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The Walkers in Skin, Episode 08

The team finds Roosevelt carless, powerless and policed by the dead, McManley's autopsy shows what the townspeople have become, and the only road out is blockaded. Throughout, the Andrew Howard riding with them is a copy.
Arc The Walkers in Skin
Episode 08
Setting Sherman Ranch; the Ballard road; Roosevelt, Utah
In-fiction date Early November 1992, the morning after the gym fire, about 9 a.m. into the afternoon
Players present Andre (GM), Rita, Dante, Ezra, Zack; Ben listening to the closing scene
Previous Walkers 07
Next Walkers 08.5 (unrecorded)

Synopsis

Donald McManley is ambushed on the road by townspeople, two of them children. In Roosevelt every car has been stolen or sabotaged and every officer in the police station has been shot; Yusuf Ansari survives under the bodies. After a firefight with a three-man cleanup crew, McManley opens a skull and finds a pilot: the people of Ballard are manufactured vehicles. The road out is held by two dozen armed impostors in police uniforms. After the other players log off, a private scene shows the real Andrew Howard waking, changed, at the bottom of the morgue pile. (Walkers 08)

The two Andrews

Which Andrew is which

For the whole of the team's story in this episode Rita plays the replica that took Andrew's place at the end of the gym scene in Walkers 07: a clone made by the skinwalkers which has his memories (Andrew, as Andre puts it, was "brain-downloaded and then cloned"). Dante, Ezra and Zack have not been told, and neither have their characters. Rita plays the replica as she would play Andrew: sunny, fussy about Bureau protocol, photographing everything. The real Andrew appears only in the closing scene, played after the other three have left the call. (Walkers 08)

The copy shows through in the dice and the fiction. It rolls a 3 in the firefight, panics, shoots out one of Betsy's windows and is wounded; Andre notes that whatever made Andrew tough "is not kicking in as much" ("Since apparently I can be shot now"). Its Lay on Hands on the Biz does nothing at all. It is the one who takes the organ from the autopsy and keeps hold of it. After the session Rita explained what the replica had been doing for its faction: it stole the sugar from the station break room, "because that's all I can eat", and got hold of the Biz's blood so that a copy of him could be started, though the faction cannot replace him without his memories. (Walkers 08)

Plot

The ambush

At about 9 a.m. the team is eating pancakes at Bigelow's armed compound. The phones are down and the walkie-talkies cannot reach Salt Lake City. Kurt Larson spots a small radio station on the map of Ballard. McManley, due at ten, radios at 11:30: a shootout on the Roosevelt road, bodies, send help. (Walkers 08)

They drive Betsy past the burned school. McManley's Suburban lies on its side behind a spike strip. Around it are four dead townspeople: a matronly woman with a shotgun, an older man with a handgun, and two children with kitchen knives. They fired without a word, and he did not see that two were children until it was over. One of his two interns is shot in the leg. The spike strip came from an empty Roosevelt cruiser whose radio is silent. "Andrew" wants to call it in and leave the scene undisturbed; Kurt and the Biz overrule him. McManley, offered a meditation technique: "If you touch me, I will break your goddamn arms." He also brings the election news: the count is unfinished, with Perot ahead. (Walkers 08)

Roosevelt

The traffic lights are out and there is not a car on the street. Kurt's Read a Bad Situation (10) finds no hidden danger, only one way out: the road. A confused local says his car was stolen and nobody answers at the station. At a repair shop the mechanics report every drivable car taken and the rest sabotaged by hand, with batteries gone, belts cut and sugar in the tanks. Someone wants nobody to leave. (Walkers 08)

At the station, Huell Kendrick throws a brick through the glass door while Kurt is still picking the lock ("I'm the FB-fucking-I"). The Biz fails the entry roll with a 3 and slices his foot. Inside, every officer of the Roosevelt Police Department is dead, and each is missing a small part taken after death: a finger, a toe, an ear. In the cells Kurt finds Yusuf alive under a heap of bodies, shot through the shoulder and missing a toe. He describes naked people, "like families", with shotguns and a machine gun, and then many cars driving away. The armory is stripped. Kurt shoots open the morgue: dozens of decaying bodies in plastic and rock salt, which is where the bodies from the Ballard school ceiling went. (Walkers 08)

The cleanup crew

Three men in gray maintenance uniforms (the Utah cleanup crew) are found inspecting the team's cars. They say they need the substation keys. Told they will be searched, one draws. Kurt (a flat 10) wounds him; "Andrew" panics on his 3; Huell is grazed; the Biz, also grazed, kills the gunman with a head shot. Kurt rams the two who run against the gate with Betsy. They will not speak. The Biz's Manipulate Someone question shows that "the facade of acting like a person has completely dropped away". Their bags hold guns, plastic sheeting and bungee cords. (Walkers 08)

"This is a vehicle"

McManley autopsies the dead gunman on the conference table. There is no stomach, about eight feet of malformed intestine, and a small fatty liver. Inside the skull is a brain-like organ, iridescent purple and green, with sucker-tipped tendrils and a passage down to the sinuses; the body's own brain is a shrunken lump at the top of the spine. "This is not a person. This is a vehicle. Somebody made this. And whatever you killed inside of it was its pilot." The pilot feeds from the host's blood and can digest only simple sugars and starches. The body is anatomically childlike, "a 200-pound baby", and an ordinary person could not be occupied this way; the raw material might be a tissue sample. "Andrew" asks to keep the organ in its Tupperware. See Pilot and host biology. (Walkers 08)

Back at the cells the two prisoners are slumped and empty. Kurt (a 10) sees movement in the drop ceiling; a flashlight through an eye shows light at the back of the mouth. Their pilots have left. Two of the ambush bodies, a child and an adult, still hold dead ones. McManley: "I think I shot something a lot worse." The team concludes the mayor of Ballard was taken months ago, which explains the sugar clues. (Walkers 08)

The bridge

The hospital has a generator it cannot spare and no ambulance. The Guard is 141 miles away in Salt Lake City; Bridgeland is 23. As the two-car convoy leaves, uniformed figures who have trouble walking are approaching the station. At the bridge on the only road, a dozen cars form a blockade manned by twenty to twenty-five people in stolen police uniforms and body armor, who turn a FedEx truck around. Kurt scouts it unseen (an 11). The team turns back toward Ballard to collect Bigelow's guards, try the radio station, or look for a road east to Vernal. (Walkers 08)

The other Andrew Howard

After Dante, Ezra and Zack log off, with Ben listening in, Andre cuts to "the other Andrew Howard". The real Andrew is dead, shot through the heart, and it is agonizing. Then the non-human parts of his biology assert themselves and he spasms back to life. He wakes naked, wrapped in plastic and duct tape, at the bottom of the corpse pile in the Roosevelt police station morgue, with two heartbeats. Rita rebuilds him from the Divine playbook into the Monstrous: Lay on Hands and Cast Out Evil are gone, What I Need When I Need It stays, and he gains a ranged "life drain" attack and a curse, Feed, that needs regular blood. Andre: "They killed you. It just didn't stick." (Walkers 08)

Cold open and framing

The episode has no cold open, recap or credits: it begins with the 9 a.m. pancakes and ends on the private "cut to the other Andrew Howard" scene. (Walkers 08)

Player characters

NPCs

Monsters and entities

Locations

Items

Revelations

  • The replaced townspeople are engineered host bodies, each steered by a pilot organism in the skull. (Walkers 08)
  • Pilots live on blood and sugar, which accounts for the City Hall fridge, the mayor's candies and the Jell-O. (Walkers 08)
  • A pilot can abandon a host and escape; one shot in the head dies inside it. (Walkers 08)
  • Body parts are taken from the dead, probably as samples for replication. (Walkers 08)
  • The faction takes leaders and police first. Ballard is "a dead town"; Roosevelt is mid-replacement. (Walkers 08)
  • The school smell and the disappearances are explained by the stored bodies. (Walkers 08)
  • Revealed only in the closing scene, after Dante, Ezra and Zack had left: the real Andrew is alive again as something less human, and the Andrew travelling with the team is a copy working for the other side. (Walkers 08)

Open threads

  • Who builds the hosts, where the pilots come from, and where the cars went. (Walkers 08)
  • Escaped pilots are loose in the station ceiling. (Walkers 08)
  • The replica holds a pilot organ and the Biz's blood, and the team still does not know what it is. (Walkers 08)
  • The real Andrew must get out of a station full of corpses and impostors, naked. (Walkers 08)
  • Whether Bigelow's guards can be trusted. (Walkers 08)
  • Rita wonders whether the Aetherius Society knew about the dark side of Andrew's gifts. (Walkers 08)

Memorable quotes

Quote

"This is not a person. This is a vehicle. Somebody made this. And whatever you killed inside of it was its pilot." (Andre, as McManley)

Quote

"I think I shot something a lot worse." (Andre, as McManley)

Quote

"I hate it here so much." (Andre, as Yusuf)

Quote

"What in the Goosebumps fuck is that?" (Dante, as Kurt)

Quote

"God turns his eyes away from me. [...] That's not true. God's not real." (Rita, as the replica Andrew)

Quote

"Yeah, they killed you. It just didn't stick." (Andre, to Rita)

Table notes

  • Dante's dice run hot all night; Rita's 3 in the firefight and 0 on the heal are the copy's failures. Ezra has neither sheet nor dice, so Andre rolls for the Biz. See Game mechanics. (Walkers 08)
  • Huell asks every local whether the coyotes seem regular. (Walkers 08)
  • The table tallies which cases involved hitting someone with a vehicle. (Walkers 08)
  • Kurt fetches the bone saw in a trash-bag suit, then showers and covers the smell with Old Spice. (Walkers 08)
  • Rita, on the rebuild: "Well, they shouldn't have shot me in the heart." (Walkers 08)
  • Andre has an NPC say "October" before the table corrects it to November. (Walkers 08)

Continuity