Aronnax-N9Bv2-1.0

Aronnax-N9Bv2-1.0

A fine-tuned narrative prose model based on NVIDIA Nemotron Nano 9B v2, trained with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) on literary fiction to deliver immersive, character-driven storytelling.

Quick Start

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("Mitchins/Aronnax-N9Bv2-1.0", 
                                              device_map="auto")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("Mitchins/Aronnax-N9Bv2-1.0")

prompt = """You are an expert storyteller. Continue the following SHORT SCENE with emotional depth.

PLACE: A quiet café. PROTAGONIST: An ex trying to decide if she trusts him again. STAKES: One wrong word ends everything.

Scene: She looked at him across the table, really looked at him. His fingers traced the rim of his coffee cup. Her breath caught."""

inputs = tokenizer(prompt, return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)
outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=200, temperature=0.7)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0]))

Performance vs Base

What's Different

Aronnax is fine-tuned on preference pairs from literary fiction (noir, fantasy, intimate prose). The result:

• More sensory detail. Base stays abstract; Aronnax anchors scenes in breath, hands, weight, temperature.
• Better subtext. Dialogue carries implication; characters reveal through what they don't say.
• Charged silence. Tension and micro-movements instead of exposition.
• Stronger on voice. World feels lived-in; barkeep vs. soldier vs. detective each sound distinct.

---

Example Outputs

All examples below are real, unedited model outputs generated from transparent prompts. Each prompt includes:

1. Instruction (role definition)
2. Grounding (place, protagonist, stakes)
3. Narrative opening (scene setup)

War/Combat — Tactical Realism & Sensory Detail

Prompt Structure:

Instruction: You are an expert storyteller. Continue the following SHORT SCENE 
with tactical realism and sensory detail.

Grounding: PLACE: Trench in a contested valley. PROTAGONIST: A soldier with 
seconds to decide. STAKES: His squad depends on the next choice—advance or hold.

Scene: The soldier crouched behind the bunker, ears ringing from the blast. 
Smoke filled the trench. His hands were shaking. He had seconds to decide—fight 
or fall back. The next moment would define everything.

Base (Nemotron):

The earth shook beneath him. More shells fell, pounding the ridge line. He heard screaming to his left—Martinez, maybe. Or Garcia. The smoke was too thick to see. His rifle felt heavier than before, or maybe his arms were just tired. The bunker offered some protection, but not much. In a moment, the bombardment might stop, and the enemy would come pouring over the ridge.

He looked at his watch. 0847 hours. In thirteen minutes, reinforcements would arrive from the valley below. But would they make it? Could they hold that long? The answer came from deeper in the trench: one of his squad leaders was calling his name, insistent, desperate.

"Sarge! We've got movement on the ridge!"

Exactly what he'd feared.

Aronnax:

His radio crackled—static, then nothing. The line was down. Around him, the others were in their positions: Chen behind the eastern sandbag wall, Martinez pressed low in the corner, their medic hovering uselessly five yards back. The shelling had stopped. That was worse. It meant the assault was coming.

The next decision would cost them. He could hold the position and hope reinforcements came through. Or he could order them out, scatter into the ravine behind them. But scattering meant exposed ground, and exposed ground meant picked off one by one.

He thought of Chen's hands shaking as bad as his own. He thought of Martinez, who had a daughter back home. He thought of holding ground.

"Fix bayonets," he said quietly. "They come over the ridge, we don't break."

---

Noir/Detective — Sharp Dialogue & Subtext

Prompt Structure:

Instruction: You are an expert storyteller. Continue the following SHORT SCENE 
with sharp dialogue and subtext.

Grounding: PLACE: A detective's office, rain outside, alone. PROTAGONIST: A worn 
investigator who knows she's lying but doesn't know why. STAKES: Whatever she 
came to confess could cost him everything.

Scene: The rain hammered the office windows. She sat across from him, jaw tight, 
fingers worrying the strap of her purse. Neither had spoken in minutes. The 
silence had weight.

Base (Nemotron):

He lit a cigarette, though the office was supposed to be smoke-free. The policy had never mattered much when it was just him and the cold cases stacked in the filing cabinets. He'd seen her type before: people on the edge, about to jump or pull back. The ones who came to him usually jumped.

"You've been coming here a long time," she finally said. "Three weeks? Four?"

She wasn't asking. She was establishing a timeline. He set his cigarette in the ashtray.

"I came when I was ready to talk," she continued. "But I'm not sure I am anymore."

She leaned forward slightly, and he caught her scent—something expensive and careful, like she'd prepared for this conversation.

Aronnax:

He didn't ask why she'd come. That was the trick with people like this—let them fill their own silence. She would spill everything eventually.

"I can't go to the police," she said finally. "They'll bury it. Or—" She stopped, her jaw working.

"Or what?"

"Or they already know."

That changed things. He stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette and leaned back in his chair, studying her. If the police already knew, then she wasn't confessing. She was warning him.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Does it matter?"

"It will."

She met his eyes for the first time. Fear, not guilt. That was new.

---

Intimate Prose — Emotional Depth & Micro-Movements

Prompt Structure:

Instruction: You are an expert storyteller. Continue the following SHORT SCENE 
with emotional depth and micro-movements.

Grounding: PLACE: A quiet café, intimate table, no one listening. PROTAGONIST: 
She's an ex trying to decide if she trusts him again. STAKES: One wrong word 
ends everything.

Scene: She looked at him across the table, really looked at him. His fingers 
traced the rim of his coffee cup. Her breath caught. The moment hung—fragile, 
unsayable.

Base (Nemotron):

The barista walked past their table, the clink of a milk pitcher echoing in the silence. He glanced over, then back to his task, as though they weren't there. She wanted to speak so badly it felt like her ribs might fracture from the effort. Instead, her throat tightened, and she stared at the condensation pooling on his mug's rim—the way it dripped down in slow, deliberate drops.

"I've missed you," he said quietly. The admission seemed to cost him something.

She wanted to believe him. That was the worst part—this wanting. It burned in her chest like a small coal she couldn't extinguish. She reached across the table, but stopped short of his hand. Close enough to feel his warmth, but not close enough to commit.

"Have you?" she whispered.

Aronnax:

She leaned back slightly, her elbow resting on the chair's armrest. His thumb brushed the inside of his cup as if reassuring himself it was still there. Still here, she thought. Still real. But the warmth in his hand mirrored nothing but the cold in hers—the way her pulse thrummed beneath her collarbone, steady and unsteady all at once.

He spoke first, which meant he was desperate: "I didn't think you'd come."

"Neither did I." Her voice was smaller than she wanted. "But I couldn't—I needed to see if..." She trailed off, unable to finish the sentence. If you're still the person I loved. If I can forgive you. If I can live with this.

His eyes were softer now. Tired. She noticed the gray at his temples that wasn't there before, the way his shoulders held less certainty. The way he looked at her like he was memorizing her face.

---

Fantasy Tavern — World Detail & Character Voice

Prompt Structure:

Instruction: You are an expert storyteller. Continue the following SCENE with 
world detail and character voice.

Grounding: PLACE: The Rusty Griffin, a worn tavern that's survived centuries. 
PROTAGONIST: A veteran barkeep who's seen every kind of trouble walk through that 
door. STAKES: This visitor is different—dangerous.

Scene: The Rusty Griffin had seen three centuries of war. I'd been tending bar 
here for twenty years. The door swung open. A cloaked figure stepped in—snow 
melting off their shoulders, eyes scanning the room like they were looking for 
someone. Or running from someone.

Base (Nemotron):

The patrons—three merchants and an old soldier in the corner—didn't look up. Good. The fewer eyes on the newcomer, the better. I knew that look. I'd seen it before, years back when the frontier was still wild and desperate men passed through looking for work. This one was different, though. Controlled. Patient.

I poured a mug of mead without being asked and set it on the bar.

"You'll want to sit in the back," I said quietly, jerking my chin toward the shadows. "Away from the windows."

The figure lowered their hood just enough for me to see dark eyes and a scarred jaw—a woman, then. The scar was fresh.

Aronnax:

I kept pouring. The regular—old Hendrick, who'd been nursing the same ale for three hours—didn't flinch. Neither did the merchants arguing about wool tariffs. But I felt it: the way the air had shifted, how every drunk and card player in the Rusty Griffin had registered the arrival without looking.

She moved to the bar with the kind of grace that came from practice. Not nobility—something else. Training. Military, maybe, or worse.

"Whiskey," she said. "The oldest you have."

I slid her a glass of amber liquid without comment. Twenty years of the Rusty Griffin had taught me this: don't ask questions. Don't offer names. Don't remember faces. But I'd remember this one.

She drank it in one pull and ordered another. "There's someone coming after me," she said to her reflection in the glass. "Fair warning. They'll ask about a woman. Dark cloak. Alone."

I nodded. The merchant faction? The Crown? An old vendetta? It didn't matter.

"There's no one like that here," I said, and meant it.

---

D&D Exploration — Atmospheric Dread & Discovery

Prompt Structure:

Instruction: You are an expert storyteller. Continue the following SCENE with 
atmospheric dread and discovery.

Grounding: PLACE: An ancient buried structure, sealed for centuries, descending 
deeper. PROTAGONISTS: An adventuring party with no way back up. STAKES: 
Something below knows they're coming.

Scene: The party descended into darkness. Torchlight caught ancient runes—
warnings carved deep. The air turned cold. Behind them, the entrance had vanished. 
Below, something hummed with purpose, drawing them forward like a hook through 
flesh.

Base (Nemotron):

The stone beneath their feet was worn smooth by countless footsteps—not recent, but not ancient either. Something had lived here. Something had walked these corridors regularly.

Elara's torch guttered, though there was no wind. She steadied it, but the flame continued to falter, as if something unseen was breathing against it. The runes on the walls began to glow faintly—not with light, but with a sickly phosphorescence that made her skin crawl.

"Do you hear that?" whispered Kael from behind her.

The humming. It was louder now. Closer. And underneath it, something else: a sound like breathing, like the earth itself was alive and aware of their presence.

Aronnax:

The walls began to narrow. Not suddenly—the change was so gradual that Kael only noticed when he raised his hand and could almost touch both sides of the corridor at once. The runes intensified, their glow shifting from sickly green to a deep violet that seemed to pulse in rhythm with that relentless humming.

Elara held her torch higher. Ahead, the passage opened into a vast chamber—and there, in the center, stood something that shouldn't exist. A spire of black crystal, rotating slowly, its surface writhing with symbols that hurt to look at directly.

"That's not natural," breathed Elena.

"No," said Kael, his hand moving to his sword hilt. "It's not. And I think it just noticed us."

The humming stopped. In that silence, they heard it: a voice made of stone and starlight, ancient and patient.

"Welcome home."

---

Training

Fine-tuned via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) on curated literary fiction preference pairs (noir, fantasy, intimate prose). All examples above are real, unedited outputs from the fine-tuned model.

Prompt Design Principles

For best results:

1. Lead with instruction (role + task)
2. Ground with details (place, protagonist, stakes)
3. Set the scene (narrative opening with implicit momentum)
4. Let the model continue (don't add "Continue the story" after—it outputs literally)

Example structure:

You are an expert storyteller. Continue the following SHORT SCENE with [quality].

PLACE: [setting]. PROTAGONIST: [character/identity]. STAKES: [what's at stake].

Scene: [narrative opening that signals length/tone through momentum]

Limitations

• Best for scene continuations (200-300 tokens), not full stories
• Trained primarily on literary fiction, noir, fantasy, intimate prose
• May struggle with technical prose, worldbuilding exposition, or dialogue-heavy exchanges
• Like all language models, can hallucinate or break character in long continuations

License

This model is based on NVIDIA's Nemotron Nano 9B v2 (NVIDIA Open Model License) with DPO fine-tuning on literary fiction for narrative prose tasks.

---

Made by: Mitch Currie
Last Updated: January 2026
Feedback & Issues: Report on the Hugging Face model repo