#hette

Hette's green patterns

The first thing that comes to my mind are the green patterns (and palette) on Hette's scarf and coat-thingy. We didn't even have Inazuma when I created them. What I had in mind was that she used to study botanics in Sumeru and I wanted it so seem somewhat oriental. Well, as things have it, when we got the Sumeru academia, we learned that all students wear berets with lining color specific to their darshan. Here's the beret for the Amurta darshan which would naturally include Hette's botanics studies:

It just seriously looks like she just loyally wears an Amurta scarf. Thanks, lore ♥

2. Outfit

Speaking of clothes, let's focus on the outfit as a whole. When Genshin first teased Collei's outfit, it instantly became one of my fav designs in Genshin. And there was no wonder, I CLEARLY have a type. Just look at the similarity and placement of design elements (even the ombre on tights xD). Hette was created roughly one year prior Collei's first reveal - outfit-wise, with no basis for future Sumeru visuals. I wanted to combine her being from Mondstadt with influence from her studies in Sumeru. Well, and as coincidence has it, Collei is from Sumeru, influenced by Mondstadt. Same design concept.

3. Silver's palette

Since we're at visuals now, I will go fast forward to Silver. If Hette is a Bulbasaur, Silver is Venusaur. She's a sword user with affiliation for Dendro.

Now if you think she looks like fem version of Alhaitham, with his secondary blue color substitued with her magenta, you're not wrong. She totally does. Only I designed her sometime in March/April 2022 while the first leaks of Haitham's didn't come sooner than July of the same year.

4. Time and leylines

When I started with Hette's story, I made few blind reaches with the worldbuilding. I wanted her to communicate with slimes, I decided it was plausible for the slimes to reside in leylines and as such her ability needed to use leylines in a deeper sense than your regular catalyst mage. She's not OP but she has this niche ability to reach into leylines. After the moonchase festival, I yolo decided I wanted to send her back in time to meet the adepti of old (also would give her the much needed knowledge of Morax). There was no known time travel nor time relativity in Genshin by then so this was the most baseless move I ever did with my lore. I used her leyline ability to make the accidental time travel - she would drop back in time when using her ability near leyline disorder. Meaning I decided to connect Genshin time with Leylines.

The next Genshin update gave us Raiden's second story quest which confirmed both time relativity and its connection to leylines. Pretty wow moment for me.

5. Zhongli pulling his fav peeps from different spaces

This one is still insanely riddiculous to me. So you know how Hette involuntarilly traveled back in time. Long story short, MANY things happened there but eventually she got sucked in the time stream again and had the choice to attempt to move back to her original time. And she did just that. However, when she reached the moment she believed lead to her OG time, she lacked the ability to crack from the leyline space back to the normal one. However, dendro slimes see her there and they manage to call Zhongli to help. That's where I made another completely baseless move and had him pull Hette out of the leyline space using his powers.

What happened two updates after I estabilished this fact? Yes, this.

Different space? Checked. Zhongli pulling someone out? Checked. HOW THE HELL???

6. THE WHOLE FURINA THING

You think this is crazy coincidence? Weeeelll, wait till you hear this one. When Hette's back in the early Archon War era, she has her Vision still with her, in time of no Visions. In another baseless move, I decided that her Vision would thus have strongly amplified powers, almost akin to a Gnosis. This eventually leads to her being mistaken for a god. Trying to not bring attention to her time travel (to not change anything), she has to roll with this claim. She ends up being part of the adepti but she doesn't engage with them in fear of being revealed. Meanwhile common people revere her so there is this invisible wall between her and others, she's lonely and this act is extremely painful for her. She's not aging at this point because the dendro is so strong with her it just keeps instantly correcting her. And she has no idea how long she'll have to keep it up.

SOUNDS FAMILIAR???

Zhongli, who got to meet her in the future(Hette's original time) had no idea about this connection between her and the weird god who used to fight alongside them for a brief time in the past. He figures out this connection when he realizes Hette was sucked in by the Leylines. So you have this god figure learning that a mere mortal was forced to play a god role in a lonely selfless act and said god figure is pained by that realization.

SOUNDS FAMILIAR??????

(And yes, I estabilished this headcanon over a year before Fontaine came).

For the record, Furina had it worse. She was truly alone. In Hette's case (or Vesna's, that's the name she went by back then), she had the luck of Marchosius being too people-person (bear) and too nosy. He eventually got her to spill the beans and confide in him. Ever since then, he kept mentoring her in a way, looking out for her and providing moral support. Which is the only reason she didn't go insane.

7. One more outfit thingy

So we estabilished Hette traveled there and back again in time, after which she becomes who I call Silver. An identity she estabilishes because she feels her Hette self is dead and doesn't want to have anything to do with her Vesna self. But a lot of leyline stuff happened, right.

When I was designing her outfit, I wanted to put a pattern on her gray sleeves. I chose hollow circles with dots because this has been one of my fav designs for a looong time, there was no real underlying thought for it. And as far as I knew, it had never been used in Genshin in any way (and they have a lot of symbols there).

Well, guess where the hollow circle with a dot appeared for the first time in Genshin? If it isn't Irminsul, aka the tree which's roots are the FRICKING LEYLINES which Hette can enter...?

At one point the group gets separated by an avalanche, Zhongli and Hette being in one group, her loved ones in the other - so she's freaking out and pitying herself over possessing a mere Dendro that is useless on this frozen rock. Zhongli, who mostly kept to himself before, gives her an encouraging speech about how unique Dendro is for being able to manipulate life, mentioning an "old friend" who once told him that with the right approach, Dendro can reach behind flora and touch actual conscious beings too. Which Hette immediately tries to find her brother and fails miserably so she feels even worse.

However, later, after the group reunites, they get attacked by a huuuge Durin-blood-enhanced matachurl. When it corners Vinn, Hette snaps and tries that ability again and this time the adrenaline gets her through. For a short moment she senses every living being in the vicinity. Their lifeforce does feel a lot like that of young trees but then there is one ENORMOUS among them. Hette assumes that's the matachurl and mentally attacks it. It so happens the Matachurl keeps closing on Vinn while it's Zhongli who suddenly struggles to move. It takes Hette a second do realize the mistake and then she successfully paralyzes the matachurl so the boys can finish him off.

BUT. This experience together with all the small hints from before (talks about "old friend", vast knowledge of everything, the generally "older than the looks" behavior) leads her to conclusion about Zhongli's identity (Hette is smart after all). She does approach him later to apologize and indirectly reveals she had connected the dots. He warns her about using that ability again to which she replies she has no intention to (it was very ugly, violating experience). And then they part ways - presumably to never meet again, case closed. (Now the story expands from what was originally planned.)

Later, when she's finally free of fear about Vinn, she goes to Liyue and settles in the Harbor because she needs to make money to meet daily needs and fund her research. She gets employed by an old eccentric lady selling premium tea which naturally means one day Zhongli shows up in the door coming for his weekly dose.

The unexpected reunion progresses to surprised Hette automatically making one of her remarks and Zhongli actually genuinely laughing at it instead of sending a rock down the roof (which petrified Hette expected for a few seconds). Seeing the actual fricking Rex Lapis in the flesh not taking himself too seriously and most importantly SHARE her sense of humor... it just completely wins her over in an instant. At this moment he is added to her loyal-to-death circle and he could ask anything from her, she would try to accomodate him.

From that moment on they do meet now and then in the store, occasionally elsewhere, and they develop a nice friendship. Zhongli finds her company very entertaining because she gives him "mortal treatment" while knowing his true identity. He always had to go incognito if he wanted to experience mortals to treat him like one of their own. But Hette keeps interlacing their communication with tons of hidden remarks targeting his true nature, remarks only he can understand and that's a new level of fun for him. As for Hette, she's just mindblown, she adores him (platonicaly) - I often compare their dynamics to a Two-Nobel-Prize-winning professor and his favourite devoted student. That's what they have.

Until one day Hette disappears. Zhongli finds out four days later when the old shop owner asks him about her. Her landlady also hasn't seen her for days. He tracks her down to a man in the marketplace who tells him she wanted to help him find his lost sack of Mora when suddenly "the ground ate her".

What happened is that Hette wanted to call the slimes to help her look for the man's Mora but it happened to be too close to a leyline disorder. Since she mentally enters leylines in order to reach for the slimes, she came in contact with the disorder and it just sucked her in and threw her back in time to the north of pre-archon-war Liyue.