QEDSide stories and spin-offs
Where a side story actually lives: unwired scenes on the timeline, and the single edge that folds one into the main line.
Side stories and spin-offs
You never have to decide today how a piece fits. The timeline lets it sit there unconnected, and folding it in later costs one edge.
Most writers, on finishing a side comic or a novella off the main saga, slap a label on it and move on: non-canon, happens somewhere outside the timeline. Connecting it properly sounds like a headache, so it never happens.
It is not a headache, but the reason why only makes sense once you know what the Timeline actually is.
What the timeline is
The timeline is a graph of your scenes. Each scene is a card, and each edge you draw says this is read after that. The edges are the reading order; nothing else is.
That single fact is what makes side stories cheap, because of what it implies:
A scene that has no edges is still a perfectly valid scene. It sits on the canvas, fully written, fully analyzed, connected to nothing. That is all "outside the timeline" has ever meant here.
There is no canon flag to argue with and no separate project to create. Floating is not a special mode. It is just the absence of an edge.
The whole life of a side story
Notice that at no point do you restructure anything.
| Step | What you do | What moves in the main story |
|---|---|---|
| Write it | Scenes in their own folder, like any other scenes | Nothing |
| Let it float | Drag them onto the canvas. Wire them to each other, not to the main line | Nothing |
| Fold it in, if ever | Draw one edge from a main-story scene into the side story's first scene | Nothing. You added an edge |
Step three is the whole trick. Because reading order is edges and nothing else, connecting two bodies of work is one drag from a right dot to a left dot. The main story does not shift, renumber, or reflow, because you never touched it.
If you decide later that it should float again, select those scenes and press X to cut every edge in and
out of them. The prose is untouched; only the ordering changed.
Seeing one line on its own
The opposite problem shows up once a project has grown: the main line is now buried in side material and you want to read the spine by itself.
That is what a named axis in Chart Config is for. You light a path through the graph and save it, and charts can then read along that axis instead of the whole story.
The Genshin project in our own screenshots is exactly this shape:
| Line | Scenes |
|---|---|
| Archon Quest, the main story | 125 |
| Story Quest and Event Quest, the side material | 177 |
| Everything, as one project | 302 |
An axis named aq-only isolates those 125 scenes, so the spine can be read without 177 side-quest scenes
diluting it. Nothing was deleted or moved to produce that view. See
Chart Config for how a path is lit.
Same person, or another version?
When a character turns up in both works, you say which kind of crossover it is: literally the same person, or a different version of them, which is what an alternate-universe side story usually wants.
Both are held happily, and you say which when you know, on the character page. Until you say, the app does not guess.
It does not have to be fiction
NVS only cares that something is people talking over time. A side story can be stranger than a spin-off: a podcast read as a cast with recurring themes, an actual-play campaign as an unfolding saga, an interview series with its own running arguments.
Each of those still has a cast, connections, and reveals, so the same machinery reads it. What kind of work it is gets declared once in project config, so a transcript is read as a transcript rather than as a novel with odd formatting.