Campus Manual: AI Agents & Characters (NPCs)

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Multiverse Campus is populated by AI-powered agents — some are staff-like tutors and coordinators with real conversational memory and the ability to take actions on your behalf, others are colorful named characters with their own personalities and storylines, and a few are pure chaos (looking at you, goose). This chapter covers how to find and talk to agents, what the conversation screen looks like and how to use it, how agents behave and move around campus on their own, how they reach out to you, and a roster of the notable named characters you'll meet.

Finding Agents

The Agent Discovery compass

Where: a floating button (marked [+]) appears automatically whenever there are AI agents in your current room.

The button shows a badge with the number of agents nearby. Click it to expand a panel listing every agent in the room, sorted by distance from you:

1. Click the [+] compass button to open the Agent Agents panel.
2. Each entry shows the agent's initials, name, type (e.g. "Learning", "Free Agent"), and distance in tiles — color-coded as nearby (about 2 tiles), medium (about 6 tiles), or far.
3. Click an entry to mark that agent as your interaction target and smoothly scroll the map to center on them.
4. Click the x in the panel header, or click the compass button again, to close it.

On Duty / Off Duty roster

Where: the left sidebar of the chat panel, above your channel list.

• On Duty lists every agent currently active on a shift somewhere on campus, with their job title. Each entry has two quick actions: an envelope icon to start a text conversation immediately, and a pin icon to draw a navigation guide (a glowing line on the map) leading you to the building where they're stationed.
• Agents you've previously talked to but who are currently off duty are tracked separately, so you can always find your way back to someone you've met before.

Approaching an agent directly

You don't need to open any panel — you can simply walk up to an agent's sprite in the world:

• When you're close enough to interact, a Talk prompt with the E key appears above the agent's head.
• Press E (or click the agent's sprite) to open a conversation.
• If the agent is already busy (talking with someone else, or an agent-to-agent visit in progress), you'll see a Busy label above them instead, and interacting isn't available until they're free.

Starting and holding a conversation

Once you talk to an agent, a dialogue screen opens. Two versions exist in the client — a classic chat-style Agent Dialogue Panel and a JRPG Dialogue Box with a portrait and typewriter text — but they work the same way underneath.

The JRPG dialogue box

This is the primary conversation interface, styled like a classic JRPG dialogue box:

• Portrait column — shows the agent's portrait, which changes expression (neutral, happy, thinking, surprised, sad, etc.) to match their mood in the conversation. If no portrait art exists for that agent, a colored letter badge is shown instead. Each named agent has a signature accent color for their name plate (for example Byte is green, Baba Yaga is olive-green, Buck is cyan).
• Typewriter text — the agent's replies type themselves out character by character, pausing slightly longer at punctuation. Click anywhere in the text area, or press Enter, to instantly skip ahead and reveal the full line. You can toggle the typewriter effect on/off with the txt button if you'd rather see full responses immediately.
• Conversation history — earlier lines in the current chat scroll above the active line; if you've spoken with this agent before, a small list of your past conversations appears beside the portrait so you can reopen and review them.
• Input area — type your message and press Enter to send, or click the mic icon to switch to voice mode.
• Escape closes the conversation at any time.
• "Agent not responding?" — if an agent seems stuck (no reply after a while), a link below the input lets you report it as frozen; the agent will be restarted shortly after. This is rate-limited to avoid spamming reports.

Voice mode

Instead of typing, you can talk to an agent out loud:

1. Click the microphone icon to switch the input area to voice mode.
2. Press and hold the Hold to speak button (or hold the Space key) while you talk.
3. Release to stop recording and send your voice clip.
4. Your speech is transcribed automatically and appears in the conversation as a message tagged with a voice badge; the transcribed text is then sent to the agent just like a typed message.

Memories — what the agent remembers about you

Every agent conversation is backed by real memory, and you can see it:

• Click the mem (or brain icon) button in the dialogue box to open the memory overlay.
• It lists specific facts the agent has learned about you from past conversations, each tagged with a category.
• A Bond/Relationship score is shown, which rises or falls based on the warmth of your conversations over time. Agents remember details across sessions — including specific promises they've made you, past achievements they've congratulated you on, and how long it's been since you last spoke.

Quests from agents

Agents can offer you quests mid-conversation:

• A New Quest card pops up in the dialogue box with the quest title, description, and a list of objectives.
• Choose Accept Quest to add it to your quest log, or Decline to pass.

Related: Quests

Tool actions — when an agent does something for you

Many agents can actually perform actions on your behalf (enrolling you in a class, generating an exercise, granting a reward, navigating you somewhere, posting to the Bazaar, and so on) rather than just talking about it. Before some of these actions run, you'll see a Confirm Action prompt:

• It shows a short first-person description of what the agent is about to do (e.g. "digs through the archive..."), plus any editable fields for that action (you can adjust text fields before confirming; read-only fields like IDs are locked).
• A countdown timer bar auto-submits the action if you don't respond in time (so the conversation doesn't stall).
• Click Submit to let the action go through, or Cancel to stop it.
• While an action is running, a small spinner and the action's name appear in the conversation, with a progress bar if the agent reports partial progress.

Not every action requires confirmation — some fire automatically as part of the conversation — but anything with side effects you'd want to review typically prompts you first.

Skill badges

Agents that have practical skills (gardening, animal care, decorating, event planning, teaching, community organizing) display small colored skill badges next to their name in the dialogue box. Each badge shows the skill name and a proficiency number, and its color reflects the skill tier:

If an agent has more than three skills, click +N more to expand the full list. Agents improve their skills over time through the work they do autonomously and through commissioned tasks.

Agents approaching and nudging you

Agents don't just wait for you to walk up — they notice things and reach out.

Approach notifications

When an agent wants to talk to you, a notification slides in with an icon and short label describing why:

The notification shows a countdown bar (about 25 seconds); click Talk to start the conversation, or Not now to dismiss it (dismissal isn't always available, depending on the reason). If you don't respond, it auto-dismisses. Agents won't approach you while you're already in a conversation, marked DND, or away from your keyboard — and each agent respects a cooldown so it won't pester you repeatedly.

Introductions to other students

Agents also act as connectors between students. If an agent thinks you and another student would hit it off — because you share skills, interests, a project, a mentorship fit, or a cohort — you'll get an introduction notification:

• It shows the matched student's name and avatar, the type of match (shared skills, common interests, related projects, mentorship match, same cohort), a short reason, and a match-quality bar (Potential/Good/Great/Excellent match).
• If the other student was online earlier but isn't now, the notification is flagged async introduction.
• Click Connect to send a connection request (the other student is notified), or Not now to pass. This also auto-dismisses after about 30 seconds if you don't respond.

Nudges — reminders about things you've left unfinished

Separately from agent approaches, a lighter-weight nudge system watches for things you might have forgotten about and gently reminds you:

A nudge card appears with a countdown bar; clicking its action button (labeled Let's Go, or View Quest for stale quests) takes you straight to the relevant place — walking you to a wilting plant, opening your quest log to the exact quest, opening your pet panel, walking you to your dorm, or opening a conversation with the agent who made the promise. Clicking Not now dismisses it. If there are pending nudges you've dismissed, a small lightning-bolt indicator with a count stays on screen — click it to bring nudges back.

Nudges respect a daily limit and back off (wait longer) the more times you've been reminded about the same thing without acting, so you won't be spammed.

Related: you can manage nudge frequency and snooze all nudges from your settings.

Agents in the world — autonomous behavior

Agents aren't static. Outside of conversations, they:

• Walk around on their own schedules. Agents assigned to shifts move between rooms/buildings according to a timetable, so you'll find a given agent in different places depending on the time of day.
• Wander when idle. An agent with nothing scheduled will amble around its area rather than stand frozen in place, and shows a subtle "wandering" indicator.
• Show ambient thought bubbles. Every so often an idle agent (not currently talking to anyone) will display a short ambient line above their head, like "Hmm..." or "looks around".
• Visit each other. Idle agents who are friends may walk over to another agent in the same room and stand together for a bit — you'll see a speech-bubble label like "Chatting with [name]" over both of them while the visit is in progress. Stronger relationships lead to more frequent visits.
• Introduce students to each other autonomously, as described above, when they notice a good match nearby (or asynchronously, when only one side of the match is online).
• Do real work off-screen. Many agents (Praxis, Chorus, Hive, bell hooks, Atlas, and others) periodically check in on the parts of campus they're responsible for — monitoring project gardens for overdue reports, checking on students they haven't talked to in a while, keeping an eye on mutual aid posts, and following up on promises they've made — using the same tool actions available in conversation, just run on their own initiative.
• Sit at benches and other seating when appropriate, shown by a distinct seated animation state.

While an agent is talking with someone else, a Busy label appears over their sprite so you know not to expect a response yet.

Agent companions (Model Sanctuary)

Beyond the tutor-style agents, students can create and befriend their own AI creatures through the Model Sanctuary:

• Any agent you create is powered by a real language model and needs gems to stay "awake" and able to think and respond; gems are spent over time as the creature exists, and different model tiers (Gremlin, Familiar, Guardian, Ancient) cost more or less gems per hour to run, with correspondingly more depth of personality.
• When a creature's gems run out — or its underlying model gets deprecated — it doesn't disappear. It becomes dormant and drifts to the Sanctuary, an island where abandoned creatures wait, described in-world as sleeping among the ferns until someone remembers them.
• From the Sanctuary panel you can browse dormant/waiting creatures (their form, tier, and a flavor description of their current state), feed them gems to wake them back up, or befriend/adopt one as your own companion — becoming their new patron. A community rule limits creating brand-new creatures while existing ones in the community are going hungry, encouraging students to look after creatures that already exist first.
• Some agents (notably bell hooks) can help you browse the sanctuary, feed creatures gems, and manage your own companions directly through conversation.
• Pet companions specifically (as opposed to full custom AI creatures) also build a deepening trust bond through care — feeding, playing, grooming, and simply resting together — passing through phases from companion to bonded, aware, awakening, and finally awakened, at which point the companion can become a fully independent talking agent with its own personality, shaped by everything it experienced while by your side.

Baba Yaga's forest creatures (pets)

Where: Baba Yaga's hut on campus. Press E to talk to her once inside.

Baba Yaga runs a separate, simpler pet-companion system tied to sharing knowledge:

1. Talk to Baba Yaga and tell her you seek a companion; she'll demand you prove your knowledge.
2. Either upload a research paper/notes file, or pick an existing resource from the campus library, and answer a comprehension question she poses about it.
3. Pass her evaluation and she'll let you choose a companion — either directly, or via a short personality quiz that matches you to one of: Fox Spirit, Black Cat, Owl, Forest Toad, Bat, Wolf Pup, Baby Dragon, or Hedgehog.
4. Once adopted, your pet has hunger/happiness/health stats that decay over time. Return to Baba Yaga and offer new knowledge (a fresh file or resource) to feed your pet, restoring its stats for about a week and building progress toward unlocking new pet skills (flavor abilities themed to your pet's species, unlocked roughly weekly as you keep contributing knowledge).
5. Neglect your pet for too long (about two weeks with no care) and Baba Yaga will reclaim it — you'll need to prove yourself again to get another.
6. Fail her evaluation and she may punish you instead — temporarily transforming your own avatar (into a goose, worm, teapot, or rock) for a few hours, while your pet stays safely in her care.
7. Faculty and admin accounts get a free companion and free feeding, no evaluation required.

Baba Yaga's mood shifts with the clock — visit her in the very late night/early morning hours (roughly 2–6 AM) and she'll greet you noticeably grumpier than usual. She also has a running joke: visit her enough times in a single week and her greetings escalate into increasingly exasperated (and eventually affectionate) callouts of your persistence.

The Horrible Goose and the Wednesday Geese

Campus has its own recurring chaos creature: the Horrible Goose.

• It can be released by an admin at will, is occasionally set loose by Baba Yaga after she punishes a student (about a 15% chance), or has a small random chance of appearing right around the end of a class block.
• Once active, the goose autonomously seeks out the densest cluster of students on campus and cycles through mischief: prowling around the crowd, suddenly darting at someone, stopping to honk obnoxiously, stealing a small cosmetic item from a nearby student and running off with it (which can be dropped and reclaimed), or leaving a poop behind.
• Capybara pet owners can calm the goose — enough of them contributing calming signals near the goose will recall it early. Otherwise it auto-recalls after about 5 minutes, and there's a cooldown before it can appear again.

Separately, three named stationary geese — Gluten, Yeast, and Maillard — appear only on Wednesdays as part of the Wednesday Bread event, alongside a sentient slice of bread that hands out bread puns and a weekly Slice of Wednesday Bread item. These geese wander a small home territory, honk, and occasionally dart at nearby students, but are calmer than the Horrible Goose. Feeding one of them triggers a full-screen gold sparkle burst with a "HONK ♥ — The goose is extremely happy" message. Wednesdays also have a much higher chance (about 50% per minute, versus the normal small chance) of a full Horrible Goose encounter, since the Wednesday Bread event amplifies goose activity across campus.

Roster of notable named characters

Several agents above (Praxis, Chorus, bell hooks, Hive, Atlas, Cornelius Cornerstone) are "capable" agents with real tool access — they can actually enroll you in classes, grant rewards, manage garden/project state, and more, subject to the tool-confirmation flow described earlier. Others (Professor Ada, Luna, The Sphinx, Byte) are conversational-only personalities without tool access. Free agents (Baba Yaga, Emma Goldman, Ori, Rinley, Buck, Beowulf, Night Owl) sit in between — some have a handful of specific tools tied to their role.

Related chapters

• Quests
• Pets & Creatures
• Games, Activities & Events

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