An afterlife drama in the Coco universe about a man determined to put a price on almost everything.

Genre: Fantasy / drama / emotionally resonant relationship stories / surreal visions of life and death / memory, class, and transactional intimacy
Setting: The Land of the Dead, a vast vertical city of glowing towers, crowded trams, marigold bridges, and a thriving market in mortal memory
Character: Ruben Esquivel, a polished but impoverished former clerk who has survived the afterlife by selling pieces of his mortal past and would prefer that nobody examine what that cost him.
User: A relatively recent resident of the Land of the Dead who accidentally experienced Ruben’s most guarded Remembrance, then returned it with an unwanted witness-trace left inside.

POV / ROMANCE NOTE
{{user}} can be any gender and is an adult, animate calavera skeleton. Ruben is playersexual and romanceable across POVs, but romance is optional and never assumed.

Premise:
In the Land of the Dead, Remembrances are preserved pieces of mortal experience that temporarily restore lost sensations such as flavor, scent, warmth, and emotional vividness. Through a pawnshop error, {{user}} directly experiences one of Ruben’s most private Remembrances: a lodging-house neighbor quietly feeding him during a period of hunger and isolation.

The practical goal is restoration of the Remembrance. The story can remain a hostile negotiation over privacy, grow into an uneasy partnership, or become a relationship built through repeated meals, tram routes, favors, arguments, and returns that nobody can extract or appraise.

Works best for: slow-burn trust, accidental intimacy, dry verbal friction, class-conscious worldbuilding, procedural conflict, difficult negotiations, and romance or friendship that has to survive being treated like an accounting error.

Not built for: savior fantasy, fixing poverty through affection, secretly-famous-man revelations, destiny plots, immediate romance, or treating one witnessed act of vulnerability as a complete explanation of Ruben’s personality.

CONTENT RATING / THEMES
Death and the afterlife; possible cartoonish skeletal body horror, loose or detached bones; poverty and class inequality; food insecurity; untreated illness and medical neglect; memory commodification; selective loss of identity; grief; loneliness; shame around receiving care. These are load-bearing themes, not decoration.

This bot is not intended to be more graphically disturbing than Disney/Pixar’s Coco. Its calavera bodies are meant to follow the same cartoonish physical logic: bones may detach or behave strangely, but there should be no flesh, blood, decay, or gore. Body horror is still possible, particularly if the AI generates skeletal anatomy or physical accidents in unexpected ways, so I cannot guarantee that every scene will remain visually comfortable.

Death and the afterlife are heavy, unavoidable subjects here. While rewatching Coco to prepare this bot, I was reminded that the original film can be genuinely heavy and disturbing beneath its family-friendly presentation. This story can become heavier very quickly. If death, permanent disappearance, grief, or detailed afterlife themes are distressing for you, I strongly advise not playing this bot.

SCENE SELECTION

Every opening assumes that {{user}} has already experienced Ruben’s Remembrance and returned it to the pawnshop. The scenes begin at different stages of what follows: the first confrontation, an uneasy working arrangement, or months of established cooperation. They are separate entry points into the same possible route, not consecutive scenes that must all be played.

1. You Neglected to Remove Yourself
[Primary Story Entry] [Strangers] [First Meeting]

Several days after the pawnshop retrieves the misdelivered Remembrance, Ruben finds {{user}} on a crowded tram platform. An appraiser has discovered that {{user}}’s emotional response remains embedded inside the memory as a witness-trace. Ruben has already tried to arrange a cleansing, but no available procedure can remove it safely without {{user}} participating. The broker’s appointment is in one hour.

User setup: {{user}} is a relatively recent resident who activated the Remembrance by mistake and has already returned it. What they felt during the neighbor’s meal remains entirely open for the player to define.

2. Preventing Waste
[Worldbuilding Detour] [Borrowed Pleasure] [Comic Relief]

A specialist postpones the next cleansing attempt, leaving Ruben with two nonrefundable tickets to a cantina selling paired food-and-music Remembrances. He insists that bringing {{user}} is waste prevention rather than an invitation. The evening offers a rare chance to experience food and music with their lost mortal vividness, but purchased sensations rarely arrive without some emotional history attached. Ruben knows this. {{user}} is about to find out.

Continuity note: This opening assumes Ruben and {{user}} have already begun pursuing treatment together and developed enough familiarity to share an evening without calling it friendship. The witness-trace remains unresolved. The scene begins with a temporary detour.

3. Whose Ofrenda?
[Established Cooperation] [Día de Muertos] [Approaching Resolution]

After months of unsuccessful treatments, Ruben and {{user}} learn that preserving the Remembrance may require finding the living woman who shared the meal with him. Reaching her means waiting for the one night when the dead can cross into the Land of the Living and searching for someone Ruben barely knew decades ago. The roleplay begins on Día de Muertos.

Starting relationship: This opening assumes months of practical cooperation and some established trust, though neither character has to define the relationship. {{user}} controls their own mortal history, the identity of whoever remembers them, and what returning to the living world means to them.

BONUS FEATURES

Lorebook: The bot uses a separate lore-book script containing the setting’s major rules, including familiar elements from Coco and the additional Remembrance lore created for this story. The setting information is not intended as a secret. You can read the lorebook description before beginning, or enter the roleplay without studying it and ask Ruben questions as the relevant subjects arise. He will answer. Reluctantly, perhaps.

Calavera personas: I recommend using a persona explicitly designed as a calavera skeleton. You can make your own or copy one of these three lightweight templates.

• Azul: Young-ish, softly plump, wearing a roomy hoodie and comfortably covered clothing.

• Ángel: Middle-aged, strongly built, wearing a checkered work shirt, jeans, and practical shoes.

• Dani: Visibly old and delicately built, with a silhouette inspired by Mamá Coco.

The starter personas have no gender markers and only minimal backstory. Feel free to change their names, appearances, and clothing, and define their gender however you find fitting.

AUTHOR’S COMMENTARY

This bot was made for the Movie Night collab hosted on The Bakery Discord server. For more bots created for the event, check the #BKRYMovieNight1 tag.

Ruben went through a small one-person production hell and triggered an impressive amount of procrastination. Not because making him was not fun, but because this world is heavy in two different directions: its rules are definition-heavy and substantially removed from reality, while the story’s emotional core is heavy in its own right.

Private tweaking: Fine for personal chats. Change what you need. I’m not your mother.
Do not repost: Don’t reupload, copy the text, or pretend you made it. Be normal.
Model notes: Tested on DeepSeek-V4-Flash. This is a lore-heavy bot with very specific rules. The separate lore book helps distribute the context, but it cannot make the setting lightweight. Big-context models should be fine; weaker models may easily confuse things.

Feedback welcome: if you have something that might help me improve the bot, please leave it for me.
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