3-9: That Old Blue Sky

The gang spends four days in Mongrel. There's a cluster of iron nodes ripe for the mining right outside the city gates so the gang sets their picks a-swingin', passing the ore to Beep and Shryke for some strength training. Outlaw Hana and Jam decide to get in on it too, switching off between who's training and who's the weight.

For equipment, the gang buys Beep some leather armour and a chainmail tagelmust, granting him some decent protection for his fragile bones and a way to keep dust off his face. Shryke, meanwhile, decides she wants to learn to shoot. She buys herself a tooth pick crossbow—a High-grade one, not quite as nice as Silvershade's Specialist-grade but it's the best the shop here has. She's going to become a thief type along with Silvershade.

Crossbow and thief skills are kind of a natural match since both want to stay in light armour. Medium and heavy armours tend to impose penalties to both Stealth and Crossbows. Conversely, there are a couple nice light armours that boost both those skills and Assassination besides: Ninja rags and assassin's rags. Ells and Silvershade have been wearing the former since shortly after they joined; Shryke buys a set of the latter from the Thieves' tower.

Assassin's rags kinda pigeonhole the wearer: They give great boosts to all sorts of thief and attack skills but they're absolutely horrendous on defense. While their actual damage resistance numbers are on par with other light armour, they only have a 25% chance of protecting the chest—the most commonly hit body part—against any given blow. On top of that, they impose a penalty to melee defense. What if, however, Shryke didn't need melee defense? Melee defense is specifically for defending with a weapon but you don't have to use a weapon in Kenshi. Instead, Shryke will train as a martial artist, coincidentally another skill assassin's rags buffs.

We'll talk more about martial arts later when Shryke starts building some skill at it but I'm excited. Martial artists have a pretty rough start—bringing your fists to a swordfight produces pretty embarrassing results if you're not actually good with your fists, as one might imagine—but they deal ridiculous damage at higher skill levels. It may or may not be a good idea to have martial arts and crossbows compete for training time but we'll see where Shryke goes with it. I believe in her.

While the gang mines and trains, waves of fogmen crash upon the city gates a few times per day. The gang mostly gets to ignore them—though their iron node is outside the gate, they're in stealth mode while they mine. Surprisingly, sneaking and mining don't seem to inhibit each other at all. The fogmen run past them to attack the gate guards, who handle them with ease.

Unfortunately, not everything goes well for Mongrel's inhabitants. Near the end of the second day, Beep, Shryke, and Outlaw Hana run by the city's second gate as they train, where they spy the aftermath of a fogman attack. It all seems typical for Mongrel at first until they notice a human among the bodies, all dressed in black.

It looks like he caught a turret bolt through the head while helping the guards fend off fogmen. This is why I'm so adamant about not giving people high-powered crossbows until they work on their Precision Shooting skill—one unlucky friendly fire incident and this man, the Shinobi Thieves trader, is stone cold dead.

It's a tragedy. His loss will be keenly felt by the Shinobi Thieves and by the family he may or may not have. The gang will feel it too. With this man dead, there will be no shinobi trader in Mongrel anymore. They will not replace him. The gang will no longer be able to buy quality discounted thief gear here.

If they'd spotted him sooner, the gang probably could have saved his life. Alas. At this point, there's nothing to do but get back to their training and work.

Meanwhile, Cat has been doing research back at the Hub this whole time. He keeps churning through research books and having to run to nearby settlements, buy up their stock, and haul it back to the gang's house, which is slowing his progress. None of the settlements around here seem to carry enough books to buy a whole whack of them at once and really get in a good stretch of uninterrupted research time.

Eventually, he runs out of patience, deciding he'd rather rejoin the rest of the gang and build up a book stockpile on their travels. He makes the run to Mongrel alone, which sounds risky but with a faster running speed than the fogmen and an attentive player, there's not much that can actually go wrong. Cat rejoins the rest of the gang safely.

With everyone back together again and Beep and Shryke up to 18 and 21 Strength respectively, it's time to leave Mongrel behind. The gang sells all the iron they'd mined up—a staggering 127 chunks of ore, 1143 kilos of iron—and hits the road.

The trip out of Mongrel doesn't give the gang much trouble. They manage to escape the Fog Island's winding valleys without running into a single group of fogmen—a stroke of luck enabled by someone else's misfortune likely just minutes earlier. A blood-curdling scream echoes from what must be a nearby deathyard. It sounds like the local fogmen are busy feasting on some poor bastard.

It feels bad but the gang keeps running. That's how things are in the foglands. You stop, maybe you die too. You never know how many fogmen there are.

Now on the foglands' outskirts, the gang finally does get spotted by some fogmen—a small band, thankfully. It's a routine skirmish for most of the gang at this point but not for all. For Beep, it's his very first fight with the gang at his back, probably his first actual fight ever. In a stroke of beginner's luck, he lands the final blow that fells the final foe. He becomes absolutely incandescent.

Beep is just getting started. The others practically have to restrain him when, an hour later, they nearly run into a much larger group of fogmen.

Fifty fogmen on the prowl. This is why I say you shouldn't stop to fight in the foglands, that you can easily end up drowning under waves of the bastards. Thankfully, the gang spots them before they're spotted in return. They give them a wide berth as they continue north.

Once the gang is sure they won't run afoul of the fifty fogmen, they head back into the very northern tip of the foglands, preparing to skirt around the northwestern edge of Obedience. There, as they pass a field of junky old scrap, Outlaw Hana bids them wait a minute. That scrap is incredibly rich in iron and it has her curious. She prospects the area.

110 Water, 100 Fertility, 100 Stone, 97 Iron, 87 Copper. An environment that's near equally green and arid. This place would be amazing to build on. They'd be able to grow everything except rice with fantastic yields. The only problem is—well, there are two problems. One is the fogmen. They aren't a constant presence here like they are around Mongrel but as seen above, they do still swing sometimes. The other problem is that if they built here, it would be really inconvenient to leave.

If the gang was to build here, whenever they wanted to go anywhere, they'd have to make the choice of going through Holy Nation territory, the Fog Islands, or Vain with all its beak things and gorillos. Given the three, they'd probably end up sprinting across the foglands most of the time. I'd always have to watch them closely just to make sure nothing went wrong.

Not only would the journey to and from this location be perilous, it could get incredibly long. To be honest, I'm compelled by the challenge of fending off fogmen while building, but I don't relish having to hump the gang's latest haul clean across the entire world when we eventually explore the southeast.

Despite the downsides, Outlaw Hana tucks the idea in the back of her mind for when the time comes to actually decide where to put down roots. Highly fertile land counts for a lot and in Kenshi, there's no such thing as highly fertile land without dangerous and annoying neighbours. This spot remains a tempting option.