Local neural voices (mlx-audio), on this Mac. Saved right away.
Before each new turn, every active rule whose condition holds fires with its chance and gives a thought, as an impulse the model must act on in that turn, to one character on stage or to all of them (one of its variants, at random). Rules are tried in order; a character gets at most one impulse per turn. Saved right away.
Large models take a while the first time: the weights are read into memory. Your turn plays as soon as the model is ready.