HexReport
English：Hex · Characters
An anti-imperial outlaw held in Tengu's Vault with 25,000 Cats on her head; break her out and all you get to watch is her walking off to find a farm that does not exist.
Hex is a female Scorchlander outlaw imprisoned in Tengu's Vault. The game never spells out her charges, but her own account is clear enough.
"Stickin' it... to the Empire... Fuck... Tengu..." — when asked what she is in for
Tengu's Vault sits at the southern end of Skimsands, guarded by the samurai of the United Cities, and it takes in the prisoners the empire finds most troublesome; the Vault Warden runs the place as a deliberately punitive institution. Sharing her floor of the cell block are Luquin, Espher, Sinklyde, Screamy, Psycho and Yabuta of the Sands, among others.
That 25,000 Cats
The bounty on her head is 25,000 Cats, which is upper-middling for the Vault as a whole (Luquin 30,000; Espher and Sinklyde 25,000 each; Screamy 20,000).
The way that money is obtained is thoroughly absurd: she has already been caught, and the people who caught her are the same people who will pay out. To collect, the player has to fight into a samurai-guarded prison, pick her cell door open, carry her out, and then deliver her to a United Cities police station for the money. The whole procedure, in other words, is to break someone out of prison and then hand them straight back.
Not recruitable, and no way home
The thing Hex is best known for is her ending, which carries a streak of black humour.
If the player simply releases her without taking control of her, she says she is going back to the farm to check on her family, and then runs off. The game assigns her the job "Wandering Trader" — the problem being that the farm does not exist; there is no corresponding location anywhere in the game files. So she wanders the United Cities forever, going wherever the road takes her, until one day raiders, slave hunters or wild animals finish her off.
She cannot be recruited either. For the player, her entire value is the 25,000-Cat head on her shoulders.
Combat data
Her figures are lower-middling, and once out of her cell she has almost no ability to protect herself:
- Strength 24.3–29.7, Toughness 27–33, Dexterity 29.7–36.3
- Weapon skills of every type and melee attack and defence: 27–33 (Polearms excepted)
- Athletics 32.4–39.6, her highest single value
- Stealth 8.4–15.6, Thievery 7–13, Cooking 24, Science 10
- Perception, Dodge, Martial Arts, Crossbows: close to 0
She carries no weapon and wears only a bandana, a leather shirt, padded halfpants and wooden sandals — standard prisoner kit. Getting her out of the desert alive basically means carrying her on someone's shoulder the whole way.