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Agent Murphy

Agent Murphy is a black-suited man who stepped out in front of the task force's car on a Radford mountain highway, claimed to be with the NSA, burned Kurt with a handheld beam device, and died in the woods soon afterward.
Type NPC (deceased)
Aliases The NSA man; burning man; the hitchhiker; Murphy
Affiliation Claimed NSA; never verified
Status Dead; remains collected by the team
First appearance Radford Horror 03
Played by Andre

Description

Murphy is a man in a black suit with a briefcase and a flashlight-shaped beam device (Radford Horror 03). His badge and wallet ID name him as NSA, but his real identity is never learned. The table treated him as a Men in Black type.

History

The hit-and-run

At dusk, Kurt and the Biz were driving a commandeered diesel car up the mountain (see Howard and his wife) at about 50 mph when a large silent dark object circled over them and flared blue under their flashlights. Murphy stepped out ahead of the car and Kurt hit him (Radford Horror 03).

Kurt and the Biz found him on the road, vomiting blood and clutching the flashlight and briefcase. He refused a hospital and tried to walk back into the woods, saying he was camping and had no identification with him. When Kurt grabbed him, he pulled out a badge: "I'm Agent Murphy. I'm NSA. You are fucking this up for me. Get back in your car and drive away." (Andre, as Agent Murphy.) Kurt kept hold of him, and Murphy turned the flashlight on him. It gave an intense blue-purple flash and a rapid electric clacking, set Kurt's shirt on fire for 3 harm, and blinded both agents for 30 to 45 seconds. Kurt then bit open the "LSD tooth", one of his special molars, and spat the dose into Murphy's mouth. Murphy screamed and fled, firing the device wildly behind him so that a tree burst into flame, and dropped off a small ledge into the dark (Radford Horror 03).

Kurt did not believe Murphy was NSA, since the CIA had no portable beam weapons and he doubted the NSA did. The Biz suspected a secret NSA project, and Andrew leaned toward aliens (Radford Horror 03).

Death in the woods

The players did not see Murphy's end. In a cut-away in Radford Horror 03, a panicking Murphy with a fractured skull and one eye partly out of its socket shot at birds until the device overheated and he vanished in a pulse of light. The cold open of Radford Horror 04 follows directly, showing what the pulse left: his slumped, smoldering figure against a tree in the burning woods as a coyote begins to eat him (Radford Horror 03; Radford Horror 04).

The remains

After the team left the ER, Kurt followed faded blood to a clearing where mildly high coyotes were devouring what was left. A circle of ground had been melted to glass. Of Murphy there remained the back of the suit, the back of the skull, a little brain, and the briefcase reduced to a melted wad. Kurt found a handful of scorched teeth for dental identification, along with the NSA ID, and bagged about two pounds of remains. Kurt assumed the device had exploded, but no trace of it could be found (Radford Horror 04).

The warped briefcase held a melted wireless telegraph with a Morse key, and loose, badly burned pages on plain paper with no letterhead. Kurt said, "I've seen some classified NSA documents in my time, and this doesn't look like any of 'em." (Radford Horror 04) See Murphy's briefcase and documents and Flashlight weapon.

Aftermath

Kurt carried the remains in a cooler, along with a dog skull and a couple of beers, into the Ferry Lodge (Radford Horror 05). In Radford Horror 07, when the team found Dean Lawson's Samsonite briefcase, Dante asked whether it matched the NSA agent's; Andre said Murphy's was not a brand the team recognized (Radford Horror 07). In Radford Horror 08, Kurt's illegal contact examined the badge. It appeared genuine, but no one by that name appears in the records. Kurt concluded, "I didn't kill an NSA agent, officially." (Radford Horror 08) The cleanup crew at the end of that episode carried the same kind of flashlight; see The cleanup crew.

What remains unknown

  • Who Murphy really was and who sent him.
  • How he came to carry a portable beam weapon, and whether he was connected to the silent craft that circled the car at the moment he appeared.

Trivia

  • After the fight Kurt put on a welding mask before handling the remains: "Never approach a hitchhiker without a welding mask." (Radford Horror 04)
  • Dante objected at the table that the FBI would never let a man they had just hit with their car, vomiting blood, walk off into the forest (Radford Horror 03).

Appearances