AgnuReport
English：Agnu · Characters
The Soldierbot Skeleton caged in the Tower of Abuse for almost a thousand years, never successfully broken into a thrall. His voice module is destroyed; all he can do is roar.
Agnu has been locked in a cage on an upper floor of a tower for long enough that the memory of two empires has faded. He cannot speak; he can only roar. And he has been roaring for nearly a thousand years without giving in.
The skeleton in the cage
In game, you find him in Venge — a scorched, cracked valley swept over and over by a death ray from orbit, which will cut open any living thing that walks in without sufficient burn resistance. That is exactly the sort of environment in which you hide the things you do not want seen.
Agnu is held in the Tower of Abuse, occupied by the Thrall Masters under the Voodoo Brothers. Inside the tower are countless skeleton thralls, decapitated and reduced to empty shells. All the player needs is a saw to pry the cage open, and he joins the squad for nothing.
Who he used to be
Agnu is a Soldierbot — and as far as anyone knows, the only recruitable individual of that model in the entire game[V1 0:02:18]. The model has far greater vision range and self-repair speed than an ordinary skeleton; it is essentially a military-police unit designed for combat and patrol[V2 0:20:41]. He is not the same thing as the similar-looking "loghead", whose strength and durability are an order of magnitude lower — the stat lines separate them cleanly[V1 0:02:18].
Soldierbots made up the bulk of Cat-Lon's legions and police force during the Second Empire[V1 0:02:18]. After the empire disintegrated, those units met one of only two fates: keep serving their mad sovereign and wander the Ashlands, or get decapitated and converted into thralls.
So which was Agnu? The clue is in his clothing. His rags and dyeable armour use a dark blue-grey palette, which is precisely the colour scheme of the Second Empire's police forces[V3 0:11:01], and even the cut of his loincloth matches imperial police units[V2 0:20:41][V4 0:06:38]. A common misidentification lumps him in with the "Airbots" in the north-east corner of the Deadlands, because his mouthful of garbled noise sounds like a severe malfunction; but the Airbots wear bright green, which does not match Agnu's blue-grey at all[V1 0:02:52].
Taking model and colour scheme together, the more widely accepted reading is that Agnu was once a Second Empire policeman[V5 0:02:11][V2 0:20:41].
Why he is still in the cage
The Thrall Masters' entire industry consists of converting skeletons into selfless thralls. The hundreds of headless thralls in the tower are the finished product. Agnu is not.
The fact that he is still caged means the conversion failed on him — and the plainest evidence is attached to his neck: the first step of thrall-making is removing the head, and Agnu still has his[V3 0:12:08]. As to why it failed on him specifically, the game offers no reason at all[V5 0:02:11].
One reading holds that his will was tough enough to make conversion cost more than it was worth, so he was thrown in a cage to await a different ending: a skeleton's memory capacity is finite, and going years without a reset causes data bloat that eventually ends in madness; and if he could not hold out and chose to reset his CPU, his skills and his will would zero out together, at which point converting him would be trivial.
A widely circulated inference holds that his voice module was destroyed deliberately — cut off the output channel, force every emotion and thought to build up internally with nowhere to go, and thereby accelerate CPU bloat and collapse[V5 0:02:44]. HeroInHisHead pushes the same argument one step further: the point of wrecking the vocal module was not to silence him but to deny him even the fallback of soothing himself with his own voice, forcing him towards madness or a reset[V1 0:11:39]. The account explains why all he can manage today is meaningless growling, but the game itself never confirms it; the wiki only records that he "cannot speak, similar to Ray".
Whatever the cause, the outcome is unambiguous: neither thing happened. He was neither successfully converted nor stripped of the will to fight. Nearly a thousand years on, he is still in that cage waiting for someone to pick the lock.
Trauma
The first layer that nearly a millennium of abuse left on him is attitude: his worldview has turned cynical and violent, and the broken voice modulator means he cannot even convey that anger accurately — all he can output is a string of rising and falling growls[V5 0:01:39].
But the Agnu you release is not a beast off its leash. He obeys orders, follows the squad, fights like a trained soldier, and even shows signs of upbringing — all of which require a considerable degree of intact mind[V5 0:03:19].
What he displays looks much more like a post-traumatic stress response. Take him back to the Tower of Abuse or into Venge and he stops, starts screaming and roaring, and refuses to move, immune even to manual orders[V5 0:03:19]; when freshly recruited, the fear is strong enough that he flatly refuses to cross that whole region[V2 0:20:41][V4 0:06:38]. The state eventually clears on its own, and if Beep is nearby, Beep can calm him down early.
Another detail carries a streak of black humour: Agnu cannot initiate speech, but when an NPC starts a conversation with him — gate guards wanting to search his baggage, bandits collecting a toll, a Hiver caravan making a sales pitch — he can, remarkably, reply. In roars, of course.
In play
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Starting Strength | 50 (far above any ordinary recruit) |
| Other skills | Almost all at baseline |
| Racial traits | Self-repair at 1.5× a normal skeleton, vision multiplier 2 |
| Food requirement | None |
| Starting gear | Dyed rag loincloth, no weapon |
Very high Strength paired with a blank skill sheet makes him an excellent clean slate: he can shoulder heavy weapons immediately and grind out the rest[V2 0:20:41]. Add in the fact that skeletons do not eat and recover quickly with repair beds and repair kits, and the long-term cost of raising him is extremely low.
Unsettled readings: whose soldier was he
Agnu's origin is one of the biggest blanks Kenshi has left and one of the ones players have filled in most enthusiastically. All three versions below come from lore channels' inferences, and not one of them is confirmed by the game's text. They are listed side by side so readers can see how sharply the strength of the evidence differs.
Version one: an imperial policeman who investigated what he should not have. HeroInHisHead gives the most complete narrative line: Agnu was a respected Second Empire policeman who noticed colleagues disappearing one after another, could not stomach the leadership's double standard towards humans, and began investigating privately; before he finished, his superiors found out and sent him to the Tower of Abuse under the name of "re-education"[V1 0:10:34]. Its virtue is that it explains both why he was sent there and why he was held alone rather than processed with a batch, but it rests entirely on narrative plausibility — no line of dialogue or document in the game supports any of it.
Version two: a legionary, the one the conversion failed on. The more conservative version only claims that he was a Soldierbot in Cat-Lon's legions or police, marched into the Tower of Abuse with other units of the same model to be converted as ordered, failed because his will was too strong, and was thrown in a cage for a thousand years[V3 0:12:08][V5 0:02:11][V6 0:05:32]. It uses only two observable pieces of evidence — model and colour scheme — and therefore stands on firmer ground than version one; following the same line, some go on to guess that his unusually high Strength also comes from that period of resistance[V3 0:12:08] — that step is pure speculation.
An assessment. Whichever version holds, some commentators point out that the most remarkable thing about Agnu lies elsewhere: even if he really did reset his CPU and zero out his skills, he still kept enough will and physical capacity to resist thrall conversion for nearly a thousand years — he is the only skeleton in the game the Voodoo Brothers could not break[V1 0:12:43].
Where the name comes from
Agnu is named after Chris Hunt's motorcycle, which in turn was named after Nixon's headless aide Agnew in Futurama — on the grounds that both "roar loudly and are completely uncontrollable"[V3 0:11:01][V1 0:01:09].
A joke about a headless body ended up as the one skeleton in the game that refuses to have its head removed; and "completely uncontrollable", the reason for the name, happens to be his most central in-game trait as well[V3 0:12:08].
See also
Video citations
- The Origins of Agnu and The Voodoo BrothersHeroInHisHead
- Kenshi: All Unique CompanionsCivilizationEx
- Kenshi Lore Master AMAHeroInHisHead
- Kenshi: Unique Companions | Shek, Hivers, SkeletonsCivilizationEx
- The Relationship of Agnu and BeepHeroInHisHead
- 5 Things I Want To See In Kenshi 2HeroInHisHead