#ringing forward

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I think I'll finish the main story update on Friday; I've spent a few hours on it between other obligations and as it stands, I'm a little over halfway done.

My schedule for tomorrow is crammed too, but I might get an hour or so of gameplay in. Everyone's been fun so far! A completely arbitrary favoritism tier list of the Penacony characters (STC):

Acheron—the red text? HI3 Mei references? And her overall aesthetic design... she ate up so well. I want her viscerally, carnally, and every way I can have her.

Sunday—his in-game CN voice caught me off guard more than I'd like to admit. I've heard his voice from the 1.6 trailer, but hearing it in game felt more off-putting. He's short? And the same height as Stelle? The way he stands is a kind of... if I speak, I'm in trouble.

Firefly—I will cry.

Misha—his eyes look like keyholes and the doors of the Reviere Hotel. From what I've gotten up to, he definitely seems to have a deeper connection to the overall plot. And his animations are cute!

Aventurine—he's... also shorter than I expected. It makes the scene with Dr. Ratio a little funny, actually. His eyes look cool, and I'm interested in knowing more about his past before the IPC! As expected, business major vibes, though he lays it on a little too thick to not be intentional. I didn't expected the comments from Dr. Ratio and Sparkle... at least in Dr. Ratio's case, I expected better, but he's already proven to be quite prejudiced in his approach to education.

Sam—haven't met him yet, but I quite like the Stellaron Hunters, and he's one of them, too!

Sparkle—she's funny. I like that. I don't know how much I trust her on Masked Fools lore yet, but I'll take any Aha lore regardless of the facts. She's also antagonistic towards Aventurine, but he did stalk her for 45 system minutes, so I can understand being a bit put off by that (those comments were rather over the top, though...).

Robin—she's pretty and definitely some percentage of lesbian. Her dress is so nice! I love her design. Though for someone who's whole thing is being in the limelight, we don't really get to see much of that (yet?).

Black Swan—Garden of Recollection lore has me on an email list. Unfortunately, I don't dig her design that much.

Gallagher—not my type, haven't seen enough to move him up the ranks.

For Duke Inferno and the rest of the Annihilation Gang—I still don't think they're showing up.

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Journal On Penacony • The Sound and the Fury (Page 1/7)

Finished the 2.0 Penacony main story a while ago, and I'm now rewatching the cutscenes from a streamer's VOD. This is meant to be more like a very public journal with some speculations, not a comprehensive summary. Bullet-pointed notes for myself, with key points in bold, and of course, spoilers. I will not warn you twice.

Side note: I alternate with pronouns between the player(s), The Trailblazer, and Stelle. Take it or leave it.

The Sound and the Fury, which is the name of this Trailblaze Mission chapter, is a reference to a novel by the American author William Faulkner. I haven't read it, but I've heard that there are a number of parallels between Penacony and some motifs in the novel.

Pom-Pom introduces us to memoria, and we get a throwaway comment about the Memory Zone. The Memory Zone sounds like something related to Fuli and the Remembrance, and the Forgotten Hall/Memory of Chaos...

The Trailblaze and the Star Rail are what connected Penacony to the rest of the universe; and with the Express leaving Penacony, three Trailblazers stayed behind on the prison turned hotel. They were Tiernan (the guard), Legwork (the mechanic), and Razalina (the surveyor).

Some people have theorized that Misha might be the grandson or a descendent of one of these Trailblazers, and I'm inclined to agree. Of the three, he would likely be related to Legwork, as he's described as being "skilled at fixing a variety of machines" (Character Details).

Interastral Peace Broadcast update! I highly recommend listening to these for anyone who likes worldbuilding, just treat it like in-game current events. Most of what they said here isn't directly relevant to the main story, but the collaboration between the IPC and the Garden of Recollection is particularly interesting... I wonder what's happened since the events of Gold and Gears?

Also, Emperor Rubert I lore! I expect it to more relevant as we continue to get involved with members of Genius Society... I'm looking at you, Polka.

Dan Heng chooses to stay on the Express—totally understandable. Bro gotta celebrate Lunar New Year. And you know, we need someone to stay watch on the Express. He'll come find us eventually, he shows up in White Night after all.

It also doesn't help that Dan Heng took center stage for the Luofu and now there's not much mystery to him anymore. His story isn't complete per say, but all that's left to explore for him is the time between him leaving the Luofu and joining the Express, and the future. It'll probably be the backseat on lore for him until we head back to the Luofu.

Okay, the cutscene before the jump? Every time before we jump, there's a focus on the chessboard. According to this lovely reddit post, it's from a game that ended in a tie—and I think it's a direct reference to Jingliu's line, "This is a chess game between Aeons." Stelle, then, might be the black rook, because that's the piece we get a zoom-in on; though it's also possible she's a pawn, or not even on the board at all. Or the piece is the Astral Express (faction)? Questions, questions...

It also doesn't really matter how the game ends, because (1) when the Universe reaches its end everything will restart anyways and (2) the rules can be broken and new pieces can appear out of nowhere. Aeons don't have to play by normal rules (see: Mythus).

Flash: Acheron (moving backwards), Firefly, Robin, Acheron again (still moving backwards but closer to Stelle this time). This isn't the first time we've glimpsed into a/the future; the other time it happened was when we protected March from the Doomsday Beast on Herta Space Station.

The implications for seeing into the future seem pretty fucking big, but as it stands, I'm not sure how relevant that is right now. It's about the journey, not the destination; what matters isn't how the Universe ends, but what we do until we reach that point.

Blink and we're in the Dreamscape version of what becomes our guest room. No clue how we got there or if we're even really there.* (I'll expand on this in a bit.)

Acheron sighs, then says, "Not another one...." The other person she's talking about might be Black Swan...? I don't think it could be anyone else. She barely knows anyone else, even.

She also tells us we'll forget everything when we wake up, which is bull fucking shit when you see some of the dialogue options.

Okay, this might go pretty fucking meta (any ORV fans?), but Acheron's ability hear our "thoughts" might be similar to how we read the text stating the character's voicelines. Or to put in ORV terms, it's kind of like Kim Dokja reading the Wall. And HSR does go meta on character dialogue, they've given color to select words (e.g. Kafka's golden text, Acheron's red text), and alternative readings to other words.

*It doesn't make much sense to see the other characters in the dreamscape when this dream isn't being shared with them, and they're all people that (assuming we haven't arrived on Penacony yet), neither Acheron nor Stelle should know who they are -> they shouldn't appear in her dreamscape. Like, you don't just imagine whole ass people. Acheron calls them shadows, but they're all memories of conversations that have happened.

I saw a theory (no clue who said it, I think I read it first in a Reddit comment, but I thought it was interesting) that we've rewinded time on Penacony, and Acheron seems to be somewhat aware of this. In the first iteration, Duke Inferno may have successfully destroyed Penacony. In the second, Duke Inferno is slain by Acheron before that can happen, but the Memory Zone boss might've fucked us over. We'd be on the third iteration, then, and Acheron allowed the Memory Zone boss to kill Firefly. There's not much merit to this to be honest beyond some wacky voicelines, but I still think it's worth lingering on.

To be in the Memory Zone like this, I feel like it would imply that this is a memory, and these events would've had to have happened in the linear past. Acheron told us this is Penacony's "welcome", but I don't think that's the case. There's some time fuckery going on for sure.

The doors that lead us to meeting Misha are different than the other doors we saw, and lack the lock-like motif.

Acheron makes no acknowledgement of Misha. Keep this in mind, okay?

"...have we met somewhere before?" Yeah, maybe in another branch of time. None of the dialogue options are absolute an yes/no answer. (Or maybe before Stelle was "born" on Herta Space Station, but I doubt that a little. If that was the case, I think the Stellaron Hunters would be more aware of Acheron.)

If you play Stelle, the red text says "she stood shoulder to shoulder with me", and if you play Caelus, it says "he crossed blades with me". The former is a reference to her Nameless friend Frebass, mentioned in the new relic set Pioneer Diver of Dead Waters. Not sure about the other guy. These could also be taken as parallels to HI3 between Mei and Kiana/Kevin.

Her red text questions are so fucking wack, y'all. Inception reference: Would you wish to stay in the dream world? Elio/player meta: Would you wish to keep going, even if you knew how this story/game would/might end? Fourth wall break meta: Do you remember her?

Anyways, she does seem to be able to notice the different branches of time from different dialogue options; "countless versions of you[...] gave entirely different responses".

She tells us "in that monochrome world, there will be a glimpse of fleeting red, and when you make a choice, it will reappear before you once more..." The red, from what we can tell so far, is her red text. What we hear seems to change based on the choices/dialogue options we selected. If that's the red, then the monochrome world would be... the text you're reading? This really does remind me of ORV.

Then she kills Stelle. Well, not really. Death in a dream is one way to wake up from the dream in Inception, so that's Acheron's way of waking her up, huh.

Acheron looks like she's crying blood-tainted tears. And her eye looks kind of like the void in White Night, too...

Okay, Stelle goes with March to the front desk, and we remember meeting Misha. So what's that all about? We didn't forget jack shit.

March calls out to us, and she doesn't make any acknowledgement of Misha, which is out of character for her. If she saw we were chatting up a new friend, I get the impression she'd try to introduce herself. But she doesn't. Isn't that interesting?

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I took a lot more screenshots while playing Penacony than I thought I did, and somehow, still not enough. Sorry to Firefly and Misha. Not sorry to Black Swan and Gallagher and especially Sam, who barely showed up. I apparently like pretty faces and loads of text.

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I've been grinding for weeks to get her.

The night of the update, I was there the minute servers were back up, with about 70 pulls worth in savings. I hadn't saved so much jade since Luocha's banner. She ran me to pity, and the minute I saw gold, Himeko was at my door. I had lost the 50/50.

In madness, I spent the past 20 days gearing characters, throwing them at the Mirror of Chaos (then Pure Fiction), completing the backlog of missions, wringing the Simulated Universe dry of lore tidbits and jade, desperately tracking my achievements... I was going through it.

I gave up on the final stretch and converted my Undying Starlight to about 10 pulls, and finally got Ruan Mei.

...and now? I'm free. Finally. She's here.

Thank gods Dr. Ratio is free. If I have to do this again in Penacony I might actually lose it.

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Finished the Fables of the Stars web event! I got the avatar in-game now :D

I'll change back to the battlepass Yanqing profile picture soon, but I think I'm going to keep this for a while. The Stelle and Caelus avatars face in different directions, so you can have them side by side for something like this! They look peaceful together.

Here's what all the cards look like, for those interested. The post won't let me add more than 10 images at once, so I'll add the rest in a reblog.

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HSR Personal Stats

Only one of the couple hundred thousand accounts made in the first hour of launch. I spent a little under an hour waiting to re-download the game after realizing I could switch dubs (initially download with English dub, but I play with Chinese dub). Those were simpler times.

The bulk of these hours come from the fact my characters tend to be poorly built, and I scattered my resources too wide early-game. I had 10 different 5 star characters by Version 1.2, barely three months into the game, and was trying to build everyone at once. (This wasn't really a case of gacha luck - most of my friends had a similar number of 5 star characters around the same time I did, and none of us are big spenders/most of us are f2p.) The time I spend in battles against enemies is at least twice as long compared to someone who builds their characters efficiently.

...besides, I added another hundred hours at least from this month alone grinding away in Simulated Universe. I'm not having a good time. TL;DR: wasted time and resources.

If I have any advice for others (you can ignore this if you spend money on the game — the field isn't leveled between us): meta does matter. If you want to be able to clear main story content and/or obtain combat-based event rewards, you want to be playing strong units and supports. Have at least one good team (or two if you care about Memory of Chaos). I struggled fighting the Swarm King because my team sucked and my characters are weak, and that's a mob you have to fight to progress in the story. It's not that hard to get okay characters if you're hyper-investing one at a time with them, so I would suggest doing that.

I adore Yanqing as a character and I'm happy to have him with maxed out traces at lvl 80, but his numbers aren't high enough for me to say he's worth generally playing. I'm thinking of subbing in with a mono-quantum or Seele hyper-carry team... I have enough fuel to sit through a few hours of relic farming. Here's to hoping they all roll crit (fat chance; my luck is horrendous), then whatever is leftover can go to Fu Xuan.

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Spent the week so far grinding away at Swarm Disaster, trying to complete Trailblaze Secrets and wrap up the Trail of Pathstrider. I should've tried to think smarter about it instead of running headfirst into stages I'm not stat ready for yet, so this one is all me. Best case scenario, I'll be done within a few more hours of AFK farming and ready to shelf this part of SU for Gold and Gears. Worst case, I'll be grinding between both after the new version update and losing my mind.

I should get around to finishing the backlog of companion missions too, but I'm taking my time with those. It's the whole "as long as I enjoy the journey, who cares how long it takes to get to the destination" thing. Bless Star Rail for not being annoying about quests like Genshin is, this is saving my life out here.

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I got Argenti! Nearly ran to hard pity for him... but I won the 50/50, so there's that.

Can't level him past level 40 yet. I haven't unlocked the boss for his ascension mats, so I guess I'm grinding that next.