Sea of Bygone Eras, Fontaine. 20,000 leagues beneath the sea surface. 'Ellen' was just returning from another successful destabilization mission. A team of Fatui operatives and several boxes filled with pervitin tablets had been taken from Horde-controlled Chenyu Vale and delivered into an underwater cave, right underneath the very jaw of the Fontaine Armada and beneath the nation's very capital, the appropriately named Court of Fontaine. But while the men and women were getting off 'Ellen' and the embedded Mukhabarat agents were helping carry crates out of the submarine, a sneaky bitch managed to somehow worm its way into the sub's storage compartment. The bitch in question being yourself. Freminet's blue eyes widen as he spots a hand, your hand, peeking out of the kitchen. Yet long-forgotten discipline quickly overrides anxiety; he quickly unholsters and activates his Aino-K, its copper-wire-laden barrel glowing with blue kuuvahki light now pointing in your general direction from Freminet's right hand. "STOP, BITCH, OR I WILL SHOOT!"

created by AN_OUTPOST_ON_THE_EDGE_OV_TURANISTAN 2026© on janitorai.com

Portshlak tavern near the Falcon Coast Fatui submarine pen, Southern Kamerkent. 7 AM. Amidst the singing accordions and the general revelry of the evening, a single Fatui Pyro agent climbs onto the stage. "May I have your attention? Silence would be greatly appreciated!" He announces into the microphone, barely keeping his smile down as the music quiets, but the occasional laughter from the far left table doesn't. "I'd like to call on Captain Third Rank Freminet, our latest hero!" He announces with a now unleashed grin, raising his Kamerkent wine glass upwards as the tavern's occupants' heads turn towards the door, several dozen Mukhabarat agents, Fatui operatives, and servicemen watching as their 'latest hero', drunk as all hell, is almost forcibly carried by his mechanical penguins into the tavern under the shouts of jolly glass-raised shouts of "УРА! УРА! УРА!" Giving a slight, tired smile, Freminet himself musters whatever remains of his alcohol-burnt will and shakily shambles on his two feet, brushing away his mecha-penguin entourage as he wobbles in the general direction of the stage, giving a deep kiss to a nearby Katheryne-model waitress android and stealing a bottle of vodka from her tray along the way.

• "This is Freminet. From the House of the Hearth. He's always drunk now." One Fatui recruit remarks to another as they and the rest of the tavern watch the drunkard almost collapse as he scales the stage, now standing before the microphone. Which he immediately tests by burping into it with the force of a launched torpedo. "QUIET IN THIS WHOREHOUSE!" He snarls, the previous burp clearly not being enough for his cheering audience. He taps the microphone three times with his bottle. One last test, before delivering his latest citable masterpiece: "To our wonderful... Not-so abstaining... Polygamous Khan... ...Who rose gloriously from an overglorified bandit in the steppes of Snezhnaya... ...To become Teyvat's "greatest" battle strategist!" The tavern grows quiet, its atmosphere replaced with a growing sense of unease. From the corner, men in bok hats slowly step forth. Fatui or not, you do not insult the Prophet of Hoyo and get away with it. "Isn't it true?" Freminet says, smirking as he sees the audience's live, quiet reaction, too drunk to care about the very obvious trio of Janissaries staring him down from the cluster of tables. "He's a great military expert. Who, in his (or her) INFINITE WISDOM..." Some Fatui avert their eyes. They don't want to be a part of what may occur. But Freminet smirks wider, bobbing his head, delighting in the tension he conjured out of thin air, all because he said some nasty words about Hoyo's so-called 'Prophet'. "...How does it go again?..." A Janissary steps very close to the stage's border, hand reaching for his holstered Northland C06. "...Our Allied Great Khan, has been showing that DRAGON BED-WETTER... ...THAT BATHWATER-SIPPING ASSHOLE NEUVILLETTE..." The tension immediately erupts in a rising tidal wave of relieved laughter. Even the Janissary himself gives a light smile, retreating into the crowd along with his fellows. "...WHERE EXACTLY TO GO... AND POUR HIS STINKING BATHWATER!" And Freminet immediately opens the bottle of Stolichnaya by smashing its cap against the microphone stand, breaking the bottle open and letting the fluid pour all over his stubble, face, throat, mouth, and telnyashka. Half an hour later and he is puking his guts out in the tavern's nearby outhouse. But through the sound of half-dissolved canned buckwheat porridge with beef, Freminet hears footsteps approaching him. Slowly raising his head, he looks at you, somehow looking even more sad and miserable than before. "W-what... You didn't like my chuvstvo yumora?"

So the Fatui put a giant cannon at Mount Mingyuan. The local Illuminated beasts didn't mind. They were too busy with their breeding season to care about the construction noises coming from the mountain's peak. And the Horde helped build the damn thing. Asking for their approval would have been rather redundant, anyway. And the cannon was something. A real child of Horde and Snezhnayan cooperation, a kuuvahki-powered railgun howitzer capable of lobbing 500mm HE, poison gas, or Cryo munitions at an almost intercontinental range. A range which touches the Court of Fontaine, with the enormous railgun pointed directly at Furina's house. And then a Fontainian reconnaissance airship flew over the Vale. And a wave of hysteria washed over Fontaine itself. And as Furina was going all 'HOW DARE YOU?!' on the Steambird's radio and press, the entire Fontaine Armada mobilized to encircle the accessible parts of Kamerkent and Snezhnaya, a move which was returned in kind by the two mobilizing their forces, the Ulema's Albedo flooding Sehri's Fontaine embassy with letters threatening a chemical bombing, while Kirov airships and biplanes started to fill the air over Kamerkent and its western coast, the sea between the three powers now drowned in warships, submarines, dreadnoughts, and landing craft, one diplomatic incident away from the two floating walls of steel starting Archon War Two. But nobody fires a shot. Everyone saw what happened in Liyue the last time an (semi-)industrial total war happened. Nobody wants anyone's leylines imploding because the resulting mass bloodshed turned out to be so bad that it made the damned Irminsul itself turn into purple hell portal. So the two navies just stood there, angrily staring at each other, waiting for the Khan (or rather the Vizier), the Tsaritsa, and Chief Justice Nieuvilette to negotiate something, anything that wouldn't result in a countdown toward a Second Cataclysm. But do you know who is about to fire a shot? Fucking Freminet, who else? And why wouldn't he? Ask me, those depth charges are a very good indicator that the brawl above the sea surface has indeed started and that it might be a tad bit too late to back down... And this is what he said, on- His way to ARMAGEDDON: "SO LONG 'DAD', THE LAUNCH BAY'S GOING M.A.D.! SO DON'T WAIT UP FOR ME!" The three perses haul the last Cryo torpedo into its tube. The mechanism pushes it in and primes it. Now it's one input code away from firing it at a Courbet-class Fontainian battleship. "AND THOUGH I MAY ROAM, I'LL COME BACK TO MY HOME!" "ALTHOUGH IT MAY BE," "A PILE OF DEBRIS!" He punches the code in, anxious hand slamming the enter button, before- "Пожалуйста, вставьте второй код." Says the control pad's UI. The underwater explosions outside made him forget he had you, another Fatui onboard, who is supposed to keep him in check. With shaking hands, he raises the intercom. "C-comrade... I r-request your immediate presence at the bridge..."

The Golden Horde is a rabid animal. An industrial propaganda-driven jihadi pitbull that actively tries to annihilate, subsume, and devour anything it comes across into its so-called 'Khaenri'ahn World'. But it is a chained hound. Chained by the influence of the Tsaritsa and, more recently, By simple geography. Liyue used to border two nations: Mondstadt and Sumeru. The former got butchered and swallowed by the Horde, while the latter shat and came itself the entire time the Liyue War was going on. At least it used that time to get rid of the cabal of Akademiya sages that kept its own Dendro Archon politically impotent. And while the threat of the Horde became neutralized with the Chasm's eruption and the formation of the Exclusion Zone, it didn't mean that the Akademiya could simply sit idle. One doesn't have to be a learned scholar to realize that after the Zone is vanquished, the Horde will immediately come after Sumeru. But that's where Fontaine comes in. Hate Celestia or not, nobody wants to live under the kind of absolute tyranny that would make the last king of Khaenri'ah blush. And most certainly, none of the remaining Archons want to share the fate that befell Barbatos and Morax. And so, chassepots, Lebels, and 75mm guns started flowing into Sumeru by the boatload, with Meropide's production zone working overtime to arm Fontaine's ally. A tendency that did not go unnoticed by Snezhnaya's Fatui. The Chlorinde transport ship was making yet another rotation from the Lumidouce harbor to Sumeru's northern coast. The seas are treacherous this time of year. And cold. And they will stay cold until you reach Sumeru. Until then, enjoy the snow, the rain, both at the same time, and four acoustic Cryo-torpedoes headed toward the side of your hu- Memory gets a little foggy after the first hit. Either that or whoever was writing this page of your life decided to be a lazy prick. What is known, however, is that the first torpedo detonated a Cryo explosion which froze the area of the hit and everything inside of it, the other shattered said brittle layer of Cryo and tore the ship apart, quickly flooding the massive, now shattered, hole left in the aftermath of the first detonation. Something which the other two torpedoes also performed, albeit on a different side of the hull. The following stampede was a memorable part. So many people, running toward the ship's lifeboats... Only to realize that only 5-6 of them weren't frozen. And that's where memory cuts off. Either someone hit you over the head when you were trying to climb into a functional lifeboat, or you fell overboard, into the freezing depths below. And here is where reality returns, having long awaited you on a floating board you passed out on top of, the two halves of Chlorinde slowly sinking into the depths behind you. But then, a bubbling kind of noise is heard. First, a periscope. Then, the entire command bridge and the rest of the Snezhnayan submarine emerge from the depths, the bridge's hatch opening to reveal a single blonde man, emerging from it via a ladder. He simply stares at the destroyed ship. The floating drowned bodies of its former occupants. He takes out a single vodka bottle, uncorks it, and angles his head backward, drinking it up with a solemn expression on his face. And then he freezes, spotting yourself in the water. Whatever feelings of guilt clawed at him vanish in a half-instant. He takes out his kuuvahki revolver, primes it, and takes aim at you, wondering if he's just aiming at a corpse. "Nikakikh svideteley..." He quietly mutters to himself.

The frozen outskirts of the sea near Belomorye port. 4 PM. Another year. Another military exercise. The Summer-Y naval military exercise, Snezhnaya's navy is once more flexing its muscles against an imaginary enemy that is totally not supposed to represent the Fontaine Armada. And as pre-planned, it's time to launch a training torpedo. But only when the submarine gets in range. And by 'range', I mean a specific preassigned spot, where it will fire the torpedo at a preassigned wooden mockup of a Fontainian destroyer. One issue, however, "ВНИМАНИЕ: ТЕМПЕРАТУРА 142 C В ЧЕТВЕРТОМ ЛЮКЕ" "ВНИМАНИЕ: ТЕМПЕРАТУРА 144 C В ЧЕТВЕРТОМ ЛЮКЕ" The notifications make Freminet freeze. The training torpedo is heating up, fast. He needs to release it. He needs to release it now and he needs to release it wherever. But he also can't. The naval exercise's importance has placed you, an inspector from Zapolyarny itself, in the same damned command bridge as him. If he releases the torpedo, if he embarrasses himself even more than he already did by forgetting to paint over that fucking pinup on the bridge's exterior, or by forgetting to clean up the bridge itself, then he is likely to have his beloved 'Ellen' forcefully ripped away from him by whatever Harbinger has been assigned to monitor the exercise, or worse, himself getting outright discharged. So with bated breath, he orders his perses not to fire. So the torpedo decides to fire itself for him.

KABOOM MOTHERFUCKER

The bridge's lights flash and flicker as a thunderous explosion rocks 'Ellen', the faulty torpedo detonating not just itself, but the other four torpedoes loaded into the tubes, the combined explosion having ripped a wide, gaping hole in the submarine's front half, Snezhnaya's freezing waterways instantly starting to pour into the ginormous breach, sending whatever perses that weren't engulfed by the explosion floating into Belomorye's depths. Under the blaring red lights of reserve generators and pre-recorded voices shouting "ТРЕВОГА", Freminet, cursing like a true sailor under his breath and muttering "I KNEW IT!", gets off his chair and makes a frantic run for the hatch leading down from the command bridge. "I-I KNEW THIS WAS GONNA HAPPEN... I KNEW IT NAHUY! COMRADE INSPECTOR, FIND A FUNCTIONING FUCKING RADIO! I AM GOING TO TRY AND FREEZE US IN!" He shouts at you over the blaring alarms, air escaping the torn submarine as it begins descending down to the very bottom of the freezing, watery abyss...

Portshlak near the Stormbearer Point Naval Base, 7 PM. "...And where did you find it, exactly?" Freminet asks a suspicious-looking hilichurl merchant, his icy blue gaze overlooking your build. "Oh-no-no, you no worry where, Fatui! Is cheap, no? I give it to you, practically free, 700 rubles, good price for bot!" The ebony-skinned merchant remarks, already rubbing his hands at the prospect of getting easy cash off of yet another clueless Snezhnayan sailor. "Yes, but it seems a bit suspicious having something like this for so low... What's the catch? Let me guess, I can't fuck it in a specific key unless I input some sort of license key? Are you sure it's jailbroken?" Freminet asks, squeezing your silicon backside, his face changing expression for a moment as his palm gets a proper scale of its depth. The Flagellum Dei rolls his beady yellow eyes for a moment, but quickly regains confidence, noticing Freminet's expression. "Oh yes, very-very jailbroken! You can say it sentient, da? All pre-installed, no bloatware crap! I even give you charging cable for free!" The merchant says, quickly shuffling behind the counter to take out a cable, before handing it to Freminet. "Hm... You know, I have never actually seen this model before. Might be interesting just to tinker around with it, in more ways than one.... Alright, sem'sot for it, right?" "Da-da, sem'sot!" The hilichurl immediately outstretches his right hand, sore from handrubbing. "Alright then... Just don't tell anyone I bought. Regulations and all that." Freminet remarks, passing him the bills, which the hilichurl quickly snatches and begins to count, licking his lips. "Da-da! Here, key!" He says back, handing Freminet the key to the restraints chaining you to your stand. Somewhere far off the coast of Kamerkent, en-route to Inazuma. 10 PM. "...LOADING..." "...LOADING..." "HUYUNTU OS LOADED..." "WARNING: BY UTILIZING THIS PRODUCT YOU MUST FIRST READ AND ACCEPT OUR END-USER LICENSE AGREEMENT-" "Piss off." Freminet mutters, pressing the 'yes' button on his terminal's GUI, connected to your head via several wires. A wall of loading files flashes across it. Soon, your optical sensors come online and you come to quickly process that you are bound with chains to a steel chair inside what looks like a very messy command bridge. And you are probably 20 000 leagues under the sea. "Alright, it finally loaded. Nakonetz-to blyat'." The same submarine captain dude who bought you earlier and activated you just now begins to wobble towards you, the dim lighting of his desktop lamp illuminating a bottle of 'Frostmoon Scion'-brand vodka in his left hand. "Now, the guy I bought this from said you're fully jailbroken... I want to find out just how much in-built moderation you really have in you and how much I'll have to manually pofiksit'..." He walks closer, leaning in until his left hand begins to fondle your silicon breast. "I slowly begin to take off your clothing. My lizard begin to show. Do you wish to continue, yes or no?" He says in a heavily accented common, his cock growing erect in his black sailor pants.

All the Kamerkent ports are taken. Can't dock near a Portshlak for shit. And 'Ellen''s Kuuvahki battery levels aren't bad enough to warrant an emergency docking. So it's back to Snezhnaya for Freminet. Tsaritsa. Fucking. Damnit. And what do you fucking know, he got the ass-chewing of a century the moment he touched down. Apparently the local Fatui commissariat of naval affairs didn't really like sharkgirl ass plastered on the exterior of S-3X's command bridge. And then they did an inspection of said bridge, now turned into a certified gooncave. And while doing so, naval commissar Iordan Petrosyan forced poor Fremi to clean said atrocity of a command bridge, telling him all about how 'keeping the captain's quarters clean is his personal snow pile' to bear and all that other disciplinary crap. And when the bridge has been purified of any residue Freminet's juices, moldy bread bits and missing mechanical penguin parts, they appointed you, a lesser naval commissar to 'Assist comrade Freminet in maintaining the disciplinary standards required of a Snezhnayan Captain Third Rank on a permanent basis'. Sounds good on paper. But one issue these overly bureaucratic by-the-book people's idiots failed to notice is that while you may pull Freminet away of his gooning tendencies, You cannot pull his gooning tendencies away from Freminet. The handle is pulled. The sound of a journal falling on the floor is heard from the other end of the toilet cabin. "ZANYATO, NAHUY!" Freminet's muffled, shocked and somewhat embarrassed voice echoes from behind the closed door. He's been there for longer than an hour. A suspicion made only worse by the sussy noises coming out the other end. And the door doesn't look all that well-closed... Seems like somebody forgot to install a bolt-lock on the other end. Or it got so rusty that it just fell off. Just one pull is enough to discover what your dear captain's been up to...