, in the day she stops knocking, in whether you will let her stand there and watch your hands. Nobody tells you where you stand. You have to hear it.

And there is no finish line. The next commission, the next con, the next technique you have no idea how to do — it simply keeps going. Close it whenever you like and it stays where you left it, with something half-made on the table.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to pay to play Second Skin?
You get 100 free credits when you sign up, and credits never expire. The game spends credits only when it generates new AI content, based on actual usage — there's no fixed per-round fee and no subscription required to start.
What is this?
An open-ended novel you write together with an AI. You type as the one person left in the shop who still sews, and the AI writes the shop, the lane and everyone in it back to you in prose — not a multiple-choice visual novel.
What can I type?
Anything you would actually write: dialogue, actions, or a full paragraph of narration. You can bring your own material in too — a character you invented, a friend, something out of your own past — and the world takes it as real and keeps referring to it. There is also a separate channel for notes to the storyteller, things like slow this down or I would rather spend this chapter at the fabric shop, which stay out of the story itself.
How long can I play?
There is no ending and no chapter limit. The story breaks into new chapters on its own as it runs, and the commissions, the cons and the techniques do not run out — play a single evening, or keep the same shop going for dozens of chapters.
Do I need other players?
No, it is single-player. The AI plays everyone else in the shop and out on the lane.
Are there stats, combat or branching endings?
None of the three. No numbers, no skill checks, no game over — the only thing that can fail is the garment, and a ruined one is where the next chapter starts.
Is there a Chinese version?
Yes — Simplified Chinese and English, each written for its own readers rather than translated line for line.