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The Roulet Estate, Episode 01

The disbanded task force wakes up hungover in an abandoned Rhode Island house with their secretary, a monk they apparently kidnapped, and something thin and grey shooting at them from the woods.
Arc The Roulet Estate
Episode 01
Setting Roosevelt, Utah (flashback); the PITF office (flashback); the Roulet house, rural Rhode Island
In-fiction date Inauguration Day (20 January) 1993, with flashbacks to November 1992 ("78 days ago") and Christmas Eve 1992 ("Twenty-five days ago")
Players present Andre (GM), Rita, Dante, Ezra, Zack
Previous Walkers 09
Next Roulet Estate 02

Synopsis

After the Utah disaster is buried under a cover story, President-elect Ross Perot decides to disband the Paranatural Incident Task Force on Inauguration Day. On Christmas Eve Andrew Howard receives an anonymous letter wrapped in foil. Weeks later the four agents wake, with no memory of the trip, in a freezing Victorian house in Rhode Island, together with Diane and an orange-robed monk who speaks no language they know. The owners were UFO believers who logged "visitations"; their safe and gun room have been emptied. A naked, spindly, grey-faced figure snipes at the team with a Soviet rifle, the car's battery is gone, and by nightfall the agents are stranded and feel watched. (Roulet Estate 01)

Plot

Seventy-eight days ago: Roosevelt

A card reading "78 days ago" opens on a medical tent at the edge of Roosevelt, Utah. EMTs in respirators treat the agents while hazmat crews carry in more National Guard soldiers covered in white powder. The team has already driven Donald McManley, his interns and the surviving Guardsmen out of the police station in the APC. McManley limps to Andrew's bed with an analysis: the powder is a cocktail of benzodiazepines, sedatives and hypnotics plus something unidentified, and only the rising wind kept it from overdosing the soldiers. The Major is carried in among the casualties. Searchers find no trace of the hazmat troops the agents saw and recover no townsfolk bodies. (Roulet Estate 01)

What survives as evidence is McManley's case of autopsy samples, Andrew's Polaroids of the UFOs, the Guardsmen who watched the autopsies (now being debriefed by national security people) and a Ziploc of powder Kurt Larson kept. The powder proves to be a mild amnesiac, so most soldiers have lost about twenty hours. Big Bill flies in because at least 50 to 60 Guardsmen are dead; his debrief starts apoplectic and moves "down the rage hierarchy." He spins the official story: a radical domestic insurgency, a cult compound under the multimillion-dollar community center, embezzlement to fund an uprising, and a Jonestown-style killing when investigators arrived. Deaths across the two towns total roughly 300 to 400. The agents lie in bed listening to radio reports of the incident and of Perot's victory. (Roulet Estate 01)

Twenty-five days ago: Christmas Eve

After 53 days of paperwork, Andrew types his last Utah report at the office on a terrible brand-new computer while Diane decorates with money that probably came from the cocaine stash. Kurt fixes the banging basement gas heater, whose unreliable igniter lets gas build up and pop. When Diane plugs in the tree it twinkles for four seconds, the breaker trips and Andrew's report vanishes; Kurt breaks into the neighbors' building, from which the office steals its power, to flip the breaker, and notices they now have cable too. (Roulet Estate 01)

The agents trade holiday plans: Kurt with his family, the Biz to Vegas with a judge friend and "very tepidly" looking into "that other thing," Huell Kendrick alone until he sees his college-age daughter after New Year's, Andrew to his mother in California. Andrew's changed body comes up. He still eats but has an "additional requirement" that Rita calls an iron deficiency, he craves very rare steak, and he was shot about five times in the torso in Utah and walked it off. Huell is not in the loop. Carolers collecting for the Salvation Army leave with Huell's cigarettes and one of the Biz's Georgia gold nuggets. (Roulet Estate 01)

Secret Santa follows. Diane gives watercolor paper for Kurt's daughter, a hand-knit sweater for Andrew, scotch for Huell and shoes for the Biz. She receives a pashmina shawl, a Herman Miller chair stamped "Property of the National Security Agency," scotch and some already-scratched scratch-off tickets. Kurt gives Andrew a fake alien fetus in a jar, Andrew gives Huell a gold Dunhill lighter and cigar cutter, Huell gives the Biz the ID of a just-deceased lookalike, and the Biz gives Kurt a floppy disk marked "Mystery Government Files." (Roulet Estate 01)

Big Bill arrives, eats the cookies and delivers the news. Perot believes the task force is a cover for Bush weaponizing the FBI against political enemies. He has asked Bill to resign, will disband and reassign the team on Inauguration Day, and is forming his own task force for the "insurgency incidents." Bill hands Andrew a padded envelope left by an FBI courier with no return address. Outside in the slush Andrew opens it and finds a second envelope wrapped in aluminum foil, holding a letter and a hand-drawn pencil sketch of some trees. As he starts to read, the episode smash-cuts to "Present day." (Roulet Estate 01)

Waking in the house

Andrew wakes on a dusty floor in his suit with a Jameson bottle under his elbow and his first-ever hangover; a Tough roll of 12 keeps his stomach down. Kurt is in an armchair with an empty bottle of peppermint schnapps, the Biz is vomiting into a Stetson that is not his, and Huell is under the couch, face to face with a mummified cat. Andrew's last memory, from just before Inauguration Day, is of officials taking the team's files and the others dragging him and Kurt to a dive bar to get angrily drunk. The foil letter is in his pocket. (Roulet Estate 01)

On the stairs he meets a bald monk in an orange robe. Kurt's Sharp roll of 7 rules out every Asian or Middle Eastern language he knows. The water is off, so Kurt drinks from the toilet tank. Huell hands the monk his unloaded gun to see whether he will shoot; he hands it back. Outside, by the car and a mailbox numbered 118, Andrew stares for a long time at a body-shaped lump under a blanket on the back seat. It is Diane, asleep. She explains that the drunk agents woke her at unprofessional hours and made her drive about seven hours to Rhode Island, stopping five times for Corn Nuts, while talking about finding proof for Ross Perot. Howard was excited that some UFO shapes matched Utah, and she thinks a phone call he took at the bar started it. The agents insisted on picking up the monk, whom she took for a Hare Krishna and who she thinks did not want to come. (Roulet Estate 01)

The monk cooks Spam, reconstituted eggs and thick instant coffee over a campfire. Andrew's most recent page is from a number he does not recognize, the car phone is dead and the car will not start. On a group Sharp check the Biz (a natural 12, for 15) and Kurt (12) spot a classic grey alien face peeking over the roof before it scuttles away. Andrew gets out his Polaroid camera and freezes, starstruck. It begins to snow. (Roulet Estate 01)

The search and the sniper

The house is a brick-heavy Victorian with fireplaces in many of its rooms, no attic entrance that the agents can find, a dirt cellar, a barn and power cut off at the street. The library holds a UFO collection and Scientology material. Andrew's Sharp 9, raised to 10 by his bonus for books, tells him the owners were a husband and wife, the wife the bigger believer, and a partly coded notebook logs several months of incidents ending in the fall of 1992: Greys in the woods, lights over the house, lost time, experiments during sleep, and things taken or moved. The living room's VHS rack includes tapes labelled "May '91 visitation," "Lights in the sky, July '92" and "September '92 visitation." Kurt pops the lock of the bedroom safe on an Act Under Pressure 9, but the door jams; levering it with a fire poker (7) opens it and gashes his shin for 1 harm. Inside is only a sheet of wedding photos, with marks where other things used to sit. (Roulet Estate 01)

When Andrew fetches the marked-up map from the car, small whizzing shots pass his head. The monk tackles him behind the car as a window explodes and drags him indoors. Kurt sees a spindly figure running east through the trees. Huell's Act Under Pressure 11 keeps it in sight: naked, unnaturally thin and long-limbed. It picks up a rifle and shoots Huell in the shin for 2 harm, the first damage he has taken; Kurt stops to stabilize him (9). Andrew keeps going, and the creature squares up and shoots him in the face. The shot is worth 2 harm, and between his pendant and his new toughness he takes none; the figure's body language reads as shock. It flees to a river, where the trail ends, and Andrew finds the rifle abandoned near the bank. He keeps the hit from the others, telling Kurt, who has noticed the broken skin on his forehead, that he ran through something. (Roulet Estate 01)

The weapon is a VSS, Soviet-era, well used and well kept. Andrew suspects the Utah cleanup crew lured them here to silence them before reassignment; Kurt counters that a lone shooter is a half-hearted hit and may be staged to look Soviet. The monk gives two thumbs up at the word "Pawtucket" and produces screwdrivers, then panics at the idea of going outside. Pushing the car toward the house, Andrew finds the battery missing. (Roulet Estate 01)

The steel door

The living room's steel door has a combination lock, like a panic room's, so Kurt spends about 45 minutes bashing through the wooden floor at its foot with a wrought-iron fireplace stand. Andrew steps outside and shouts "Can we just talk?" to no answer, then glimpses a brilliant light streaking low through the trees, gone when he turns to look. The hammering stops: Kurt is staring at the door, dizzy, having lost a minute of time. Andrew finishes the job and squeezes his head and flashlight under the door into a weapons closet with empty racks for about twenty guns, empty ammo boxes and a WWII flamethrower left on the back wall. As evening falls Kurt lifts clean fingerprints from the VSS, feels strongly watched with no possible vantage, and pockets a couple of the labelled tapes while the monk chants in the bathroom. (Roulet Estate 01)

Cold open and framing

The episode is told out of order, with more on-screen text than any other in the arc. (Roulet Estate 01)

  • Cold open: under a title card reading "Inauguration Day, 1993," all four agents lie draped over furniture in a dirty abandoned living room in mid-afternoon sun. The Biz crawls three feet to a dusty Stetson and vomits into it. Cut to credits and a title card; Dante suggested "The gang gets unemployed."
  • Flashback cards: "78 days ago" and "Twenty-five days ago."
  • Smash cut: from Andrew starting to read the letter to Andrew waking on the floor, with corner text "Present day."
  • Andre noted at the table that "the time skip skipped over Christmas," which is why Christmas Eve was played as a flashback.

See The show for the framing devices across the campaign.

Player characters

Non-player characters

Monsters and entities

Locations

Items

Revelations

  • The Utah white powder is a sedative and hypnotic cocktail with one unidentified ingredient, and it erases about twenty hours of memory. (Roulet Estate 01)
  • The official story for Utah is a cult compound and a Jonestown-style mass killing; the true toll is roughly 300 to 400. (Roulet Estate 01)
  • Perot believes the task force is Bush's political weapon and will disband it on Inauguration Day. (Roulet Estate 01)
  • The triangular UFOs that excited Andrew on the drunken night match the craft the agents saw in Utah. (Roulet Estate 01)
  • The owners documented their "visitations" in a coded notebook that stops in fall 1992 and on videotapes dated from May 1991 to September 1992. (Roulet Estate 01)
  • The safe and the gun room were emptied before the agents arrived. (Roulet Estate 01)
  • Andrew can take a rifle shot to the face without harm. (Roulet Estate 01)

Open threads

  • What the letter says, who sent it, and who paged Andrew or called him at the bar.
  • Who or what the sniper is, whether it is alone, and who sent it.
  • What became of the owners, their money and heirlooms, and about twenty guns.
  • The monk's language, his origin and his interest in Pawtucket.
  • Kurt's lost minute and the feeling of being watched.
  • The unread "Mystery Government Files" floppy and the Biz's "other thing" in Vegas.
  • The barn, the tapes and the coded notebook are unexplored.

(Roulet Estate 01)

Memorable quotes

Quote

"Guess what, Ross Perot? You're gonna have a rough first fucking day."

Dante, out of character

Quote

"Baby's fermenting."

Rita (as Andrew Howard), on the alien fetus in its jar

Quote

"Oh, we kidnapped a man."

Rita (as Andrew Howard)

Quote

"I think I just saw him on the roof."

Dante (as Kurt Larson), after comparing it to Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Quote

"I don't like 'guns.' I don't like the plural."

Dante (as Kurt Larson), on the emptied gun racks

Quote

"We send in the Indestructo-twink first."

Dante, out of character

Table notes

  • Andre handed out Secret Santa assignments in chat. Ezra privately sent Andre the idea for the Biz's gift ("I just made Andre's life a little bit harder"), and Andre ruled it a floppy rather than a CD. (Roulet Estate 01)
  • Zack could not recall the names he had given Huell's ex-wife and daughter, and Andre moved on with "we'll put a pin in that." (Roulet Estate 01)
  • Dice: Ezra's natural 12 for 15 on the group Sharp check ("The Biz might be a shitbag, but he is smart"), against Rita's 6 and Zack's 7. (Roulet Estate 01)
  • Rules talk: nobody could think of a way to Help Out on the safecracking, so Dante rolled it straight, and Rita explained that Andrew negates 2 harm normally and 3 with the pendant. (Roulet Estate 01)
  • Running bits: vomiting, toilet-tank water and the "sacrifice bathroom," "twink" jokes about Andrew's bullet resistance, Kurt asking the monk for Gatorade in every language, and "Always with the flamethrowers." (Roulet Estate 01)
  • Period-accuracy debates covered VHS box sets, pagers, car phones and Spirit Halloween. Andre admitted a "small mistake" about the car phone. Zack's microphone misbehaved ("audio is haunted"). (Roulet Estate 01)

Continuity

  • Picks up directly from the end of The Walkers in Skin: Roosevelt and Ballard, the APC evacuation, the autopsies and Andrew's Polaroids. Andre says the Utah paperwork is "somehow even worse than the nuclear thing," a nod to the end of The Summer Service. (Roulet Estate 01)
  • The Biz's gold nuggets come from the Georgia case, The Things in Appalachia. (Roulet Estate 01)
  • Huell's ex-wife and daughter are mentioned for the first time. (Roulet Estate 01)
  • Sets up the toilet-tank water, the tapes, the notebook and the monk, all of which pay off in Roulet Estate 02, and the VSS, which is traced in Roulet Estate 03.
  • The owners are not named in this episode. "Margaret Roulet" is first spoken in the recap of Roulet Estate 02, which also identifies the letter's sender and adds that the sketch showed black triangles.
  • The card over the cold open dates the waking to Inauguration Day, and in Roulet Estate 02 Big Bill is due to be fired "sometime today." Two remarks in this episode sit a little earlier: Andrew remembers the drinking as "right before Inauguration Day," and Andre, asked whether it is after New Year, calls it "early January."