contract zero

✰ LANTERN RITE 2025 ! – reblog & send to earn Peace Talismans.

[XINYUE KIOSK] - Back again, Xinyue Kiosk’s keeping up the competition, offering sweet treats, savory dishes, and even refreshing veggies for all those looking to share a snack.

[TEA TASTING] - Third-Round Knockout is once again bringing the new year on with plenty of new tea options for all those caffeinated connoisseurs that want to branch out. Including, for the first time in quite a while, specialty imports all the way from Natlan!

[DRAGON DANCE] - Uh-oh! It seems like the main crew that would lead the dragon dance are two members short, and need two sets of hands NOW! Grab someone and help keep this dance from falling through.

[KAMERA BOOTH] - Liyue is as scenic as it is busy. Several Kamera’s are set up on the docks, surrounding mountains, and some of the best balconies in the area. Make a memory with someone important to you, or keep the lens' attention for yourself!

[LANTERNS] - Like a sea, lanterns float up and flood the night sky. Meaning often dictated by color, they contain our hopes for the new year. Gather with those most cherished and wish for blessings.

[FIREWORK SHOW] - While noisy, fireworks are an incredible display of beauty and color. Make your mark on the new year with a bang!

[JADE HEARTS] - A popular shape for a popular stone in the land of Geo, these Jade Talismans sold quite well. Now, they’re made as a profession of love and desire to ring the New Year in with the company of another.

[BURNING INCENSE] - Even with all the raucous celebration, it is always important to find a quiet moment and remember those who now belong among the stars.

[TOUR GUIDE] - With as many sights to see as Liyue has, join up with a group of strangers to garner the best sights across the city and countryside!

[GIANT JENGA] - While not necessarily a Liyue classic, a recent uptick amongst the younger generation has brought this classic game to the port, and with blocks bigger than ever! Will you best your friend, or will all the pieces come crumbling down? 

[RED ENVELOPES] - Customize your own envelope as a gift to those most cherished. Whether you slip in some mora or a confession of love, even the smallest of envelopes can be life-changing!

[SNAKE PETTING] - As the mascot animal of the year, an exhibit has been set up with several non-venomous and super friendly snakes, if you’re not afraid of these scaly babies.

[JADE MYSTERY] - Shitou is running a special promotion! Guess the correct Noctilucous Jades to find out what it is, just don't gamble all of your mora away...

There's an entire faire going on, running through the hallways and open spaces of this space station, but her exploration of all the myriad cultures and societies on display has been interrupted by one simple thing: a window, looking out into a starry expanse deeper and more vibrant than anything on Teyvat. It's humbling and awe-inspiring in equal measure, to gaze upon the universe and know that even one such as she is but a tiny speck compared to even the small slice of infinity that stretches out before her.

Eventually, the faire, the lure of new knowledge, pulls her eyes away from the majesty of the stars. Wandering back through the crowded corridors, noise-cancelling headphones firmly in place but eyes wide open, Nahida feels like a sponge thrown into the ocean, soaking in information at a nearly unprecedented rate. There's so much to discover; so many worlds and civilizations beyond her own, countless new languages to learn, an even greater number of new cuisines to try.

She turns a corner and finds herself surrounded by yet more new experiences; this time, in the form of a wide array of games and puzzles. Despite how busy the space is - and the variety of entertainment it contains - people are constantly on the move; and caught in the motion of the crowd, Nahida eventually ends up in front of something that reminds her of ancient Liyuean stone lock puzzles, which the sign proudly proclaims to be Xianzhou Hexanexus: Revolution - an All-New Experience.

There's only one other person standing at the same booth - a silver-haired individual, not that much taller than Nahida herself. "Well, this is interesting," she comments, studying the geometric construct intently. "I've never been to the Xianzhou Luofu, but this puzzle looks strikingly similar to one from my homeworld. Do you know how it works?"

Today was another one of those days. Where a collection of activities and games met, Silver Wolf would be there, even if it were on the Herta Space Station. Regardless, her appearance is a mere hologram, despite the form looking indistinguishable from the real Silver Wolf to the untrained eye.

Her dexterous fingers spin the palm-sized hexanexus, turning the sides with ease to match the simulated configuration. Solved in mere seconds, she sets the puzzle back down on the display, grabbing another one and rotating it about, her eyes not leaving the toy as she responds to the voice addressing her. "You rotate the solid and translucent pieces so they line up with the solution you're given. Sometimes, the sides have special markings on them, so you gotta take those into account when you're turning it around too," she chats nonchalantly. This one takes a bit longer to crack, but Silver Wolf finishes it within two minutes nevertheless, setting it back down before the surprised Xianzhou native running the booth.

"Dr. Baizhu! This girl collapsed during the Liyue Millenial Tournament! Please do something!"

There isn't one, but two Liyuean men borderline dragging a silver-haired girl up the stairs by the arms to the front of the pharmacy. The first thing he notices is that her head is lowered and that she is barely able to stand. The second thing is that she is definitely not from Liyue, judging from her attire. Baizhu exits from behind the counter and approaches the girl, examining her condition.

"Excuse me? Miss?" He gently pats her cheek to check if she's responsive, to which he finds that she's faintly mumbling incoherently. Her eyes are half-lidded and her face is pale. "Prop her up by the bench over there, and I will see what I can do for her."

The two men do as they are told and step back to let the doctor get to work. He starts first with trying to bring her back to life with a cup of cool water. "Please, have a sip. Can you tell me your symptoms? How are you feeling?"

Silver Wolf's head hangs so her chin is tucked into her chest, and she's desperately trying to hold back the urge to eject the contents of that morning's breakfast from her stomach. "S-Slower," she mutters to those next to her (whom, exactly, she's unsure), dragging her to Aeons knows where - up a flight of stairs that seems endless. Was she on the way to prison, finally? She hoped, at least, that prison wouldn't spin as much.

She finds herself plopped onto a wooden bench, its seating slightly cushioned with embroidered silk. Finally, rest, maybe the planet would stop moving so much now, Silver Wolf thinks to herself. Oh - it seems the more she so much as thinks about spinning, the dizzier she feels, and she has to clamp her lips shut again to hold back a gag.

Something cool is pressed against her lips and she parts them, not really having the energy to refuse whatever was being offered to her, and Silver Wolf is relieved it appears to be ice water. The essence of life, indeed, as it manages to relieve her dizziness, but only slightly. Her hands grip tightly onto the edge of the bench, hanging on as if she would be flung from her spot if she didn't.

(scroll further for wolfie's plots)

as stated before, i would love to prioritize muses/muns i have not interacted with yet, but please don't let that discourage you from reaching out if we'd already interacted and you'd like to snag one of these! i'm taking a break from discord so please dm me here or on silver wolf's account to claim; i'll try to be proactive with checking my messages, but apologies in advance for any slow responses.

freminet

fontaine antimatter legion invasion - he'll probably be out on a dive or miscellaneous mission when he resurfaces to nothing less of chaos, but one of his convictions is to protect his family and, by extension, his home, so suffice to say he'll lend a hand in the defense efforts.

general lantern rite themed prompts (non-commission) - (ignoring the fact i just pitched a combat-themed thread) i think freminet would benefit from A Break from fighting; i'd love for him to participate in the festivities from the sidelines, perhaps browsing the offerings at wanwen bookhouse, listening to storytellers and operas on the stages, or being roped into a dance or lantern-making workshop where your muse needs a partner and they fortunately or unfortunately spot freminet all by himself.

silver wolf

herta space station faire - at risk of being booted out of the space station entirely, you might spot the hologram of a certain stellaron hunter trying her hand at the minigames set up at certain booths or deciding between a diting or cycrane plushie to bring home.

DESPITE HIS FEIGNED IGNORANCE, Welt knows that the Stellaron Hunter calling herself Silver Wolf has noticed the stares he's laid upon her time and time again. Welt cannot deny the familiarity he feels whenever he looks at her, reminded so much of the young woman he'd trained and cared for over a decade ago. Perhaps that familiarity is why he's so shocked to see her in the square without anyone to accompany her, looking up towards that crystal sculpture with a level, almost bored expression.

The express had been requested to return by both the Silvermane Guards and Wildfire in the past week, to act as mediators while they hurriedly attempted to quell the growing tensions. Despite this, Welt remained content to leave that to the rest of the nameless, preferring to walk from the room in hopes of avoiding the ache that seeing an unfamiliar Bronya and Seele brought to his heart. It's been nearly two years, and yet Welt still can't bear the idea of looking at them and seeing only the girls he'd left Joey behind with.

He isn't aware of where his feet are taking him at first, passing by trolley after trolley as he descends the long steps, intent on getting away from the building as fast as possible. It's only when he's practically barrelling over the younger woman that he's forced to pull himself from his mind, looking downwards with concern, before he's coming face to face with one of the few people he'd rather not have bumped into. 'An almost capricious fate...', yet still he puts that smile onto his face, hand reaching to steady the woman he'd rudely knocked.

Truth be told, she wants no part of the current Belobogian administration, especially because that old hag in office that everyone says "looks just like her" still refuses to drop her guard on Silver Wolf's perfectly innocuous goals. What a joke. She's turning a corner trying to run from another soldier addressing her with a flustered "M-Miss Supreme Guardian…!", the coil of her ponytail swaying in the frosty wind when she ungracefully crashes into a taller figure.

"Oh, it's the old dude with glasses from the Express," she speaks without thinking, nevertheless taking his offered hand, brushing off her bandaged knees as she stands again. Silver Wolf doesn't miss the tone in his voice, turning to see the curious IPC soldiers craning their heads in her direction. "Sure, uncle, why not?" She offers a shrug, already continuing to walk in the direction she had already been headed, with the intention for her new companion to follow.

...wait, not that kind of training?

crystallize — the xianzhou luofu — feixiao and blade

Blade's combat prowess cannot be ignored, however. If he intends to impart some of that knowledge... Feixiao will stand watch, and safeguard those stationed here. The other girl, however... Oddly enough, the General hasn't seen her face before. She's heard the name "Silver Wolf" on several occasions, known as a genius hacker-- but Feixiao supposed she's good enough to stay under the radar for the most part. The Stellaron Hunters never lacked for talent and subtlety. "So. What do you have planned?" She speaks in a gruff tone, arms crossed over her chest as azure eyes glance from Blade's taller stature to Silver Wolf's much smaller one-- she doesn't care if she makes it abundantly clear that she doesn't trust either one of them. "One funny move... and it's over for you both. Understand?" She pauses. "Over for one of you, anyways. The other can go straight to the bottom of the Shackling Prison."

"Well, hopefully that served as a good introduction to today's practice. If we're moving up in levels from the easiest difficulty to the hardest, seems like it should be me that goes first." Another nonchalant pop of her bubblegum, and Silver Wolf engages the wrist module on her right arm with a pump of her fist, the cybernetic blade seemingly constructed entirely out of holographic pixels extending over the back of her hand. "Who's first?"

A soldier in the front row who'd seemed to be itching for a fight during the past few minutes steps up almost automatically. A makeshift arena forms, more like a crude circle where the training spar would be taking place more than anything. Everyone else seems to step back, forming into a perimeter, breaths held in anticipation.

Silver Wolf shifts her stance, right foot in front of the left, stabilizing herself. The soldier's heavy metal lance seems to make a sound as it slices through the air towards her person.

Request: [1d20] Roll: [1] Result: 1

The taps of her fingers on her wrist module were not fast enough for the brute force of the spear's blades slashing at her. The pixelated cube she's positioned over the soldier's head falls without hitting anything as the soldier lunges forward and dodges it, almost as if they planned the move at the perfect moment. Instinctively, she lets out a sound both of surprise and pain. A large slash traces along her forearm and through her midsection, and where one would expect blood to be pouring from the flesh wounds, the bystanders instead see glitching pixels, Silver Wolf's form revealed to be a mere hologram.

"Not bad," she offers, retracting her blade and taking a step back, her hand hovering over the digital open wounds. There's little else she can say; for all her lack of strength, she didn't expect to perform this poorly out the gate.

sea of quanta — the xianzhou luofu — firefly

“I don't think that would be a bad place to start at all...with how listless they are some excitement could bring a smile to their face. Or...their equivalent of smiling at least.” Perhaps the ingeniums are capable of content chirps with their avian designs. “They are capable of experiencing despondency so surely they must be capable of expericing satisfaction...though if the game includes a losing condition we need to be sure it won't cause them to spiral further.”

Different lyrics, same rhythm. Constructed for a purpose yet flawed with a desire for more that weighs at their spirits. Firefly finds resemblance where perhaps she should not. Far from heartless is she capable of being, that beating heart in her chest bleeding at the cries of birds weeping over their own clipped wings. They aren't like her, not really, but she feels kinship all the same.

Bones ache in a protest of mere existence. Skin feeling a chill she can recognise logically as a consequence of her own frailty, a fleeting feeling firing across nerves. For a brief moment there is hesitation, a stiffness not born of illness across her limbs, before she relaaes a silent breath and her body leans, limbs and presses lightly into Silver Wolf's side. A smile plays soft on her lips, she holds no doubt she will recieve a nudge if her presence so close is not welcomed.

Silver Wolf does not startle easily, and so her expression remains unchanged when Firefly leans into her side, but she's not dense, and the warmth of her companion serves as a reminder to reroute her train of thought. What about a game where there are no losers? It shouldn't have taken her the subtle touch to reconsider her strategies, but Silver Wolf is certainly no stranger to losses, so otherwise the thought wouldn't have even crossed her mind.

Nearly imperceptibly to the untrained eye, though she knows Firefly can tell, she shifts her posture so her jacket sleeve presses against Firefly's shoulder, the faux fur of her hood ever so slightly tickling both of their cheeks with the minutely narrower space. Of course, all the while, the reciprocation remains delicate enough to not exacerbate any potential pain or discomfort - Silver Wolf is always careful with these things.

Tuning out the outside world for just a moment, the hacker becomes engrossed in searching her wrist module for the query "games where everyone is a winner," her toe tapping upon the floor in a silent rhythm as she scrolls the results. Even in this brief moment of simple research on a bustling ship, it feels as if she and her companion are the only two living beings in a three-dimensional, blank space simulation - if this moment were a game, she'd surely have a few choice words for the developer, if it were anybody else beside her but Firefly.

fonatine, lechots clockwork workshop — @phantomiaou

observation comes as naturally to her as breathing. where it had once been her sharpest tool for survival, she has since earned the privilege for it to be a weapon of choice—an additional card up her sleeve—but there is what they say about old habits, how harder they are to kill than half the men she's met, and by the time lynette reaches the clockwork shop, violet eyes and silver ears have since assessed the professions and purposes of most passersby.

one of those passersby is not fontainian, but so notably so. lynette first starts her analysis, as usual, with hearing. hearing soon turns to seeing. then the entirely new jingle begins to play, and the liveliness of it all has lynette turn fully from the shelf of knickknacks she had long stopped perusing.

...did she just do that herself?

blonde hair and a beret flash through her mind for a fleeting moment. this new version of the toy chirps a charming little tune, thinks lynette, unlike any other she thinks she has heard.

"excuse me..." a customer? a collaborator? lynette had heard nothing of livre taking on a new shop hand. "are there any more penguins like that?"

Her eyes first land on the fluffy cat ears that are yearning to be pet, but of course, Silver Wolf has some semblance of manners, and her hands stay put, her face as stoic as ever. Perhaps she'd be willing to extort some money out of another sucker, but lie to a cat girl, she could not. (She almost voices this fact as if to demonstrate her good will, but thinks it best to not let on that she's an internationally wanted criminal-slash-hacker if the other person doesn't already know that.)

a collection of words to describe the strangeness of being human, continued.

✦ aesthosis: the state of feeling trapped inside your own subjective tastes—not knowing why you find certain things beautiful or ugly, only that you do.

✦ anoscetia: the anxiety of not knowing “the real you”.

✦ chrysalism: the amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm.

✦ elsewise: to be struck by the poignant strangeness of other people’s homes, which smell and feel different from your own.

✦ exulansis: the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it, which allows it to drift away from the rest of your story until it feels out of place.

✦ fata organa: a flash of real emotion glimpsed in someone sitting across the room, as if you could see backstage through a gap in the curtains.

✦ flichtish: to be nervously aware how much of your self-image is based on untested assumptions about yourself.

✦ funkenzwangsvorstellung: the primal trance of watching a campfire in the dark.

✦ ghough: a state of panic that everything good will be taken from you too early, which makes you want to swallow the world before it ends up swallowing you.

✦ hiddled: feeling the loneliness of having to keep a secret to yourself.

✦ jouska: a hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head.

✦ koinophobia: the fear that you’ve lived an ordinary life.

✦ loss of backing: an abrupt collapse of trust in yourself, which makes it that much harder to guarantee that your word is worth anything, even to yourself.

✦ mahpiohanzia: the frustration of being unable to fly.

✦ malotype: a certain person who embodies all the things you like the least about yourself, which leaves you feeling repulsed and fascinated in equal measure.

✦ maru mori: the heartbreaking simplicity of ordinary things.

✦ midding: the tranquil pleasure of being near a gathering but not quite in it, feeling blissfully invisible yet still fully included.

✦ nementia: the post-distraction effort to recall the reason you‘re feeling particularly anxious or angry or excited, trying to retrace your sequence of thoughts like a kid gathering the string of a downed kite.

✦ occhiolism: the awareness of how fundamentally limited your senses are.

✦ ochisia: the fear that the role you once occupied in someone’s life could be refilled without a second thought.

✦ onism: the awareness of how little of the world you’ll experience.

✦ querinous: the longing for a sense of certainty in a relationship.

✦ rückkehrunruhe: the feeling of returning from an immersive trip only to notice it fading rapidly from your awareness, as if your brain had automatically assumed it was all just a dream.

✦ sayfish: a sincere emotion that seems to wither into mush as soon as you try to put it into words.

✦ solysium: the unhinged delirium of being alone for an extended period of time.

✦ tarrion: an odd interval of blankness felt after something big happens to you but before you feel the resulting emotional reaction.

✦ the kick drop: the moment you wake up from an immersive dream and have to abruptly recalibrate to the real world—unquitting your job, falling right back out of love, reburying your lost loved ones.

✦ the standard blues: the dispiriting awareness that the twists and turns of your life feel new and profound but are not unique, which makes even your toughest challenges feel harmless and predictable, just another remake of the same old story.

✦ the wends: the frustration that you’re not enjoying an experience as much as you should.

✦ vaucasy: the fear that you’re little more than a product of your circumstances.

✦ vicarous: being curious to know what someone else would do if they were in your shoes, eager to watch another actor put their own spin on the character that is You.

✦ watashiato: curiosity about the impact you’ve had on the lives of the people you know, wondering which of your harmless actions or long-forgotten words might have altered the plot of their stories in ways you’ll never get to see.

✦ wellium: an excuse you come up with to rationalize a disappointing outcome.

✦ wildred: feeling the haunting solitude of extremely remote places, which makes you feel like you’ve just intruded on a conversation that had nothing to do with you.