"So when you think of sex, think of me... the guy with the snake on his face!"
--Sammy the Snake, an old John Candy character from SCTV

The Rattlesnake Ranch is a house of prostitution owned by the KingSnake, outside the dusty little town of Royalty, Texas. It's built around an old drive-in movie theater, with a ranch house, and a circle of trailer homes where the actual hanky panky goes on. Because of the Kingsnake's inaccurate belief that snakes are sexy, the rattlesnake motif is everywhere--snake skins, snake skulls, black velvet paintings of snakes.

LinhMei was sent here from Memphis. ThankfulJones and BobbyDufour came to rescue her, and to avenge BillRuby's death, in Session17. At least that was the plan.

Many of the girls working here turned out to be Tlahuelpuchi, which is to say, flying vampiric heads.

It wasn't established why or how the girls got to be tlahuelpuchi. Thankful blamed the Kingsnake for turning Linh Mei into a creature of the night, which is understandable, but I myself like the idea of the Snake having been oblivious to the fact that all the girls working for him were undead. The similarity between the Mexican tlahuelpuchi and the South East Asian penangglan (of Fiend Folio fame) raises the possibility that Linh Mei was already a vampire, and converted the other girls after arriving in Texas, instead of the other way around. But I'm happy to leave that an open question.

Two visual images from this session came to me after the game; I wish I'd thought to emphasize them while playing. One: all the girls had big bouffant Texas hair. For me, that just makes the image of the flying heads even better. Two: You remember Thankful, staggering from his shotgun wound, walking Linh Mei's tiny headless body down the hall. What I forgot was that she was wearing roller skates. So her body would sort of roll along, the wheels squeaking on the carpet, as Thankful limped along. Hee. Details like that amuse me to no end. [Rob]