#and welt with AE likely has some experience with science and engineering

[prringlecan]

When are we getting more Herta and Welt interactions PLEASE I know she wants to pick apart that old man’s brain soooo bad

Likely for her own curiosity but if I were a genius and some old fuck showed up saying he was an animator and then not ONLY pulled a BLACK HOLE out of nowhere, but CUT IT IN HALF????????? I think Herta would really enjoy working with him at least

[busghost]

what are your thoughts on Himeko lorewise? just watched Final Lesson 😢 did she have a good and worth life?

Like many characters in Honkai, being Himeko was suffering. BUT The last few years of her life were full of love and happiness with the St. Freya crew.

Sources for Himeko's backstory come mostly from the Alien Space manga, her battlesuit descriptions, and oddly enough the Durandal visual novel as she makes a short appearance in Bianka’s origin story.

Starting from the beginning Murata Himeko was born on June 11, 1987, to Schicksal scientist Murata Ryusuke and an unnamed mother in Japan. Her mother died when she was young.

She graduated from high school with top honors (some people claim at age 15, but I haven’t found the source for that yet, but she was extremely intelligent). She then went to the United States to enroll in Cal Tech's Aerospace and Space Engineering program. One of her professors was Dr. Frederica Nikola Tesla, and was well on the way to her degree. There was a point just at the start of the Alien Space manga where Welt Yang substituted for Tesla and she had something akin to a schoolgirl crush on him. She also was an enthusiastic alien hunter, always on the look for aliens in the news or shady forums.  Once you play Chapter XI-EX, you learn more about her hopes and dreams at this point in her life.

Everything went wrong for her in 2005 when her father Murata Ryusuke left Schicksal to give Anti-Entropy the controls to the 4th Divine Key. I’m gonna skip through a lot of the manga’s plot but basically, all Himeko knew was one moment she was having dinner with her father and Professor Welt, then she woke up in a hospital, her father was dead, and Welt was nowhere to be found.

what actually happened:

Welt chose to leave her out of the loop on what had happened, because her father used her, knowing she could possibly die, to appeal to the fact that AE actually cares about human life. Ryusuke betrays AE, kills his alien friend, and attempts to kill Welt to get his Herrscher core. So Welt kills him with 5D chess (he is actually able to experience more than three spatial dimensions because that’s apparently a power the Herrscher of Reason has) because he was a crazy bastard willing to kill his own daughter “for the sake of humanity”. This is an insultingly stupid version of the 2005 plot in Alien Space. I didn’t include the 2029 plot but it does confirm there’s an alternate universe where Himeko is still alive. It also confirms that this universe’s Himeko is dead, so I guess this death is sticking.

Anyway, the only clue she has about any of this is a letter from Schicksal, so that’s the lead she follows. She became a Valkyrie at age 19, older than most, and with poor Honkai adaptability, so she had the Schicksal artificial stigmata implanted, greatly reducing her lifespan. She was part of the Valkyrie Assault Squad, led by Ragna until 2010 when a mission left her as the only survivor. Prompted by Ragna she became a teacher at St. Freya.

One day when she visited the orphanage that Ragna used to help at she met Bianka Ataegina and informed her of Ragna’s death, which lead Bianka to become a Valkyrie.

And so we get to the beginning of vol. 1 of the manga. Himeko is a sad, angry alcoholic who can’t get a relationship to last longer than one date. She’s also  Schicksal Far-East Branch’s most powerful Valkyrie, Major of Valkyrie Squad V, and Captain of the battleship Hyperion. And her current date has just been interrupted because she has to go respond to the 3rd Honkai Eruption (hey that’s the game’s title!). A few days later and she’s a surrogate mother to Kiana, Mei, and Bronya because Theresa moved them into her apartment.

Chapter Chiyou and Chapter Xuanyuan both happen but those are both in Chronicles in the game and are worth playing if only for the crystals. And since you say you’ve played Chapter 9, that’s basically everything there is about Himeko.

misc. Himeko ramblings/opinions/feelings below the cut.

I love how Himeko goes from telling the girls that if a comrade is corrupted by the Honkai they must be killed immediately, to giving her life to bring Kiana back from the Honkai. Not only giving her life but giving her life when the option was to save herself OR save Kiana because to her it wasn’t an option. The power of love, a science serum, and a badass suit of armor really is beautiful.

I know I only gave basically the “here’s what happened” above but, she really did seem so happy when Kiana, Mei, and Bronya became part of her life. With the addition of Theresa of Fu Hua to that group, they really had a beautiful little family and despite all the bad that had happened to her previously, I really think that she was happy in the end.

Excuse me, I’m gonna go cry again and maybe make a sappy post about Himeko. Again.