1-5: Looking for a Third

Riddly runs into town to get help for Jam, picking up the wooden backpack so it doesn't get forgotten along the way. Unsure of where to turn, she heads into the samurai barracks. In general, expecting United Cities samurai to help you is... kind of stupid, and Riddly knows that, but one did rush to her and Jam's aid against the United Heroes League just moments ago. Maybe they're a particularly kindly samurai? Maybe she could find them again in here?

The barracks isn't particularly large or busy. There are a couple samurai around but Riddly does not find one willing to talk to her. Strangely, she does find a man who is clearly not a samurai wandering around on the second floor.

Ells is a shek, the fourth “race” alongside human, hiver and skeleton. They resemble hairless humans with bony plating covering various parts of their body, long backward-sweeping horns protruding from the sides of their face, and smaller bony spikes on their chin, shoulders, elbows, hips, and knees. Women additionally have two backward-sweeping horns protruding from their brow whereas men just have bony plates up there. Shek skin tones range from light grey to a mid-tone purplish brown to dark brown and rarely black. The purplish brown (or is that brownish purple) is by far the most common.

You'll notice that Ells has had his horns cut off; this is a common punishment in the Shek Kingdom that marks a shek as disgraced in some way. Slaving factions will also cut an enslaved shek's horns just like they'll shave off a human's hair. Whichever of these two things happened to Ells, he's understandably not super eager to talk about it.

The character creator describes shek thus:

Like hive soldiers, they get xp gain bonuses to Toughness and Attack. They also get a bonus to Strength. They pay for this with a long list of penalties in Dexterity, Athletics, Stealth, Farming, Thievery, Robotics, Science, Dodge, and Labouring. Shek are really specialized toward being big strong frontline fighters, but it's not like they can't do anything else. They'll just take a little longer to get good at those things.

Usually when you recruit a character, you'll be taken to the character creator to customize them if you want. This is the case for all random recruits and some of the unique recruits, like Ells. Other unique recruits, like Riddly, don't give you that option and I'm not sure if there's any rhyme or reason delineating who you can customize immediately and who you can't. In any case, it's easy enough to customize any recruited character once you have them in case you want to change their look or their name. I usually don't, though. It feels more like they're people in the world and not just dolls for me to play with if they come as they are.

Anyway, Ells is on the team now! His first job is going to be to pick up Jam before anyone else does and carry them to safety. It occurs to me after I recruit him that he's actually the worst person I could have recruited for this job for one specific reason:

It came up when he and Riddly were talking that Ells has a bounty, and that wasn't just for flavour. He does indeed have a bounty! It's not just some generic randomly-assigned bounty like that outlaw swordsman the gang turned in earlier, either. There are wanted posters for Ells all over the world. The local bar doesn't have one today but for the sake of interest, here's how his wanted poster reads.

The wanted poster describes him as a greenlander instead of a shek, which is not a game bug or typo. Bounties are simply written by people and sometimes people make mistakes or have their own agendas. Yet more evidence that the gang should consider their actions carefully before turning in a bounty.

You can rack up a bounty if you get caught committing crimes in places run by one of the three major factions: The United Cities, the Holy Nation, and the Shek Kingdom. Ells has a small bounty in all three. A petty rum thief he may be, but against all odds, he's a well-travelled one.

The general rule of bounties is the bigger your bounty, the harder things will be for you. Faction guards, faction police and bounty hunters all have a chance of trying to capture you, with the chance increasing the higher your bounty. Bounties also stay on you longer the higher they are. The smallest bounty, c.100 (for trespassing) will last a mere 4 hours. The duration scales up dramatically until you get to a bounty of c.10,000 or higher, which means that your character is considered Notorious and their bounty will never expire.

Ells' fairly small bounty will stay on him for 40 hours. It's worth noting that's 40 hours from when the game first spawned him (in our case from basically the start of the game since we went to Sho-Battai right away), not from when he joined the gang. There's no inherent difference between player characters' bounties and NPCs' bounties. In fact, as the wanted poster suggests, the gang could have chosen to turn Ells in for his bounty instead of recruiting him if they wanted! He seems like he never hurt anyone, though. No sense in doing that.

In short, Ells is a risky choice to send out to rescue Jam because he might get attacked and arrested the second he steps within sight of the samurai gate guards. He'll just have to roll the dice. He dashes through the gates, acting like a regular citizen who has very important citizen business to attend to in a hurry and... they don't bother him! This time.

Contrary to the shek stereotype, Ells does not have any fighting skills whatsoever. Instead, he has a bit of skill at sneaking around and stealing things. He also knows what a bandage is. Every single other one of his skills is dire, but hey, so are Jam's.

Aside from his stealing skills, Ells comes with one other valuable thing: Rum!

Each of these three bottles of cactus rum will sell for 455 Cats, which is pretty nice considering the party only has 4,762 Cats altogether. The game helpfully informs us that here in the Great Desert, it has a price mark-up of 87%—in other words, it's 13% cheaper than average. The gang could sell it for more in a different part of the world where cacti don't grow and it's harder to come by, but the trouble would be getting to a different part of the world. That's a bit beyond their means right now.

The game marks stuff we steal as stolen goods, forcing us to sell them at half price. Amusingly, Ells' rum isn't marked as stolen despite him being a rum thief. Perhaps he finally decided to buy some legitimately after getting slapped with that bounty and that's why he was so broke he had to beg Riddly for food? In any case, the gang will be selling that rum. There's no game mechanic for actually drinking alcohol in Kenshi so selling is the only thing they can do with it.

If you're wondering why there's a floating pile of gear in front of that KOed City Hero, that's because Riddly took all that guy's stuff and threw it on the ground before running back to town to recruit Ells. It's nice enough gear the gang figured they might want it, Riddly didn't have the space to carry it at the time, and who knows if that Hero would still have been around to loot by the time the gang got around to it. Throwing it on the ground was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, honest.

Ells picks up this gear, picks up Jam, and starts making his way back. As he approaches, though, there's a commotion outside the city gates.

A bunch of guys from a faction called the Manhunters are on their way into town. They've gotten into a fight with a skimmer, which is interesting to the gang insofar as they can probably butcher the skimmer for claws to sell and meat to eat later. However, one of them has spotted an unconscious City Hero just outside the gates and is in the process of enslaving them. The Manhunters' entire raison d'être, after all, is kidnapping people and selling them into slavery. They'll do it to anyone unconscious they see, which is why Riddly was in such a hurry to have someone pick Jam up and spirit them back into town.

Speaking of Jam, they're going to need to heal up quite a bit before they can get back on their feet—those City Heroes really did a number on their chest. Riddly bandaged Jam up after that fight, but healing isn't just a matter of bandaging your wounds. That's the first step of two. Once you're all bandaged up so your wounds can heal, you really ought to get some rest. The health bars for a character's body parts will gradually regenerate over time once bandaged, but bed rest heals them 8 times faster. To that end, the gang heads up the stairs from the town bar—the typical place to rent a bed.

While Riddly and Jam are getting into bed, the usual bar gossips are at it again, this time about someone named "Captain Eyegore".

Lord Tengu is none other than the Emperor of the United Cities, which would make this Captain Eyegore someone terrifying indeed.

Ells shrugs it off and saunters back out (still not bothered by the guards!) to scavenge some gear from the United Heroes. He manages to grab a couple sets of leather body armour for Riddly and Jam, then takes that nice Junkbow off Riddly and takes her ninja gi. It's not armour in any sense of the word but it boosts Stealth, which is more his thing than anyone's in the party right now. He could also use something to help protect against the dust storms around here, so he heads to the far side of town and buys himself a tagelmust: In the real world, a kind of veil and turban in one, worn by nomads in the deserts of western and northern Africa. In Kenshi, it's not really worn over the mouth, but it does still provide 70% protection against dust storms. So does Riddly's turban, so that's both of the party members who can wear headgear pretty much protected. Jam unfortunately is going to be stuck without any dust storm protection as the vast majority of dust storm protection comes from headgear. There is one body armour that provides 20% (swamp ninja rags), but it's hard to find, 20% isn't all that much, and it also sucks.

After a bit more puttering around from Ells, Jam and Riddly finish resting up. The gang is ready for a new day.