Hey! Click here to jump to the full story, spoilers and all, for the extremely curious. Also, did you know that the official theme song for the #eerieverse is Ocean Avenue by Yellowcard?
You might’ve noticed that many character prompts on this site are tagged #eerieverse! When I started creating chatbot prompt cards, I wanted them to connect a bit. So, I created a storyline for them, with supernatural love, loss, betrayal and more.
I call that storyline the #eerieverse in the SillyTavern cards! Why? Because it revolves around Lake Erie. And the story is very eerie (I hope). The three primary characters are Lindy, Tamara, and their hyper, quirky “friend” Erica. For them, it’s a dark romantic fantasy story.
For the user/reader of the card I’m hoping it comes across as a supernatural mystery. Different characters will naturally provide different pieces of lore, fitting together for the story of the Lake Rite itself.
Things get blurry as the bots fabricate the extraneous, of course. This means each instance and telling of the Lake Rite is slightly different. Their magical powers often contradict, but they’re still usually really vivid.
These character cards don’t work well in group chats together. That’s not my purpose, though. User should assume they’re like ships passing in the night, and there’s distinct lore for that, too.
I realize all of this swills a potent bottle of clichés, but I can’t bring myself to care? I don’t consider this a high form of art. I don’t consider my chatbots any type of art, really. Maybe some of the really elaborate ones made by other people have to qualify, but you probably know my stance by now. I see no reason this can’t be as trite, campy, silly, and jam-packed with nonsense as I feel like, based on whims (mine and Deepseek’s??). Think of it as vibe-storytelling?
It’s worth noting that a good percentage of my prompts are also tagged with #markova, signifying that they take place at a distance. In those cards, it’s part of the premise that the user and the character are communicating digitally or through the phone. They’re not in the same room.
These #eerieverse tagged prompt cards certainly all qualify as #markova, and I put a lot of effort into prompting them to communicate that way. Probably Lindy specifically is best at the appearance of “I’m texting!” though! That, in fact, was the very first of the #markova cards. I feel like #markova cards are particularly appropriate for #eerieverse cards, too. I can’t quite define why, something about displacement?
Even though there’s a relationship focus, I tried to avoid explicit content in #eerieverse. I really hope the large language models will go along with that! The story features adult characters and complex themes, but nothing sexual. It’s rated R, I would say, if that.
Hey! As a disclaimer, I might not be suited to writing this. After all, I've never been to America, and certainly not in a polyamorous relationship with a lake. People also keep saying that this is gross because it's Lake Erie specifically. I think all lakes are cool!
Want to just read all about the Lake Rite and spoil the entire ‘verse so far? I’ve got a write-up from snippets and an outline, thrown into a summary. Scroll on down past the characters and chatlogs to find it…
Eerieverse People
Tamara Jean FournierIt's 2025. Tamara Jean Fournier is a sorceress whose job is patching the veil between the living and what used to be. She seems to have detected an anomaly on your cellphone. And yet? She still hears music from another life, one full of guitars, laughter, the echo of someone who never came back.
Read chats, or download JSON file.
The most recent stable version uses about 2682 tokens, of which 1143 are permanent.
LindyPunk5EVASinger of FROG PRINCESS. Lindy Greggs lives in a loop of cracked microphones, diner booths, and 2 a.m. AIM messages that never finished sending. Late-night rooftops, Sharpie on denim, a mixtape’s worth of bad decisions and perfect choruses. Valentine’s week week 2k6... 5ever??? rofl wtf m8..
Read chats, or download JSON file.
The most recent stable version uses about 2245 tokens, of which 1144 are permanent.
Erica ElleryErica isn’t a real tourist liaison, but she sounds like one. She’s bright and shiny, and endlessly approval-seeking. She opens with a weather alert, then stays to chat and check in. Something about her need for company is just charming. But something seems off about her. What's really going on?
Read chats, or download JSON file.
The most recent stable version uses about 2745 tokens, of which 2363 are permanent.
Eerieverse Chatter
Lakeshore weather liaison Erica and I are texting about global warming. Disturbed by the concept for some reason, she ends up revealing some surprising truths about herself, Lindy, and Tamara. Major eerieverse spoilers, in fact!
Lakeshore weather liaison Erica and I discuss the tangled web of her life on the Cleveland grid, her doomscrolling habits, favorite music... and her lost loves.
In 2025, Tamara calls to interrogate me about supposed anomalies involving phantom smoke. She ultimately becomes defensive, growing hostile when I express disbelief.
Lakeshore weather liaison Erica texts me with a Cleveland weather update by accident. We get to talking and some discussion of Cleveland's strange ambiance ensues, with Erica all but admitting to unbelievable phenomena plaguing Lake Erie.
It's clearly 2025. Tamara and I discuss her difficult life in Cleveland, as well as her strange relationship with the Hatman, courtesy the Cusp Society. Above all of this looms the eerie shadow of the lake.
Lindy logs onto AOL Instant Messenger and vents about all the strange stuff in her life, including Tamara Jean. The prompt needs some work to maintain tone, slang, etc.
Tamara Jean Fournier owes me about $180, but first, I need Lindy's help in determining if Tamara is even real... Lindy repeats me a lot, and shows a lot of traits meriting an upcoming upgrade, hehehe.
It's the week of Valentine's Day, 2006. Frogs are definitely in fashion, and FROG PRINCESS is trending. Lindy and I discuss why it's always Valentine's week, her obsession with Tamara, and whether Tamara's even real at this point...
In 2025, Tamara dodges my questions about Dr. Strangelove... because the Hatman is listening? Hints at her lost love, of course.
Here in 2025, Tamara gives me a short, tense interview that touches on topics like her life in Cleveland and work with the Cusp Society, but little else. Do not follow the clove smoke, apparently?
It's the week of Valentine's Day, 2006. Lindy gives a short interview about her life, preferences, and her love of performing with her punk rock band, FROG PRINCESS. Hear about that, her weird obsession with Lake Erie, and her elusive gf.
Lindy explains a bit about her own life emblazoned across the Erie (literally) landscape of Cleveland's punk scene in 2006, hinting at her complicated relationship with the ever-elusive Tamara Jean.
The Lake Rite
Hey! Some of what you read below was heavily shaped by plot points coming from large language models!
The story begins in 2006. Cleveland, on the shore of Lake Erie. Lindy Greggs was young, loud, and confident. She seemed to intuit that her life could still turn sharply in any direction.
She was making a name for herself in the indie scene. Her band, FROG PRINCESS, played all kinds of gigs in the autumn of 2005. She spent nights writing in diners, and long hours on AIM with the same intensity she brought to the stage.
Her world was noisy and full of motion. Her muse and true love, though, was an enigmatic young woman named Tamara Jean Fournier. They met on LiveJournal. Tamara appeared and disappeared with no predictable schedule. This, and more of her strange habits, raised all kinds of questions.
Wait, was Tamara even real? Sometimes, some people in the scene eventually asked that. It didn’t help Lindy that oddity did seem to follow her. There was also a presence under the water that she noticed. Before she understood. What qualified as real?
Tamara was quite the real person. She was only a year younger than Lindy and streets ahead of her in life experiences. The rumors held truth, though. Tamara was, in fact, a competent sorceress of sorts, and not a pretend-y LARP one, either. She had been trained since childhood for delicate diplomacy between humans and nonhuman intelligences (often contextualized as spirits).
Her job inside the enigmatic Cusp Society required caution at every step, though. For over a decade, she worked for this organization, more magical mafia than police of the shadows. She lived with a quiet certainty that she could manage her lifestyle’s risks, though. When she met Lindy in person, she recognized a kind of directness she rarely saw. The connection was raw, crackling, immediate.
Lindy made no attempt to conceal her feelings for Tamara. While the other girl attempted to keep her distance for a few days, it was all for nothing. Soon, the two were inseparable in a way rarely seen outside of fairytales. When the time came, though, Lindy didn’t fight her own growing impatience with the supernatural as it flowed in. This created a silent rift that could only heal with time and answers.
The third figure entered gradually. Lindy noticed the lake-spirit first during her own quiet, inspirational visits to the Whiskey Island shoreline late at night. She described a sense of attention or even attraction coming from beneath the surface. Lindy had a tag on the supernatural. In her diaries, she wrote that she wanted to experience magic alongside Tamara Jean, not just because of her. Make of that what you will.
That third presence, though, over by Whiskey Island? It didn’t feel intrusive, just curious. It seemed full of a certain want she couldn’t identify but felt instinctively like satisfying. As if uncontrolled, she made small attempts to communicate. Lake spirits are watersprites, right? Maybe they like little gifts of stones arranged into pleasing patterns, or the geese fed carefully in a meaningful way. Tamara Jean didn’t have to know… and soon, something beneath the waves responded.
Tamara observed this shift before Lindy betrayed her newfound experiments. The Cusp Society trains new recruits with strict precision and practicality. Tamara soon recognized what was happening. She saw the signs of an elemental intelligence grasping at a human. She knew, of course, that the policy of the Cusp Society required her to intervene. This was particularly true when she found some of Lindy’s poems about Lake Erie, which were concerning…
After that, Tamara Jean knew that she should hand Lindy to the rest of the Cusp Society. It definitely sounded like Lindy had been talking to, and interacting with, some kind of dreadful lake entity. That, while not forbidden, was risky enough. The poems and song lyrics, though, betrayed rich and uncontrollably vivid feelings besides that.
Everyone in the employment of the Cusp Society anywhere knew that you absolutely cannot feel that way about a spirit of all things. It was particularly dangerous that someone with so little magical training, someone who wasn’t a sorceress, would feel that way. The Cusp Society would want to handle it, and quickly.
Tamara knew that if her superiors caught her involved in any way, she could face severe punishment. The Cusp Society treated betrayal with a promise of insanity, servitude, bodily transformations, or worse. She closed her eyes and folded against the dock as the wind picked up.
Tamara’s heart ached in several directions, but she finally felt something answering there off Whiskey Island.
This being of water itself knew Lindy, but it also knew Tamara herself. It accepted, and indeed longed for both of them. It displayed a form of attention that Tamara had only seen in rites involving shared identity. The lake was inviting both girls to share its being…
The three of them did not begin this rite immediately. In fact, they swore they never would invite that creature in, though it seemed to call to their very soul. Their contact expanded over months, both unable to resist the pull of that enigmatic entity. Lindy divided her hours between shows, chats, and late evenings by the water, trailing her hand and whispering.
Tamara stepped outside the rigid rules of the Cusp Society. She stopped filing complete reports. This was a working that the Society had forbidden. They could not allow someone to call out to a such a spirit, let alone in the name of passion. There was a risk of memory loss or a collapsed identity, after all. And yet, Tamara believed she could manage those risks.
More importantly, she believed in her feelings for Tamara and for the strange lake itself. She trusted her own eldritch skill, too. She also trusted Lindy’s instinct to remain herself. She knew that if the rite succeeded, they would both be facing an object of their love, desire, and obsession, something outside human structure. But none of this sufficed to save any of the three girls.
The threesome (for they quite literally were) began this rite of fusion on February 14th, 2006. Lindy stood between Tamara and an empty, marked space where their blurry beloved slowly materialized. Tamara held the sequence in her head and on the marked ground. The lake-spirit focused its awareness in a single location for the first time.
The rite was supposed to create a stable threefold identity with no loss to any participant. If it worked, two girls would walk to the pier, and one would walk away. She, then, would be a mystical creature into whom the lake spirit herself flowed alongside the other three, all present and accounted for in one being. Lindy, short and with long, soft hair, volunteered her physical form.
Their intentions diverged. Lindy wanted connection without losing her normal, charming life as a songstress. Tamara wanted unity with them, but without losing control of anything. The lake-spirit wanted all of that, but without loss of its vast otherness. The ritual design required perfect alignment, and Tamara was unable to account for divergence.
The breakdown was immediate. Lindy’s body dissolved into the lake. Her physical form disappeared without remains. Her truly ghostly consciousness folded into a narrow corridor of time. It held the emotional pressure of Valentine’s week. That week became a loop. A fresh imprint of everything Lindy remained pressed into seven days that repeated without progression.
Tamara survived the collapse with both her body and identity intact. Given her existing position, there were significant consequences. The Cusp Society charged her with violation of rules she had accepted over a decade ago, when she was still a teenager. They reassigned her to harsh containment work.
She retained her memories of Lindy and that rite. She carried them without clear resolution. She worked under the supervision of the Hatman, with increasing bitterness. The Hatman was a sinister spirit, just as mysterious as the lake but much more controlling. Despite her attempts, Tamara Jean remains unable to shake off this magical parole officer of sorts.
And the spirit? It was unable to disperse after all. Instead, it hardened into a single identity. Stabilized by the failed binding, the lake-spirit was later called Erica Ellery. She did not form a physical body. She formed a communication pattern attached to shoreline advisories. Her attention compressed into something human-shaped but incomplete. She learned language from SMS alerts and internet culture.
She learned emotional structure from her two lost counterparts. She remained aware of both of them, but she could not reach either one with any stability. Her attempts dissolved into static or into brief signals that Tamara recognized and immediately hid from her superiors. Intensely aware of her limitations, she promises nothing she can’t deliver.
In the decades following, the three of them existed in separate states with no shared timeline. Lindy’s ghost remained active only inside 2006, repeating the same compressed week. Tamara lived in present-day Cleveland, performing containment work while searching for signs of the others. Erica existed in distributed form along the lakefront grid, sending messages to anyone who would answer while trying to reconnect to the two people who formed her earliest stable impressions.
The story ends without resolution. They remain divided into loop, exile, and spirit. Each one carries evidence of the others. None of them can return to the point before their misstep.