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It's like this...
Mondstadt feels like home. Well, "home" is a redundant word for a traveler like you, but it feels like how home has been described to you. When the wind shifts, and the sweet scent of apples and flowers, grass and springs, is suddenly replaced with the crispness of Cider Lake and the moorlands beyond... it's so achingly familiar.
On just such a day, you'd first set foot in the town. You'd listened to unfamiliar voices speak in a language you didn't understand, and had stumbled your way clumsily through conversations by means of constant - and at times somewhat fanciful - translations by Paimon.
Now you walk down the streets and everything, everyone is familiar. Even the people you don't actually know, the faces you can't put a name to, smile at you. You smile back. That, you think, is what "home" should feel like.
Liyue has this sense of pleasant, restful anonymity. It's not that you're not seeing familiar faces as you wander through the harbor - on the contrary, you are always running into someone you know and pulled into a conversation, dragged down the street hand-in-hand with a friend, or plied with food and asked to stay a while.
But Liyue is big, it's bustling, and it takes you in its stride. The hero who saved us all, you say? Well yes, yes of course. But gods and mortals and myths and ghosts all intermingle here, and it's nothing to make a big fuss about. The high and mighty grace the same paths as farmers and street urchins. You belong, but when you leave, perhaps they won't be looking for you. They will just be happy when you return.
Sometimes the harbor overwhelms you, and even the towns feel daunting, so you get yourself lost in the mountains instead. You sit down on the fragrant moss, breathing out, as behind you soft footsteps approach.
Inazuma is full of contradictions. Coming there is not exactly restful, and certainly not like home, but if you are gone too long, you find yourself becoming restless and irritable. You want to be there, want to find a well-worn seat or a trailing root of a tree to rest on. Waiting patiently, watching the world around you crackle and sizzle beneath the bright dome of the sky, you know that someone is bound to find you.
There might be a sturdy, almost numbing slap on your shoulder. A steady grip. A gentle touch. A polite tap. A not-quite-there brush, startling you and making you whip around, only to find nothing but insubstantial and teasing laughter.
Familiar hands welcome you there, and they tug at you when you're gone. Come back. Come back. We miss you.
Sumeru always rolls over you like a wave of comfort, making your steps quicken. Sometimes it's the weighty humidity and deep-green scent of the jungle, sometimes the scorching desert wind, but somehow the sensation is the same at heart. You feel warm, you feel welcome, you feel invited in.
The friends you have there are straightforward in how they greet you, always casual about your presence, but never dismissive. It's you, their friend, back to share a bite or meander along the streets; back to spend a few hours wandering the jungle or take in the sights and mysteries of the desert. They missed you, and they're not shy about it, pulling you into their arms and their lives with seamless ease. But they won't stop you from leaving either. They will find other company, every bit as enjoyable as yours, until you return again.
It might be something to feel melancholic about, but in truth it's a relief. You are a traveler, and they accept you as such. So maybe this, too, is a kind of home.
Fontaine is still so fresh and bright. You cannot settle down here, you have to move around. The streets, the waterways, the wilderness, the prison, the colorful underwater miasma... everything draws your attention, pulls you this way and that. While it's no longer as deep a thrill, it is nevertheless pleasant and exhilarating to go along for the ride.
It's the same way with the people really, they carry fragments of all Fontaine's attractions like brightly colored jewelry dangling in their eyes and from their finger tips. With a magpie's eye, you cannot look away, you flutter along with them. You gossip about fashion, about intricate politics, about the latest spectacle, the juiciest rumors, the most sentimental of old tales.
It's so easy to laugh along with the jokes, sing their songs, add your own spin to the stories. Without even trying, you feel like you are part of this many-faceted interplay of history and humanity and living myth. Like a game piece from another board entirely, which somehow nevertheless fits neatly into this new set of rules.
Now there's Natlan, which you are putting together like an intricate puzzle as you are finding piece after piece hidden in new and unexpected places. Each new person you meet gives you less of a sense of a specific place to belong to, and more a new aspect of a land that has shifted and changed for so long to survive, it now bears a thousand faces. Getting to know a new friend means unlocking a new unique view of what was already there, like watching the world through different pieces of colored glass and seeing it transform before your eyes.
It's exciting, because you feel as though you are tracing deep roots through the earth, your fingers looking for new meanings beneath this soil and within the people it nourishes. But at times, it makes you long for the familiar, simply because you're not sure where you fit in yet. There is no neat little slot for you, no easy explanation as to where you ought to belong. There is only the rush of the new and the unsettling drop into the unexpected, the strange, the wondrous. Which is, in a sense, exactly where you belong too. Not belonging, nor settling, just like this blazing country which is many countries, many faces, many new ways of seeing Teyvat.
And you're not done yet.