Skinwalkers¶

The Skinwalkers are brain-like organisms that pilot engineered, childlike copies of human bodies, replacing the leaders, police and townspeople of Ballard and Roosevelt, Utah, in the arc The Walkers in Skin.


Type	Monster (parasitic or symbiotic species and its copies)
Aliases	walkers in skin; body snatchers; snatchers; pilots; clones; replicators; worm people; tendril-mouthed replicators
Abilities	Piloting engineered host bodies; tendril "kiss" replacement; memory probing; coordinated sabotage; opening an unnaturally wide mouth
Weaknesses	Can digest only simple sugars and starches; flawed, deteriorating copies; die with the host on a head wound; can be detected by a mouth check or a flashlight in the eye
Affiliation	Skinwalker faction
Status	Main force stranded when the community center collapsed in Walkers 09; at least one pilot escaped
First appearance	Walkers 04 (cold open)

Description¶

The visible copies look like ordinary townspeople, but they are manufactured "vehicles" rather than possessed humans. In the autopsy in Walkers 08, Donald McManley found that a captured host had no stomach, about eight feet of malformed intestine instead of the normal thirty-two, a slightly undersized liver with signs of fatty liver disease, and green fluid in the head wound. Its own brain was a shrunken lump, and its body ran a couple of degrees warm and had bad teeth. Andre (as McManley) described the body as "a 200-pound baby" (Walkers 08).

The pilot itself is a non-human, brain-like organ with swirls of iridescent purple and green, and long tendrils covered in small suckers. McManley told the team: "This is not a person. This is a vehicle. Somebody made this. And whatever you killed inside of it was its pilot." (Walkers 08) See Pilot and host biology and Pilot organ in Tupperware.

Seen from outside, the copies have fine grey filaments that spool out of the mouth, flat black eyes in at least one early sighting, and a rainbow-gray slick for blood. When pressed, the captured copies dropped "the facade of acting like a person" entirely and would not talk (Walkers 08). In the final session the copies were naked, fearless and tactically poor (Walkers 09).

Abilities¶

Replacement. A copy opens its mouth impossibly wide and extends tendrils to "kiss" a victim; sweet-smelling vomit and tendrils into the mouth complete the swap (Walkers 07). The faction clones people from tissue samples, such as the cut from the mayor's ring and the bite taken from Huell. See Replication.
Memory probing. Tendrils entering Huell Kendrick's mouth pulled up childhood memories, including the smell of his childhood bedroom and his father eating bacon (Walkers 09).
Sabotage and coordination. The Roosevelt police were massacred, each officer missing a small body part, every drivable car was stolen and the rest disabled, and a blockade closed the only road out (Walkers 08).
Animal allies. Upright horses and a pack of unnaturally clean coyotes acted for the faction in and around the gym (Walkers 07). The episodes never say whether the animals are themselves skinwalkers. See Upright horses and Upright coyotes.

Weaknesses¶

Diet. Pilots feed on the host's blood and can digest only simple sugars and starches, which fits the sugar clues (Walkers 08). In Walkers 09 the team tested whether a suspect could eat solid food.
Flawed copies. Hurried copies are made wrong: the replica Andrew had leukemia and a deterioration track, and sickly duplicates refused to open their mouths (Walkers 07, Walkers 09).
Head wounds. A pilot killed by a head wound dies inside the host, though a living pilot can flee a dying body into a drop ceiling. A flashlight shone through an eye shows light at the back of an empty mouth (Walkers 08).
Pepper spray. Andrew's pepper spray erased the head of Andrew's double for a moment and sent it into a seizure (Walkers 07).

History¶

Early signs (Walkers 03 to 06)¶

The cold open of Walkers 03 showed rows of plastic-wrapped human-shaped figures, one of which moved. The cold open of Walkers 04 showed a pale man spooling grey tendrils onto a plate of Jell-O while a shiny-wrapped figure sat in the next chair. In Walkers 06 the same man, addressed as Doug, pushed tendrils into a woman's mouth. A bite from a "homeless" man in Ballard (see The "homeless" man) later gave the faction Huell's tissue.

The gym and the replacement (Walkers 07)¶

In the Ballard High School gym, a double of Andrew Howard greeted the real Andrew while horses and armed townspeople looked on. After the double collapsed in a seizure, it crawled over the pinned Andrew and pushed its tendrils into his mouth. The faction was said to hold about sixty percent of Ballard (Walkers 07). See Andrew Howard (duplicate).

Roosevelt (Walkers 08)¶

The team found the police station massacred, killed one of three skinwalker "cleanup" men in gray maintenance uniforms and captured two, whose pilots then fled into the ceiling. They met a blockade of twenty to twenty-five heavily armed copies, most dressed as police, at the bridge (Walkers 08). See Utah cleanup crew.

The evacuation (Walkers 09)¶

The copies piled hundreds of cars and supplies in the community center and carried tanks of blood with writhing creatures down a shaft to a portal machine built into a dead grub-angel. The team wrecked the machine, stranding fifty to sixty copies, and the brain-creature of Andrew's double wriggled out of its mouth and scuttled away (Walkers 09). See The portal, Skinwalker Huell and Dead grub-angel power core.

Later mentions¶

Speaking to Boris Yeltsin, the Biz called the creatures skinwalkers and described them as good at mimicry but not strategic; they grow more convincing the longer they have been around. Yeltsin compared them to Koschei the Deathless (Radford Horrors 01). Dante remarks in the same episode that "the last kind of body snatcher we did could only do sugar".

What remains unknown¶

Who builds the host bodies, and where the pilots came from; the table jokes about aliens (Walkers 08).
What lies beyond the portal, and what happened to those who went through (Walkers 09).

Trivia¶

The cold opens never name the tendril-mouthed figures; they connect to the main plot through the matching grey tendrils later seen on Andrew's double in the gym.
The name "skinwalker" is used by the players only sparingly in the arc: the first mentions in Walkers 06 refer to the Skinwalker Ranch legend, and the term is applied to the creatures themselves in Walkers 09. In Walkers 08 the players mostly say "body snatchers", while McManley calls them vehicles and pilots.