My Dearest Puppet

Chap 1

You awoke to the sound of your alarm blaring annoyingly into your ear before hastily rolling over and turning it off. You lay there motionless in the dark room trying to relish the last remnants of drowsiness before slowly dragging yourself out of bed and getting ready for school. As you got up little did you realize your phone looked a little different from the night before. A little more of a purplish hue than usual.

Put simply, you were not a morning person. You found that getting up for school and getting there is quite a burdensome task that consumes most of your energy and attention. It is due to this reason that you didn't realize something was a little different regarding your phone. In any case, you head off to school for another repetitive and mundane day. In class, you don't use your phone, so it wasn't until lunch that you realized something was amiss.

As you sat down in front of your food, you held your phone in your hand as you quickly swiped away notifications from the night before and morning. As you were disposing of the unnecessary notifications, you came across an undeletable notification from the phone system.

"Please update and download the newest feature on the Hoyoverse App"

Suspicious of the undeletable notification you quietly mused to yourself your observations.

"Hmmm... the request itself wouldn't be so strange if it came from the Hoyoverse app but the fact that it came from the phone system makes it odd. Then again, I'd do anything for more Genshin content so it's not like I would have refused anyway."

You promptly clicked on the notification which led you to update and download the new Hoyoverse feature. Once the update was done, you opened the app to look for the new feature. One thing that stood out was a change to the app theme. Instead of the usual white and blue, it was now purple, blue, and red. The Scaramouche character palette. At first, you were a little confused by the sudden change in theme but you gladly accepted it since it was the colour palette of your favourite character. You scrolled through the app looking for some other new changes when you realized all the forum posts were outdated, the most recent was posted the day before right before midnight. Much to your surprise, you didn't see any new posts about the release of The Wanderer even though it came out last night. Usually, the community would be buzzing about the release of a new character but there was nothing. You frantically searched on social media platforms for any news about the wanderer or Scaramouche for that matter but all the information on him was distorted and erased. All except for the innocent wanderer after Scaramouche erased his own existence. Frustrated, you decided to wait until after school to continue your search as the bell rang signalling the end of lunch.

For the rest of the day, you couldn't help but contemplate what was going on. First off, there was no trace of playable wanderer at all. Second, all information about him was lacking. Even in the official cutscenes, all that remains is the wanderer after Scaramouche decided to erase his existence. It was as if everyone in the real world forgot his sacrifice like the rest of the characters in the game. The final oddity was, like the traveller, why did you remember what happened?

As soon as the dismissal bell rang you dashed out of class and went home as fast as you could. On the way back, you were horrified to see that when you logged onto Genshin on your phone, your C6 wanderer was nowhere to be seen. You quickly checked your bank account and to your surprise, all the money you spent on C6 wanderer was still there and your primogems remained the same before you started wishing as if nothing had happened. Confused and lost, you went back to the Hoyoverse app and resumed looking for the new feature. It wasn't until you saw a new icon of Scaramouche's old hat that you stopped your frantic search.

"This must be the new feature," you mumbled to yourself, somewhat relieved that it's related to your favourite character. "Yeah, the devs could never forget about him, even if everyone else does."

You quickly clicked on it hoping that it would explain what was going on. What showed up on your screen next was a complete surprise as a snarky and annoyed voice also cut into your thoughts.

"Hmph took you long enough. I was beginning to think that you were too slow-witted to find me."