Wait

A wait beat holds the script still. It is the pacing tool: a gap before a reveal, a moment for a sound effect to land, a page break in a long monologue.

Fields

ms is a positive integer number of milliseconds. Milliseconds are the only duration unit in Narratomi, so a wait, a choice timeout and an audio fade are all spelled the same way. The editor row is a picker reading "for click" or "for ms", plus a number field when you choose the latter. Switching to "for ms" starts you at 1000; clearing or mistyping the field clamps back to 1.

What the runtime does while it waits

The player rests on the beat. Nothing else runs: a wait is not a hold, so the stage keeps doing whatever it was already doing (looping music, an animation started by a parallel stage beat), but no further beat in this scene is read until the wait ends.

The transcript shows a lone ellipsis while a wait is on screen, so a reader scrolling back can see that the silence was authored.

ms: the player sets a timer and advances itself when it fires. A click does not shorten it. Pausing the story stops the clock, so a reader who opens the pause menu mid-wait does not come back to a story that ran on without them.

click: the story sits there until the reader taps or clicks. If a line was still revealing when they clicked, that click finishes the line and the next one advances past the wait.

Auto-advance does not apply. It only runs on line beats, so a wait means what it says even for a reader who has turned auto on.

Where wait beats can live

At the top level of a scene, and inside a choice option's inline body. Inside a body they edit with the same two controls.

When not to use one

A wait is a fixed number that you guessed. Two better tools exist for the cases people usually reach for it:

• Waiting out a clip or a sound. Leave the stage beat's parallel unchecked. The beat itself holds the script until the action resolves, with no duration hard-coded anywhere. See Stage.
• Giving the reader time to decide. That is a choice with a timeout, which shows a countdown and takes a default option when it lapses. See Choice.

Example

From the walkthrough's beats chapter, a pause used as punctuation:

line   The wait beat pauses the script, for a duration or for a click.
       Here is a one-and-a-half-second wait:
wait   for ms  1500
line   ...that gap was authored. Pacing is a beat too.