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The Summer Service, Episode 05.5

A session of The Summer Service was played between the hotel siege and the finale but never recorded; in it the team found the missing scientists alive, lost its FBI car, stole another, and ended up behind a convoy of the infected on a flooded freeway with the angel thing coming ashore after them.
Arc The Summer Service
Episode 05.5 (unrecorded)
Setting Marblehead, Massachusetts, and the freeway toward the nuclear plant
In-fiction date Summer 1992; between the pre-dawn escape from the hotel and the afternoon of the finale
Previous Summer Service 05
Next Summer Service 06

Unrecorded session

This session was played but never recorded. It has no number of its own; "05.5" marks its place between Summer Service 05 and Summer Service 06. No quotes or roll results survive, and Summer Service 06 gives no recap. Everything below is what that episode establishes in passing.

Where the recordings break off and resume

Summer Service 05 ends before dawn on the road toward Salem. The team has escaped the hotel in Donald McManley's RV, switched to the Biz's Buick behind the abandoned gas station, and picked up McManley's assistant with the ivermectin; the players put off deciding whether to take it. (Summer Service 05)

Summer Service 06 opens in the afternoon, in the storm, on the flooded freeway. The team is in a stolen car behind a slow convoy of the infected, and the angel thing is "making its way towards you, trenching out the ground". (Summer Service 06)

What Summer Service 06 establishes

  • The scientists were found alive. Andrew Howard tells the radio contact, "we found our research guys. They were alive." Testifying to a House subcommittee a few months later, Kurt adds that the survey team "had been kidnapped and held hostage up until that point". (Summer Service 06, Appalachia 01)
  • The team lost its FBI car. It turns up near the back of the convoy with Jester at the wheel and Kurt Larson's gear still inside. Andrew's account is simply, "they carjacked us."
  • The team stole a car. Andre reminds the players "that you stole this car", and that they are glad they "didn't take the Biz's Buick" into wheel-well-high water. The Davy Crockett, mounted on the Buick in Summer Service 04, is with them in the stolen car.
  • The infected formed a convoy heading for the nuclear power plant, and the team followed it.
  • The angel thing came ashore. The creature left the sea and came up the freeway after the team. The team set off a claymore on a truck; Kurt says they were "trying to slow down whatever the hell it is". The sonar operator in the finale's cold open hears this as a small explosion, "maybe like a grenade", just after the creature "went on land".
  • Huell took a dewormer. Early in the finale Andre tells Zack that "the deworming agent is kicking in" for Huell Kendrick, and the worm bonus comes off his sheet.
  • The team had fought worm bags. Asked whether they have fought those things, Kurt answers, "Yeah, pretty gnarly."
  • The lab techs stayed behind. Dante checks that "we left the lab tech guys there, right, with the RV", and Andre confirms it.
  • The Guard had been called. The National Guard sergeant on the radio is looking for "the FBI agents who called us out".

(Summer Service 06)

The radio contact opens the finale by apologizing for "my commanding officer's rudeness earlier". The only such exchange in a recorded episode is the voice that says "We're the goddamn Marines. Get off the line" in Summer Service 05; whether the two sides spoke again in the unrecorded session is not established. (Summer Service 05, Summer Service 06)

Never established

  • Where the scientists were found, and what they told the team.
  • How the FBI car was lost, and why the team was using it rather than the Buick.
  • Whether Kurt and Andrew took the ivermectin along with Huell.
  • What became of Madeline Weathers, and whether she burned the church.
  • What the two sets of financial books showed.
  • What McManley's assistant killed on the road from Salem.

Player characters: Kurt Larson, Andrew Howard, Huell Kendrick, Dick "The Biz" Baxter.

NPCs: the rescued survey team; Jester; McManley's lab techs (minor characters).

Monsters: the angel thing, worm bags, the worms.

Continuity

  • Picks up three threads left hanging in Summer Service 05: the ivermectin, the fate of the scientists, and the cult's armed move against the agents.
  • Leads directly into the opening scene of Summer Service 06.
  • The scientists' captivity comes up again in Kurt's testimony at the start of the next arc. (Appalachia 01)
  • See Lost episodes for the campaign's other unrecorded sessions.