WHO IS TALULAH? REUNION AND CHI XIAO
Table of Contents
Talulah is the first villain of Arknights and Reunion’s former leader. She infected herself with Originium to escape the duke who raised her, and she is now playable. Arknights Endfield names Reunion only once, behind her sister’s sword Chi Xiao.
To escape the man who raised her, Talulah pushed a splinter of Originium into her own arm, knowing it would give her an incurable disease. That man was an Ursus duke who was training her to be his heir, and once she was Infected she was no use to him. Years later she led Reunion, the Infected army that burns a city in the opening chapter of the first Arknights, and she came close to killing Amiya. Seven years after that debut she has been announced as a playable operator. Endfield, set on a new planet a hundred and fifty years later, never says her name. It mentions Reunion once, and you only find that line by searching an old library for the name of her sister’s sword.
How we checked this. Every quote is from the official English text of the original Arknights or Arknights Endfield. Where the games leave something unsaid, we say that too. The images are frames from our Talulah video, built from official Hypergryph and Gryphline art and footage.
Endfield Hub is a fan-made resource and is not affiliated with Hypergryph or Yostar.
Watch it first: the whole story in 15 minutes, from our YouTube channel. Every quote it uses follows below, in full.
TL;DR
- She chose Oripathy to escape Kashchey. “I’m an Infected now, Duke Kashchey. My life is wound short, and your schemes, your plans, your investments, all for naught.”
- Ch’en and Talulah are half-sisters through their mother, Wei Yenwu’s sister. Talulah’s father was Edward Artorius, Wei’s sworn brother.
- Reunion grew out of the Ursus tundra, from the Infected who stood with her, Patriot and FrostNova among them.
- The tyrant of Chernobog was Kashchey living on inside her. Ch’en and Amiya pulled her back, and she ended it with “I am fire.”
- She chose to live: “I will live until I have the right to die for them.”
- Endfield keeps three traces: the Reunion manifesto in a Wuling vault, the Infected no longer shunned on Talos-II, and the names of Patriot and FrostNova in the prologue.
How Does Endfield Mention Reunion?
It happens in a Wuling side quest. Chen Qianyu leads you into an ancient vault, Sword Vault Dale, because she thinks it hides a legendary sword technique called Chi Xiao Swordmancy. The quest log says what you find: “The vault neither contains ‘Chi Xiao Swordmancy’ nor data about lost tech. Instead, it is a repository of cultural works.” The shelves hold books from Terra, the first game’s world.
When you search the archive for Chi Xiao, one of the results is a book called Callsign: Crimson Rain (Kazdel). Its entry calls it “a radical piece of writing calling for the oppressed, especially the Infected, to unite together and fight for their rights,” adds that it is “a piece of key ideological literature for the Infected prior to the Reunion Movement,” and that it “was once banned in multiple nations.”
That is the only time Endfield names Reunion. The search matches because of the word “crimson”; the game never says the link is deliberate. Endfield’s first chapter has a second trace, a voice reciting a list of names, which we come back to at the end.
Is Chen Qianyu Related to Ch’en?
Chen is a Lung swordswoman from Hongshan who fights with two blades. Her family’s story is about a third one. In one voice line she remembers her mother’s crimson sword, a family heirloom her mother said a heroine of Yan gave to their ancestor, and old folks from all over Hongshan came to their house just to see it. Then her mother disappeared, and the sword went with her. Chen puts it plainly: her mother left her behind to take up Chi Xiao.
Her files keep coming back to that absence. Even the courtyard gate gets a story: its hinge broke two weeks after her mother, Chen Chichi, walked out, and from then on its creak told her father every time Chen came and went. Her potentials carry the sword’s name too. One is called Shadowless, which is also the name of the first game’s Ch’en’s strongest skill, Chi Xiao - Shadowless. Another is called Improvised Chi Xiao, since Chen does not have the real one.
Gilberta adds one more clue. Long ago at Rhodes Island she met a lady with a unique blade standing by a lake. With one flash the water barely rippled, but a whole cloud split in two. The lady left a letter to be passed to Chen once she comes into her own, and Chen herself says her mother’s blade “stirred the very clouds.”
Endfield never says who the heroine of Yan was, or whether the lady by the lake is Chen’s mother, and it never uses the name Ch’en. Every clue it gives points back to the same sword. For the Endfield side in full, see our Chen Qianyu lore post and Gilberta lore post.
What Is Chi Xiao in Arknights?
In the first Arknights, Chi Xiao belongs to Ch’en, a superintendent in the police of Lungmen, a giant city that moves across the land on wheels. Her uncle Wei Yenwu rules the city and trained her with the sword. The game calls it the dragonslaying sword, because it cuts straight through Arts, Terra’s word for magic. Before it was Ch’en’s, it was Wei’s, and he used it during the worst years of his life.
Decades earlier, Lungmen was secretly run by an Ursus noble, the Duke of Kashchey. Wei and a small group of friends overthrew him and drove him out. One of those friends was Edward Artorius, a noble from one of Londinium’s highest families, keeping his identity secret in Lungmen. Wei called him his sworn brother, with whom he shared no blood.
Edward fell in love with Wei’s sister. Kashchey, plotting from exile, passed that secret to Wei’s jealous twin brother and to a shadowy power in Londinium. Wei says it in his own words: “I was forced to choose between Edward or my sister’s unborn child.” Edward died in Lungmen about twenty years before the main story.
Years later Kashchey throws it in Wei’s face: “your Chi Xiao drank his blood. You did it.” To Kashchey, Wei answers: “Kashchey. You killed my brother.” In private he tells Fumizuki, “I won’t treat Edward’s death as if it was by Kashchey’s hands.” The game never shows who struck the blow, and neither do we.
Edward’s daughter was Talulah. Her mother was Wei’s sister, and that same woman was Ch’en’s mother. So Ch’en and Talulah are half-sisters, and both are Wei’s nieces. Both girls grew up in Lungmen. Swire remembers the young Talulah as bossy, quick to anger, always first to charge in, and the only one who could snap Ch’en out of a sulk. Wei taught the two of them a sparring game where a hit to the face scored three points, the chest five and the waist two; Talulah later says he taught it because other kids were bullying her at school.
Then Kashchey came back to Lungmen for Talulah. He told Wei he could have her back, but the restraints on her would tear Lungmen in half: kill him and take back his niece at the cost of the city, or let them both walk free. Ch’en shouted her sister’s name, but Lungmen let them go. Kashchey took Talulah to Ursus and raised her as his adopted daughter.
Why Did Talulah Infect Herself?
Kashchey did not raise Talulah as a daughter so much as a successor. He set her tasks, tested her and graded the results. In one test a man named Antonio ran off with secret records, and Kashchey had Talulah frame him so the police would beat him to death on the road. She tried to let him escape, but Kashchey’s agents dealt with Antonio anyway, and afterwards Kashchey told her she had not done as well as last time.
He also used her father against her. Her father’s killer, he told her, was still alive and well, and if she trained hard enough she could take her revenge one day. He said what he wanted in so many words: “I long for an heir.”
Talulah’s way out was the splinter. Half a year before this conversation she had embedded a shard of Originium in her own arm, and now she told him:
“I’m an Infected now, Duke Kashchey. My life is wound short, and your schemes, your plans, your investments, all for naught. You have no way to use me ever again.”
Kashchey’s reply: “Ah. Truly… an unforeseen method.” In Ursus the Infected are hunted by patrols and driven out of towns, so she had chosen that life over becoming his heir. Some time after this, she stabbed him and left.
How Did Talulah Found Reunion?
Talulah’s own past is told through letters she writes to her sister. Each opens with Ch’en’s given name, Hui-chieh, and one is dated “Third year without the Black Snake,” her name for Kashchey. In them she is hiding in a small Ursus village, living with an old woman and making up a new story every day about where her fancy clothes came from. The old woman remembers every version: “A bald-faced liar, that’s what you are.”
Her closest friend there is Alina, an Elafia who teaches the village children and writes down everything the two of them hope to build. Alina is Infected too, and when Talulah’s temper flares, Alina talks her down. When an Infected patrol searches the village, an old man tries to take the blame for Talulah and is murdered for it. Talulah fights back, and after that she keeps going.
She leads a small band north into the tundra, looking for the guerrillas already fighting for the Infected there. She finds a young Caster called FrostNova and her Yeti Squad, and FrostNova’s adoptive father, a giant Sarkaz warrior known as Patriot. Their real names were Yelena and Buldrokkas’tee. Patriot calls her an empty idealist at first. She takes in two orphans, Sasha and Eno, and she lets anyone who wants to leave the group go, even after some who left betray her to the Ursus army. That choice wins Patriot over. Infected from the villages, the camps and the tundra start standing together under her, and that movement becomes Reunion.
What Happened to Alina?
One decision would cost Talulah Alina. A patrol was searching a village that had traded food with Reunion, so Talulah drew it toward her own fighters and ambushed it to keep the villagers out of trouble. What was left of the patrol fled east, the same way Alina had gone to trade for supplies.
Talulah found her lying in the snow, still holding an empty basket. She carried her home through the storm, asking who had done it. Alina refused to say: “You mustn’t fight for revenge. You’ve already chosen, Talulah.” If Talulah let hatred in, Alina warned, the curse that old man put on her would swallow her up. Alina’s last words were about the children and about Talulah’s sister, and then: “Snow… is warmer… than I ever imagined.”
Talulah walked straight past the camp with Alina on her back and into the night, leaving a trail of flames. FrostNova stopped anyone from following: “Whatever happened, it’s hers alone to remember.” Talulah would later have no memory of what happened after that.
Was Talulah the Tyrant of Chernobog?
The next time players see Talulah is the opening of the first Arknights. The Ursus city of Chernobog is burning, Reunion is tearing it apart, and Talulah is the tyrant leading them. She corners Amiya, the young leader of Rhodes Island, and nearly kills her; Ace holds her off so the others can escape, and he never comes home. From there she treats her own people as expendable: she abandons a squad of her soldiers and throws W, her Sarkaz mercenary captain, off the city.
FrostNova dies in Lungmen, and Patriot dies defending Chernobog’s core city, which Talulah has aimed straight at Lungmen to start a war between Ursus and Yan. To stop the collision someone has to reach the top of the core city, and Ch’en goes up with Chi Xiao.
Amiya goes with her. Amiya can see other people’s memories, and on top of the tower she sees what has happened: “You should have died when Talulah stabbed you.” Kashchey’s Arts had survived the stab and lived on inside Talulah, slowly taking over her mind until the Black Snake was wearing her body. The tyrant of Chernobog had been Kashchey, with Talulah buried underneath. The game does not date when the takeover began.
What Does “I Am Fire” Mean?
Kashchey taunts Ch’en anyway: “Ch’en Hui-chieh. You are my sister in blood and flesh.” Ch’en draws Chi Xiao and answers: “Get the hell out of my sister’s body.”
As the fight wears Kashchey down, Talulah starts to surface. She hears Alina’s voice and says the names of the people he mocked: Mister Buldrokkas’tee, Yelena, little Eno, little Sasha, the quiet Lyudmila, the kind Alex, Alina. Then she ends him:
“I might be a Kashchey… But I’m definitely not another Black Snake.”
“I am fire.”
When Kashchey is gone, Talulah gets up on her own and asks her sister, “When did your claws get so sharp?” Ch’en arrests her and explains that she is not judging her: “Right now, there isn’t a place in the world just and capable enough to judge you.” Even after all that, they still talk like sisters. Talulah asks if Ch’en is living out “those weird novels you used to read,” good food, great wine and amazing scenery, and Ch’en tells her, “Hey! Shut up…!”
Talulah refuses to die. If she dies, the names only she remembers die with her: “I will live until I have the right to die for them.”
What Happened to Talulah After Chernobog?
Later, Reunion’s own survivors kidnap her and demand an answer for everything done in her name. She does not make excuses. She will wait for her judgment, and until then she will live. She tracks down what is left of Kashchey, hiding as a professor at a small northern college under the name Koshelna. Her reaction: “Couldn’t have picked a more obvious name, could you, Kashchey?”
Out on the tundra, with the Infected who choose to follow her, she founds a village and names it Reunion. Ch’en’s file notes that the name now means a village more than a group of fighters. Ch’en keeps watch over it for Rhodes Island, bringing supplies and news, and the children there start sewing teddy bears for her after someone saw her staring at one. In the latest chapters, Talulah cuts her way into a sealed district to rescue Infected prisoners and agrees to fight alongside a new Ursus resistance, while still worrying: “Reunion has a past full of mistakes.”
When Is Talulah Playable?
Seven years after her debut, Talulah is finally becoming playable. At the Chinese server’s anniversary stream she was revealed as a limited six-star Guard, arriving on November 1 with a new story event called “Vremya, v Put’!” (“Time, Onward”). Global players will get her at a later anniversary; there is no Global date yet. We will update this when the official Global announcement lands.
What Did Talos-II Keep of Reunion?
A century and a half later, pieces of Talulah’s story are still on Talos-II. The manifesto sits in the vault of Terran culture, between action movies and old poetry, labelled as reading from before Reunion. Endfield’s history also records that once Rhodes Island’s Oripathy treatment spread, “the Infected were no longer stigmatized in Talosian towns and villages,” which is the world Reunion was fighting for. Chi Xiao has an heir as well: Chen fights with an improvised version and is still hoping to find the real blade, and her mother.
And in Endfield’s first chapter, “A voice stirs a list of names”: Kal’tsit, Theresa, Theresis. Scout, Ace, Outcast, Whitesmith. Buldrokkas’tee, Yelena. Patriot and FrostNova are on that list, two of the people Talulah said would be forgotten if she died. The game only calls it “a voice.” Our reading: she stayed alive to remember them, and a whole new world later, someone is still saying their names.
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