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The Walkers in Skin, Episode 03

On the team's first evening in Utah, something kills the rental car and drags it sideways at dusk, and a night in Ballard yields a sheriff, a bartender, an undisturbed grave and an overloaded substation.
Arc The Walkers in Skin
Episode 03
Setting Sherman Ranch and Ballard, Utah
In-fiction date Late October 1992 by Andre's account at the table, from about 5:30 p.m. into the night (see Continuity)
Players present Andre (GM), Rita, Dante, Ezra, Zack
Previous Walkers 02
Next Walkers 04

Synopsis

Heading into town to start the exhumation, the team is caught in the dusk event: the car dies fifty feet from the ranch gate, the sky pulses, and the van slides six inches sideways before everything returns to normal. In Ballard, Sheriff McDermish agrees to file the exhumation paperwork and the bartender Maggie supplies the town's gossip. The team finds Shelly Wilmarth's grave untouched, a substation arcing into the ground, and a fenced community center site with a clear view of their own front door. (Walkers 03)

Plot

Ham bang

After a dinner of sandwiches and 3% beer in the guest double-wide, the team decides to go into town about an hour before sunset. Nancy the goose is waiting outside. Kurt Larson's flashbangs are in checked baggage, so Huell Kendrick throws lunch meat instead (Manipulate Someone, a flat 10). Halfway to the car the goose comes back for more. Huell's Act Under Pressure is an 8, a partial: everyone gets in, but she bites his nose until it bleeds and swells shut. (Walkers 03)

At the big house, Walt Murphy hands Andrew Howard an unrequested brownie and promises to clear a night-patrol ride-along with Bigelow and fetch them around 1 a.m. He warns them not to shoot the livestock, which "move in ways that look pretty odd if you're jumpy." Huell is paged by Donald McManley, who answers the return call with "Is it a real one this time?" He will not drive the RV to Utah; he needs warning to repack and fly. Huell promises to call the moment the case looks real. (Walkers 03)

The dusk event

Fifty feet from the gate the Plymouth Voyager dies, and every electronic device in it with it. Outside there is a high, tinnitus-like whine; thin clouds flicker with lightning and the hair stands up on their necks. Kurt: "That's fucking lightning." They retreat into the car. The sky pulses brighter and dimmer in a stuttering rhythm while Andrew photographs it and Huell develops a pounding headache. Then the car moves six inches sideways, something pops, and the engine restarts. (Walkers 03)

Kurt runs UTAW-style checks: trash out the window, his non-dominant hand out the door, a taste of the air. Tire trails confirm the drag, and there is nowhere to hide a giant electromagnet. His battery watch has stopped, the two-dollar Casio worn by the Biz is permanently scrambled, and Andrew's mechanical Fossil is fine. Under the hood are four or five scattered scorch marks where the metal got hot enough to anneal. Andrew mutters about the 1950s Levelland, Texas case. Huell, told to call McManley, says "maybe later". (Walkers 03)

The sheriff and the bartender

The door of the sheriff's double-wide is answered by seven-year-old Bud: "My daddy's on the shitter. Can I help you?" Sheriff McDermish, part-time, heavyset and eager to be "a resource", serves sweet tea beside a Monopoly game he is losing to his son. He will file the exhumation paperwork tomorrow, but warns that the judge once stalled an exhumation for six months. The team tells him not to drink the tap water; Bigelow had told him the same without saying why. (Walkers 03)

At the bar the young bartender takes Andrew for a "Mormon fed", demands ID, makes him drink a vodka-Coke shot, then softens and gives him a root beer float. Huell beats the Biz at darts by spending a Luck point on a 7; the Biz rolls a 4 and pays $20 on a bet nobody made. The bartender recognizes both of them from television. Her gossip: the community center is being built half a county away from the community, pushed by Deborah Wells, on Pueblo ruins that were bulldozed despite a protest. Ballard has about thirty blackouts a year, four school computers that never worked, and a stink at the high school; anyone who can get a degree "magically" disappears. She once saw something she took for ball lightning streak past her car on the ranch's back road and shoot straight up. (Walkers 03)

Drunk, Huell tells her about the water. The Biz coins "Half-Gallon Howard"; Andrew turns red and studies the counter. The sheriff trades Vietnam stories with Kurt and describes his shot-off buttock until the bartender bans both topic and display. She introduces herself only at the end: "I'm Maggie, by the way. Not that anyone asks." (Walkers 03)

The grave, the substation, the site

Kurt picks the cheap lock on the churchyard cemetery. After half an hour they find Shelly Wilmarth's grave under an expensive black granite slab: undisturbed, tidy, with grass trampled by a recent visitor. (Walkers 03)

Near the ranch turnoff the substation is popping and flickering. Kurt's Investigate a Mystery is a 10, two questions: the equipment is arcing into the ground, it is being driven far harder than it was designed for, and something blew into it and made a path to ground. The community center itself is a cinder-block shell behind chain-link and barbed wire, with work lights on and "cultural genocide" painted over the contractor's logos. It stands at the end of a dirt road in empty desert, and the double-wide is visible from it. Kurt concludes the ranch is the likely reason it was built there. Back home a goose-shaped silhouette charges out of the dark and rattles the doorknob. (Walkers 03)

Cold open and framing

A slow zoom through a dark, dusty industrial space of wires and pipes, lit by thin shafts of light from below, with distant shouting. The camera passes row after row of human-shaped figures wrapped in clear plastic. As it reaches the last one, it moves. Cut to credits. These are the plastic-wrapped bodies. There is no "previously on". (Walkers 03)

Player characters

NPCs

Monsters and entities

Locations

Items

  • Plymouth Voyager and its engine scorch marks
  • The three watches, Andrew's photographs, and the pending car-phone request (see minor items)

Revelations

  • An electrical event at the ranch gate can kill electronics, heat metal and physically move a car. (Walkers 03)
  • The substation is overloaded and arcing; Kurt suspects off-spec power use. (Walkers 03)
  • Shelly Wilmarth's grave has not been dug up, but someone visits it. (Walkers 03)
  • The community center overlooks the ranch. (Walkers 03)

Open threads

  • The source of the event: the ranch's science, the substation, or something else. (Walkers 03)
  • Why Deborah Wells wants the community center there. (Walkers 03)
  • Whether the judge will allow the exhumation. (Walkers 03)
  • Ballard's vanishing graduates and the smell at the high school. (Walkers 03)
  • McManley has not been told the case looks real. (Walkers 03)
  • The 1 a.m. night patrol. (Walkers 03)

Memorable quotes

Quote

"Ham bang it is." (Dante, as Kurt)

Quote

"It's like, imagine, if you will, Ezra, the opposite of a welfare check." (Dante, out of character)

Quote

"Must have been the wind." (Dante, as Kurt, chambering a round after the car moves sideways)

Quote

"I had to make sure it wasn't another Mormon fed." (Andre, as Maggie)

Quote

"They shot me in the ass. Communism is a terrible ideology." (Andre, as Sheriff McDermish)

Quote

"What kind of watch do you think a man who wears a full set of striped pajamas, including the hat, would wear?" (Rita, out of character)

Table notes

  • Andre first calls the superintendent "Misabelle", then asks the table to "retcon that in your minds": she is Deborah Wells. (Walkers 03)
  • Ezra looks up the real Salt Lake City sunset for the date ("I'm gonna be that guy"); Andre had already checked ("I am also that guy"). (Walkers 03)
  • Zack spends a Luck point on darts. Ezra: "I appreciate blowing it on stupid shit." See Game mechanics. (Walkers 03)
  • Ezra on the Biz's disillusionment since the Radford Moth: "You think you got the strawberry jelly bean, but it turned out to be apple." (Walkers 03)
  • Andre's audio cuts out several times during the session, and the players ask him to repeat lines. (Walkers 03)

Continuity

  • The date does not line up with Walkers 01. There, Andre dates the Letterman interview to November 1, 1992, with the team leaving for Utah after it. Here, on the team's first evening in Utah, Andre says it is "late October", and Ezra looks up the sunset for October 30, 1992 (5:25 p.m.). Both episodes agree only that the election has not yet happened. (Walkers 03)
  • The sheriff points at a moth scar on Kurt's neck, and the Biz's let-down over the moth and Kurt's "off-brand Bigfoot" recall the Radford and Appalachia cases. The team's one large "sock full of gold", still sitting in the DC office, comes from Appalachia. (Walkers 03)
  • McManley's "Is it a real one this time?" follows his call-outs in The Summer Service and The Things in Appalachia; his RV stays home. (Walkers 03)
  • The plastic-wrapped figures of the cold open are not explained until Walkers 07 and Walkers 08. (Walkers 03)