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The Walkers in Skin, Episode 09

The arc finale: a National Guard convoy, a homemade killdozer and three agents on horseback assault the community center, the real Andrew Howard comes sprinting back, and the team shuts a portal in a cavern under Utah.
Arc The Walkers in Skin
Episode 09 (finale)
Setting Ballard, Sherman Ranch, the community center and the cavern
In-fiction date One evening in early November 1992, sunset into night; the election result is announced at the end
Players present Andre (GM), Rita, Dante, Ezra, Zack
Previous Walkers 08.5 (unrecorded)
Next Roulet Estate 01

Synopsis

The convoy drives through dead Ballard toward the community center, picking up a patriot in an armored bulldozer on the way. The ranch farmhouse floats into the sky and is launched toward Roosevelt. In the fight at the fence a naked, bloody Andrew Howard runs in at thirty-five miles an hour, insisting he is the real one. He is. The replica that Rita has secretly played since Walkers 07 is exposed, and she takes back the original, now the Monstrous. Below the building the skinwalkers are evacuating through a portal powered by a dead angel. The team wrecks it. Outside, white powder is falling, black triangles are overhead, and people in hazmat suits are collecting the bodies. (Walkers 09)

The two Andrews

Which Andrew is which

Rita begins this episode still playing the replica that took Andrew's place at the end of the gym scene in Walkers 07. It is the Andrew who rides with the major and wears the team's Sharpie X. When the real Andrew arrives in the middle of the battle, Andre voices him at first, so that for a few minutes Rita's replica and Andre's real Andrew argue over which is which. Once the replica has refused to open its mouth, shot Kurt and shown its tendrils, Andre ends the secret: "Now that the game is up, Rita, let's swap back who we're controlling." From then on Rita plays the real Andrew and Andre plays the replica until its death in the cavern. Up to that moment Dante, Ezra and Zack play their characters as trusting the Andrew with the X: Huell pulls him onto his own horse and helps him shoot at the real one. (Walkers 09)

By this episode the replica looks ill. Andre describes worsening bruises on its arms and an unhealthy cast to its skin, and reminds Zack that this Andrew "has been a lot less bulletproof than you've known him to be". (Walkers 09)

The real Andrew's account: he lost time after pulling the pin on the grenade in the school gym, was shot point-blank in the chest, and woke under a pile of bodies in the police station morgue, which was full of false police. He broke out, and Kurt realizes he was what had escaped through the station window. He has been gone about two days and spent the afternoon explaining himself to Nancy the goose. He says he was dead and "there was no God up there". Since waking he runs at about 35 miles an hour and shrugs off small-arms fire, and he looks subtly inhuman and perhaps slightly taller. His death and revival were shown in the closing scene of Walkers 08. (Walkers 08, Walkers 09)

Plot

The convoy

At dusk the Guard's Humvees and APCs roll through lightless Ballard, followed by Betsy and Bigelow's people on horseback. Kurt Larson, the Biz and Huell Kendrick are on horses too, since horses are nonferrous. "Andrew" (the replica; see above) rides with the major. Huell finds the battery missing from his walkie-talkie; asked why, Andre says only, "You don't know." Kurt warns the major to bail out if a vehicle starts to rise. (Walkers 09)

A dust plume behind them turns out to be a killdozer: an armored bulldozer with machine guns, pipe bombs and a flamethrower, finished that morning by Ned Simpson, a feed-store worker who has spent six months welding it and believes he is fighting "the communist menace". Kurt: "in the CIA, this is what we call an asset." The major lets him join. (Walkers 09)

The substation is arcing so violently that it has set fires on both sides of the road. Near the ranch a cloud crosses the sun. Kurt's Read a Bad Situation (a 10) shows that it is the farmhouse, floating inside a halo of barbed wire, roof panels and horseshoes. As the sun sets a purple glow builds over the ranch; the house vanishes in a vapor cone, launched toward Roosevelt, and the glow snaps into a burning white ring a kilometer across. Invisible waves shove the vehicles, and everyone loses a second or two at a time. The major halts, orders body armor and horses, and sends Walt "Coyote" Murphy back with his illegal RPG and two Guardsmen to destroy the substation, at Kurt's suggestion. (Walkers 09)

The killdozer charge

A megaphone appeal ("This is the National Guard, please, sir--") is answered with gunfire. Ned drives into the fence and the heap of cars behind it, most of Roosevelt's. The naked defenders are poor tacticians and utterly fearless. The opening Kick Some Ass rolls are 7, 7 and 5, and everyone takes harm. Kurt sweeps climbers off the killdozer with the flame light (an 11). (Walkers 09)

Two Howards

Huell's Investigate a Mystery is a 12. A naked, blood-covered Andrew Howard with a gaping chest wound and a miserable face is sprinting toward them from the direction of Coyote's team. The Howard beside Huell wears the X, so Huell pulls him onto his horse and they both shoot the runner, who drops, rolls and keeps coming. (Walkers 09)

A naked copy of Huell, Skinwalker Huell, drags the original off his horse, tendrils coming from its mouth. Huell frees himself on an exact 10, after one tendril has been in his mouth long enough for him to smell his childhood bedroom. His horse tramples the copy and crushes its head. (Walkers 09)

The runner catches up, shouting that he was shot, woke under dead naked people and found no God, and that Huell should check whether the other one can eat solid food. He jumps onto the horse and forces a hand into the X Howard's mouth. Kurt puts the P90 to his head (Manipulate Someone, 9) and he backs off, the first "skinwalker" to talk or show any self-preservation. Kurt cuffs him, then asks the X Howard to open his mouth. "I don't wanna." Rita rolls an 11 to shoot Kurt in the leg, and the replica bolts. Huell rides him down (a 12). When Huell pushes fingers into his mouth, a gray tendril enters Huell's and pulls out a memory of his father, Thomas Kendrick, eating a plate of bacon. (Walkers 09)

Andre announces the swap: Rita now plays the real Andrew and Andre the replica. The real Andrew eats freeze-dried macaroni and cheese and keeps it down; Kurt uncuffs him and sends word to the major that the other Howard is not to be trusted. Huell, one harm from death, faints. Nancy the goose arrives, having followed Andrew's trail. (Walkers 09)

The Ballroom

As vehicles begin to lift, the team goes in by the unguarded back door. A locked door marked "Ballroom" opens onto a shaft several hundred feet deep, with scaffolding, stairs and heavy electrical conduit. Outside it has gone quiet. White powder is falling like snow, and a silent black triangle passes over; another breaks apart as if shredded by something invisible. Kurt breathes a little powder and is dizzy (Tough, 10). (Walkers 09)

At the bottom is a vast lit cavern. Naked skinwalkers carry tanks of blood, with things writhing in them, toward a machine the size of half a dozen semi-trailers. It is built into the corpse of a glowing grub-angel like the one the team fought at Marblehead, and it holds open a twenty-foot portal onto a burned landscape under a smoky sky. It is an evacuation. The team marks their brows with Sharpie, strips, and walks in among them (Huell leads, an 11). They see the duplicate limping about and the mayor, Wilford Hiram, carrying supplies. A maimed old farmer vomits his brain into a tank and dies. In a pile of the dead's belongings Andrew finds his suit, his bag, and his pendant in a Ziploc marked "Hazardous!!!". (Walkers 09)

Then the cavern's power fails, presumably the work of Coyote's team at the substation. The portal spasms, something screams in an unknown language, and the crowd rushes it. Kurt throws grenades into the crowd and through the opening. Huell (a 10) lands one deep in the machinery and the portal winks out, stranding fifty or sixty skinwalkers in the dark. The flame light fires its last charges and melts. (Walkers 09)

The duplicate attacks: "You trapped us here." Return fire cannot hurt the real Andrew, who shoots his copy in the back, and the pilot wriggles out of its mouth and scurries away. The ceiling starts to come down. Huell (a 14) leads the sprint up the stairs. (Walkers 09)

Cleanup

Everyone outside is unconscious. Black craft swoop overhead, the killdozer hangs in a tree, and the community center slides into a sinkhole. Dozens of people in hazmat suits (hazmat cleanup teams) are clearing bodies. Andrew takes a few dozen blurry Polaroids. Kurt commandeers a Humvee from a panicking medic ("I'm the chain of command. We're moving.") and drives off, still naked. At the wrecked substation they right Coyote's overturned APC and find him and the Guardsmen alive. The APC's radio now reaches Salt Lake City, and Kurt puts on record that a cover-up they did not cause is under way. They collect McManley and his interns from the police station and drive for a hospital. On the radio, Ross Perot has won the election. (Walkers 09)

Cold open and framing

Andre first recaps the previous session, Walkers 08.5, which was never recorded. The cold open is a high shot of the community center, with hundreds of cars piled inside its fence and armed, mostly naked townspeople hauling supplies. It pans down to a wet, sullen, naked Huell beside an ice cream van and a bulldozer, eating Twizzlers. Cut to credits. Andre notes that an earlier cold open showed this Huell's face rising from a vat. (Walkers 09)

Player characters

NPCs

Monsters and entities

Locations

Items

Revelations

  • The Andrew with the team was a copy. The original died, came back changed, and is now fast and close to bulletproof. (Walkers 09)
  • Skinwalker tendrils read memories. (Walkers 09)
  • The cavern under the ranch held a portal machine built into a dead angel like Marblehead's. The portal resembles the one in Georgia but opens somewhere else. (Walkers 09)
  • The skinwalkers were leaving, carrying their pilots in tanks of blood to a burned world. (Walkers 09)
  • A third party with black aircraft, hazmat crews and a sedating powder cleans up afterwards. (Walkers 09)
  • Perot is president-elect. See Alternate history. (Walkers 09)

Open threads

Memorable quotes

Quote

"It's the time for every patriot to take up arms and/or bulldozers and fight the communist menace." (Andre, as Ned Simpson)

Quote

"I don't know how to prove to you guys that I'm the real me, but I'm the real me. He's not the real me, and I would like my pants back from the clone freak, if possible." (Andre, as the real Andrew Howard)

Quote

"It's funny, Howard, that the way that you proved you were human was by being bulletproof." (Andre, out of character)

Quote

"Like, you weren't even gonna tell my mom that I got stolen? Like, she at least deserves to know." (Rita, as Andrew, to the replica)

Quote

"I'm the chain of command. We're moving." (Dante, as Kurt)

Quote

"Got the real Andrew back, fucking killdozered a community center, and, you know." (Dante, out of character)

Table notes

  • Huell twice holds a gun on Andrew for an identity test about cigar-shaped craft, and Rita reads real UFO sightings aloud. (Walkers 09)
  • Zack, after the memory probe: "I'm getting Ratatouille'd." (Walkers 09)
  • Zack's dice run hot, with several 12s and a 14. See Game mechanics. (Walkers 09)
  • The party infiltrates the cavern naked, and Kurt hands Andrew a pair of bloody underwear. Andre: "It's an erotically charged campaign." (Walkers 09)
  • Kurt tells the major this is nothing worse than Iraq; Andre replies, "Iraq hasn't happened yet." (Walkers 09)
  • Rita gives Andrew's middle name as Nancy. (Walkers 09)

Continuity

Unrecorded session

The horses, the National Guard, the Sharpie X marks and the cleared police station all come from Walkers 08.5, a session that was played but never recorded. It is known only from Andre's recap at the start of this episode and from remarks made during it.