1-6: The Art of Escape

Riddly, Ells, and Jam all standing in front of the bar. Riddly and Jam wear leather armour they stole from City Heroes while Ells has on Riddly's old black gi top and dark green cargo pants he likewise stole from a City Hero.

Jam, Riddly and Ells head out to see what the day will bring!

To the gang's great dismay, the first thing it brings is one of the samurai police finally recognizing Ells from the wanted posters and attacking him.

Ells attempts to flee into the desert but he not succeeding. A samurai policeman attacks him with their baton and is not gonna stop.

None of the gang is anywhere near fast enough yet to outrun the samurai police. Jam and Riddly are forced to book it in opposite directions as the fuzz beats the shit out of Ells and hauls him in.

Ells gets Assault added to his rap sheet, which is a little insulting since he never at any point attacked the policeman. He never even entered combat mode. It seems Assault can mean either actual assault or just resisting arrest, which considering there's no mechanic for peacefully submitting to arrest, just means you're getting charged with getting arrested. This adds 500 Cats to Ells' bounty, bringing it up to a total of c.1500. Not the number you wanna see tick up while you're in the middle of getting hauled off to jail.

Ells sits in a cage in a room full of cages, looking dejected. The cage is just barely big enough to fit him. It looks miserable. Many of the other cages also hold people the United Cities has arrested.

So Ells gets thrown in the pokey. The police are at least polite enough to bandage his wounds, but this really sucks. The police have taken his crossbow, most of his bolts, and his pants, and his leg is really badly wounded from the cop beating the shit out of him. The cops don't keep a guard up here, so he can at least get to work picking the lock, but there's not much chance of escaping with his leg like that. The lockpicking is basically just going to be for practice, to get his skill up.

Looking around, there's a lot of other people in here too. A lot of starving vagrants, a couple City Heroes, a couple Sand Ninjas. Unfortunate souls all. The City Heroes can still go fuck themselves though.

This is a pretty big setback. The gang is in no shape to be springing Ells so he's just going to have to wait out his sentence. The only thing they can really do for him is bring him food. His jailers won't unless he's about to literally starve to death.

Ells isn't actually hungry yet but Jam shows up anyway to offer sympathy. While they're there, they also poke around in various containers to see if the cops put Ells' stuff in one, but no luck. The cop who took it must still have it on him. Unless the gang is elite enough to knock the cop out and take the stuff back (they aren't), that means it's as good as gone. The gang says goodbye to that sweet junkbow they were so stoked to purloin.

Discouraged, Jam and Riddly decide if Ells has to serve out his sentence, they'll at least hang around and do something to make some money while he's stuck in there. It doesn't seem like there's much scavenging to be done right now so they might just have to go mine some iron to sell.

As they're leaving town, they notice someone—another rebel farmer—laying motionless in the sand. He's not dead—just unconscious—but he's got a pair of shackles around his ankles. He's been enslaved. Jam decides to help out.

Jam crouches over the enslaved man, picking the lock on his shackles. A progress bar reads 'Lockpicking (Chance 24.8%)'. They're close enough to Show-Battai that the city gates can be seen clearly in the background, though a raging dust storm makes long range vision less than clear. A text box informs us: 'This character is currently committing Terrorism, make sure nobody witnesses it'.

After crouching down all sneaky-like and making sure no one can see, Jam sets about picking the lock on the guy's shackles. While picking the lock on a house or a safe or something might count as Burglary and net a small bounty if seen, the game informs us that picking the lock on a slave's shackles is a much more serious crime: Terrorism. The consequences would be high if Jam was caught, but disgusted by the United Cities' apparent love of slavery and frustrated at their inability to do anything for Ells, this is something they simply have to do.

Thankfully, the dust storm helps hide Jam's actions from the samurai. They get away clean. Wishing the now-former slave good luck when he gets back up, Jam and Riddly head off to the nearest iron deposit to mine. Just as they reach it, though, there's a commotion back at the prison!

Ells, now outside his prison cage but with shackles around his wrists and ankles, flinches as a man attacks him with a club. The man, a member of the Slave Traders faction, yells at him as he does so. Other Slave Traders mill about the room, as does another prisoner who has also now been clapped in irons.

Slaver Caravan Guard: Get back here, slave!

A caravan of slave traders have come into town and are picking up and enslaving everyone in the prison. This includes Ells and, for some reason, as soon as they haul him out of his cell, they act like he's escaping and beat the shit out of him. His leg, which had started recovering, is right back to being all busted.

It takes Ells a bit to gather himself up off the ground. By that time, most of the slave caravan has already shuffled off with their haul. There's only a couple left and they're on their way out, so Ells wonders if he can trick them. Maybe if he just climbs back in his cell, they'll think he's a safely locked up prisoner for the next group to get or something. He gives it a try and... as much to his surprise as anyone else's, it works! As soon as the slavers leave, he slips back out of the cell, hides on the outside ring of the police station, and gets to picking the lock on his shackles.

Ells hides on a walkway that encircles the second floor of the police station. It's the middle of the night, good for sneaking. His inventory is open, showing that the sandals he was wearing have been replaced by slave shackles, an item that cannot be removed until their lock is picked. He still has his sandals in his inventory though because he is a clever boy and stashed them before the slavers took them.

Prisoner Shackles

Heavy prisoner shackles. They stop you from running and doing a lot of things. They will trip you up in combat. They are locked on, you need to pick the lock somehow..

Even without any lockpicking skill, all Ells needs is a little bit of time and elbow grease to get the shackles off. The lock on them isn't particularly complex. He's nowhere near escaped yet, though.

There's a close call where one of the slavers comes back to look for him, but after taking a brief look around the prison room, she can't find him and gives up. Ells breathes a sigh of relief. He's nowhere near out of trouble yet, though. Escaping the police station is going to be a whole other matter. The jail area is easy enough—no one is even bothering to guard it—but downstairs the cops keep a constant vigil. They have lights on too, which—of course they would, but I note it because light makes a massive difference in how effective stealth is in Kenshi.

Ells hides in the stairwell and spies on the police downstairs. The police chief still stands behind the counter, awaiting bounties. Behind him, three cops sit around a table, right under a ceiling light that's gonna be a massive pain in the ass for Ells. On the far side of the room, three training dummies stand in a row, with another cop whacking away at one.

Ells gives it a shot but he doesn't get very far at all. Pretty much the second he stretches a pinky toe into the light, they see him. The police club him and his poor leg, shouting “Stop! Anarchist!” and toss him back in the cell. A second group of slave traders comes by before long, slaps another set of shackles on him and starts leading him out again along with a bunch of other people they've enslaved.

This time, Ells plays it smarter. He's not going to try anything funny while he's still in the station. He'll wait until he can make a clean break. He also realizes, as he's forced to limp along, that he can play his messed up leg to his advantage. His limping is much slower than the slavers want to walk, so he's falling behind. So far behind, in fact, that if he were to slip away at an opportune time, they may be too far away to notice.

An aerial shot of Sho-Battai. Ells stands in front of a three-storey watchtower that's right next to the police station. The rest of the slaver caravan is already on the other side of town. A few are passing in front of the bar, which is close to the city gates.

It would be a bad idea to trust most United Cities citizens not to rat out an escaping slave, but the slavers take Ells on a route that passes right by the Shinobi Thieves' tower. The Thieves don't swear allegiance to the UC. If anyone wouldn't rat him out, it'd be them. So when no one's looking, he slips inside and finds a place to hide.

Ells is on the second floor of the Thieves' tower, crouching as if to hide but there's no one here he needs to hide from. In front of him is a shelf with a few food ingredients, and around the room are various dummies and other training equipment. A Shinobi Thief is in this room, silently training on the assassination dummy.

The Shinobi Thieves don't seem to pay Ells any mind. They walk back and forth, going about their business as he picks the lock on his new shackles with no comment and thankfully no interest in saying anything to the samurai.

1-7: IT SUCKS TO BE IN THE UC ⮞