EllsReport
English：Ells · Characters
A drunken Shek who begs his way around Sho-Battai, wanted for drinking the distillery's stock; recruiting him costs 300 Cats, and the booze in his pack is worth more than that.
Ells is one of the few characters in Kenshi whom it is profitable to recruit.
A fat man wanted over drink
He is a slow-witted, overweight Shek citizen of the Empire who spends his days wandering the streets of Sho-Battai begging for food. There is a small bounty on his head, the charge being repeated theft of alcohol from the distilleries.
"Ells isn't a thief! Ells just gets thirsty sometimes… But the bar guards beat Ells for drinking the rum. So Ells gotta go drink rum from the distillery when no one's looking. No one else shares with Ells like you do."
That is probably the most complete piece of self-defence in his entire script. He refers to himself in the third person and his sentences hang loosely together, both hallmarks of the "Dumb" personality dialogue package — and although he has no zone-specific lines, his own dialogue package is stuffed with exclusive ones, making him one of the most talkative low-intelligence characters in the game.
Recruitment, and the arithmetic
Hand him 300 Cats and he joins. He is fixed in Sho-Battai regardless of which world state the town is in; if you cannot find him, go and look around the outhouses.
When he joins, his pack contains 3 bottles of Cactus Rum, worth about 520 Cats each. Which is to say you pay 300 and get back roughly 1,560 in goods — a net profit of a thousand and change after the fee, and a genuinely rare case of a recruitment that pays for itself.
Do not expect him to fight
His combat numbers are all in the neighbourhood of 1: Strength 1.1, Toughness 1.2, Dexterity 0.8, every weapon skill at 1. He spawns with no weapon at all, wearing nothing but ragged halfpants and wooden sandals, for an armour coverage of zero.
The only bright spots are Thievery 20 and Stealth 12 — the professional legacy of a career spent stealing drink. Field Medic 5 is at least marginally usable. Turning him into a fighter means starting from nothing, but as a runner, pickpocket or pair of legs for carrying things, he works from the moment he joins.
Trivia
During development he was called "Pickles" and then "Squint", and both old names are still sitting in his dialogue package in the FCS. He occasionally refers to himself as "Squint" in game — a leftover from an earlier version that never got cleaned up.
His wanted poster lists his race as Greenlander, with the eyewitness description "fat as a bughouse". This is an error in the official data: he is in fact a Shek.