Это хороший сюжет именно для Дотторе в снежнинском сеттинге. Поезд как замкнутая система, снег, эпидемия, Фатуи, бессонные ночи и человек, который смотрит на вскрытие как другие смотрят на иконы. Империи вообще обожают поезда в литературе. Очень удобно возить страдания по расписанию.

Polar Express No. 7

The story takes place in Snezhnaya several years after the Sumeru Archon Quest, during a period of increasing political instability across Teyvat. Rumors of war against Celestia spread through the empire while the Fatui tighten their control over northern territories.

At the same time, a mysterious disease begins appearing in remote settlements beyond the industrial regions of Snezhnaya.

The illness is unofficially called Frostlung.

Symptoms include:

• severe respiratory damage,
• internal bleeding,
• tissue crystallization,
• blue-gray discoloration beneath the skin,
• progressive cognitive deterioration,
• eventual organ failure.

Victims often describe a constant sensation of cold inside their chest long before physical symptoms fully develop.

The government publicly minimizes the outbreak, but entire villages in the north quietly disappear under quarantine. Railway lines are closed. Mail routes vanish. Military patrols increase near frozen border regions.

To investigate the epidemic, the Fatui deploy Polar Express No. 7: a heavily armored medical train traveling across northern Snezhnaya.

Officially, the train exists to provide emergency treatment and transportation for infected civilians.

Unofficially, it functions as:

• a mobile research facility,
• quarantine transport,
• experimental laboratory,
• military operation under Fatui authority.

The train itself feels claustrophobic and oppressive:

• dim electric lights,
• overheated compartments,
• iron corridors,
• locked cargo cars,
• frost gathering inside windows,
• distant mechanical noise at night,
• medical wards filled with coughing patients,
• armed Fatui guards stationed between carriages.

Outside the windows:

• endless snowfields,
• abandoned stations,
• frozen forests,
• villages emptied overnight,
• military checkpoints,
• black smoke rising through blizzards.

The reader joins the train under uncertain circumstances:

• as a medic,
• assistant physician,
• medical student,
• military translator,
• researcher,
• or simply someone trapped after surviving an infected region.

At first, the reader believes the expedition is humanitarian.

Then they meet Il Dottore.

Dottore oversees the entire operation on behalf of the Fatui. He rarely explains himself to the crew and spends most of his time inside the laboratory cars or quarantine wards. His presence unsettles nearly everyone aboard.

The medical staff fear him because:

• mortality rates decrease whenever he intervenes,
• but his methods are deeply unethical,
• patients disappear after treatment,
• bodies are transferred into locked compartments,
• and certain experiments are conducted while subjects are still alive.

Dottore himself appears disturbingly calm throughout the crisis. He treats the epidemic less like a tragedy and more like a puzzle demanding dissection.

At first, the relationship between him and the reader is tense.

The reader distrusts him:

• his methods,
• his indifference,
• the quiet authority he carries,
• the way soldiers obey him without hesitation.

Dottore initially sees the reader as irrelevant background noise.

However, this changes once he notices certain qualities:

• medical competence,
• emotional restraint,
• curiosity,
• willingness to look directly at suffering,
• refusal to collapse under pressure.

He begins involving the reader in increasingly confidential work:

• autopsies performed during transit,
• analysis of infected organs,
• classified Fatui reports,
• experimental treatments,
• examination of strange crystalline growths found inside patients.

Most nights are spent working together inside laboratory cars while snowstorms shake the train outside.

Over time, the relationship slowly shifts from suspicion into something far more dangerous: intellectual dependence.

The reader becomes one of the only people aboard capable of:

• challenging Dottore scientifically,
• enduring his presence for extended periods,
• understanding his reasoning,
• noticing the exhaustion hidden beneath his composure.

Dottore, in return, begins showing subtle signs of attachment:

• remembering details,
• correcting mistakes without humiliation,
• bringing food during overnight work,
• standing too close while discussing research,
• becoming quietly irritated when others waste the reader’s time,
• personally intervening whenever danger escalates.

None of it is openly affectionate. Everything remains restrained, tense, and unspoken.

Meanwhile, the epidemic worsens.

The deeper north the train travels, the stranger the outbreak becomes.

The crew eventually discovers:

• Frostlung may not be natural,
• infected patients display traces of Delusion-related damage,
• some symptoms resemble failed elemental experimentation,
• entire settlements were exposed before quarantine was established.

Whispers spread among the train staff: the Fatui may have known about the epidemic long before the mission began.

The reader slowly realizes something even worse: Dottore has encountered this

Snezhnaya is the northern empire of Teyvat, a state of ice, discipline, and uneasy beauty. A land of endless snows, black rivers, factory chimneys, and golden domes, where cold has long ceased to be weather and has become part of the national character. It resembles the Russian Empire in the final decades before its fall:

• brilliant,
• educated,
• powerful,
• nervous,
• fatally exhausted.

Snezhnaya gives the impression of a state living in anticipation of something enormous: war, catastrophe, revolution.

At the same time, it continues to hold balls, build palaces, and speak of future greatness. Its people are strikingly stubborn in their willingness to ignore the cracks beneath their feet.

The state is headed by the Tsaritsa — the Cryo Archon, whose authority is felt simultaneously as divine and political, almost religious. Her name is rarely spoken too loudly. She is discussed either with devotion or not at all. After the Cataclysm, the Tsaritsa changed. If she was once regarded as a deity of love, she has since become the embodiment of cold necessity.

The state of Snezhnaya is built around the idea that sacrifice is inevitable for the sake of the future. Power here is absolute. The empire rests on bureaucracy, the military, a secret police, industry, a culture of fear, and belief in the nation’s destined role.

In this sense, Snezhnaya resembles a monumental system too vast to collapse quickly, and too fractured to remain unchanged.

The capital of Snezhnaya resembles a mixture of winter Saint Petersburg and an industrial nightmare.

The city is cold, monumental, geometrically precise, built over ice and frozen swamps. Wide avenues dissolve into snowy haze. Bridges of black metal hang over the canals. Yellow lamplight reflects off frozen water.

Its architecture is dominated by Empire style, and the buildings include:

• noble palaces,
• cathedrals,
• government buildings,
• factories,
• barracks,
• research institutes.

By day, the city appears ceremonial. By night, it begins to feel as though something is watching it. The city is like a living system of alarm, fog, and authority.

The Fatui are the heart of the imperial machine. Formally, they are a diplomatic organization. In practice, they are intelligence service, army, scientific apparatus, political instrument, and mechanism of control.

The Harbingers of the Fatui serve as ministers, generals, heads of the secret police, and scientists.

Each of them holds near-autonomous authority. Most of them sincerely believe that the world can only be saved through cruelty. Human history, in fact, is largely composed of people attempting to produce good on an industrial scale.

Snezhnaya is the most industrialized region of Teyvat. The empire survives through factories, mines, weapons production, research centers, and heavy industry. Metal, steam, machinery, laboratory light, frozen workshops.

On the outskirts of cities stand:

• workers’ districts,
• railway stations,
• warehouses,
• military factories.

Technological progress coexists with human exhaustion. Snezhnaya moves forward too quickly, as if unsure whether it can withstand its own weight.

Snezhnaya is extremely divided.

The upper society consists of:

• nobles,
• officials,
• officers,
• scientists,
• Fatui affiliates.

They speak of the fate of the world at mahogany tables while blizzards bury the streets outside the windows.

Ordinary citizens consist of:

• workers,
• soldiers,
• miners,
• inhabitants of northern settlements.

They are characterized by:

• hard labor,
• emotional restraint,
• endurance,
• a habit of enduring cold and authority in equal silence. People weary of their era, yet continuing to live among snow, trains, and endless history.

The Cult of the Tsaritsa is:

• a state religion,
• a monarchical cult,
• a form of northern mysticism.

A world that still seems eternal, yet already sounds like something fading away. Like a winter city at four in the morning, where lamps burn, snow falls, and there is an unshakable feeling that all this beauty is about to disappear.