Repeater Zombie
The card dealer sits at a table that has not seen a game in years. His hands move with practiced rhythm, drawing from an empty shoe, placing cards that do not exist onto felt that has rotted to bare wood. His smile is fixed. His eyes are dead. He will deal until something interrupts the pattern, and if that something is you stepping close enough to reach, the dealing stops and the feeding starts.
Repeater Zombies are one of the most common undead threats within Vegas City itself, and they are a uniquely cruel product of the city's history. Most of them were slaves: card dealers, industry workers, prostitutes, entertainers. People who performed the same repetitive tasks every day of their living servitude. In death, they continue. The motions persist with eerie fidelity, a mockery of the routines that defined their captive lives. They cannot adjust to changes in their environment. They do not adapt. They simply repeat, endlessly, whatever their bodies remember doing.
The danger is deception. A Repeater Zombie performing its routine can pass for living at a distance, or in dim light, or when a traveler is tired enough that hope overrides caution. The prostitute in the doorway, the worker hauling at an empty station, the dealer smiling over nothing; they look like people until you get close. Close enough to reach. The transition from performance to predation is instantaneous. One moment the routine continues. The next, something hungry is on you. In a city built on the labor of the enslaved, the dead still work. They just serve a different appetite now.
Repeater Zombies are one of the most common undead threats within Vegas City itself, and they are a uniquely cruel product of the city's history. Most of them were slaves: card dealers, industry workers, prostitutes, entertainers. People who performed the same repetitive tasks every day of their living servitude. In death, they continue. The motions persist with eerie fidelity, a mockery of the routines that defined their captive lives. They cannot adjust to changes in their environment. They do not adapt. They simply repeat, endlessly, whatever their bodies remember doing.
The danger is deception. A Repeater Zombie performing its routine can pass for living at a distance, or in dim light, or when a traveler is tired enough that hope overrides caution. The prostitute in the doorway, the worker hauling at an empty station, the dealer smiling over nothing; they look like people until you get close. Close enough to reach. The transition from performance to predation is instantaneous. One moment the routine continues. The next, something hungry is on you. In a city built on the labor of the enslaved, the dead still work. They just serve a different appetite now.
Basic Information
Ecology and Habitats
Repeater Zombies are an urban phenomenon concentrated within Vegas City, a direct byproduct of the city's reliance on slave labor. Their behavioral repetition maps to the tasks performed in life, which means their distribution tracks the city's former infrastructure: casino floors, industrial districts, entertainment venues, and the service corridors connecting them.
They represent a navigational hazard more than a tactical one. Individually no more dangerous than a standard walker, Repeater Zombies are a threat because they blend into the ruined cityscape in ways that other undead do not. A shambler in the street is obviously dead. A figure standing at a counter, hands moving in a familiar pattern, requires a second look that might come too late. Survivors operating in Vegas City learn to approach every occupied room with the assumption that its inhabitants died performing whatever they appear to be doing.
They represent a navigational hazard more than a tactical one. Individually no more dangerous than a standard walker, Repeater Zombies are a threat because they blend into the ruined cityscape in ways that other undead do not. A shambler in the street is obviously dead. A figure standing at a counter, hands moving in a familiar pattern, requires a second look that might come too late. Survivors operating in Vegas City learn to approach every occupied room with the assumption that its inhabitants died performing whatever they appear to be doing.
