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Kurtis "Kurt" Larson

Kurtis "Kurt" Leonard Larson is a Vietnam veteran and former CIA case officer from the agency's UTAW branch who serves the Paranatural Incident Task Force as its consultant, burglar, interrogator and tactical lead, played by Dante.
Type Player character
Aliases Kurt; Kurtis; "Special Agent Kurtis"; Larson; "Mr. Kurtis"
Playbook The Expert
Affiliation Paranatural Incident Task Force (consultant on loan); CIA; formerly UTAW
Family Wife Huyen; son Benji Walther Larson; twin daughters Peggy Browning Larson and Melanie Colt Larson
Status Alive (as of Radford Horrors 04)
First appearance Radford Horror 01
Played by Dante

Description

Kurt is in his late forties, about 46, and complains about his spine. He wears a mustache, which he scratches to hide his lip movements, and dresses like a suburban father: a short-sleeved white shirt with no tie, a fanny pack and a "utility dad belt." Dante pictures him in khakis and a polo with yellow-tinted aviators over his actual glasses. He is slight and not physically imposing; Andre pictures him as smaller than the Biz. (Radford Horror 01, Radford Horror 03, Radford Horror 05, Radford Horror 06)

His body is a record of his career. He has two overlapping bullet holes in his lower arm from being shot in exactly the same spot twice, years apart; a Vietnamese spear scar through the shoulder; hearing damage from a hand grenade that went off in his tent; scars that creep up his neck; and "a whole host of little holes" under his shirt. The campaign adds a moth scar on his neck and a bite-and-stab wound in his leg. Andre once described his face as "an open, honest war criminal face." (Radford Horror 03, Radford Horrors 02, Walkers 03, Walkers 04, Walkers 06)

His manner is friendly, folksy and chatty. He calls people "Slick," "buddy" and "son," calls the FBI agents "boys," "Federales" and fellow "alphabet boys," apologizes for swearing, over-tips, and likes to introduce himself by his full name: "Kurtis Leonard Larson." Under the patter he is deadpan, sardonic and given to gallows humor, Vietnam anecdotes and tall tales that nobody can check. He calls himself a "Midwest boy," and one episode cut to credits on his Minnesota-flavored "Aw heck." He likes jazz, smokes only for cover or to ingratiate himself, and prefers McDonald's to local cooking. (Radford Horror 01, Radford Horror 02, Radford Horror 04, Radford Horror 07, Appalachia 01, Appalachia 09, Radford Horrors 04)

Background

Vietnam

Kurt spent about five years in Vietnam. His stories from it include pretending to be dirt, eating in trenches, Viet Cong tunnels and prison camps, a dog he named Willie Pete, and a pair of stilts he carried from the war until 1992. He says he was an advisor to Marines, has been exposed to Agent Orange, and has been in an internment camp. In his own words he has "been in many wars." (Radford Horror 08, Appalachia 01, Appalachia 03, Appalachia 04, Appalachia 08, Walkers 02, Walkers 04, Radford Horrors 02)

CIA and UTAW

Kurt was a CIA case officer in UTAW, the Unorthodox Tactics and Warfare division, which trains its people "not to jump to conclusions, but instead maintain a possibility space of potential likelihoods." Its unofficial motto, as Kurt quotes it, is "anything done in defense of the American people is legal." UTAW experimented with bombs on bats, dolphins, dogs, gerbils, rats and cats, with lasers, with psychic dream exercises and with LSD, and worked on plots against Castro; an FBI agent in Salt Lake City knows it as the "explode the cigars" outfit. The experience left Kurt convinced that animals make bad operational tools. (Radford Horror 01, Radford Horror 02, Radford Horror 04, Summer Service 06, Walkers 02, Radford Horrors 03)

The jobs he claims include toppling a despot, posing as an insurance salesman (he "made a sale"), posing as a male prostitute, impersonating a general, crawling three miles through a sewer pipe, hiding in a septic tank, poisoning the Cuban dictator through a handshake, accounting for "three of Castro's body doubles," and accidentally exploding Castro's dog. He mentions Colombia, Korea, Kuwait, Dubai (which he is "not allowed to talk about") and being summoned to South America to torture a man. He says he was legally declared dead years ago. Most of these are stories Kurt tells in passing, and nothing on screen confirms them. (Radford Horror 05, Radford Horror 08, Summer Service 01, Summer Service 04, Summer Service 06, Appalachia 01, Appalachia 07, Walkers 05, Roulet Estate 01)

He also has a history with the strange. He is "on the fence" about whether he once killed a vampire, and he took part in a tulpa summoning on LSD; pressed on whether he merely tried, Dante answered, "Tried nothing. Carl is dead." The agency trained him to resist psychic intrusion and interrogation, and Andre treats him as one of only two task force members, with Andrew Howard, who have real psychic defenses. (Radford Horror 03, Radford Horror 04, Radford Horror 07, Walkers 01, Radford Horrors 04)

The Iran-Contra affair ended the careers that he and his arms-dealing associate Carter had had. By 1992 he was on loan to the FBI Counterterrorism Task Force, carrying case officer credentials and interagency loan paperwork but no badge. In the fall of 1992 George H. W. Bush called his file "interesting reading" and said he slept better knowing Castro had people like that haunting him. (Radford Horror 01, Radford Horror 03, Summer Service 04, Walkers 01)

Family

Kurt's wife, Huyen, is a former Viet Cong fighter who once tortured him; Dante summed the marriage up as "enemies to lovers." She cooks mostly Vietnamese food, keeps the language alive around the house and, as Kurt puts it, does "a great augmenting" of the children's education at home. Andre has called Kurt the only happily married player character. They have three children, each with a gunmaker for a middle name: a son, Benji Walther Larson, who is nineteen and "got real into Nirvana," and twin daughters, Peggy Browning Larson and Melanie Colt Larson. The family car is a minivan, which Kurt drives carefully. (Radford Horror 02, Appalachia 07, Walkers 02, Radford Horrors 01)

History

The Radford Horror

Kurt's boss at the Counterterrorism Task Force, a man who said he had been in Hanoi, downsized him with a favorite analogy about wanting a German Shepherd and getting a crocodile, and sent him to the new task force under Andrew Howard on a contract of "a couple of years." The team assembled at the D.C. barbershop on May 24, 1992. Kurt cracked the keypad on its steel basement door with luminol and a black light (the code was 4-5-1) and cartwheeled down the stairs into a panic room of Vietnam-era arms. He then drove the team to Radford, Virginia to look for the missing Amanda Lucky, serving cucumber sandwiches and juice boxes packed by his wife. On the first morning he spotted the rooftop watcher on the post office, memorized the plates in its lot, found the pills hidden in Amanda's bedpost, and climbed the trellis to find where a rope had been tied on her roof. (Radford Horror 01)

He took point on the interviews, questioning Yobiah Whateley, Dr. Lori and the town pharmacist, then staked out the Augustine barn alone, lying in the hayloft for more than two hours and leaving with a hair tie and copies of Derek Augustine's notes. That evening he noticed a white van tailing the team and, to turn the tables, commandeered the car of an elderly couple at a drive-thru; they went along only after he showed his Vietnam scars. Driving their diesel up the mountain, he was the first to notice a silent object in the sky, and then hit Agent Murphy at about 50 mph when the man stepped into the road. Kurt grabbed him as he tried to leave, and Murphy set him on fire with the flashlight weapon; Kurt bit open a hollow molar and spat LSD into Murphy's mouth. He took 3 harm, with charred circles on his chest, and was healed in the car by Andrew's laying on of hands and Huell's first aid. (Radford Horror 02, Radford Horror 03)

After the emergency room, still slightly high, he tracked blood with luminol and a black light, collected Murphy's teeth, ID and about two pounds of remains, and opened Murphy's briefcase in a welding mask. He led the autopsy of Amanda Lucky, finding the crucifixion wounds, the needle marks and the butterfly hair tie that matched the one from the barn. (Radford Horror 04, Radford Horror 05)

On the night stakeout he marked the craft with a black-painted Super Soaker full of glow-stick fluid and radioed, "Target is marked... It's got the Whateley boy." Something then struck at his mind for 2 harm and a spell of blindness. He splinted Huell's arm with a stilt, tailed the craft by car, and led the break-in at the Whateley house, where he crawled through the cellar to a mummified teenager nailed to the wall. He blamed himself when Wilbur Whateley slipped out the moment the yard watch was dropped. (Radford Horror 06)

The case ended at the old-town church. Posing as a private investigator, Kurt charmed the guard Douglas Douglas, dug up Dean Lawson's cash in the yard of the Lawson cabin and found his heroin under a bedroom floorboard, and snorted heroin to win over the pilot Freak, from whose plane he spotted the church. Inside he fought the Radford Moth: he resisted its mind three times, shot it, took its proboscis through the thigh, and burned it with an Everclear Molotov that rained fire on him too. He cut Phoebe Augustine free and carried her out on an amphetamine tooth, dragged out Huell and then the Biz, took a burning beam, and padlocked the door behind them. He reached five harm before Andrew healed him. With soldiers closing in, the episode cut to credits on his "Aw heck." (Radford Horror 07)

He took charge of the escape from the cleanup crew with hand signals, duct-tape bandages and an ambush in which he hid under bloody leaves as bait, and came away with one of their flashlight weapons and a shadow poncho, which he handed to Molly Underhill in tinfoil as "special federal evidence." After a week in the Radford ER he tested both by the river and supplied the cover story for the sheriff. An illegal contact later checked Murphy's badge for him: it looked genuine, but nobody of that name existed in the records. (Radford Horror 08)

The Summer Service

In Marblehead, Massachusetts, Kurt did most of the phone work as an "FBI consultant," bonded with the veteran Briggs, and learned that FBI counterintelligence was watching the Biz, which he kept from the Biz. At the colonial church he only pretended to finish the communion wine, and felt sweaty and off afterward. (Summer Service 01)

Unrecorded session

Summer Service 02 was never recorded. Later recaps say that Kurt, Huell and Andrew were exposed to the nerve agent at the stealth wreck, that Kurt's hands got wet and he was hit hardest, and that it was Kurt who described the wreck's radar-minimizing shape and capacitor turret. (Summer Service 03)

He spent the rest of the case sick: adult chicken pox, nerve-agent effects and, it was presumed, the worms. He slept in the back seat under a space blanket and carried a -1 to everything. What he had seen underwater frightened him enough to call an old weapons contact, and at the cost of a Luck point Carter delivered an M28 Davy Crockett with one W54 round. Kurt was as pleased as "a kid on Christmas." (Summer Service 03, Summer Service 04)

He picked the locks at the lighthouse and at Arnold Weathers' house. There the worm-ridden dog Puddles bit deep into his forearm, and Andrew's church mace, fired to save him, beheaded the dog and passed through Kurt's hand. He took 3 harm and lost about a tenth of his blood. He still ran kitchen experiments on the worms (vodka, heat and salt kill them), talked Madeline Weathers out of burning the church by showing her his grenades, and, when armed church members surrounded the hotel at 4 a.m., passed the sixty-pound warhead out of a window and led the team unseen to McManley's RV. (Summer Service 03, Summer Service 05)

In the finale he was the team's radio liaison and arms expert. He negotiated with the radio contact, revealed the Davy Crockett with "Can you keep a secret?", and taught the others to fire it while lying in the back seat. Huell won the right to fire and remembered Kurt's stance tip as he slipped. Kurt used his amphetamine tooth twice and noticed that the Geiger counter spiked when the creature died, not when the warhead went off. He helped Andrew give the Guard the terrorist cover story. He ended the arc asleep in a National Guard medical tent after antivirals and chicken soup. (Summer Service 06)

The Things in Appalachia

On October 3, 1992, Kurt testified to a House subcommittee about Marblehead in an old service suit, dodging without lying, with his CIA boss sitting silently in the room. Sent to Dahlonega, Georgia, he treated Bigfoot as an assassination target and read a big-game hunting book for weaknesses. (Appalachia 01)

He ran the field procedure: inverted-wedge searches, a photograph of every print, and luminol at each scene. In the hidden tunnel under the Consolidated Gold Mine he took point on the strength of his Vietnam tunnel experience, was mauled by one of the ape-men and shot it, which produced the team's only blood sample. He argued that the creature was an animal but that the blinking red light on it meant people were involved. (Appalachia 02, Appalachia 03, Appalachia 04)

At Auraria he pressed women's-shelter cards on members of the Covenant and promised to report them to child protective services. When a dead "Bigfoot" turned up on Comstock's property, he ruled out UTAW because the man in the costume wore no body armor, identified a Navy SEAL trident tattoo, and read him as a hired mercenary who had been double-crossed. At the Spud Hut he bought a margarita spud with three fake IDs, and he opened his escape kit to disguise Andrew and hand out Hawaiian shirts. (Appalachia 04, Appalachia 06, Appalachia 07)

Inside the distribution center he introduced himself to Jan Martense as CIA, put on a European accent for a reporter ruse, and propped the break room door with his shoe. When the ape-men came out, one punched his dog whistle into his throat, and with four closing on him he set down a Claymore and yelled "Ear pro!" Underground he quieted the screaming Sheriff Burke, numbed Huell's wound with cocaine, hotwired a forklift, and got the working shift of ape-men to take ketamine-filled Combos by eating one himself. He led the stand against Big Bob with a near-fatal chest shot, and took a "reasonable amount" of gold for his wife and kids. He protected the handler Clive from the rest of the party. (Appalachia 08, Appalachia 09)

Unrecorded session

Appalachia 05 and the finale, Appalachia 10, were never recorded. Kurt's interrogation of Jan in the next episode establishes that Kurt shot Jan in the finale, and that Jan was captured. (Walkers 01)

The Walkers in Skin

Kurt was ordered to stay away from the Letterman taping and spent it five stories under the ocean at Black Site Omaha, interviewing Jan ("Kurtis, you shot me." / "Ah, you shot my leader in the face. Seemed only fair."). He traded for Jan's account of how he came by the first ape woman, Shelly, kept the crack in the air secret from him, and kept his promise to ask the guard for playing cards. In the following weeks he arranged a CIA job for the Spud Hut savant and sourced a P90. (Walkers 01)

At Sherman Ranch he refused to disarm on Robert Bigelow's porch, spread the warning about Ballard's water, and promised Alberta Wilmarth the exhumation of her mother. He led the field work after the dusk event, when the watch his wife gave him stopped, and found the scorch marks on the engine. Walking to the big house alone, he was stalked by an upright coyote and handled it with baloney and a "verbal flashbang." His Vietnam stilts were lost with the crushed rental car. (Walkers 02, Walkers 03, Walkers 04)

During the night event he believed he was in Saigon and hid behind a dresser with the P90, shouting in Vietnamese. He bit his LSD tooth to reach "a more familiar broken state," then pulled the levitating Andrew down by the ankle. He ran the ground-penetrating radar, got Yusuf Ansari to admit his innocence, broke a lockpick at Ballard City Hall, and threw his broken watch into the beam. At his request the Utah National Guard went on standby. (Walkers 05, Walkers 06)

When a naked intruder broke into the double-wide he shot the man's foot with the P90, took a chokehold, and ran the aftermath. He was not at Ballard High School when Andrew was replaced by a duplicate, and he worked beside the duplicate without knowing. The next day he was the tactical lead in Roosevelt: he ran procedure at the road ambush, rammed two fleeing men with Betsy, and led the breach of the police station. (Walkers 07, Walkers 08)

Unrecorded session

Walkers 08.5 was never recorded, and no later recap says what Kurt did in it.

In the finale he rode a horse beside the Guard convoy (horses being nonferrous), recruited Ned Simpson and his killdozer as "an asset," and recognized that the cloud over the ranch was the farmhouse floating in the sky. He proposed sabotaging the substation. When a second Andrew appeared, Kurt held the newcomer at gunpoint and cuffed him, then asked the Andrew he had been travelling with to open his mouth; that one, the duplicate, shot Kurt in the leg and ran. Kurt uncuffed the real Andrew. For the infiltration of the community center he marked his brow with Sharpie and stripped, and in the cavern he threw grenades into the crowd and through the portal and sprayed a flame light until it melted. He took a Humvee ("I'm the chain of command. We're moving."), drove out still naked, and put on record by radio that a cover-up was under way that the team had not caused. (Walkers 09)

The Roulet Estate

On Christmas Eve 1992 Kurt fixed the office gas heater, restored the power by sneaking into the neighbors' building, and gave Diane a Herman Miller chair stamped as the property of the NSA. He gave Andrew a fake alien fetus in a jar, and the Biz gave him a floppy disk marked "Mystery Government Files." He had kept a Ziploc of the white powder from Utah. In January he woke in an armchair in the Roulet house holding an empty peppermint schnapps bottle, and with the Biz he spotted a grey face peeking over the roof. (Roulet Estate 01)

He opened the safe with a fire poker at the cost of his shin, took fingerprints from the VSS rifle, lost a minute of time, and pocketed the visitation tapes. Digging in the basement he hallucinated a Vietnamese prison guard and emptied his sidearm into the hole. He found the chimney passages and led the climb to the attic lair. (Roulet Estate 01, Roulet Estate 02)

At the Brooks Pharmacy siege he invented a burning-tire smoke screen, stripped to his underwear for the ruse, picked the back door and bound the gunman with that underwear. When the task force was disbanded he was sent to Sri Lanka, then recalled after Waco to train American agencies; in April 1993 he was lecturing at Quantico on silent breach coordination. (Roulet Estate 03)

The Radford Horrors

In early April 1993 Kurt was at a school science fair, where his daughter Peggy won gold with a projectile-stabilization project and he kept up his cover as a "continuous improvement consultant." Called to the Biz's apartment by Andrew, he found the bug-out briefcase in a heat vent and concluded that the Biz had meant to return and had been intercepted. Asked whether he himself was a double agent, he said, "Not currently." (Radford Horrors 01)

Back in Radford under Daniel Webster, who refused to let him out of his sight, he argued a spear gun through airport security by showing his spear scar, and held a grenade as a dead man's switch when IRS Criminal Investigations stormed the Ferry Lodge. At the Safe Environment Fund site he fired a P90 burst into the air after guards tasered Webster, found a thoroughly professional cleanup, and scraped pearlescent goo from a branch. That night he pinned the rabid mouse to the floor with the spear gun. After rabies shots he led the investigation at the Douglas Pinball Emporium and did most of the detective work that followed, including the questioning of Wilbur Whateley. In the closing image of the latest session, Andrew lifts him one-handed into the tree where he sleeps, at the campground. (Radford Horrors 02, Radford Horrors 03, Radford Horrors 04)

Relationships

Abilities and equipment

Playbook and moves

Kurt is built on the Expert playbook of Monster of the Week. For more on the rules as played, see Game mechanics. (Walkers 04)

Gear

Memorable quotes

Quote

"Not your average spook. I think of myself as more of a Casper." Dante (as Kurt) (Radford Horror 01)

Quote

"I got shot in the exact same place, twice, in Vietnam, five years apart. Now, that's a sacrifice." Dante (as Kurt) (Radford Horror 03)

Quote

"Listen. Once immolated, twice shy, let me tell ya." Dante (as Kurt) (Radford Horror 04)

Quote

"Moth to a flame, bitch!" Dante (as Kurt) (Radford Horror 07)

Quote

"I spent a lot of time in Vietnam pretending to be dirt." Dante (as Kurt) (Radford Horror 08)

Quote

"All right, boys, raise your hand. Who wants to cause a nuclear incident?" Dante (as Kurt) (Summer Service 06)

Quote

"Just remember, anything done in service to the American people is legal. At least that's what they always told me in my unit." Dante (as Kurt) (Appalachia 03)

Quote

"I'm CIA. I'm certified for anything." Dante (as Kurt) (Appalachia 09)

Quote

"Parlez-vous français?" Dante (as Kurt) (Walkers 04)

Quote

"Listen, you wake up to spears once, never again." Dante (as Kurt) (Radford Horrors 04)

Trivia

  • Attendance: Kurt is present in all 37 recorded canon sessions. His only absence is the non-canon one-shot Philosopher's Fist, in which Dante plays Derk. His part in the unrecorded sessions is known only where a later recap mentions him; see Lost episodes.
  • Names: "Kurt" and "Kurtis" are used interchangeably at the table. Zack once called him "Kirk." (Walkers 06)
  • UTAW: Dante first expands the acronym as the "unorthodox tactics and weapons division," says "Unorthodox Tactics and Weapons" again in Summer Service 06, and at once corrects himself to "Tactics and Warfare." It has twice been misheard as "Utah." (Radford Horror 01, Summer Service 06)
  • The bullet holes: Kurt says the two wounds in the same spot came "three years apart" in Radford Horror 01 and "in Vietnam, five years apart" in Radford Horror 03.
  • The children's ages: in Radford Horror 02 Kurt says, "Boy's nineteen, girls are both thirteen." In Radford Horrors 01, set a year later, Andre needed a child of elementary-school age for the science fair, and Dante made the twins nine. When Kurt shows a family photo in Appalachia 07 he says the three are "all grown up."
  • Stilts: a pair of stilts in the trunk is a running gag. One became Huell's splint and another Kurt's crutch; the originals, which had shrapnel in them, were lost in Utah. (Radford Horror 06, Summer Service 05, Walkers 04)
  • Dentists: Kurt holds that every hotel the team books fills up with a dentists' conference, "like a curse or something." (Appalachia 02, Walkers 02)
  • Verbal psionic flashbang: his technique of breaking an opponent's concentration with a line such as "The accident wasn't your fault." He has used it on a giant moth and, in French, on a coyote. (Radford Horror 07, Radford Horror 08, Walkers 04)
  • Visualizing the polygon: a CIA "polygon of defense" exercise he does for hours at a time. (Walkers 01, Roulet Estate 03)
  • Predictions: in 1992 he says of the World Trade Center, "Those things will stand for a thousand years, I swear," and predicts electric cars within three years. (Radford Horror 01)
  • Bessie: when Huell asks for the P90, Kurt tells him to "treat Bessie right." The team's car is the similarly named Betsy. (Walkers 06)
  • He never votes ("conflict of interest") and says ketamine "might be the only drug I have a problem with." (Walkers 05, Appalachia 09)

Appearances