The portal¶
The portal is a roughly 20-foot gateway in the cavern beneath the community center near Roosevelt, Utah, used by the skinwalkers to evacuate through to a burned, blasted world; the party wrecks it in the finale of The Walkers in Skin.
| Type | Technology / gateway |
| Aliases | Evacuation portal; portal machine |
| Location | The cavern beneath the community center |
| Power source | The corpse of a glowing grub-angel |
| Status | Destroyed in Walkers 09 |
| First appearance | Walkers 09 |
Discovery¶
In Walkers 09, the party enters the community center. A perimeter hallway runs around the building, and the ground feels hollow underfoot. They pick the lock on the "ballroom" and find that it opens onto a giant hole in the ground, a few hundred feet deep, ringed by metal scaffolding. They descend the rickety catwalks to a huge cave lit by work lights.
In the cavern, naked skinwalkers carry tanks of blood, with things writhing inside, toward a machine the size of half a dozen semi-trailers. The machine is built into the long-dead corpse of a creature like the glowing, grub-like angel the party fought in the seaside town in The Summer Service, with cords and tubes plugged into the machine. It opens a portal about 20 feet across; the tanks are carried through it and people seem to pour out. Andre tells the players that it looks like an evacuation (Walkers 09).
The far side¶
Looking through, the party sees a burned, blasted landscape under a sky full of smoke, with emergency lights set up in a trail that the people carrying tanks follow. Zack asks whether it opens onto the room where the party last saw a portal, in Georgia during The Things in Appalachia. Andre answers that it has similar qualities but does not exit there (Walkers 09). In Walkers 01, Dante (as Kurt) declines to tell the informant Jan Martense about the Georgia portal, as the informant seems not to know of it.
Destruction¶
The party's plan is to throw grenades at everything and through the portal. To get close, Dante (as Kurt) makes a small Sharpie mark above his left eyebrow, strips, and signals the others to do the same, so that they can pass among the naked skinwalkers. As the party gets ready to throw, the power in the cave goes off. The portal becomes visibly unstable, flickering and spasming at the edges, a diffuse scream in a language the party does not speak sounds, and people rush forward through it. Explosions go off in the confined space (Walkers 09).
Zack (as Huell) then makes an Act Under Pressure roll and throws a grenade unusually far, landing it in the middle of the support machinery. The machinery goes flying and the portal winks out, leaving 50 or 60 skinwalkers stuck on this side, screaming in the dark. After the party's flashlight weapon burns out, an explosion overhead drops chunks of the ceiling into the panicking crowd, and the party sprints up the swaying stairs as the whole place seems about to cave in (Walkers 09).
What remains unknown¶
The episodes do not say what became of those who went through before it closed, or who built the machine. The arc ends with dozens of people in hazmat suits and several indistinct black aircraft cleaning up the site, and Dante insists that the record show a cover-up the party is not responsible for. See Pilot and host biology for what the party learned about the skinwalkers' bodies, and Replication for how copies were made.