4-3: Dream On

As the gang travels south of the Stenn Desert, Horse finds himself imagining the looks on the Kral's Chosen faces when they wake up to find their swords missing. It puts a spring in his step and a song in his heart.

The moment passes anyway—mid-argument, they walk face first into a howling sandstorm. This is the end of the Stenn Desert; the gang has crossed into a place called the Spider Plains.

Among other things, the Spider Plains are home to the Berserkers, another group of shek outlaws. Compared to Kral's Chosen, they're a little wilder, not so much ideological extremists as a loosely organized bunch of people who want to do nothing but fight. This perhaps oversells their aggression—the gang is able to walk right into a place called Berserker Village and look their leader in the eye without so much as a whiff of violence.

The Berserker Village is a broken shell of a place, just a couple isolated lengths of wall around a few collapsed buildings with the berserkers living inside. Their leader, Ghost, is here, locking Ruka in a staredown when she ambles into his hangout spot. He's not very chatty. He does have a 10,000 Cat bounty on his head but it doesn't say much about what he's wanted for; it lacks the lurid detail of most other unique bounties.

The gang decides to leave this one be, at least for now. If Bayan says the Shek Kingdom doesn't need their help dealing with the Berserkers, who are they to contradict him? Leaving Ghost alone is no skin off their collective nose.

In truth, I think it'll make things more interesting later if we leave the Berserkers and Kral's Chosen be for now. Besides, while the gang is interested in making friends with Esata the Stone Golem, they don't exactly envision themselves as her little cops. It'll take more motivation than a small bounty to go dragging a guy out of his home like that.

So the Spider Plains is home to the Berserkers. But why is it called the Spider Plains? I'm so glad you asked.

This is a skin spider. It's a little taller than a human and will happily eat a human alive, just like a beak thing. They tend to travel in groups of 2-4, easy to see coming here on the wide-open plains. They're pretty slow, too, so they're easy enough to avoid. As this one happens to be travelling alone, the gang lets it approach, surrounds it, and takes it down without much fuss. Skin spiders don't have the obnoxious attack radius of beak things; while their bites can be deadly, they rarely hit more than one person at a time. They need even or greater numbers to be dangerous.

Skin spiders look so different from real-world spiders I can't imagine these things triggering anyone's arachnophobia but for me, a non-arachnophobia-haver, these are significantly creepier. It's the way their torsos look almost like hunched-over humans, the first segment of their hind legs thick like thighs, their skin leathery like a hiver's with the colouration to match. They may not be the most fearsome of Kenshi's beasts but they raise unsettling questions.

Not on account of spider-related heebie jeebies or anything, the gang's little tour of the shek lands comes to a close. They've met the Shek Kingdom's leadership, the two main outlaw factions, and even added a new friend to their ranks. Now satisfied that they have a decent handle on the biggest movers in the world around them, they're ready to head back to The Hub and start prepping to build their new home in earnest.

This adventure has been a pretty peaceful one, all told. Nearing Squin once more on the way back across the Stenn Desert, Ruka starts getting a little antsy over it.

She may be in for more disappointment as the gang segues into building a settlement; they won't be cruising for more fights for a little while. Once back at The Hub, it's finally time. They have a bunch of construction materials they've scrounged up and have been keeping in storage—they pack it all up so they can use it to start their new home. A few of them make runs to Stack, Squin, and the nearest hive village to grab even more materials.

Everyone shares the load. When Pilaf's pack fills up, Burn grabs Jam's old wooden backpack from the Sho-Battai days and loads that up too. Riddly takes a second one they pinched from the Dust King's Tower. The others can't carry nearly as much material—Unlike Pilaf's pack carrying materials in stacks of 5 and the wooden backpacks carrying them in stacks of 9, regular backpacks and inventories can't stack most items. Nonetheless, everyone fills their packs with what they can.

The long green cases are “building materials”, used rather predictably for building buildings. The gang also packs iron plates to build machines and crafting stations, electrical components to build more sophisticated machines and crafting stations, fabrics to build beds, and wheatstraw, hemp, and cactus for planting. Pilaf also carries some meat, sleeping bags, medkits, splint kits, skeleton repair kits, and tools for picking tough locks: The usual stuff you don't want to leave home without.

Ultimately, the gang has decided to settle in that spot Outlaw Hana prospected in Chapter 3-4. It's a spot pretty much right in the centre of the world map, directly east from The Hub, at the northwestern corner of Shem and right on the border of the forbidding, acid-raining Deadlands.

The spot is about where the cursor points in the shot above. There is unfortunately no way to drop one's own markers on the in-game map.

After double-checking everything to make sure they actually have enough of each relevant material to get themselves started, they're off. It's an exciting moment for everyone. Beep, whose baseline level of excitement rests several notches above most, is positively brimming.

This might just be my favourite bit of travel banter in the game. It really paints a picture, you know? The hives have no concept of gender so I can just picture Beep sitting in a bar in Mongrel, listening to a bunch of swaggering adventurer type men talking about wanting to be with beautiful women, not having a clue what they're going on about but lapping it up and synthesizing it into his idea of what it means to be a strong warrior.

If you're curious, I've been quite deliberately been using he/him pronouns for Beep, in contrast to the they/them pronouns I use for other hivers and most skeletons. This is because Beep refers to himself with he/him pronouns. Now, insofar as the developers' intentions, Beep's uniqueness here is probably just down to the fact that he refers to himself in the third person. Other hivers and skeletons get referred to using he/him pronouns by other characters despite being explicitly genderless. However, if I may get on my soapbox for a minute, I hate the cultural standard of using male pronouns as a default for people or creatures of unknown gender. I won't be partaking in it. All hivers and skeletons are they/them to me unless they refer to themselves otherwise.

This point of stubbornness happens to position Beep as trans (genderless-to-male), a headcanon I enjoy. I think it works. Beep's whole thing is about becoming, after all. Like he told Jam when they first met, he never made any sense in the hive. Never fit in his prescribed role. His vision for self-actualization is about strength and independence, yes, but we see here that that vision is also wrapped up in gender. He wants what a man wants—or perhaps more accurately, wants to want what he thinks a man is supposed to want. The desire for beautiful human ladies clearly doesn't suit the man he's becoming—he probably won't be sticking with it—but whomst among us, in the early stages of transition, hasn't tried on an aspect of gender performance only to find it didn't quite fit? Beep may just be a silly little guy but this particular tentativeness of his feels quite warm, quite familiar to me.