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The Radford Horrors, Episode 01

While the Biz trades alien intelligence with Boris Yeltsin in a Moscow opera box, the rest of the old task force searches his abandoned apartment and is ordered back to Radford under a new agent and a new FBI Director.
Arc The Radford Horrors
Episode 01
Setting Hotel Metropol, Moscow; Washington, DC (a school science fair, Huell's apartment, the Biz's apartment, FBI headquarters); woods near Radford, Virginia (cold open)
In-fiction date Early April 1993
Players present Andre (GM), Ezra, Dante, Rita, Zack (joined a little late)
Previous Roulet Estate 03
Next Radford Horrors 02

Synopsis

Dick "The Biz" Baxter has been a prisoner in Russia since January and is now a pampered guest at the Hotel Metropol, where Boris Yeltsin questions him in person about Marblehead, the skinwalkers of Utah, a melted alien weapon and Andrew Howard. In Washington, Andrew, Huell Kendrick and Kurt Larson, summoned back by President Ross Perot, search the Biz's apartment and find his gold, a book cipher and a bug-out briefcase with a Swiss passport. At FBI headquarters the newly appointed Director Rudy Giuliani makes them consultants under Special Agent Daniel Webster and sends them to find a missing FBI team in the town of their first case. (Radford Horrors 01)

Plot

Moscow: the gilded cage

The cold open runs straight into the Biz, lying on a king bed at the Metropol in a terry-cloth robe with a champagne bottle under his arm and stroganoff and blini beside him. He has watched a Russian dub of Los ricos también lloran for about three hours. His guard sits at a little table weeping over the soap and eating the borscht the Biz did not want. (Radford Horrors 01)

The captors who kicked him in January and asked about Bill Clinton are long gone. The new ones ask only about aliens, and know a surprising number of specifics. The Biz has met Yeltsin several times. His strategy, which Ezra laid out for the table, is to exaggerate American seriousness about the paranatural, with big budgets, many teams and himself a compartmentalized foot soldier, and to hide that the United States barely pays attention and that Perot will probably axe the task force. If he seems less valuable, it is "back to the frozen shit bucket and the kicking." A Manipulate Someone 11 means the Russians are "buying exactly what you are selling." He quietly notes the window bars and downspouts and hides bed sheets, but does not actually want to escape, and dreads explaining months AWOL if he is sent home. (Radford Horrors 01)

The opera box

An officer with unaccented English announces that the president wants the Biz in his opera box in an hour, "clean and sober and properly dressed," and hands him a Russian-style suit that fits perfectly though nobody measured him. He shaves off his mustache. His back is covered in half-faded bruises and his ribs show. (Radford Horrors 01)

In the Metropol's opera house Yeltsin pats the seat beside him and gets to business. Soviet detectors recorded a surge in the cosmic microwave background last year and triangulated it to the "nuclear incident" at Marblehead. The Biz holds to his earlier story: the military handled it, he was an advisor, he does not know what munitions were used. He does not admit that the team set off a very small nuclear weapon. Yeltsin already knows about the engineered worms and has intelligence about a second organism; the Biz confirms a huge sea creature that chased their car, "a big, confusing grub creature with rings rotating around it." (Radford Horrors 01)

Yeltsin explains why he asks in person, says Russia is "developing a test," and turns to the "people who were not people" at the ranch in Ballard. The Biz describes the skinwalkers: good mimics, not strategic, erratic and violent when confronted, the older ones more convincing than the new. Yeltsin compares them to Koschei the Deathless. Then he unwraps a silk handkerchief around a broken, half-melted device identical to the team's flashlight weapon. Several teams of Russian scientists could not identify it. It was taken from a man wearing very dark, welding-style glasses. The Biz tells him what it is, likens it to a Star Wars blaster, and explains that the glasses keep the user from going blind. (Radford Horrors 01)

"Tell me about Andrew Howard," Yeltsin says. The Biz praises his former boss and leaves out everything supernatural. Asked about Howard's family: "Don't think he ever mentioned them. I never mentioned mine, I might hasten to add." (Radford Horrors 01)

Washington: the missing man

Perot has summoned the old team on short notice. Kurt, back a day early, is at a school science fair where his nine-year-old daughter Peggy Browning wins gold with a projectile-stabilization project, and keeps up his cover as a "continuous improvement consultant" with a chatty PTA dad. (Radford Horrors 01)

Andrew, off a plane from New York, visits Huell, who is in a wheelchair with a bandaged foot, skipping physical therapy, in a squalid apartment with Roseanne on. Diane has told Andrew that nobody can reach the Biz. Huell plays reluctant, is desperate to get out, and agrees after fifteen minutes of Roseanne. (Radford Horrors 01)

At the Biz's building the front-office staff say, "Oh, thank God, the police are finally here about Baxter. Is he dead?" Half the room looks disappointed at the answer. Inside the apartment the television and heater are still on, there is rotten meat in the fridge, and there is no body. A loose floorboard hides the Biz's share of the gold, eight or nine thousand dollars in cash in Ziploc bags and his cocaine. Unopened FBI mail shows he was granted six months' personal leave for a "family emergency" and never signed the follow-up paperwork. (Radford Horrors 01)

Andrew's Investigate a Mystery (12) yields two things. A discount Playboy subscription begun days before the disappearance shows the Biz planned to stay. And a copy of Moby-Dick has had its first few hundred pages torn out; pages in the wastebasket have circled and underlined words, and there is a chart of numbers and arrows in the back. Andrew quietly asks Huell whether the Biz could be a double agent. "Of course, I didn't notice when you got replaced with an alien," says Huell. (Radford Horrors 01)

They call Kurt, who arrives in the family minivan. He finds bills for classified ads the Biz placed in three small Washington papers (the Washington City Paper, the Washington Informer and the Georgetown Current) and spam mail with shared return addresses. The circled words so far read "instructions to cause soon submarine lost near," order unknown. Kurt's own Investigate a Mystery (11) turns up a heat vent with stripped screws under the bed, and in it a briefcase holding Swiss francs, a cheap revolver, a change of clothes and a Swiss passport with the Biz's photo under the name Noah Mueller. Kurt concludes that the Biz meant to come back, was corresponding with a third party, and was intercepted. He has Diane pull flight records, the newspapers and any reports of lost submarines. (Radford Horrors 01)

FBI headquarters

The next morning, outside the door marked "William Sessions," the three find a stranger staring at them: Special Agent Daniel Webster, "a man who looks about twenty-five percent more like a Fed than Andrew Howard." In the men's room an acquaintance named Todd tells Kurt that Perot fired Director Sessions about three hours ago. (Radford Horrors 01)

The new Director is a balding New York corruption lawyer and old friend of Perot, appointed that morning. Giuliani explains that there has been an incident tied to one of the team's old cases, that people are missing, and that the FBI task force sent to investigate has gone AWOL. Perot found the original classified reports unacceptable; Sessions stood by them and was fired. The old team will go as consultants under Webster's operational authority, "strictly there for informational purposes." They are to find out what happened to the previous team and to "establish an acceptable fact pattern" for the previous investigation. Then he asks what they can tell him about Radford, Virginia. (Radford Horrors 01)

Cold open and framing

  • Cold open: shot in a found-footage style. FBI agents in yellow-lettered jackets sprint through snowy woods at night as something flying picks them off from above. In a clearing they find naked, emaciated men hanging from tree limbs by their punctured hands, bellies distended and rippling. A dim shape in the brush lifts an agent and drains him "like a pouch of Capri Sun." A female agent aims at it, freezes, bleeds from the nose and, moving like a marionette, turns her pistol on a colleague. A helicopter shot shows muzzle flashes, then silence.
  • No credits: Andre announced, "This time we don't cut to credits," and went straight to the Biz.
  • End credits: the episode cuts to credits on Giuliani's question, and Ezra read out the title, The Radford Horrors. Dante called the sequel "an Aliens."
  • Production value: Andre had everyone put on a recording of a Russian opera in the background for the Yeltsin scene.

(Radford Horrors 01) See also The show.

Player characters

Non-player characters

Monsters and entities

Locations

Items

Revelations

  • Russia traced a cosmic microwave background surge to Marblehead and knows about the worms and a second organism. (Radford Horrors 01)
  • Yeltsin does not trust that his own officers are who they appear to be: he fears they have been replaced. (Radford Horrors 01)
  • A flashlight weapon identical to the team's has turned up in Russia, taken from a man in welding glasses. (Radford Horrors 01)
  • The Biz kept an alias, an escape kit and a coded correspondence. (Radford Horrors 01)
  • Perot fired the FBI Director over the original Radford reports, and his own handpicked team has vanished there. After the credits the table worked out that the agents in the cold open were that team. (Radford Horrors 01)
  • Webster believes the old team is "dirty as hell" and covered something up in Radford, as Andre put it after the credits. (Radford Horrors 01)

Open threads

  • How the Biz got to Russia, who he was writing to, and what "submarine lost near" refers to.
  • Where the Russians' detailed knowledge of the aliens comes from, and who the man in the welding glasses was.
  • What Yeltsin's test is.
  • What is hunting in the Radford woods and what the hanging men are.
  • Why Perot rejected the reports. Dante's theory was that Perot dislikes reading "aliens and shit"; Ezra's was that the original report was a cover story.
  • Whether Andrew's blood diet stays hidden around Webster.

(Radford Horrors 01)

Memorable quotes

Quote

"There's something honest about being made to shit in an ice-cold bucket."

Ezra (as the Biz)

Quote

"I have faith in my military officers, but I do not have faith that my military officers are my military officers."

Andre (as Boris Yeltsin)

Quote

"Nuclear reactors do not emit cosmic microwave background."

Andre (as Boris Yeltsin)

Quote

"There are degrees of double agent. Let's be clear here."

Dante (as Kurt Larson)

Quote

"Establish an acceptable fact pattern for the previous investigation."

Andre (as Rudy Giuliani)

Quote

"But he doesn't think a big moth got him. And a big moth got him."

Dante, out of character, on Perot and the missing FBI team

Table notes

  • Ezra had not named his new character. Asked for a name, he said, "Fuck me, I didn't actually come up with one... Daniel—Daniel Webster. And I hope that that's not a real name of somebody." Zack called Webster "the Bean to Howard's Ender." (Radford Horrors 01)
  • Ezra shaved the Biz for the opera: "I don't think I can convincingly roleplay a guy with a mustache." (Radford Horrors 01)
  • "Half Gallon Howard," Zack's nickname for Andrew, kept returning, and Roseanne followed the Biz to Moscow ("Goddamn, you can't escape"). (Radford Horrors 01)
  • Zack had Huell pocket a $20 from the Biz's stash as winnings on a bet that there would be cocaine under the floorboards. (Radford Horrors 01)
  • Ezra: "I had completely forgotten that there were ever any other agents involved in any of our—" Andre: "There weren't." (Radford Horrors 01)
  • Zack asked whether Radford had been Mothman. Andre: there was no man element, just moth. (Radford Horrors 01)
  • Dice: Ezra found his dice in a drawer in another room and rolled the 11 that sold the Biz's story. Andre briefly thought "we've been doing Investigate a Mystery wrong the whole time," then corrected himself. (Radford Horrors 01)
  • Homework: Andre asked each player for a list of the equipment they were taking to Radford. (Radford Horrors 01)

Continuity

  • Follows The Roulet Estate by about three months: Huell's foot, the Biz's disappearance from hospital and the shutdown of the task force. (Radford Horrors 01)
  • The Biz's whole share of the gold is under his floorboard here, although the epilogue of Roulet Estate 03 had the other agents bury it in a park near his home. (Roulet Estate 03, Radford Horrors 01)
  • Returns to the setting of the first arc, The Radford Horror, whose UFO turned out to be a giant moth.
  • Yeltsin's questions revisit The Summer Service (the worms, the sea creature, the nuclear weapon) and The Walkers in Skin (the skinwalkers, the flashlight weapon).
  • Huell's quip about Andrew being "replaced with an alien" refers to Andrew's duplicate in Utah.
  • Roulet Estate 03 left the Biz handcuffed to a chair in the former Soviet Parliament building. Andre placed that in January; by this episode it is April and he has been moved to the Metropol. The first interrogators, who asked about Bill Clinton, have been replaced by ones who ask only about aliens. (Radford Horrors 01)
  • When Kurt asks Diane about lost submarines, Andre notes that the ones she knows of went missing while the team was at Marblehead in The Summer Service. (Radford Horrors 01)
  • The Director is introduced only as "FBI Director Giuliani", a New York lawyer with a long career in corruption investigation. His first name is first used at the table in Radford Horrors 02.