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ok listen i KNOW the 1.4 archon quest dropped some lore about Khaenri'ah and whatever I'm typing about Hilichurls may not hold up but listen. Listen.
Remember that one Mitachurl from the Lantern Rite festival - specifically the "move three lanterns to find the treasure" game, the very last game where one location was to go to the area around Lingjiu pass and you had to drop into one of those huge broken pillars to dig out some treasure - and there was a Mitachurl sitting there staring at a notice board (can hilichurls read?) with a sweetflower in a flowerpot next to it, and a huge bunch of straw beds with sunsettias-
I think about him every day
Ella finds a slip of paper wedged in the corner of a cobblestone.
Curiosity gets the better of her (as it does many times) and she plucks it up, only to find - to her absolute horror, pure blasphemy on it’s page.
Mi Muhe Ye means I Love You in Hilichurl, is what the scrawling, overly-flourished penmanship says. Which is just infuriatingly incorrect. Everyone knows that Mi Muhe Ye is a battle cry with intent for hostility.
Hilichurls don’t have a word for love, anyways! Probably.
Ella isn’t one to allow for rampant misinformation under her watch. Luckily for her, the writing is signature, and well-recognized by Mondstadt - their currently standing cavalry captain carries a fountain pen in one of his breast pockets and often scribbles inconsequential nothings on the message board at Cat’s Tail.
Ella personally thinks his handwriting is atrocious. Fanciful and ostentatious like the man himself, but impossible to read. It’s a good thing for everyone involved that he found a career in… calvarying, instead of becoming a scribe.
The task at hand: Ella can’t call herself a reputable scholar if she lets such misinformation in her field of study spread! Why Captain Kaeya wrote this is beyond her comprehension (it looks like it had been blown away by the wind rather than left here deliberately) but still.
With that, she sets off to find him.
In the wake of Windblume, Captain Kaeya can be found on patrol in the city as Acting Grandmaster Jean takes back her desk and the mountain of paperwork that must have no doubt accumulated during her shift in duty. Ella’s not about to bother him on the job, but oftentimes she’s seen him in the library when he’s off the clock, either rifling through the shelves or chattering away with their librarian.
Good for Ella, because she spends a bulk of time in the library anyways, so it should be no large deviance from her schedule to simply wait for him to appear.
It doesn’t take long. That, or she’d been more absorbed in her work than she realized (oh, the sky is dark already). Captain Kaeya waves to Lisa, and then heads down the stairs.
Ella hops out of her seat, paper in her hands. “Sir Kaeya!”
“Miss Ella,” Captain Kaeya says, bending at his waist in a curtsy. “What business does an honored scholar like you have with me?”
His words are - just like his handwriting, all flourish. Everyone in Mondstadt delights in watching him receive new delegates from other nations, crowding around the town square to watch him make the perplexed company blush.
Ella thrusts the piece of paper in his face. “You wrote this, didn’t you?”
“My, I did!” Captain Kaeya says. “I was wondering where that had gone.”
“It’s wrong,” she informs him. “Mi Muhu Ye does not mean I love you in the slightest! In fact, it’s a battle cry. I hope you’re not approaching hilichurl camps saying that as a greeting, Sir Kaeya.”
“Oh? I must have gotten my facts mixed up, then,” Captain Kaeya says, scratching his chin. “Perhaps I should give those Hilichurlian language texts another go.”
Ella is… surprised. She sees him at the library very often, although she hasn’t exactly paid much attention to the books he reads - why would she? But the Hilichurlian language texts aren’t a popular read, and they’re by her desk most times, so she doesn’t know how she missed him browsing them. “You’re interested in Hilichurlian linguistics?”
“Oh, of course,” Captain Kaeya says. “It’s impossible to avoid running into Hilichurls in this line of work, why not learn a little bit more about them?”
Ella perks up. Finally, a man of culture!
“I agree! They are such fascinating creatures, with such a rich history… it’s a shame that studies in the field are lacking.”
“A shame indeed,” Captain Kaeya nods, understanding to her plight. “It would be better for everyone else if we could simply carry out peaceful negotiations with hilichurls, no? Instead of all this bloodshed on both sides when we encroach on each other's' territories. I look forward to the leaps and bounds you’d no doubt make in your research, Miss Ella, for the progress to society it will bring!”
Ella’s not a knight, but she’s starting to understand why the company preaches about their captain. She’s feeling a new motivation in her veins, and she has the strange urge to salute.
“I won’t let you down, Sir!”
Captain Kaeya smiles good naturedly, and then she thinks she’d probably taken too much of his time already. Lisa is glancing over, one eyebrow raised, like she’s lazily considering meandering over to tell them off about talking so loudly in her library.
Ella bids Captain Kaeya a farewell, and goes back to tackling her observation notes with renewed vigor.
Venti, Mondstadt's “most popular” bard (that title is most likely self-claimed, but he is good, so nobody refutes him on it), sings at the foot of Barbatos’ statue that morning. Ella has spoken to him many times before, at which he’d always nod appropriately and encouragingly at her tangents, and makes funny faces at her Hilichurlian pronunciation.
He is, however, a great conversational partner, and does show genuine interest in her research. He rambled something about Hilichurlian songs (“It’s only natural that I, the greatest bard in all of Teyvat, learn to play ballads in all the languages! Why should Hilichurlian not be one of them?”).
He makes a good point, though, and Ella herself can’t exactly carry a tune enough to attempt to recreate the Hilichurlian chants she has recorded. She would ask him to tag along one of these days, except that he never seems to be around when she’s actually ready to embark on her expeditions.
She has, however, prodded his brain for knowledge of any Hilichurl-related ballads of old. A peculiar thing that sets Venti apart from the other bards of Mondstadt are the songs he sings - not necessarily about the quality, but of content . He sings those popular songs that all the Mondstadt children know by heart, and he also sings tunes that are unfamiliar yet intimate.
There are many bards who compose their own songs but none that do so much other than Venti, who has so many tunes it’s a wonder how he even remembers them all. He is also unique in his choice of setting, often spinning tales about times of old, most of them nonsensical, but enrapturing all the same.
Most stories do have some grain of truth in them - or if not, they had at least a new perspective which may do good in repetitive research, and so she asks him once, if he had any to share about Hilichurls.
He’d given her a funny look, and then she’d tossed him an apple. He’d grinned, and then sang her a song that was decidedly not about Hilichurls. Something about a land far far away, with a land forged in iron and fire and chalk and dust. It was the usual brand of nonsensical Venti-esque type of which Ella didn’t pay much mind to, but it was a fun song, and it struck her with inspiration about what a larger Hilichurl society would look like. Perhaps as time passes, their species will evolve from their current small encampments into sprawling cities - how exciting!
“Nice weather we’re having,“ Venti remarks to her as she passes.
She waves at him distractedly, beelining for the gates. Times a-wasting, daylight's burning, and she's bounding with newfound determination to look for a Hilichurl camp to study.
She's halfway down the steps when she realizes that hey, Venti is here! And immediately doubles back.
But Venti is gone like the wind already. Sigh. One of these days she'll drag him with her.
The outlander that everyone so affectionately dubs as the Traveler runs into her at the edge of an outcropping overlooking a Hilichurl encampment.
Ella perks up, because things always seem to go well when Traveler comes. It's tough, being a scholar in a dangerous field without a fighter on hand. She'd hire a guard from the Adventurer's Guild but her field of study isn't exactly too lucrative for her to spend money like that. She takes care to stay within the areas she knows the Knights patrol, just in case.
She counts her blessings, and one of them is having such a small stature. Hilichurls don't attack children, which is a reassuring thought that points towards empathy in their species!
In fact, Hilichurls rarely attack humans at all, unless their territory is being encroached upon aggressively! They do attack merchant carts to raid the food, but there hasn't been recorded Hilichurl deaths in recent Mondstadt history. For all that Pallad recklessly finds himself stumbling upon small groups of Hilichurls, he hasn't actually died yet - the Hilichurls must find no aggressive intent on him and simply chase him away for their territory.
Ella had remarked that to the Traveler once, who simply laughed. "I'm not rescuing reckless Pallad from the Hilichurls anymore," they say. They don't elaborate on why but Ella thinks she can understand. Pallad is a fool but a foolhardy one and somehow always emerges at the end of the day without a scratch, despite stumbling into every trap he gets - a rescue is just a waste of effort. If Ella was any less passionate about Hilichurls and more about human survivability instead, she might find Pallad (and that Adventurer's Guild boy, Bennett) to be very interesting study specimens.
"Reading to Hilichurls, again?" The Traveler sounds exasperated.
"I'd have you know that this is very important research!" Ella huffs indignantly. Everyone is always rebuffing her! Well, she gives some benefit of the doubt to the Traveller, who for all their skepticism, still helps her out in the end.
"Right," the Traveler says. "I'll go drag a Hilichurl out for you-"
"No!" Ella can't ever tell if they're joking - they always say that! She doesn't think they are, considering all the times she watched them mercilessly slaughter whole encampments of Hilichurls during her experiments gone wrong. It's a little unsettling how quickly they cut through them.
"You have to treat the Hilichurls with respect," Ella reminds them. That's how two way communication works best.
The Traveler sighs, but clutches the notes Ella hands them anyways, and jogs over to the camp where three hilichurls stand guard.
Ella watches as the Traveler reads off the notes, and one by one each Hilichurl… breaks out into a dance! A success!
“Looks like it went well,” Ella says to them cheerfully, and they give her a disconcerted look.
The Traveler hands her back her notes. “Why do you always try out the same few phrases?”
Ella pauses. “What?”
“You know,” the Traveler says, waving a hand at nothing. “You’re always asking me to read the same few phrases to them. Why not try out something new?” They stare at Ella, eyebrow raised.
“W-well,” Ella says, flustered. “The phrases I’ve compiled are-are phrases that I’ve studied extensively! I’m not going to send you straight into danger- I’m not going to give you information I’m not sure about! We’re talking about communicating with Hilichurls, here, a single wrong word can risk them attacking you!”
The Traveler shrugs. “I can just kill them if you get a word wrong. Isn’t research about testing out what you’re not sure off?”
Ella splutters. “If you keep upending Hilichurl camps, you’ll drive them to extinction!”
“They keep popping out of nowhere,” the Traveler points out.
“Well!” Ella crosses her arms. “Still! It’d be irresponsible for me to risk the lives of innocent Hilichurls because of a miscommunication error!”
The Traveler shrugs. “Suit yourself. I have other commissions to take, I’ll see you around.”
Ella watches them dash and leap off the side of a cliff. The telltale whoosh of a glider deploying blows some wind Ella’s way.
As much as Ella hated to admit it - her academic process being questioned by a mere, brawn-only, brute-force adventurer! ...the Traveler did have a point.
She needed to double down on her observations and perhaps take more risks in her research.
There is a whole encyclopedia of phrases that Ella has marked as a “maybe” - Hilichurl vocabulary she’s heard in passing, but not enough in different contexts to distinguish their meaning. These words are ranked from an arbitrary range of “get a happy Hilichurl to dance” to “get hit over the head with a wooden club”. She has wisely not attempted these phrases on her own, but if the Traveler doesn’t mind stalking straight into Hilichurl camps to read them poetry, who is Ella to stand in the way of progress?
She gathers her materials again, wanders the whole of the Mondstadt city, and then leans against the fountain in defeat.
“Miss Ella!” Oh, it’s Captain Kaeya. “What has you looking so down?”
“Hello, Sir Kaeya!” Ella greets. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen the Traveler around?”
“Our dear Honorary Knight?” Captain Kaeya hums, tapping his chin. “I’m not too sure, if I’m being honest. Whatever for?”
“Oh,” Ella sighs, dejected. “I needed them to accompany me to a Hilichurl camp for my research.”
“Ah, Hilichurlian linguistics,” Captain Kaeya nods understandingly. “I’m happy to see you engaged in your work, but you should keep safe. I think it’s best if you wait for the Honorary Knight to return. Perhaps you can leave a commission notice for them with Hertha or the Adventurer’s Guild.”
“Honestly?” Ella says, “I don’t usually put out a commission for them. They always seem to just find me when I’m about to go on a Hilichurl camp!”
“They do have that particularly charming quality of landing themselves into trouble,” Captain Kaeya muses.
Ella’s not too sure what their Captain considers charming , but who is she to judge? “I just figured I’d play safe today because I’m expanding my research.”
“Good choice,” Captain Kaeya says. “I trust that you remember the knights’ patrol routes, so if you choose to go without the Honorary Knight - I wouldn’t recommend it, though, you can keep safe.”
For a brief moment Ella contemplates asking him to come along with her, but he’s the Cavalry Captain (granted, without a Cavalry, but everyone in Mondstadt knows that there is no official title appropriate enough to encapsulate the strange assortment of duties of Sir Kaeya). It’s the middle of the work day and he must have a lot of work to do - that, and Ella gets the impression that she’s just been gracefully dismissed.
She feels a little awed, should she salute? “Yes Sir!”
Ella decides to head down to the Hilichurl encampments today - just to observe them, no dangerous stunts today. (She still brings along her linguistic notes, in case the Traveller decides to miraculously appear and save the day.)
They’re fascinating creatures. They’re so sophisticated that it wouldn’t be fair to call them creatures or animals - they’re a sapient species in their own right. They have societies and social hierarchies and different communities, a whole language .
It wouldn’t be fair to call their abilities primitive , for all that their tools have yet to be as complex as human inventions, they construct housing structures with wood and animal hide, forge their own weapons and cooking utensils, and - Ella hasn’t seen one for herself, but she reads in texts about the description of Hilichurlian transport balloons. Without the magic and technological marvel of humans, Hilichurls use anemo slimes to power the balloon - how innovative! Ella wishes she could observe one.
She’s seen the other ways Hilichurls work with elemental slimes, used in the construction of exploding barrels, to create weapons and shields, even to throw them as weapons. She’s come across camps who seem to be keeping Pyro Slimes as pets, for the lack of a better description, with the slimes submerged in carefully constructed water containers to keep them extinguished and docile. Whatever for, she’s not too sure, but it’s certainly a peculiar interaction.
This particular Hilichurl encampment looks like it’s guarded by three Hilichurls, currently dozing in the shade of a tree. An axe on the ground means that there’s a Mitachurl wandering nearby somewhere.
She hides in a bush, taking notes. It's funny that Hilichurls cook, she thinks. They're like humans that way. She wonders if it's a personal preference where cooked food just tastes better, or it's similar in the sense that humans can't eat raw food without getting sick.
It makes her wonder, then, about the origins of Hilichurls. Where did they come from? Perhaps they had some sort of common ancestry with humans? No other wild species has humanoid anatomy or opposable thumbs. Or was it a case of convergent evolution, where two wildly different ancestral species just happened to develop similarly?
There's not much literature on the origins of Hilichurls. The oldest texts she can find are from 500 years back, and anything before that is a large gap in history - not just in Hilichurlian studies but in many other areas of science!
How terrible it must be to have lost the world's heart of knowledge - the library of Khaenri'ah. The Sumeru Academy Library, the biggest wealth of knowledge left standing today, couldn't hold a candle to what the lost library must have been like.
They would have had a dictionary for Hilichurlian. An encyclopedia breaking down every bit of their oddities. Perhaps maybe Hilichurlian texts? Surely they have a written form of their language!
Ella vibrates with excitement just considering the possibilities - but alas, all this has been lost to time. Now she - and all the other scholars - can only hope to rebuild a fragment of Khaenri'ah's tomes.
-So engrossed in her own thoughts that she does not notice the Hilichurl's attentions on her, or the Mitachurl's return - until she hears heavy set footsteps and by then she knows she shouldn't run, lest she induce them to chase her like a prey animal.
But "oh!" she startles, falling on her behind as the Hilichurls surround her, chirping with curiosity. The Mitachurl, cashing a shadow over her hiding spot, glances over at her with disinterest and remains more engrossed in the heap of sunsettias resting on a bed of straw.
Luckily they know she poses no threat! Maybe they’ll let her off like Pallad?
"Um- um-"
How does the Traveller do it, facing them down! Up close, they're even more terrifying! Those clubs they're holding can bash her skull in with just one hit and she doesn't even want to think about those arrows, or that large axe!
No way she is going to try out lines she's not sure about! Stick to the basics, Ella.
"C-celi dada, mimi nunu!"
The Hilichurls reply with chirps and clicks and oh, if Ella wasn't panicking so hard, this would be a priceless learning opportunity. But as she has it now she can barely hear herself with the pounding of her heart in her ears!
She hopes she doesn't butcher any of the pronunciations!
"U-um, y-ye dada-"
-the strum of a lyre freezes her to her spot.
She's too terrified to look away from the hilichurls but a flash of unnatural green makes her glance to her left.
"V-venti!"
"Hello, Miss Ella! Fancy seeing you around!"
Venti the bard laughs and hops around with the lyre in his hands - does he not see the whole gang of hilichurls that surround them! - and he strums a few notes on his lyre.
The hilichurls turn towards him!
"Venti!"
Venti opens his mouth-
-and what comes out is… is… is he- is he speaking Hilichurlian?!
Then suddenly he's next to her and yanking her back, and an anemo current blasts them into the air!
She screams and holds on tight to Venti but it's over and she’s back on the grass before she knows it, several yards away from the Hilichurl camp.
"W-what- Venti! What was- Anemo- Hilichurlian- you-!"
Venti giggles, far too calm for such a harrowing situation. "Catch your breath before you speak, Miss Ella!"
"Thank Barbatos!" She says, winded.
Another flash of green catches her eye- oh, it's a vision! Belatedly she remembers that Venti the bard has an anemo vision, and it wasn't a direct act of divine power from their archon that brought them out of there, but Venti. And then she remembers again that Venti is a bow user - not that she'd ever seen it in action, nor can she imagine him fighting, but he must be proficient in it if he is a vision user, and oh, she must not have been in any danger at all!
"Thank you, Venti!" Ella gasps. "Oh, but you- you can speak Hilichurlian?!"
"Who, me?" Venti looks puzzled.
"You- back there!"
"Oh!" Venti says. "I simply read off one of these notes - they must be yours, right?"
They are! Ella must not have noticed them when they flew off her person, too worried by the Hilichurls. "Thank you," she says, as Venti hands them back to her. "Um, which one did you read?"
"This one!" Venti points out. "You marked it as a friendly greeting."
"Oh!" Ella takes a pen out of her pocket - her hands are shaking a little - to make a little marking at the side of the phrase. "Thank you again, Venti! I don't know what I would have done if you were not around."
"You seemed to have handled yourself well," Venti says.
"I was terrified!" Ella says. They begin a walk back to Mondstadt city. "I usually have the Traveller with me, but I didn't plan to go too close this time."
"You should be more careful," Venti says.
"Yes, I shall." Ella turns to him. "What had you so far out from the city?"
"I was going on a walk," Venti says. "I hear the apples further from the city are the juiciest!"
Ella nods. She's a Hilichurlian expert, not an apple expert, but everyone knows that wild fruits are crisper and fresher.
Venti chatters her all the way back to the gates and waves her away as he hops to Angel's Share. She makes a mental note to drop by the market to get a bunch of apples when it opens the next day to thank Venti with, and heads off to the library.
“Oh, drat,” Ella says, belatedly.
“Oh, it’s Miss Ella!” It’s Captain Kaeya again! He sure does like spending time in the library. “Was that a curse I hear? Dear Miss Lisa doesn’t like those words - it ruins the book’s sensibilities, you know.”
Ella… isn’t sure what that means at all. But she (and the rest of Mondstadt) have long given up trying to understand a thing about their Captain’s oddities.
“I just remembered something I forgot to do,” Ella sighs. “I met Venti out when I was looking for Hilichurl camps, but I forgot to ask him if he could play one of the Hilichurlian ballads for them! I’ve always wanted to see their reactions.”
She decides to forgo information about almost becoming Pallad. Everyone knows that he (as one of the main guardians of Spark Knight Klee) is famously lax with children. But Klee can take down an entire mountain, so maybe he’s just famously lax with Klee? She does not want a curfew put on her, thank you very much!
Captain Kaeya’s lone eye glints, like he already knows. “Ah, what a shame. Perhaps you can catch him some other time - Venti’s very attached to Mondstadt, you know.”
That’s an odd sentiment, but not… untrue? She wonders why he’s saying that, though.
“True, but he never seems to be around,” she sighs. At this rate, it’d take forever to test out all her hypotheses, especially since the Traveller comes and goes.
Wait, she just got a great idea.
“Sir Kaeya? Can I ask for a favor?”
Captain Kaeya blinks. “Hm?”
“You’ve expressed interest in Hilichurlian linguistics… and your line of work brings you in close contact each time. If you don’t mind, can I enlist your help in testing out some of the Hilichurl phrases before you - ah, have to clear out camps? Nothing big, I promise! Just read out lines and see if they attack or, uh, dance in front of you, just to get general impressions! These are all untested phrases, you see, so I should not approach them alone if I don’t know what the impression would be.”
She holds one set of her notes out to him - she makes many copies each time, because field work means that they could get ruined by the elements any time.
Captain Kaeya takes a sheet of paper from her, and he slowly looks over it, thoughtful.
And… he reads it slowly, mouthing out the words, until his eyes scan to the bottom of the list and he just… continues staring at the page..
He’s silent for an oddly long time, the pause stretching to make it almost uncomfortable, and Ella doesn’t want to interrupt his musings (what is he thinking about?), but from the corner of her eye she sees Miss Lisa look up from her book at the sudden lapse in conversation, puzzled.
Ella coughs a little. “Um, Sir Kaeya?”
Kaeya blinks, startling a little, and then he’s smiling at her and all the strange tenseness from before dissipates (other than from the back of her mind.)
“I must have zoned out a little, there! I was thinking, I would feel bad if I said a phrase well-received by Hilichurls that they start dancing at me, and I had to kill them! How terrible that would be!”
Ella blinks at that, “that will be... terrible.”
“Looks like I’ll just have to go through all the phrases until I hit a bad one. Then they’ll attack me and I’ll feel less bad for defending myself.” Captain Kaeya folds up the paper neatly and pockets it. “If that is all, Miss Ella, I’ll be heading off. I just came here to return a book before Miss Lisa zaps me, I’m afraid I have paperwork to finish up.”
“Oh, oh!” Ella fights the urge to salute, again. :Yes, sir! Thank you very much for your help, sir!”
Captain Kaeya laughs. “I’ll see you around.”
“Hello, sweetie, another late night?”
“Oh, yes,” Ella nods to Miss Lisa. “Thank you for keeping the library open till now.”
“It’s no matter, I had my own work to go through,” Miss Lisa says lazily. “I couldn’t help but overhearing your conversation with Kaeya just now.”
“Ah,” Ella says, clutching her notes. Captain Kaeya and Miss Lisa (and Acting Grandmaster Jean) are close friends. She’s seen them meet for tea. “I hope it won’t be too much of a bother to his duties.”
“I’m sure it’d be fine,” Miss Lisa says, waving a hand. “I’m sure he’d take no time at all to read Hilichurlian.”
“Uh, yes,” Ella says. Captain Kaeya is very smart, although it was more of a question on him reading Hilichurlian to the hilichurls, not to himself…
Although Miss Lisa is looking at her, eyes glinting, like there’s a little bit of an inside joke there she doesn’t quite get. Maybe between her, Captain Kaeya, and Master Jean?
“I’m sure ,” Ella says, smiling at her a little awkwardly.
Miss Lisa laughs, and waves her out of the library.
The wiki article on Ella said that she actually kinda sucks at Hilichurlian which is so funny to me