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The Things in Appalachia

The Things in Appalachia is the third arc of PITF, in which the task force goes to the north Georgia gold country to investigate disappearances and Bigfoot sightings and uncovers an illegal gold mine worked by ape-men beneath a potato restaurant chain's distribution plant.
Setting Dahlonega and Auraria, Georgia, with opening scenes in Washington, D.C.
Episodes 10 sessions: 8 recorded, 2 unrecorded (05 and 10)
In-fiction dates October 3 to about October 7, 1992
Main threat The Ape-Men and their keeper, Jan Martense
Previous arc The Summer Service
Next arc The Walkers in Skin

Overview

A few months after Marblehead, the Paranatural Incident Task Force is handed a thin dossier: a missing boy, a missing woman and a run of Bigfoot sightings around Dahlonega, a gold-rush tourist town. The agents arrive to find the best hotel full of dental oncologists, a religious community called the Covenant living in a ghost town, a band of teenage monster hunters, and a potato restaurant, the Spud Hut, whose trucks never stop running. (Appalachia 01, Appalachia 02)

The case splits into three strands that take the whole arc to braid together. The first is a real predator: something pale and fast that climbs, hangs its leavings in trees, lures a man into a cave, takes a boy from a mine tour and mauls Kurt Larson in a hidden modern tunnel. The second is a hoax: clean giant footprints, a "Chewbacca" collected by a black sedan, and finally a dead ex-serviceman in a stolen costume, shot in the back of the head. The third is the Spud Hut itself, with its hundred-item menu, its savant counter man, its cipher of a secret menu, and its trucks hauling sacks of dirt. (Appalachia 02, Appalachia 03, Appalachia 04, Appalachia 06, Appalachia 07)

Running underneath is a private plot. The Biz, on instructions from a KGB front, plants a camera in the hotel room next to the team's. The room's occupant turns out to matter a great deal: by the seventh session, state police are accusing the FBI of spying on presidential candidate Bill Clinton, and the team is hiding from reporters while it works. (Appalachia 01, Appalachia 02, Appalachia 07)

The strands meet under the Spud Hut plant. Its manager, Jan Martense, has spent a year and a half working ape-men in the old mines on ketamine, and his conspiracy staged the Bigfoot hoax to discredit sightings of the ones that escaped. He leaves the team to die on a sealed underground level. They get out through the mines, past a crack in the air that somebody else is using to pump gas into the tunnels. (Appalachia 08, Appalachia 09)

Two sessions of the arc, including its finale, were played but never recorded, and several early threads (the Covenant, its river, the baptism of a vacuum salesman) are not picked up again in the recorded episodes. See lost episodes.

Episodes

Episode Summary
Appalachia 01 Solo scenes after Marblehead, a secret KGB errand for the Biz, and the drive to Dahlonega.
Appalachia 02 A shoe and a rabbit pelt in the treetops, the first Spud Hut dinner, fake footprints, and a camera in room 111.
Appalachia 03 Andrew sleepwalks to a cave of remains; a boy vanishes on a mine tour; a pale creature mauls Kurt underground.
Appalachia 04 McManley arrives, Sheriff Burke demands answers, and the team visits the Covenant in Auraria.
Appalachia 05 (unrecorded) The evening after Auraria: a Spud Hut auditor, a hybrid blood result, and the Biz's private night.
Appalachia 06 The "dead Bigfoot" is an executed man in a stolen Chewbacca costume, traced to a motel dumpster.
Appalachia 07 A cipher menu, a tracking tag in bloody vomit, the Clinton accusation, and a wrecked truck full of dirt.
Appalachia 08 Inside the Spud Hut plant, Jan Martense leaves the team at the door of a room full of ape-men.
Appalachia 09 Clive explains the gold mine; ketamine Combos, a crack in the air, Big Bob, and escape to the woods.
Appalachia 10 (unrecorded) The finale: Andrew shot in the face; Jan shot, crushed by an ape-man and captured; the plant explodes.

Principal cast

The task force

Dahlonega

The Covenant

Spud Hut and the mine

Smaller parts are collected under minor characters.

Monsters

Key locations

How it ended

The recorded story stops with the team hurt and loaded with gold in the woods outside the plant, and Jan driving away in a red pickup with a large animal crate. (Appalachia 09)

Unrecorded session

The finale, Appalachia 10, was played but never recorded. What follows is what the characters say about it in Walkers 01.

The same day, the team caught up with Jan. He shot Andrew Howard in the face; Andrew survived and left hospital in about half the expected time. Kurt shot Jan, the Biz put a shotgun blast into him, and a falling ape-man broke his skull. He was taken alive and ended up in the CIA's Black Site Omaha. The Spud Hut facility exploded shortly after he fled it, which Kurt puts down to the gas that an unknown party piped into the mines. (Walkers 01)

A month later the Clinton surveillance scandal was still running. The official line blamed "Jan Martense, the illegal gold miner", but the state police had the Biz's night-vision goggles from a rose bush, and he went on Late Night with David Letterman as "the most hated cop in America". At Omaha, Jan told Kurt that his ape-men were his own sons by an ape woman he called Shelly, whom he took five years earlier from the van of a man with NSA identification he had run over. (Walkers 01)

Unresolved

  • Who opened the crack in the air and piped gas into the mine, and why.
  • What Shelly was, and why a man with NSA identification had her.
  • The fates of Willow Greengrass, Gene Cartwright and Frederick, which are never confirmed on a surviving recording.
  • The identity of the man whose lighter was marked "HF", and why Andrew walked to his remains in his sleep.
  • What happened to Jeremy at his baptism, the Covenant's land dispute, and the Spud Hut runoff in its river.
  • What became of the surviving ape-men, Sheriff Burke and the gold.
  • Who shot Troy Cleaver. Kurt assumes it was Jan, and Jan does not deny it.
  • Exactly what the Biz did on the night before Appalachia 06, which was played in an unrecorded session and partly in private between Ezra and Andre.
  • Whether the cryptogram secret menu was ever decoded.

See also unresolved mysteries.

Trivia

  • Episodes 04 and 07 survive only as single mixed audio tracks, so it is not always clear who is speaking in them.
  • The in-fiction calendar drifts. In Appalachia 01 the solo scenes fall on Sunday, October 3, the team is briefed in Washington on Monday the 4th, and it reaches Dahlonega at 7 p.m. on Tuesday the 5th, which makes Appalachia 02 Wednesday the 6th and Appalachia 03 and 04 Thursday the 7th; in Appalachia 04 Andre believes it is Wednesday; in Appalachia 07 he says the team arrived on October 4 and that it is now the 7th.
  • The local newspaper is the Dahlonega Times in Appalachia 01 and the Gold Bug in Appalachia 06. The Bigfoot photograph is credited to "Charlie" Briggs in Appalachia 02, but the photographer the team reaches in Appalachia 06 is Derek Edwards.
  • Jan says in Appalachia 08 that he grew up in East Germany, but the players call him Polish from then on. His name is heard as both "Jan" and "Yan"; Andre's explanation in Appalachia 09 is that people in town do not say it correctly.
  • The Claymore's toll is one ape-man dead in Andre's count at the end of Appalachia 08 and two in the recap that opens Appalachia 09.