General Hat-12Report
English：General Hat-12 · Characters
Supreme commander of the Second Empire's police force, still holding Ashland Dome IV today; his CPU records the crackdown that spun out of control just before the empire fell.
General Hat-12 was head of the Second Empire's police force, a skeleton of the Skeleton P4MkII model. The empire has long ceased to exist, yet he remains inside Ashland Dome IV in the Ashlands, with a handful of old imperial police captains still at his side.
What he did
Everything known about his deeds is written on his own CPU — an extremely short, extremely restrained account: he was head of the imperial police, he launched a mass crackdown on an emerging cult of heretics, and his heavy-handed methods, far from containing the situation, fanned the accusations and the chaos, so that the whole thing deteriorated faster than it otherwise would have.
That passage matters because each of the Second Empire's four surviving named skeletons left behind a confession that reads like a last word, and put side by side they form an autopsy report on the empire's collapse:
| Character | Location | Error recorded on the CPU | Sale price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Head of Agriculture | Ashland Dome I | Failed to foresee the famine, yet still blamed himself for the empire's fall | 18,000 Cats |
| Rhinobot | Ashland Dome II | Only wanted to help, but had no moral judgement module, and so helped build even the child labour prisons | 30,000 Cats |
| General Jang | Ashland Dome III | The longer the Hydraulic Knights fought, the more they found that their own blades had killed more of their own kind than the pirates ever did | 72,000 Cats |
| General Hat-12 | Ashland Dome IV | Crushed an emerging cult; the excessive force fed the chaos instead | 60,000 Cats |
In other words: famine, blind obedience, civil war and a law-enforcement machine out of control stand side by side, and not one of them was caused by an outside enemy. Hat-12 represents the last of the four.
Combat data
He is among the highest-statted of the named skeletons in the Ashlands:
- Strength, Toughness, Dexterity: 77–83
- Melee Attack, Melee Defence: 77–83
- Heavy Weapons, Blunt: 92.4–99.6 (his speciality)
- Sabres, Hackers, Polearms: 77–83; Katanas: 61.6–66.4
- Turrets, Precision Shooting: 77–83
- Field Medic, Athletics, Swimming: 77–83
- Perception, Dodge, Martial Arts, Stealth: close to 0
The weakness is written on the last line: Perception is minimal, Dodge is effectively absent, and Martial Arts is in single digits. He holds a Meitou-grade Heavy Jitte, so trading blows head-on is a very bad deal; but he will not notice a character sneaking up on him, and his Assassination skill of 40 also means he is poor at countering it himself.
Ashland Dome IV
It is a multi-storey domed ruin south of Ashland Dome III, with only two entrances and a spiral staircase in the centre leading to the upper floors. Reading the Ashlands Map will mark its position on your map.
This is one of the richest ruins in the game: a guaranteed 7 AI Cores, plus a full set of Model # ancient weapons (Plank, Heavy Jitte, Paladin's Cross, Mercenary Club, Polearm, Longsword) and a [Masterwork] Thief's Arm.
As for Hat-12 himself, his value is concentrated inside his body: taking his CPU (60,000 Cats) kills him on the spot, and there is also an AI Core (25,000 Cats). The two together come to roughly 85,000 Cats, making him one of the highest-paying single corpses in the Ashlands.