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The Walkers in Skin, Episode 05

The team inspects the flattened car, lives through a night of private hallucinations that ends with Andrew floating out of a refrigerator, and finds a cavern under the whole ranch.
Arc The Walkers in Skin
Episode 05
Setting Sherman Ranch; Roosevelt, Utah
In-fiction date The afternoon after Walkers 04 through the next day; Andre says the election is "tomorrow" on the first afternoon
Players present Andre (GM), Rita, Dante, Ezra, Zack
Previous Walkers 04
Next Walkers 06

Synopsis

The wreck of the Plymouth Voyager turns out to be magnetized and to have hit the road sideways at terminal velocity. That night the night event strikes the guest double-wide: each agent hallucinates something different, Andrew Howard levitates, and the Biz loses every filling in his mouth. Robert Bigelow's sky camera has filmed a white ring. The next day the rented ground-penetrating radar finds a cavern seventy feet down, the mayor pays a call, and a junkyard owner confesses to crushing the car. (Walkers 05)

Plot

The wreck

With nothing scheduled until tomorrow, the team drives Betsy to the Roosevelt police station. A young officer, starstruck when Kurt Larson admits to being CIA "on loan", is rewarded with the story of how Kurt accidentally exploded Fidel Castro's dog. The wreck lies on its side in the garage. Kurt tests it with loose screws: it is magnetic now, and was not when parked. His Best of Queen tape survived but plays only static. Andrew attacks the trunk with a crowbar (Kick Some Ass, 8), falls, and has the harm absorbed by his pendant. (Walkers 05)

Kurt's Investigate a Mystery ("only a six, but it's a nine") shows that all the damage came from hitting the ground at terminal velocity: the car was skewed in the direction away from the ranch, as if still moving that way when it fell, and landed upside down. The upholstery is slightly melted and it smells of coyote urine. Andrew: "Car got abducted. They didn't want it, though." Pressed by the Biz with a plastic FBI badge, the officer gives up the department's suspect, a local junkyard owner with a crusher, a magnetic crane, car-theft priors and no alibi. (Walkers 05)

At Stewart's grocery the checkout lady winks at "Half-Gallon Howard". Donald McManley pages Huell Kendrick: he is flying in tomorrow, having first thought the team said "ghosts". Andrew dictates a field-kit list of crystals, "energy batteries", tinfoil and microwave parts. (Walkers 05)

Back at the ranch, Alberta Wilmarth sits in her truck bed with Nancy calm in her lap. Told about the coyote that followed Kurt on two legs, she says it is "probably one of the weird ones", and that there is a reason she does not live here anymore. The team spends a couple of hours pounding in four posts and chaining Betsy to them. A single eye watches from the roof of the house; when they have backed fifty feet away, the goose drops from it. (Walkers 05)

The night event

Huell wakes to screaming as the world pivots ninety degrees, like a tumble dryer, and Andrew's bed is empty. Kurt wakes in Saigon and shouts in Vietnamese from behind the dresser. The left half of the Biz's vision is outer space crumbling, and he tastes blood. Andrew is buried alive and freezing. (Walkers 05)

Huell traces the screaming to the refrigerator, but his Act Under Pressure, at -1, is a 6 and he crashes through the card table. Kurt's roll to remember his mission is a 7, a mixed result: part of him stays stuck in Saigon, so he bites his LSD tooth and shifts into a state that is still broken but more familiar. He opens the fridge, which to him is the trunk of an ancient tree. Andrew spills out flailing and floats toward the ceiling. Kurt hauls him down by the ankle as white light pours through the windows. (Walkers 05)

Then it stops, and everyone drops to the carpet. Every filling in the Biz's mouth is gone. Andrew had clawed the food and shelves out of the fridge before sealing himself inside. Guns, badges and wallets are scattered and the silverware is in a pile. The house has shifted a few inches, so that the stairs no longer line up with the porch, and it is warmer than the air outside. Bigelow phones to ask whether they saw a white light. Andrew is furious: "God damn it, I almost got abducted. Why weren't the windows open?" Kurt treats the Biz's mouth with cocaine from his shoe heel. (Walkers 05)

The ring

At the big house an exhausted Walt hands out coffee and cider. Bigelow shows a frozen frame from his sky camera (Bigelow's recordings): a bright white ring with a faint purple glow, oscillating for a few seconds. He talks about the Black Sun and quotes Revelation 6:12. A lot of his equipment broke and the thermal camera whited out. Betsy, chained outside, is untouched and cold. His staff have been having nightmares; one, Marina, dreams of drowning. The events have been escalating for weeks, and he thinks "we may be on the verge of making contact". Kurt offers a cover story about Russian neurological warfare and gets Bigelow to agree to ring the double-wide with cameras. Around 4 a.m. Rita asks when Alberta's mother died; Andre answers "about, I think, like two months ago", and Andrew lines the escalation up with Shelly Wilmarth's reappearance a few weeks back: "We really gotta dig that body up." (Walkers 05)

The cavern and the mayor

In the morning a Roosevelt dentist working from a spare room refills the Biz's teeth in gold, the only material on hand, over five hours. Drebin delivers the radar with his iguana Herbert on his shoulder and demonstrates on the septic tank: an empty coffin would show a void, a full one would not. Then he notices a large signal seventy feet down, "like a cave". Kurt's Sharp roll is a 13: the cave extends under the whole area, with no shallower point on the property. Alberta, by phone, guesses a natural gas bed and asks them to tell no one until she works out "the play". (Walkers 05)

Mayor Wilford Hiram arrives in a new Cadillac. His rings cut Andrew's hand in the handshake. He crunches lemon candies from a tin throughout, fishes for why federal agents are in town, and leaves offering the help of "the government of Ballard, Utah". Andrew and Kurt give him the "oddball task force" cover and trust him not at all. (Walkers 05)

The Roosevelt officer phones: the junkyard owner (Yusuf Ansari) has confessed, with no motive given. Andrew tells the others, "I think the aliens coerced a guy into confessing." They collect the Biz, loopy on Novocain and nitrous, and go to interview him. (Walkers 05)

Cold open and framing

Andre opens with a spoken recap, then the cold open. A woman drives a pickup into the desert, one hand on a bulging backpack. Coyotes encircle the truck in the afternoon sun. One opens its mouth unsettlingly wide, gray fibers swimming up its throat. The backpack is full of white powder; she scoops it with a coffee cup and pours it down the coyote's throat. "And we cut to credits." (Walkers 05)

Player characters

NPCs

Monsters and entities

Locations

Items

Revelations

  • The car was carried away from the ranch and dropped; it is now magnetic. See the vanishing car. (Walkers 05)
  • The audience sees coyotes with fibers in their throats being fed white powder by a human. (Walkers 05)
  • The night event heated and shifted the team's house but left Betsy, parked at the big house, untouched; Kurt concludes the car was probably not a target. (Walkers 05)
  • A cavern lies about seventy feet under the whole ranch. (Walkers 05)
  • Bigelow's data shows the ranch phenomenon escalating nonlinearly for weeks. (Walkers 05)

Open threads

  • Who the cold-open woman is and what the powder is. (Walkers 05)
  • Why the junkyard owner confessed. Kurt's first question will be what make of car he stole. (Walkers 05)
  • What the mayor wants. The team floats embezzlement, or a community center built to get at a gas reserve. (Walkers 05)
  • Whether the eye on the roof was the goose. (Walkers 05)
  • McManley's arrival and the exhumation. (Walkers 05)

Memorable quotes

Quote

"We once exploded Fidel Castro's dog completely on accident." (Dante, as Kurt)

Quote

"Car got abducted. They didn't want it, though." (Rita, as Andrew)

Quote

"Oh no, if he's on two legs and following you, that's probably one of the weird ones." (Andre, as Alberta)

Quote

"God damn it, I almost got abducted. Why weren't the windows open?" (Rita, as Andrew)

Quote

"Right, you are now on cocaine and LSD, which is clearly superior." (Andre, out of character)

Quote

"We may be on the verge of making contact." (Andre, as Bigelow)

Table notes

  • Kurt drops his P90 repeatedly; Huell keeps handing it back. (Walkers 05)
  • Kurt's LSD tooth, long established, is finally bitten. His drugs stay on for the rest of the session. (Walkers 05)
  • Dice: Huell's 6 at -1 forward; Kurt's "only a six, but it's a nine"; Kurt's 13 on the radar, counted as 12. See Game mechanics. (Walkers 05)
  • Andre has McManley's interns driving through the night, then remembers he is flying: "Shit. Sorry." (Walkers 05)
  • Of the Biz's gold fillings, Dante says "it matches his watch" and Rita "matches the nickname". (Walkers 05)
  • Andre's closing remark: "Imagine waking up and your coworker is in the fucking fridge." (Walkers 05)

Continuity

  • When Shelly Wilmarth died differs between episodes. In Walkers 01 Alberta says her mother died two years ago and shows an obituary dated winter 1990. Here Andre tells the table she died "about, I think, like two months ago". (Walkers 05)
  • Andre says the election is "tomorrow" on this episode's first afternoon, the team's second day in Utah. Walkers 01 called the morning the team left Washington the day before the election, and Walkers 03 put their first evening in Utah in late October. (Walkers 05)
  • In the opening recap Dante credits the exhumation order to Rita having "called dad", meaning Andrew's call to Big Bill in Walkers 04. (Walkers 05)
  • The bomb collar, thermite and net gun were ordered in Walkers 04, where the radar dealer was arranged but not named; he introduces himself as Drebin here. (Walkers 05)
  • McManley still insists the ape-men of the Georgia case "should have just been chimpanzees". (Walkers 05)
  • The cavern is entered in Walkers 06 and is the setting of the finale. (Walkers 05)