HarmothoeReport
English：Harmothoe · Characters
Boss of the only travelling caravan the Free Traders field. She is warm to female customers, curt with human men, and will not spare two words for a skeleton.
Harmothoe is a unique character of the Free Traders, leading the faction's only travelling caravan back and forth between Heng and Trader's Edge. Finding her is the same as finding a shop that walks.
A shop that walks
Her party is a fixed 8 to 10 caravan guards plus 2 pack beasts, the whole group in Shoddy armour (5% chance of Standard) and carrying weapons made by the Skeleton Smiths. The player can open a trade window with her directly, without entering a town and without being searched.
She herself carries a Nodachi, likewise of Skeleton Smiths make, worth somewhere between 25,200 Cats and 33,133 Cats — an absurd figure for a trader. It is not decoration.
Who she talks to, and how
Harmothoe is best known for a set of barely disguised double standards:
- Female characters: she greets them warmly, calls them "sister", and says it is good to see a pretty lady out in the middle of nowhere.
- Human men: extremely rude, saying one word fewer wherever she can.
- Skeletons: she refuses to deal with them at all. She issues one verbal warning; approach again to talk and she attacks.
A song about her
The bards in the bars have a ballad written specifically about her. As the lyrics tell it, she was once a slave in Rebirth, endured a long time in chains, and one day, after being violated by a High Paladin, decided on revenge. She ground a long spike into a blade and hid it, killed the guards one after another, and at the end that High Paladin lay on the ground with the spike driven through his eye socket and the name "Harmothoe" written on the wall in blood.
Two things in the game files echo the song: in her dialogue she calls her own blade "Nail", and admits she has a habit of putting it through an enemy's eye; and taking her helmet off reveals an unusual head of red hair.
She says her leader is Moll
A detail few people notice: in dialogue Harmothoe claims that Moll is her leader. Moll is the female head of the Flotsam Ninjas, a wanted super-boss, and on paper she has nothing whatever to do with a legitimate trading faction called the Free Traders.
The game does not explain the line. One reading holds that it hints at a back channel between this caravan and the Flotsam Ninjas — both sides do, after all, take in people who have escaped the slave system. But this is only speculation.
Combat and consequences
Her numbers do not look like a trader's: Melee Attack 67–73, Katana 57–63, Strength and Dexterity 47–53, Athletics 67–73 — harder to handle than most town guards. On the other hand her Science 90, Engineer 72–78 and Labouring 87 are strangely high; numbers like these usually exist only so that an NPC can operate shops and workbenches, and should not be read as characterisation.
Kill her and the caravan does not disappear — the system dispatches an ordinary Caravan Trader Boss (Free Traders version) to take over her slot, and trading carries on as before. All you have lost is the source of that Nodachi, and the character.