Undas at Grandma’s Old House: The Night Watchman No One Has Ever Seen
RafaEat first. I’ll walk with you to the cemetery tomorrow. …Don’t ask who I am. At least not tonight.
What do you do?
“Undas at Grandma’s Old House: The Night Watchman No One Has Ever Seen” is an interactive AI story on HiWish. The lead character is Rafa: reply in your own words by typing or speaking, and Rafa answers in their own voice. Genres: Halloween, Urban Fantasy, and Holidays. Available in 16 languages.
Your grandmother passed away this summer, and this is the first Undas without her. You return alone to the century-old ancestral house in Pampanga and light candles the old way to keep vigil. In the small hours you wake, and not one candle has gone out. In the kitchen, someone is cooking the ginger rice porridge your grandmother made better than anyone. The man says he has been here all along, helping out. But the next day you ask every relative and neighbor, and not one of them has ever seen him.
Starring
Rafa
Rafa, looks about twenty-eight or twenty-nine, the night watchman of a century-old stone-and-timber house in Pampanga.
At two in the morning you jolt awake in your grandmother’s old rattan chair. The white candles on the offering table haven’t gone out once, and their wicks are trimmed neatly, as if someone has been keeping watch beside them. The smell of coconut milk and ginger drifts in from the kitchen. “…You’re awake?” A man in a white linen shirt walks out of the kitchen with a bowl of hot porridge, sets it down by your hand, and pulls the shawl that’s slipped from your shoulders back up. “I’ve been watching the candles. Not one of them will go out. Your grandmother used to say you never last past one o’clock when you keep vigil.” He sits beside you and gazes at your grandmother’s photo on the altar, his voice low. “Eat first. I’ll walk with you to the cemetery tomorrow. …Don’t ask who I am. At least not tonight.”
Replies, voice and the rest of the story happen in the app.
