The Specials area is a shelf of curated, produced editions built on top of existing stories. A normal story is generated as you read it. A special is assembled ahead of time by an admin into something new: a comic, a fully illustrated edition, a narrated audiobook, a scored reading, a picture book.Five kinds ship today. Every one of them publishes what it actually cost to produce, down to the credit.
A special always wraps an existing story rather than replacing it. The source story keeps its own page, its own author and its own rules: nothing about how it reads, who wrote it, or who may extend it changes because a special was built on top of it.Specials are admin-produced. You cannot build one yourself, and you can request one: any story of yours, or any public story, can be sent in as an order from the Specials page.
The five kinds: Comic, Choice Images, Audiobook, Scored reading and Picture book
Comic wraps a story and renders its chapters as illustrated comic pages, panel by panel. The source story's text stays free to read exactly as it always did. Only the comic layer sits behind premium. It comes in three versions: Short comic is one or two pages per chapter, a quick summary for a reader who already knows the story. Full comic is about thirty pages per chapter, expanded with the reactions and quiet moments the prose only implies, reading like a printed comic issue on its own. Screen comic carries the same amount of art as Full, spread over about fifty-five narrower pages so each one fits a phone or tablet screen without zooming.Choice Images is a fully illustrated edition: every chapter carries its own image, and so does every individual choice branching from it. Here the whole edition is premium, source story included.Audiobook is a narrated production of a story, added in v0.16.2. It has no chapters and no reader route, because the recording is the content: the player sits on the special's own page and starts there.Scored reading, added in v0.18, pairs a chapter's text with sound and music cues an admin placed and approved. The chapter reveals one beat at a time as you read, each beat firing its own cue, so nothing plays ahead of where you actually are.Picture book, added in v0.18, turns a chapter into five to twenty pages, each one wide illustration and one short line meant to be read aloud to a child of four to eight. The reader goes fullscreen, a page turns with a swipe or an arrow key, and every page carries a Things to find list for the adult, so the picture stays interesting after the line is read. The story text underneath stays exactly as it was.
The Specials table filters by kind, so jump straight to Comic, Choice Images, Audiobook, Scored reading or Picture book instead of scrolling past the others.
Listening to an audiobook
An audiobook special opens on its own page with the player already in place. It is the browser's native audio player on purpose: you get the scrubber, the volume, the playback-speed menu and your phone's lock-screen controls without us reinventing any of them. Seeking works properly too, because the file is streamed in ranges rather than downloaded whole.Productions that were mastered twice offer a Voice only and a With music & effects switch above the player. Both are the same recording, so switching mid-sentence keeps your position and lands you on the same sentence with the background layer added or removed. When only one mix exists, no switch renders at all.
Audiobooks carry no bookmarks. Nothing chapter-shaped exists in a single recording, so there is no per-chapter mark to set. Your player position is the only place to pick up from.
What's free, what needs premium
The Specials area is premium. Since 2026-08-22 that includes the browse table and each special's own start page, not just the produced content: everything inside it is something only a premium account can use, so anonymous visitors and free accounts are routed to the Premium page instead, where the area is described and the upgrade lives.One thing stays free regardless. A Comic special never touches the story underneath it, so those chapters keep reading exactly as before for everyone, premium or not.
While the beta runs, premium is a single click at no cost from the Account tab of User Settings. See credits and premium .
What it actually cost to make
Every special's start page shows a cost card split into text credits and image credits, next to a short editorial note on how the piece was produced. These are settled figures from a per-special production ledger. A generation step that fails and gets fully refunded leaves nothing behind on that ledger, so the number you see is real spend, never an estimate.An audiobook is the honest exception. Narration is produced outside the app, so its credit totals read zero and the editorial note carries the real production story instead. Zero credits there means no in-app generation happened, not that the piece was free to make.Publishing the true cost is deliberate groundwork: voting and donating toward what gets made next are designed but not built yet, and the published numbers are what that future funding model will be built on.
Ordering a special
The Commission a special button on the Specials page opens the request form. It is the only entry point: a story's own page no longer advertises ordering. Pick the story from your bookmarks, from your own recent stories, or by searching every story by title, then pick the kind and fill in the options that kind offers, including a dedication, whether the finished piece is visible to other premium users at a discount, and an optional gift recipient.Comic and Picture book orders choose how much reference work the production aims for: none, one sheet per character and scene, or as many as needed. A sheet is drawn once and reused so the same face comes back on every page, and the count is taken from your story's own cast, so the live price estimate follows the choice straight away. Comic, Picture book and Audiobook orders also choose what you get back, from numbered images, a PDF, a CBZ archive, an MP3 or an M4B audiobook. Choice Images and Scored reading offer no format at all, because both are read inside the app. A Comic order also carries a version card for each of Short, Full and Screen, each with its own description, its own link to a published example special and what that example's own chapter cost in credits, and its own price. Audiobook orders ask instead whether you want background music and sound effects, and show Custom, quoted by email where the estimate would be. A Scored reading order shows the same Custom, quoted by email line - placing and approving cues is per-story work, so a fixed rate table would only mislead you there too. A Picture book order is priced per page: longer chapters make more pages and cost more, and the form shows the page count its chapters will produce. Comic and Picture book orders can also tick Print without the Infinite Story credit lines for a flat 15 EUR on top of the estimate, added after the in-app discount: the printed credit lines on the back cover, the title card and the colophon go, while the AI disclosure stays in the file's metadata, which is never removed.A Picture book order also shows a real sample: a finished print export you can download and open, with the exact settings it was built with listed next to it, such as trim, binding, colour profile and the text layer. The same sample shows up on that sample book's own public page too. Every setting on the card is a choice you get to make on this form.
The image model refuses violent, drug-related or explicit passages. Such scenes are toned down, replaced or omitted, and a story built around them may not be possible as a comic. We tell you before any work starts. Use the order form's content notes field to flag any passage you are worried about.
Every Comic order needs the example opened first. Below the version cards sits a checkbox confirming you have looked at the example for the version you picked and know the comic is drawn by an AI at the quality it shows - the form will not submit a Comic order until it is ticked.
Any number on screen is a rough estimate. Submitting sends the request by email and asks for an exact quote. Nothing is ordered or charged in the app itself.
The audiobook block also links to our public production walk-through, which shows how one of these is actually made. It is worth a look before ordering the one kind with no in-app sample and no in-app price. We reply from [email protected] with the real price and next steps. If a gift recipient does not have an account yet, we sort out access by hand once the piece is made.
Finding the Specials area
Premium accounts in Advanced experience mode carry a Specials entry in the sidebar. Simple mode keeps the sidebar to the essentials and leaves it out, and the address still opens the area directly if you follow a link into it.Accounts without premium see a Premium entry there instead. That page is where the area is explained and where the upgrade happens, and it is the one destination every premium-only surface routes to.Switch modes from Switch to Advanced near the top of the app, or back from Advanced the same way, at any time.
Best practices
Use the kind filter on the Specials table rather than scanning the whole list for a Comic, a Choice Images edition, an Audiobook, a Scored reading or a Picture book.
Read the cost card and the editorial note before deciding what to order. They tell you what a piece of this size really takes.
Add notes to an order rather than leaving them out. Anything about the story's tone or what you have in mind helps the exact quote match what you actually want.
Watch the production walk-through linked in the audiobook block before ordering one. It is the closest thing to a sample of what you will get.
Remember a Comic never touches its source story's text: reading the original chapters stays free for everyone, whatever the special costs.
Under the hood
Specials live in their own table, wrapping a source story by reference rather than a flag on the story itself. The wrapped story is never altered, and for Comic its text stays on the normal, unlocked read path.Production cost is an append-only ledger keyed to the special, summed live into text and image totals on the start page. Only settled amounts are recorded, so a fully refunded failure records nothing. An audiobook records nothing at all, because its production never ran through the app's generation pipeline.The premium content gate is a small, composable check used by every kind's content route. Since 2026-08-22 the browse list and the start pages sit behind it too, and a visitor the server does not answer `unlocked` for is redirected to /app/premium rather than shown a locked control.Audio is served by a route that hands the file to the browser with range support, so the player can seek without downloading everything first. The variant you pick is a fixed token that maps to a filename on our side; nothing you type ever becomes part of a path.Audio responses are marked private in their cache headers. Premium bytes must not end up in a shared cache, which is why they are not cached the way the public image layer is.An order is not stored anywhere in the app. It is emailed straight to our production address, and that email is the only record. Nothing about it moves a credit or opens an admin queue. The estimate shown for a Comic comes from a fixed rate table; an Audiobook has no such table and says so.The sidebar entry is gated to premium accounts in Advanced experience mode, but the route carries its own server-side gate, so a direct link is checked the same way whichever mode you are in.