2-15: Obedience

Burn's elegy hangs thick as the fog in the air. These hands, frozen for thousands of years in a desperate, futile grasp for life, are the same as Burn's hands; though vastly different in size, their construction alike. Jam thinks back to the conversation they had with Burn when they first met, how Burn opined that “behaviour bred from greed and fear hold human evolution at a standstill”. If this is what they meant, what they'd seen fearful humans do... Jam doesn't know what to say. They somewhat awkwardly thank Burn for sharing and spend some time pondering the horrors skeletons must have witnessed over their lifetimes. The horrors they must have endured.

The gang does their best not to complain about the bone-shivering creeps this place gives them and presses west through the grisly forest of hands. They're soon on the other side of it and into a part of the canyon that isn't so unsettling. The smooth metal gives way to rocky ground and between natural stone pillars, they spy a rather more inviting ruin.

The lock here isn't too tough, but by now the gang knows an easier lock on an unmolested ruin probably means more danger inside. Ells, being the sneakiest, creeps in alone to check it out while the rest keep a low profile outdoors.

A single security spider here on the ground floor, conveniently facing away from anywhere Ells might care to go. Nothing really to loot, though. The good stuff must be upstairs.

Ells is getting pretty stealthy, having reached a score of 56 out of the maximum 100. This is enough for him to start Naruto running, letting him move at a much faster pace than the default crouched crab shuffle while sneaking. This newfound skill lets him dash right on past the bots up to the top floor. There, in the treasure room, a spider bot stares directly at the room's one entrance, a narrow, well-lit passageway. It seems a bit unfair but Ells is not about to admit defeat.

As in many games, when a character is trying to sneak, NPCs have three different states pertaining to how aware they are of the sneaking character: Unaware, alert, and aware. In the above screenshots, Ells has a blue eye next to his name, signifying that all nearby NPCs are unaware of him. If one (or more) starts to get a sense that he might be there, the eye will turn yellow and he'll get a little yellow arrow pointing toward each alert NPC. If he's been spotted, the eye turns red and he'll get red arrows pointing to the NPCs that see him. Alert NPCs usually won't start walking around to actively look for the character, but while an NPC is alert, there's basically an invisible meter filling up that will flip their status to aware when it fills up all the way. This means that as long as Ells' stealth skill is good enough for him not to get busted right away when the security spider goes on alert, all he needs to do is Naruto run past the spider and find a dark corner to hide in within the treasure room to go back to being undetected and safe.

It works! Ells spends a few seconds in a tiny little spot by the wall where the lights don't quite reach and the security spider improbably completely loses track of him. He searches the room and shoves a few valuable research materials into his backpack then gets to work on the safes.

The tougher of the two safes has a fiendishly complex level 78 lock, something Ells can barely even attempt with this 38 Lockpicking skill. He has a 5.7% to crack it. This isn't actually as dire as it sounds—when you fail a lockpicking attempt you can immediately just try again—but with low enough chances or poor enough luck, time can present its own issues. In Kenshi, the sun finishes setting at 11 PM and starts rising at 5 AM, which imposes a hard limit on Ells' ability to be in here safely. He starts working on the safe at 1:18 AM, easily enough time for any reasonable lockpicking attempt. 5.7% is not reasonable, though, and the challenge nearly gets the better of him; it's 4:50 by the time he finally breaks in.

Ells is going to have to grab and run, but at least his hours of toil pay off. The safe has a pair of CPU Units, a few Ancient Science Books for advanced research, and five Skeleton Repair Kits. Ells has actually been filling his pack with skeleton repair kits—while there are a lot of skeleton parts here that are worth a pretty penny, skeleton repair kits outsell every one but the CPUs. I suppose that shouldn't be too surprising. Some of these other skeleton parts only exist to be sold and some can be used in highly advanced crafting, but a repair kit is essentially necessary healthcare for any skeleton or anyone with a prosthetic, and no one's out there making proper ones these days. As with skeleton limbs, the only substitutes are hive-made and it's obvious from a passing glance they're not as good.

Ells hands his loot over to Pilaf. The sun is rising now but it's not fully up yet. There's still an hour of twilight that might be enough to hide him from the spiders. Deciding to push his luck, he rushes back in, stuffs his pack a second time with all the skeleton repair kits and power cores he can carry, and makes to leave. The spider guarding the treasure room finally sees him. That's fine by him, though. He's already on his way out. He breaks into a run and the rest of the gang, still hiding on the ramp up to the lab, hears his hurried footsteps and does the same. Security spiders may be deadly strong, but they're about as fast as they are perceptive—they can't even catch baby Pilaf. The gang makes tracks, continuing on their way to the coast.

Cresting a hill to escape the canyon, Outlaw Farmer tenses up. Travelling through the pit called Obedience let them bypass the heart of the foglands, but they still have to pass through the outskirts now. Fogmen could still be about.

The gang keeps their heads on swivels and makes it out of the fog islands without being attacked. They officially enter the land of Dreg, the name for the stretch of coastline here. They're about to relax, starting to think they're safely out of fogman territory—so of course that's exactly when the fogmen strike.

They come in numbers as fogmen do. Too many to safely stand and fight. Too many to trust that the gang can simply weather their attacks as they flee. Burn, ever inedible, steps up to the plate. Assuming a defensive stance, they hold off as many fogmen as they can. Unfortunately this turns out to be only half—the other half ignore them and keep running after everyone else.

The gang breaks formation, everyone but Burn sprinting as fast as they personally can in order to split their pursuers. They don't actually have anywhere to run to, but Jam and Outlaw Farmer, leading the pack, soon spot what looks like a hive village in the distance. With a shout, they pivot and speed toward it.

Honestly, everyone but Pilaf should be able to outrun fogmen at this point. Fogmen run at a speedy-for-the-real-world 18 mph, while the gang's natural maximum speeds range from Jam's blistering pace of 23 mph to Burn's still quite respectable 18. Running speed depends on a number of factors: Athletics skill, race, equipment, prosthetic legs, and how much stuff you're lugging around. It's that last factor that's sinking Horse and Keys down to 17 and 16 mph respectively—while neither is objectively carrying that much, neither is very strong yet, either, so there's not much they can carry without being weighed down.

The gang starts piling into the hive village's robotics shop as they arrive; first Jam and Outlaw Farmer, then Ells and Riddly. There, they prepare to defend themselves against the coming fogmen, but another complication arrives first.

Scrawny cannibals chanced to be passing through. They spot Ells on his way and pour into the robotics shop after him, swarming the hive. They don't do very well, though. The gang and the hive fight side by side despite the prince screaming at Jam to leave the whole time, clearly an adept multi-tasker. The unlikely allies are halfway done tearing through the cannibals when Horse, Keys, and Burn arrive with the fogmen.

Fogmen and cannibals are both people eaters. They'll both prioritize securing food over fighting. As the fogmen join the mêlée in the robotics shop, they start picking up scrawny cannibals the gang and the hive KOed and trying to fight with guys slung over their shoulders. Then when fogmen start falling, the remaining scrawny cannibals start picking them up and trying to fight like that.

Needless to say the gang doesn't have much trouble with this one.

Chaotic as all that was, it was still a lot of attackers and some of the hivers took a beating. One worker drone, right back at their electrical workbench station after the battle despite bleeding from the head, seems a little confused.

The hive queen isn't anywhere around here; the gang doesn't have a clue what this guy is freaking out about. Jam wonders if a blow to the head didn't rattle something loose and shake their connection to the hive mind. The worker's hands move at a frenetic pace, their rhythm leaving no opening for conversation, and the prince here is already in a bad enough mood from the presence of Jam's hiveless self. Wishing to avoid more of a scene, the rest of the gang ushers Jam out before they manage to figure out a delicate way of checking on the worker.