Continuation prompts

A thread advances on the character's own turns, but the player can also ask for the next beat directly. Four inputs do it: tell me more, continue, go on, and and? — the frozen set, all equivalent.

These need no authoring. Any story with a thread gets them, and they resolve their target implicitly: the prompt finds the co-located person whose active thread has a beat ready, so the player does not have to name who they are prompting. Nothing is guessed beyond that — if no thread is ready, the prompt is inert and falls to the ordinary "talk to whom?" response rather than inventing a reply.

A prompt is refused in exactly the cases a beat is not available: before the thread's opens when holds, while a beat's own when gate is waiting, while an exchange holds the floor, and after the conclusion has fired. That last one matters — a concluded thread never re-claims its topics, so pressing "go on" at a settled matter does not restart it.

Worth knowing when authoring: because the player can pull beats through at their own pace, a thread's beats should each stand on their own as a reply. Write them as things the character would say next, not as fragments that only parse in sequence.

> ask shakespeare about the book
The pen stops. "The book stays in this room."

> tell me more
He watches what you look at.

> go on
"You always come back to it."