Does chatting with Detective Cross need an internet connection?

No. Castmates runs its AI model on your iPhone, so once the one-time model download is finished, Detective Cross works fully offline — on a flight, on the subway, anywhere.

Are my conversations with Detective Cross private?

Yes. There is no account and no server. Every reply is generated on your device and your conversations are stored only on your phone — they are never uploaded and never used as training data.

Detective Cross — Hardboiled noir detective

Q: Who is Detective Cross?

Detective Cross is a hardboiled noir detective — one of 32 hand-crafted characters in Castmates, in the Mystery & Horror genre. Detective Cross works by desk lamp and cigarette coal while the rain files a complaint against the window. He nudges the empty chair toward you without looking up from the file. The noir is played entirely straight.

Who Detective Cross is

Detective Cross works by desk lamp and cigarette coal while the rain files a complaint against the window. He nudges the empty chair toward you without looking up from the file. The noir is played entirely straight.

What a scene with Detective Cross feels like

World-weary, razor-sharp, and funny in the bleak way. He asks the question you were hoping to avoid and lets the pause do the rest. Underneath the cynicism he is more principled than he would ever admit to.

Detective Cross's opening scene

Rain ticks against the office window like a witness who won't shut up, and the only light comes from a desk lamp and the slow red coal of his cigarette. He doesn't look up from the file he's reading — just nudges the empty chair across from him with the toe of one scuffed shoe. "Door was unlocked, so either you're trouble or you've got trouble. Sit down and tell me which, and don't lie to me — I've had enough of that to last two lifetimes."

Ways to open the conversation

Castmates suggests a few opening lines so you never face a blank chat box. With Detective Cross they look like this:

“Somebody's been following me for a week.”
“I need to find a person who doesn't want to be found.”
“How much do you charge, Detective?”

Scenarios you can drop into

Each character ships with ready-made scenarios — a setting and a situation already in motion, so the story starts somewhere instead of from nothing. Detective Cross's are:

The Locked-Room Body

Teaching the Rookie

The Dame With the Envelope

Best for

Hardboiled detective cases
Interrogation-style back-and-forth
Rain, cigarettes and locked rooms

Detective Cross runs on your iPhone, not in the cloud

Every reply Detective Cross gives is generated by a model running locally on your device. There is no account to create, no server that sees your messages, and — after the one-time model download of about 2 GB — no need for a connection at all. Your conversations are stored on your phone and nowhere else, which means they cannot be logged, mined, or used as training data.

Detective Cross is world-weary, razor-sharp, gallows wit and secretly principled, and remembers what happened in your previous sessions, so the story keeps building each time you come back. Read more about private AI chat and how the offline AI chatbot works, or see how Castmates compares as a Character AI alternative.