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Tale, End Upon The First Encounter ​

Patch: 3.7 · Chapter: As Tomorrow Became Yesterday · Side Mission 07a (optional branch of Mission 07, "Fallen Petals, Leave Fading Traces of Fragrance") Previous: Fallen Petals, Leave Fading Traces of Fragrance · Next: (end of the Amphoreus arc) Wiki: https://honkai-star-rail.fandom.com/wiki/Tale,_End_Upon_The_First_Encounter

Official summary ​

The mission infobox carries no |summary= text. The in-game mission-description flavor card reads:

A shooting star flashes by, like the most brilliant pen, carving staccatos into the endless loop of night. The story ends beneath the dome. The future lies in the bright, distant stars.

Synopsis ​

This is a brief, wordless-almost epilogue vignette, played entirely from Mem's perspective — the only mission in the arc to hand the player Mem as its point-of-view character. It is not a new scene in the present: it is a memory-recap (flagged in-game as "Sequence Recap 14" and "Sequence Recap 15") that replays the very first moments of the Amphoreus arc — the Express coach crashing into Janusopolis back in 3.0 — and re-frames that "first encounter" through the lens of everything the arc has since revealed about the eternal recurrence. The setting is the "Abyss of Fate" Janusopolis, "Under the Dome, where the stars fall."

A new sprout of Remembrance wakes in the Abyss ​

The recap opens on the moment (originally 3.0) when, deep in the Abyss of Fate, Mem heard the deafening crash of the Astral Express coach coming down. Frightened but curious, Mem chose to go and see what had happened.

The player now walks that memory as Mem. Mem babbles in its own half-language ("Mem... memem?"), disoriented and lost in the dark temple: "This... where?" / "Mem... lost..." / "Scared... so scared...!" It hears the distant sound and wavers — "Scared, but..." — then resolves: "Go... see?" This is the small, private act of courage that, unremarked at the time, set the entire arc in motion: a newborn sprout of Remembrance deciding to follow a sound in the dark.

Head toward the Dome, where the stars fall ​

Mem makes its way through the ruined temple toward the fallen star. It reaches a great heavy door ("Big door... heavy... Can... pass...?") and broken stretches of path it can only cross by leaning on its power over time ("Path... broken... Help... time!").

At a second broken path, Dan Heng's voice carries through — a line lifted verbatim from the 3.0 arrival, when the downed coach had just severed all contact with the Express:

Dan Heng: I guessed as much... It's no longer working. Looks like it's just the two of us out here now.

Mem, on the far side, senses them: "Someone... behind the door?"

The recap then marks the pivotal beat (Sequence Recap 15): Mem passes through the temple door and comes upon the Trailblazer — who has, in that original timeline, only just set foot on Amphoreus. The game poses the mission's central question in its own narration: "Was this a first meeting, or... a long-awaited reunion?"

On the other side, Dan Heng is heard doing exactly what he did on arrival — surveying the statuary and architecture, judging that Amphoreus holds a real civilization, and worrying whether its people will be hostile to outsiders:

Dan Heng: ...Let's find someplace safe to set up a base of operations first. This statue and the buildings we've seen so far point to a civilization here on Amphoreus... We can only hope they're not hostile toward outsiders.

Mem edges quietly closer ("Big door... moving... Quiet... mem!"). Over this reunion, a new voice sings — credited only as "The Other Author ♪," the arc's recurring guise for Cyrene / Remembrance (the "Author" who writes and re-writes the story of Amphoreus). Her lines are the emotional payload of the whole vignette:

"The Other Author ♪": I've reunited with you so many times, and every time feels like the first time we met. Each time, "love" breaks through the stubborn cycles... And takes flight toward a pink tomorrow ♪

With that, the "first encounter" is recast as the latest of countless reunions across the eternal recurrence — a meeting that, cycle after cycle, "love" (Philia) uses to break the loop. The mission closes on this note: the achievement O Muse, Tell Me is unlocked, the Light Cone Fly Into a Pink Tomorrow is awarded, and the Remembrance Trailblazer's Trace Unfinished Epilogue is unlocked.

Key characters ​

  • Mem — The POV character for the entire mission. Shown at its origin point: a frightened, newly-woken sprout of Remembrance in the Abyss of Fate who chooses to investigate the Express crash, and whose small decision to "go see" leads it through the temple door to the Trailblazer — the true "first encounter" that opened the Amphoreus arc.
  • Dan Heng — Present only as replayed voice-lines from the 3.0 arrival: confirming comms are dead ("just the two of us out here now") and cautiously scouting Amphoreus's civilization. Not a new appearance — a memory of the landing.
  • Trailblazer — The one Mem meets behind the door, just arrived on Amphoreus. Silent here; the encounter is seen from outside, through Mem's eyes.
  • Cyrene / "The Other Author ♪" — Sings the closing verse, framing the meeting as one of countless loop-crossing reunions where "love breaks through the stubborn cycles" toward "a pink tomorrow." Confirms the mission's thesis that the "first encounter" was always also a reunion.

Lore notes ​

  • A memory-recap, not a present-tense scene. The mission is explicitly built from "Sequence Recap 14" and "Sequence Recap 15." Every beat — the crash, the severed comms, Dan Heng scouting, Mem finding the Trailblazer — is a replay of the opening of 3.0 (the Express coach downed near the Abyss temple, comms cut), now retold from Mem's side of the door. Nothing new happens in the arc's present; the value is the re-framing.
  • "First meeting, or long-awaited reunion?" The game's own narration poses this, and Cyrene answers it: across the ~33.5 million recurrences, the Trailblazer and Mem meet again and again, "every time [feeling] like the first time." This retroactively colors the 3.0 first encounter as another turn of the eternal recurrence (see digest: Eternal Recurrence; Cyrene's ceremonial-blade loop mechanism).
  • "The Other Author ♪" — A soft epithet for Cyrene / Remembrance, the "Author" who has written and rewritten Amphoreus's story every cycle (cf. Cyrene's oracle book As I've Written / As We Have Written and her role as Fuli's substitute for saving the world's memories). "Love" here is Philia (cf. Cyrene = PhiLia093), cast as the force that "breaks through the stubborn cycles."
  • "A pink tomorrow" — Ties the loop's hoped-for exit to the arc's standing "see you tomorrow" / guiding-oath imagery. [?] The specific "pink" coloring is left as a tender, unglossed motif (echoing the "Rosy Celestial Maiden" / March 7th imagery and the mission's shooting-star flavor text).
  • Mem's origin. The mission is the clearest on-screen depiction of Mem before it is entrusted to the Trailblazer: a lone, fearful Remembrance sprite in the Abyss of Fate that follows the crash on its own initiative. This complements 3.0 (Mem entrusted to the Trailblazer by Fuli's gaze) and 3.4's implication that Mem originates from the Membrance Maze fairies of Aedes Elysiae.
  • Rewards as lore. The unlocks name the mission's mood: achievement O Muse, Tell Me (an invocation-of-the-muse epic opening, apt for a story that "ends upon the first encounter"), Light Cone Fly Into a Pink Tomorrow, and the Remembrance Trailblazer Trace Unfinished Epilogue — signaling this is a coda placed at the arc's very end that loops back to its very beginning.

Connections ​

  • To 3.0 (Heroic Saga of Flame-Chase): directly replays the arc's opening — the coach crash near the Abyss temple, severed comms, Dan Heng and the Trailblazer's first steps on Amphoreus, and Mem's introduction. Dan Heng's "just the two of us out here now" is the 3.0 landing beat.
  • To the Eternal Recurrence (3.4) and Cyrene's loop (3.4–3.6): Cyrene's closing verse ("reunited with you so many times") explicitly reads the first encounter as one loop among millions, consistent with the ceremonial-blade / Time-reset mechanism.
  • To Mem's lineage (3.4): reinforces Mem as a Remembrance sprite tied to the Membrance Maze / Aedes Elysiae fairies.

Sources ​

Hindsight (full arc) ​

  • Reread with the reveal: Replaying 3.0's crash from Mem's side of the temple door lands completely differently knowing Mem = the Demiurge = the regrown "heart" Cyrene/PhiLia093 nourished across 30M cycles (m03/m07) — the frightened sprite deciding to "go see" is Amphoreus's Heart taking its first step toward the Trailblazer.
  • Reread with the reveal: "Was this a first meeting, or a long-awaited reunion?" answers itself against the Eternal Recurrence (Amphoreus = a Nanook-gazed Erudition Scepter run 33,550,336 times) and the fact that the Trailblazer died in the 3.0 crash — every "first encounter" is one loop among millions, and "The Other Author ♪" (Cyrene/Remembrance) confirms it: "every time feels like the first time we met."
  • [?] left open: The "pink tomorrow" motif is a tender, unglossed sign that pays off in m07's pink-star wish (the Coreflames scattered to glow pink for thirteen seconds); nothing new happens in the present — the value is the reframe of the arc's opening as its ending.

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