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somehow-progressing · 3 years

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WTNV 182 / 132 Connection

So this isn't the first time Cecil's mother and trees have been connected.

In 132, exactly fifty episodes previously, her bedtime story was about a boy who turned into a tree.

I reviewed this episode to look for connections and..

Oh, boy.

So, first off, the boy's interest in science obviously reminded me of Carlos, right? But then the similarities stop there.

And start leading towards Cecil.

(The rest under the cut)

We now know that there was a time where Cecil's father was in the picture, although it may have been when Cecil was very, very young. The family dynamic in 132's story matches his exactly: a mother, a father, a sister, the youngest son.

My first thought was, "Well, this can't be a parallel to Cecil's family. They're far too loving, which doesn't match up with what we know of Cecil's mother at all." But then I looked closer.

The boy's parents are verbally insistent that they love him, to the point where it comes off as "I'm your parent so I have to love you, it's my job to do everything for you." Putting pressure, and a sense of guilt, on the child while never actually living up to their word.

"He knew he would never need his father to give his life for him. He just wanted his father to show concern for his health. He knew he would never need his mother to give away all of her belongings for him. He just wanted his mother to show interest in his curiosity." - 132, Bedtime Story

His parent's love is very idealistic, while not being one that they actually show or.. Possibly, feel. They don't show concern for his health, or value his interests. He's their son, but he's not anything more.

"My mom seems really proud of me too! She hid from me for three days! Like, the longest ever! And she’s covered all the mirrors in my house. I’m not sure why, but I think it must be because of pride. Being proud does all sorts of things… to a… um… to a person." - 33, Cassettes

Cecil's own experiences parallel this. He interprets her love through ideals, to fill the void of it in actuality. When you're a child, you think that a parent is supposed to be loving. They're supposed to care. When they don't, or they leave you alone in your house, or they ignore you, or they tell you not to cry after you've been injured because "you don't even exist," your brain doesn't know how to process it. Like he did with his memory loss in 182, Cecil tries to rationalize it. Mother abandoned me because she's proud, because she cares about me- because she's my mother and she has to.

The boy's relationship with his sister parallels Cecil's as well.

"His sister would tell him, “I hate you, brother.” But their parents would instruct her to be nice and so she would say sarcastically, “I love you, brother. I would climb the tallest mountain for you." - 132, Bedtime Story

"He knew his sister really loved him. He knew he would never need his sister to climb a mountain for him. He just wanted his sister to believe him that mountains were real." - 132, Bedtime Story

As mentioned in Ghost Stories, Cecil has had a very difficult relationship with his sister.

"See, my mother disappeared when I was only 14. Abby had just started school, but she had to drop out to return home and raise me, and I thought that Mom would be back at any moment, like maybe she was away on business. Our out for a walk. Or just hiding.

But Mom did not come back, not for my entire childhood. And I was petulant and subversive, and Abby was reserved and controlling and she blamed me for having dropped out of school and I blamed her for just… not being Mom.

But in our adulthood, my mother did return home, sick and sorry to two children who barely spoke to each other in the morning." - Ghost Stories

Which would match up with the sister's animosity with him.

The difference here is that, out of the entire family, the boy knows that his sister actually loves him. And in Cecil's life, his sister is the only one he has made amends with. No matter how she treated him in the past, they are part of the same family once again. (As of 182, at least.)

Here, a direct parallel to Cecil is established. This boy's life mirrors his own.

Now, here's where it gets interesting.

Just as Cecil enters the tree, the boy is transformed into one

"He spent a lot of time in those next several months watching his family, their grief at his loss. His parents’ happiness at his sister’s education." - 132, Bedtime Story

There has been a lot of theorizing that Cecil's mother may have been covering the mirrors and leaving flowers because she was mourning Cecil, and not just his father.

"What was it your mother said before she left home when you were a teenager? Did she tell you she was an oracle?" - 171, Go to The Mirror?

It's entirely possible that Cecil's mother knew what would happen after she left, or had enough of an idea to subconsciously work it into a bedtime story.

It's possible that this is a glimpse of a timeline where Cecil really didn't survive entering the tree. His parents mourn, and his sister is allowed to pursue the education she wanted. (Which, in all honesty, a pretty cruel burden to place on Cecil's shoulders. It's not his fault that their mother disappeared, leaving Abby to take care of him.)

Next, we watch the boy slowly lose his humanity as his awareness widens outside of himself.

"Time slowed for him, and his knowledge grew so vast and so expansive, human triumphs and pains became only a small sliver of his interest. There were much larger systems to comprehend than humanity." - 132, Bedtime Story

Cecil is canonically one of the people in Night Vale that time slowed down for. Like Earl, he has been stuck at a certain age for a long, long time.

"He had forgotten what he used to be." - 132, Bedtime Story

Cecil has canonically lost large parts of his past. He no longer remembers them.

"Later that spring, the woman and the man and the child brought a picnic and some games, and the tree was happy, but could not comprehend why. Nor did the tree intend to. The tree was simply happy, and this was a feeling that existed. Years later, the family wore black again and cried. And the tree felt sad, but it did not connect this feeling to any kind of narrative. It was simply sad, and this was a feeling that existed." - 132, Bedtime Story

The boy tree is becoming incredibly distanced from his family. (A woman, man, and child, just like Abby, Steve, and Janice.)

"You know, Cecil and I first met at one of these things. Seems like we should have met earlier than that. I had dated his sister for a while. But Cecil’s busy, he- he serves his community. He really gives himself to his community. Who do you live for, you know? Who do you give yourself to? Those are questions we should all be asking ourselves." - Steve in 100, Toast

Steve confirmed that Cecil was distant from his family and the people around him before Carlos came along, burying himself in his job.

And then an angel cuts down the tree.

"Over a few days, the tree and the fruits and the separated stump died. But the tree retained everything. As its body was planted into boards, as its twigs were ground into mulch, the tree felt the knowledge of each seed it had planted across the valley, each creature it had nourished with its fruits, and each piece of lumber built into a home for generations of humans to come.

The tree felt its branches burned in a fireplace, and it rose up as smoke and dissipated into carbon across the sky, coming down in trillions of molecules to build more soil, more trees, more creatures. The boy could truly learn everything now, cell by cell." - 132, Bedtime Story

Cecil has given himself to his community. This boy, this tree, has been divided and used up as a resource, to serve the community in which he lived. Not to mention the fact that Cassettes Cecil died before becoming the Voice, like this boy/tree was cut down before he could serve/understand his community.

"Cecil, sweet Cecil. Whose life lies directly on the fault lines of this broken reality." - Huntokar in 109, Huntokar

Patching together:

- this quote from Huntokar that gives off the impression of Cecil as the glue keeping the fractures together, and

- the way that Leonard Burton, a deceased Voice, is brought back the moment that Cecil left town, filling the vacant spot, and

- the way that Night Vale fell apart when its citizens rejected their reality, and began to be patched back together along with the narration of their Voice

It all leads to:

The Voice of Night Vale is a significant, needed position.

It’s possible that he holds the fractured town together, in a way, his words reminding the citizens to keep their will and hold onto what is in front of them. (In the case that the cold light is the Smiling God, this gives it a motive. If it takes out Cecil, the town is left vulnerable for it to devour.)

Just like the tree, Cecil is used by his town.

His mother knew that he would become the Voice one day- it was prophesized. That’s the reason he was given the tape recorder, that’s the reason she told this story.

We still don’t know what was in the book in the table.

Then, this very interesting quote from 182:

“I’ve been in this job for a long time. Probably longer than I’ve been alive. I mean: you’ve been alive.”

He says the truth for a moment, then backs up because that doesn’t make sense to him. Coupled the way his mother’s story parallels Cecil’s, with boy becoming the tree, becoming a resource that serves the town and seeing all of it (similar to how Cecil knows what’s happening in the town and what its citizens are thinking without leaving his studio. See: every traffic report and episodes likes A Story About Them.) and Cecil mentioning the odd nature of his job in 182..

I think we’re about to learn exactly what it means to be the Voice.

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not-from-the-absence-of-violence · 3 years

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Inundated with the fated thought of you

A glimpse into one of the first dates between Carlos and Cecil.

I wrote this as a christmas gift for @heyhelloitsk !! and as always thank you to Rowan @drowninginstarlights for beta reading!

Carlos was different. He’d always known it, and over the course of his life, he’d struggled with it on a variety of levels. Having a diagnosis and a good therapist helped, of course, but it didn’t mitigate the feelings that the world just wasn’t built for him.

Night Vale was, in many ways, a breath of fresh air. It was scientifically speaking so incredibly interesting, no one seemed to particularly mind him experimenting on it, and it was so delightfully different that Carlos didn’t even stand out.

And then there was Cecil, of course, sweet Cecil, who he got to hear on the radio every day and was now, to his astonishment, dating. Dating wasn’t exactly new to Carlos, but dating Cecil was like everything in Night Vale: weird and exciting.

Sometimes Cecil was aware of that, he’d get that odd, distant look he sometimes gets (Carlos is currently investigating the theory that Cecil might be involuntarily psychic) and ask if he missed the world he had come from. Carlos had learned that what Cecil actually meant to say was “Would you not rather go back?”.

Carlos had given it much thought, and he’d found that he didn’t miss his old world. He had given that much thought as well, and he’d come to the conclusion that the reason he didn’t want to leave Night Vale was because there was still so much of it left to study and categorize.

Now, however, as he sat on Cecil’s couch, watching while Cecil prepared something that by all laws of science shouldn’t be edible but smelled good, Cecil occasionally turning around, revealing his government mandated “All hail the glow cloud” apron and just smiling at Carlos or telling joke that was semi-incomprehensible, Carlos was beginning to review his previous conclusion.

Feelings were complicated things, and they very stubbornly refused to be understood, but for what was certainly the first time in a very long time he felt like he didn’t need to understand. It was nice enough to experience it.

After Cecil had shoved what he graciously called a casserole into the oven, he came to sit next to Carlos on the couch. “What were you doing while I was cooking?” he asked.

“This is very important scientific research,” Carlos said, but he felt his ears burn as he looked down onto his paper where the important numbers and equations were surrounded by bubble hearts and other little doodles.

Cecil looked at his notes and nodded seriously. “Looks very important, yes.”

Before Night Vale, Carlos had learned that silences should be awkward, but by now, he knows that Cecil didn’t mind. He also didn’t mind excitedly carrying an entire conversation when Carlos didn’t feel like talking. Most importantly, however, he didn’t mind when Carlos rambled. Usually people got tired, but Cecil would always listen to him with rapt attention, smiling like Carlos was the world's biggest genius for explaining different types of salt rock.

So they sat in comfortable silence, the ominous hum of Cecil's oven as background noise, smiling at each other.

“How was work today?” Carlos eventually asked, even though it wasn’t particularly necessary considering he’d heard it on the radio.

Cecil’s eyes lit up anyway, and with his excitement the lightbulbs brightened. He talked excitedly, recounting with detail his work day, and with his hand movements and laughs the environment moved with him, the colours blinking, the air rushing. Carlos loved it. He’d asked Cecil about it, of course, but he seemed to be either unaware of his powers or considered them as natural as breathing, and he’d met every one of Carlos’ questions with a confused but curious glance.

Cecil was in the middle of his animated explanation of the new intern's way of petting Khoshekh without being consumed by the yawning void when he briefly caught Carlos’ eye. “Is it alright if I hold your hand?” he asked.

It caught Carlos a little off guard. Cecil’s gaze was almost timid, fixed upon Carlos, accompanied by a sudden rush of a soft breeze and the smell of petrichor. It was almost overwhelming.

Carlos and physical touch had a complicated relationship. Generally speaking, he wasn't very fond of it, sometimes he craved it dearly, but in a very specific way, sometimes it hurt. Most people didn’t give him the space he needed for experimentation, but he knew that Cecil would. So tentatively he nodded, reaching out to take Cecil’s hand. Cecil immediately laced their fingers together. That didn’t feel bad, just a little cramped, and he felt a rush of excited emotion from Cecil. It seemed the slight telepathy apparently also worked based on touch. Carlos shifted his hands a little to be more comfortable, Cecil shifted a bit closer.

The whole thing was very slow, but then Carlos gently laid his head on Cecil’s shoulder, who was almost vibrating with excitement. The air around them seemed to shimmer, like a distant heat haze, with Cecil’s feelings. It was a dazzling display, and Carlos had never felt more cared for.

Cecil moved a hand ever so gently towards Carlos’ hair. He made a gesture. May I?

Carlos nodded and Cecil gently sunk his hand into Carlos’ hair. It was nice actually, Cecil stroked his hair in a rhythmic motion, careful not to tangle it or yank at it. Carlos let out a quiet, happy sound. He turned to look at Cecil who was looking back at him wide eyed and openly adoring. Pinpricks of light burst around them, looking almost like fireflies. Carlos felt like he was in a movie, surrounded by light, the rest of the world disappearing.

His heart thundered in his chest, and he could feel the flush creep its way along his neck and ears.

“It’s so soft!” Cecil marveled, flapping his hands with excitement.

Carlos understood him then. Night Vale was so different that perhaps no one would ever find the words to express the shared feeling of unity they had right now. But that was alright because Cecil made the lamps flicker and bounce; Carlos called him “neat” and attempted to explain gravity to him.

They both knew what it meant: I like you, I am happy, I am safe, I am home.

They sat there together, experimenting with small touches for a while. Cecil was clearly happy to indulge him, and very quick to stop at the first sign of discomfort. Eventually Carlos tired of it, mentally taking notes on both his and Cecil’s responses to write down later. The oven was still humming and Carlos sighed a little. The humming had started to grate on him now.

Like clockwork, Cecil clicked his fingers, and out of nowhere a soft background tune started playing, unobtrusive but perfect.

“Better?” he said kindly.

That was the first moment Carlos realised he was falling in love with him. This utterly impossible man, who recounted unknowable horrors like it was boring chit chat, who had sat there looking at the lights above the Arby’s with him, who was kind and weird and fit right in with Carlos.

“Yes, Cecil,” is the only thing he managed to say. “Thank you.”

Cecil smiled and stood up. “The casserole must be done by now!” he said, heading over to the oven and pulling the casserole in question out of the hot oven without mittens on.

They ate together, laughing and enjoying each other’s company. They watched a documentary that was intermittently broken up by government propaganda. Cecil asked Carlos to stay the night and for the first time he said yes.

Carlos mulled the day over while pretending to sleep, as you did in Night Vale. He realised he didn’t just want to stay for science anymore. He wanted to stay because this world was built for him, because Cecil was here, because of the town and its people, no matter the dangers.He wanted to stay because it was home, the only one he’d ever had.

He wanted to stay because he loved it.

He felt many things towards this discovery that he couldn’t put into words, so he just gently laid his hand on Cecil’s unmoving hand and smiled as the streetlight outside the window turned on.

#wtnv #welcome to night vale #cecil palmer #carlos the scientist #cecilos #fic #my writing

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cecilspeaks · 4 years

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176 - The Autumn Specter

Lips are the toes of the face. Welcome to Night Vale.

[spooky theme song]

It’s Halloween again, Night Vale, my favorite day of the year. As a kid, my mother used to dress my sister Abby and I in homemade costumes and take us door to door, vaguely threatening our neighbors until they gave us candy. When I was a teenager, I got a little old for trick-or-treating, so I started going to haunted houses with my friends. A lot of those haunted houses were kind of predictable with all their chain saw killers and Victorian ghost children singing nursery rhymes, who would follow you home and sing by your bed for months afterwards, but they always got to me. I loved the emotional rush of being scared. I still do. Of course, I don’t go out much to haunted houses, but I still love good old fashioned scary stories. I thought today would be a great day to share some of my favorites with you. I had my new intern, James, put together a few spooky tales that are perfect for putting you into Halloween mood.

But first, let’s have a look at the Community Calendar. This Saturday night at the New Old Night Vale Opera House, is the annual costume gala. This event is the Opera House’s largest fundraiser and one of the most prestigious costume contests in the region. A panel of judges will be on hand to determine the best costume at the ball. Last year’s winners were Joel Eisenberg and his partner Danny Jimenez, who dressed in a tandem outfit of a stegosaurus. I was there, listeners, and it was impressive! The creature was so realistic-looking. The craftsmanship of the costume was top notch, but listen, I have to confess I’m always more into high concept creativity rather than realistic details when it comes to costumes. Like I remember the 2015 gala, when Amal Shamun came dressed up as the concept of ennui. She made herself 12 feet tall, dressed in a taupe long coat, and created a constant drizzling rain inside the ball room. Anyone who looked at her got super sad and wanted a hug. But Joel and Danny’s stegosaurus was fine.

Sunday afternoon is the fall craft sale in Old Town Night Vale. An inscrutable maze of stalls showcasing the finest products from our town’s artisans. There will be cultural events for children, like finger painting classes, puppet shows, and a visit from the Autumn Specter. The Autumn Specter returns. It comes to collect its crops, with its great and sharp sickle. [creepily] It will harvest every ripe soul in Night Vale, the Autumn Specter is hungryyyy! It is Octoberr and it is timme to feeeeeee-duh.

Hey James, this Community Calendar doesn’t seem right, it’s just a bunch of stuff about the Autumn Specter. Also this font size, what-what is this 32 point? That’s just much too large. And it’s printed in red ink and that is a waste of our color toner, James. Eww, eww! This red ink is still really damp. OK, plus there’s nothing about start and end times of the craft fair, or anything about the food trucks, like if the Autumn Specter is hungry, surely it wants some falafel or Korean barbeque or tacos. James, could you just redo this story? James? James? [clears throat] Well, listeners, I don’t know where James went. Um, I can hear him breathing, but I don’t see him anywhere. Yeah, it’s fine, let’s just get onto our first spooky story.

[static, old-fashioned music] One quiet moonless night, not long ago and not so far away, a teenage girl sat in a house that was not her own. It was the home of Tony and Sheila McDowell. The girl was their babysitter, and she had just put the two young McDowell children down to sleep. The girl watched TV alone in the dark living room, only the bluish flicker of a scary movie illuminating her face. The phone rang abrupt and loud, startling her. She raised the receiver to her ear. “Hello?” she said with a slight quiver. “Have you checked on the children?” came a raspy voice. The babysitter ran quickly upstairs, opening the door of the kids’ bedroom. She flicked on the light, and there they were, fast asleep. She went back to her movie, but the phone rang again. “Haave youuu checked on the childrennn?” came the same voice, only more sinister. The babysitter again hurried upstairs, opened the door, turned on the light, and saw the children still asleep. The caller called again and again and again. “Have you checked on the children?” The babysitter, so scared, barely able to move, hung up the phone before the voice could finish its repeated query. When the phone rang once again, she answered and shouted: “Stop calling me!” But this time, it was a different voice. The person on this occasion said: “Ma’am, this is the police. We’ve traced the call. The call is coming from inside the house. Get out, get out!” The babysitter panicked and started to run, but then she remembered: she never called the police! How would they know to even trace the call? So she crept fearfully upstairs to the children’s room, and the phone was ringing again, the clamoring bell igniting her fright. And she cracked open the door and she saw- She saw the young McDowell boy and his little brother hunched over a phone and giggling! They were pranking her, and she felt relieved but embarrassed. And she told them to stop fooling around and go to sleep. And they all shared a good laugh.

Let’s have a look now at traffic. [papers rustling] Um.. OK, well I don’t seem to have a traffic report from intern James. Also James isn’t here right now, because I sent him out to go pick up lunch a few m- Oh, hey James, James, James, James – wait, why are you standing in the control booth? You were supposed to go get lunch and also I’ve asked you a couple of times not to wear that burlap bag over your head. I mean yes it looks great, with the Jack o’ Lantern face drawn onto it, I mean the mouth is a bit lopsided and the eyes are a tad uneven, you know kinda flat and emotionless, but all in all it’s a cool look, but it’s decidedly not allowed in Station Management’s dress code. Oh, you’re holing a knife, too! So did you get- did you already get that lunch then? Well if that- if that’s the case, you don’t need to cut my sandwich in half, I’ll-I’ll take it whole. And also I need that traffic report, thanks. James? What are you waiting for, the Autumn Specter to do it for you? [chuckles] Hop to it! James?

[clears throat] Well, while James is working on that, let’s get back to my favorite spooky Halloween stories. This one isn’t a story so much as a fun Halloween game. The legend of Bloody Mary.

According to the lore, if you turn off all the lights, and stare into a mirror, repeating “Bloody Mary” three times in a row, she will appear and tear your face off! I’ve never tried this because I don’t own any mirrors, but my husband Carlos conducted this very experiment in his science lab. He said he darkened the room and repeated the name and nothing happened for a long time. But then a figure of a woman appeared, silvery gray and shimmering, and she approached Carlos slowly, her hollow white eyes never blinking. She brought her face only inches from Carlos and said: “Are you for real?” And Carlos said yes, he was indeed – real. And Bloody Mary said: “OK because this time of year, I just get a bunch of giggling, screaming teenagers, and I’m really tired of ripping off their faces for no pay whatsoever!” And Carlos gave her some resources for starting a union and she thanked him and she offered to tear his face off in exchange for the consulting, but Carlos said no, he liked his face, and wisher her luck. Night Vale, pay your malevolent spirits! They’re overworked especially around Halloween. And a 20 per cent gratuity for poltergeists, phantasms, revenants, and ghosts is standard.

And now for t- what the, oh you- [papers rustling] Wait, OK. You know, I thought intern James had handed the traffic report to me, but this is just a piece of parchment with a 9-pointed star seemingly drawn by a finger dripped in blood. And then there are a series of ancient runes scrawled around the outer edges. Now I took runic in college. I mean, most of my friends took Spanish as their language, but I thought living here in the American Southwest, it would be more useful to study ancient Scandinavian and Germanic alphabets. And from what I can make out, these are a message about the return of the Autumn Specter. Ugh, alright. OK. I love that intern James loooves Halloween and whatever this the Autumn Specter is. In fact, James is still in the break room right now construction a sacred totem out of ash tree branches and twine. He’s been muttering to himself all day in a language that I don’t recognize, and the only words I can understand are “Autumn Specter”. But I still have neither my traffic report nor my lunch! Wait, do you think James is… Naah, put it out or you mind, Cecil.

Let’s tell another spooky Halloween story. There once was a beautiful young woman who wore a green ribbon around her neck. She won the affection of a handsome young man. They fell in love and one day the boy asked the girl why she always wore a green ribbon around her neck. She would not tell him. One day the man and the woman were to become husband and wife. In her white bridal dress, the woman still wore her green ribbon. The man asked her on their wedding night if he could untie the green ribbon, but even on the most intimate of evenings, she said no, and he respected her answer. But he longed to know what she was hiding behind the ribbon. Through the years, the man asked the wife again about the ribbon, but she never removed it, nor answered his questions about it. She only warned him that he would not like what he saw if she were to remove it. He asked less and less, but his curiosity grew and grew. And they became old, very old, and they knew their time left was short. The man asked one more time: “My dearest wife, love of my life, tell me that I may remove the green ribbon from around your neck.” And the old woman said: “My adoring groom, here in our room after all these many years, yes you may. But I caution you, as I have many times before, that you shall not like what your eyes behold.” The man hesitated, but finally reached his weakened, wrinkled fingers to the green bow along her nape. And he tentatively pulled the ribbon, and suddenly it unfurled, falling from her neck, and the man gasped. Upon her neck was a series of ornate letters spelling out “GOTH LIFE”. The woman said: “I got this tattoo in high school but kind of outgrew it and it’s super embarrassing.” And the man replied: “It is for sure weird, but also pretty cool. I like it.” And she never wore the green ribbon again.

You know, listeners, I’d love to bring you that traffic report, but right now, um, I’m facing something much more urgent and more dire. My studio door has opened on its own, and as I turned around, I could see down the long faintly lit corridor of our offices. And at the end of the hallway stands a figure, and he wears a Jack o’ Lantern mask, his head crooked to one side like a dog asking a question or like a hanged man, or both. And it is intern James, and he holds a long knife and he walks, he walks slowly toward me. And he is speaking at first in a mutter, but now louder, a strange shout in an obscure tongue like a magician casting a wicked spell, and he is moving much faster toward me, like a limping run, and his blade is raised high, and James is not an intern, Night Vale, bu the Autumn Specter itself come to reap my soul!

But before he does that, Let me take you to the weather.

[“Welterweight” by Nels Andrews. https://nelsandrews.bandcamp.com/]

So. During the weather, I went to human resources and requested a file on intern James. Oh I’m fine, by the way, and James is not the Autumn Specter, but I’ll get to that. So I found a copy of James’ résumé and cover letter for the position of radio station intern. His application was originally submitted in 1845. “That’s almost two centuries ago!” I exclaimed, but according to HR, they’re pretty backlogged on the intern apps. “What are you gonna do, we get to them when we get to them,” they said from the bottom of their abandoned well. Paperclipped to James’ application was a wrinkled and yellowed news clipping from the Night Vale °Daily Journal, and the article says that James died on Halloween night in 1849 when he was hit by a train. I then went to the hall of public records and found that our radio station was built in 1950, atop the very train tracks where James met hi send. James’ soul has been wandering the halls and offices of our radio station ever since. For all James ever wanted was to be a radio intern. To serve the listening community, to lift high the voice of journalistic truth. And it was his death that led to the shutdown of those train tracks and the eventual construction of a new station home, and the building we still use now. So I was wrong about James. He was an intern, after all, and not a malevolent Halloween spirit.

But I was right that the Autumn Specter had come for me. For when I turned to see James running down the hill, I did not notice the Autumn Specter behind me, with its bony hands and scarecrow mouth, and I did not notice its soul reaping sickle, which it had raised high above its oversized head and stick thin body. And James had given his life for the building of our radio station, and in death, gave his soul for the very same cause. And James threw himself upon the Autumn Specter, and he tried to stab the Specter’s neck and chest, but it-it- it did nothing. And the Spectre pushed James aside and then turned its black coal eyes upon me. And it raised its curved blade once again and swung! I tried to duck, but was too slow. And just as the sickle’s edge reached my face, James dove in front of it and vanished in a burst of white flame, as he was struck. And the room was empty and the Autumn Specter was gone too.

To the family and friends of intern James, he was… an OK intern. Not always on top of his writing deadlines, but he literally sacrificed his soul for our radio station. I can’t bring you a traffic report today, but I will live to bring you one tomorrow. If we find a new intern. And HR tells me that we have hundreds of candidates, although most of them are not yet aware that they are candidates.

Stay tuned next for our new cooking competition show, “Flay Bobby Flay”.

And as always, Good night, Night Vale, Good night.

Today’s proverb: The road to hell is paved with cobblestone. It’s super bumpy, not at all comfortable, and really bad for your car’s suspension.

#wtnv #Welcome to Night Vale #welcome to night vale transcirpts #episode 176 #the autumn specter #sorry i misspeled it as spectre

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hypnoshatesme · 4 years

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Do you like Science? Because I’ve got my ion you

Cecil couldn’t stop fidgeting. He had gone through his entire wardrobe trying to decide on the perfect outfit for this occasion and now he was reconsidering if green had been a good idea after all as he fixed the slightest wrinkles in the sleeve of his tunic, only to wrinkle the other sleeve in the process. Cecil was nervous. This wasn’t sitting on Carlos’ car and watching the lights above Arby's in silence. This was a date. And it had been a long time since Cecil had been on a date. And he had never been on a date with somebody as perfect as Carlos.

He was overthinking again. Cecil tried to remind himself to breathe. It would be fine. It would be like that night, but with talking and drinking and eating. It would be just as nice. It would be better, even, lacking the shadow of (presumed) death that had hung over them the night on the hood of Carlos’ car. Cecil just needed to keep calm and conversation would come naturally. He could do it. Talking is what he did, after all.

“Cecil!”, Carlos' caramel voice called out as he speedwalked up to Gino's, in front of which Cecil was waiting.

The voice alone shattered Cecil’s feeble calm, his heart pounding nearly painfully as he looked up to meet the scientist. He hadn't seen Carlos since the night at the Arby's, where he had looked tired, shaken, dirty and bloody, but still like the most beautiful thing on earth. Now, in his pristine white lab coat, his glossy locks neatly combed with only a few stray strands falling into his forehead, stuck to his beautiful skin that looked like it'd be so very smooth to the touch. He was breathtaking. The very definition of perfection. Cecil’s mouth went dry.

"I’m so sorry I made you wait, the samples at the lab tried to escape and it took a moment to restrain them…", Carlos continued as he came to a stop in front of Cecil.

Cecil tried very, very hard not to gawk, to give any sort of answer, but Carlos flashed him an apologetic grin and Cecil nearly choked on his words. He tried again after an awkward cough, "O-Oh, don't worry, Carlos. I haven't been waiting too long.", he managed a tad quicker than normal.

Carlos grinned and nodded towards the door, "Let's not wait any longer, then." They both walked into the restaurant, tentatively locking arms on their way.

There was silence between them after they ordered and Cecil was trying to remember how to form words. He was known for babbling when nervous, a waterfall of words, pointless anecdotes and the like leaving his mouth to fill in any uncomfortable - and sometimes comfortable - silence. That wasn't happening today. He kept getting distracted by Carlos' fingers running through his gorgeous locks, by his hands rearranging the cutlery in front of him, eyes scanning the room occasionally. Had those always been so beautifully chocolate brown? When they fell on Cecil, Carlos’ perfect lips pulled up into a shy smile and Cecil forgot how to speak all over again, blushing deeply and scrambling to hide his embarrassment behind his drink, that thankfully had arrived quickly.

“I’ve been reading a book on Helium and struggling with putting it down.”, Carlos finally said, and Cecil was too busy trying to keep it together to notice the slight waver in the scientist's voice. He was too busy to even ask if said book was approved by City Council.

But he did notice the tone. It was the kind of tone used for jokes, one followed by an expectant silence and Cecil laughed before even registering the fact that he hadn't understood what exactly the joke was. He was too eager to finally know what to do and his body went on autopilot and then he was panicking again because he couldn't tell how much laughter was the correct amount to whatever Carlos had said. When he finally got himself to look up at him, though, the sight took his breath away. Carlos was smiling, warm and...relieved? Cecil wondered, but only for a fracture of a second, before he noticed the way the scientist's eyes crinkled and forgot all about the relief. Carlos' eyes were shining, his whole face was, illuminated by that perfect smile showing his perfect teeth. Cecil thought he might faint if he didn't look away but he also wanted to remember this expression forever, burn it into his memory - literally, if necessary.

Carlos started to talk about his experiments, then, and when their food arrived a couple minutes later Cecil had been swept into the conversation, nervousness melting a little with every smile Carlos gave him. He took a more passive role, nodding and inquiring further about the science Carlos was excitedly talking about. Carlos seemed to light up with every question or interested comment Cecil made, occasionally making another pun or joke Cecil usually didn’t understand, but laughed anyways, making Carlos chuckle on more than one occasion. It was the most beautiful sound Cecil ever heard.

Back at home after the date Cecil was still grinning, felt light and, if possible, more in love than before. It had been the most perfect date and he already felt giddy about the next one. When Carlos asked him as they were walking to the parking lot, Cecil’s answer had come out as a squeek, delighted and surprised that Carlos would want to meet him again. The scientist seemed to have enjoyed it, but having the confirmation made Cecil’s heart flutter all over again. And then of course, the kiss. Cecil hadn't seen it coming, hadn't expected it, and he was proud he managed to not drive into anything on his way home, with the knowledge that Carlos, beautiful, perfect Carlos, had actually kissed him. The small voice at the back of his head telling him that he had basically lied to Carlos by laughing without understanding was barely audible. Not with the lingering memory of Carlos' lips on his.

They were sitting on Carlos’ couch after dinner. Cecil had intended to take Carlos out for their third date, but all restaurants had been struggling with their food turning into a gelatinous, blue goo. Cecil had been quite excited to try something new, but Carlos had not liked the idea and had invited Cecil over to dine at his place instead. The food had been delicious and Cecil had been thoroughly satisfied at the blush dusting Carlos’ cheeks as he kept complimenting his cooking. “It’s adequate at best, really, Cecil.”, he kept mumbling. Maybe it was adequate at best, Cecil wasn’t much of a cook himself, but that certainly didn’t stop him from making sure Carlos knew how much he had enjoyed it. The fact that Carlos looked adorable when flustered didn’t give much incentive to stop.

They had moved to the couch after cleaning up and Carlos found that the avalanche of compliments falling from Cecil's lips was quite effectively stopped with a kiss. Cecil looked dazed when they pulled apart again, and Carlos couldn't help but try to bring him back with a particularly bad joke. He planted a kiss underneath Cecil’s ear, whispering, "I wish I were adenine, so I could be paired up with U.".

Cecil did snap out of his haze, blinking for a moment in confusion. When he spoke there was no trace of laughter in his voice: “Carlos..”, he said instead, voice uncertain.

Carlos felt his pulse pick up in panic, “Ah, nevermind, that one was really bad.”, he said too quickly, leaning away from Cecil and chuckling nervously. He could feel his face heat up.

Cecil’s face fell seeing how his reaction had made the scientist uncomfortable, “No, Carlos, t-that’s not...I...I don’t understand your jokes.”, Cecil said quickly, voice lowering to a murmur by the end of the sentence.

Carlos looked at him, blinking, “Oh well, I...I guess that might be a bit difficult for somebody who isn’t as familiar with science, I-”

“No, no, no, Carlos, I...I never understood them.”, Cecil quickly added, face flushing deeply. He stumbled over his words as he continued, voice getting higher in his rising panic, “I-I just thought you sounded like- you were clearly waiting for some sort of reaction and your tone made me assume you probably had said something funny so I laughed and you looked so very happy so I just...continued doing so and I was afraid to tell you that I didn’t understand the jokes. I didn’t want you to think I’m dumb or something but I also didn’t want to make you mad when you eventually found out I’ve been lying to you and-”

“Cecil!”, Carlos tried again since his first call was drowned in Cecil’s stressed out rambling.

Cecil looked up, tentatively meeting Carlos’ eyes. Cecil’s eyes were wide, guilt and embarrassment discernable in every of his features. Carlos couldn’t keep in the laughter that had been bubbling in his chest as Cecil was rambling anymore, not with Cecil’s grave expression in this thoroughly ridiculous situation, and so he snorted out a laugh.

Cecil’s expression morphed into one of confusion and uncertainty, and Carlos tried to calm himself down. He took Cecil’s hands and squeezed them, stopping their slight shaking and catching his breath, as he looked at Cecil’s shocked face.

Carlos smiled reassuringly, “Cecil, I love you so very much.”

Cecil froze, before his face lit up, “I...I love you, too!”, his voice went soft at the edges, dreamy. However, doubt made its way back into his eyes quickly, “You...aren’t mad?”, he asked, voice unsteady.

Carlos chuckled, shaking his head. He considered telling Cecil that he could never be mad at him, but opted for something else instead, “Sweet Cecil, if anything I’m thankful.” Cecil cocked his head to the side, eyebrows raising in confusion and Carlos squeezed his hands again, if only to keep himself from pulling the other man into a kiss right then and there. He definitley couldn't be mad at the radio host, not when he was giving him an expression like this.

Carlos took a deep breath before trying to explain, “I was so nervous that night and I had carefully planned out all the things I could talk about but then when I actually was sitting across from you I couldn’t remember any of it and I was starting to sweat from nervousness and when I finally managed to get myself together enough to say something that stupid joke came out and I…”, Carlos chucked a little at the memory, “I was half expecting you to just get up and leave after that.”, Carlos had been terrified, panicking the moment he closed his mouth. It seemed silly now.

Carlos smiled at Cecil, now, “But you didn’t, you didn’t even roll your eyes, you just laughed and that just...put me at ease and suddenly there was no problem in just talking normally. In that moment, I was so very happy I made you laugh, it gave me the confidence to go on and try to enjoy the evening. And I did. Did you?”

Cecil, whose eyes had gone wide with awe, nodded enthusiastically. Carlos finally breached the gap and pressed his lips to Cecil’s. Cecil returned the kiss eagerly, hands coming up to play with Carlos’ hair, pulling the scientist closer. Carlos hummed contently into the kiss, cupping Cecil´s cheek.

When they had to pull apart for air, both were chuckling at the whole situation, at the idea that the other had been just as nervous that evening. Carlos leaned his head against Cecil’s shoulder, sighing happily. Cecil was still playing with the tips of his hair, his other hand coming to rest in his lab. Carlos took that hand, caressing the smooth skin with his thumb. The sigh from Cecil was one of utter bliss as he buried his nose in Carlos’ hair. Cecil felt light, his heart fluttering and happy and he still couldn’t quite wrap his head around this, the fact that he was holding his Carlos and that everything was okay and Carlos seemed content.

Cecil thought he might burst with love. He hoped he wouldn’t, it would make quite the mess of Carlos’ neat living room and he was sure that would not be appreciated. Also, it would be much harder to curl that wonderful hair around his fingers when his fingers were just a splash of blood and bone on the carpet. Cecil pressed his lips to Carlos’ head, before pulling away slightly so that he knew Carlos could hear him, “Will you explain the jokes to me? I want to try and understand them...”

“Oh, honey, if I did that you would realise just how bad they are. You would probably miss not understanding them…”, Carlos mumbled as an answer, shifting to look at Cecil's face.

“Mhm, but I want to know for future ones! I want to be able to react genuinely…”, Cecil smiled, pressing a kiss to Carlos' forehead.

Carlos laughed, that wonderful sound Cecil had been afraid he’d never hear again after telling him he'd been lying to him, “Cecil, you shouldn’t encourage my awful puns and jokes.”

Cecil looked into Carlos' beautiful, chocolate eyes, his own twinkling with mischief, “I think I just finished doing exactly that.”, he grinned, and Carlos couldn’t help but grin back.

Cecil leaned down, planting a kiss on Carlos’ beautiful nose. Carlos huffed out a little laugh before pulling Cecil into another kiss. Carlos felt light. This was perfection.

#welcome to night vale #wtnv #Cecilos #cecil palmer #carlos the scientist #fluff #awkwardness #cute #they're such dorks #painful puns #wtnv fanfic

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iwillsithereandtrytocontribute · 4 years

Text

1- The Scientist

Masterlist Last Next Ao3

Pairings: Logince (not yet established at this point

Warnings: slight gore, let me know if I need to add anything

A Welcome to Nightvale and Sanders Sides crossover fic suggested by Local Carlos Stanon!

Characters: Roman - Cecil Palmer

Remus - Kevin

Logan - Carlos the Scientist

Janus - Steve Carlsburg

Patton - Lauren Mallard

Virgil - Intern Maureen

Thomas - Dana Cardinal

Remy - Tamika Flynn

Emile- There is no Emile because everyone in Nightvale and Desert Bluffs need therapy and there’s no one to give it to them.

A friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep.

Welcome to Nightvale.

“Hello listeners,” Roman said smoothly. “I have a quick notice from the City Council before we get to the important news.” He leaned forward, closer to the mic that hung from the low ceiling in the radio station. “The City Council would like to announce that you should not know about the Dog Park. You should not think about the Dog Park. Again, dogs are not allowed in the Dog Park. People are not allowed in the Dog Park. There is a possibility of seeing Hooded Figures through the electrified fence that surrounds the Dog Park. Do not approach the Hooded Figures. Do not approach the Dog Park.” Roman’s voice doubled in volume as he spoke, filling the station and the homes and cars of his listeners. He sat back in his chair as he completed his report. “The Dog Park will not harm you.

Listeners, a new man has come into town. Who is he? What do he and his beautiful, perfect hair want? He says he is a scientist, gesturing to his coat. Well…” Roman smirked knowingly. “We have all been scientists at some point haven’t we? But why now and why here, in our little town?” Roman cocked his head to the side, placing his elbows on the desk in front of him. “Of course, we will soon discover what he plans to do with the lab he is renting near Big Rico’s Pizza.

And now, traffic.

There is a cactus in the desert. There are many cacti in the desert, but only one that matters. You will wander the desert. Searching. Searching. Searching. The sun will beat down on you, slowly melting your skin, your organs, your bones. The freezing nights, solidifying your remains until you are a shambling mess of what you once were. And still you wander. Searching for something that isn’t there and perhaps never was. You don’t remember why you’re in this desert, what you’re searching for or how you got here. How did you get here?

An update on the new visitor to our town. The...” Roman paused, savoring the word, “... scientist’s name has been revealed to us through the use of the Secret Police’s monitoring systems.” Roman shuffled some papers on his desk, looking through them until he found the right one. “A quick reminder to speak as loudly as possible when having private conversations. You don’t want the Secret Police to miss anything important after all. And do your best to have interesting conversations. Maybe discuss owning a writing utensil, or acknowledge the existence of angels. Brighten your agent’s day.

Returning to the scientist. His name is Logan Sanders, and he is perfect in every way.” Roman sighed wistfully. “His lab coat is crisp and clean. His perfect hair is complemented by his blindingly perfect smile. Logan called a press conference today, which of course, I attended. He told us that our little town is the most scientifically interesting community in the U.S. by far. The perfect, beautiful Logan told us that he and his team of scientists were already busy studying a house in the Desert Creek housing development that doesn’t exist. It seems like it exists, like it's just right there when you look at it, and it's between two other identical houses, so it would make more sense for it to be there than not. But it does not exist, according to Logan and his team of scientists.” Roman shrugged. He was well aware that his audience couldn’t see him, but he shrugged anyway. There was something nice about the motion of shrugging, so he shrugged. “Existence is a tricky thing.

“He said more, but I was busy watching him. He smiled and grew animated talking about something scientific. Everything about him was perfect, and I fell in love instantly.

A quick reminder to parents out there; keep an eye on the color of the helicopters while your kids play in the Sand Wastes. Are they blue? That’s the Secret Police, your kids are safe to play. Are they black? Probably the world government. Return to your homes and cower in fear. Are they red with orange stripes? Return to your home and cower in fear. Do they have images of hawks and falcons all over them? Well, no one knows what those helicopters mean best to-

just a moment listeners, I’m receiving a call from—” Roman gasped excitedly— “Logan!” He flapped his hands energetically. “While I take this, let us go now, to the weather.”

***

“Welcome back listeners. Now I don’t want to take up time from our final story or our sponsors, (we have to pay the bills somehow), but I just have to tell you about the call from Logan,” Roman gushed. “I gave him my number at the press conference and told him to ‘Call anytime. Like literally, anytime.’ He looked at me strangely, but he took the slip of paper and he called me! Just now!

He said that I need to tell you that the sun didn’t set at the right time today.” Roman laughed. “I told him that the sun doesn’t have a schedule. But he persisted, telling me that it was important that I inform my listeners that the sun did not set at the correct time. So here I am. Informing you. I asked if he had anything else to say to me and he muttered something about needing to write some numbers on his new whiteboard and hung up.” Roman shrugged again. “You win some you lose some am I right?

And now a word from our sponsor.

You are a human. Probably. This message is for humans. If you are human you are made of up to 65% water. Therefore, water is required to make you human. Without water, you are not human and should not be listening to this. Stop listening. Stop it. Now. Brought to you by Clorox. Humans are not the only sentient beings composed of water.

The NRA is selling bumper stickers as a part of their annual fundraiser. They sent one to the station for some publicity, and as we are a community radio I’m happy to read one for you now. The bumper stickers read, ‘Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. Guns have nothing to do with it. Stop blaming guns for your actions. They don’t like it. There, there guns, the mean people can’t hurt you anymore.’” Roman sat a little straighter, and leaned towards the microphone.

“Someone took my advice to discuss the hierarchy of angels and they are now being taken to a reconditioning facility somewhere deep beneath the desert. Thank you for making your agent’s day,” Roman said smoothly with a smile. “As always, you are reminded that you should not know about the hierarchy of angels as they do not exist.” He nodded at the camera in the corner of the room and at the car that never moved from outside the station.

“Stay tuned next for silence followed by wallowing in your own thoughts.” Now came his favorite part.

Until next time. Goodnight, listeners. Goodnight.”

Not far away, a scientist stared at the radio. He hadn’t turned it on when he arrived this morning. In fact, he hadn’t even known there was a radio in this lab. This morning someone introducing himself as Roman had suddenly blared out of the radio, scaring Logan half to death. Somehow, this stranger knew that he had come to town and… Logan felt his cheeks get hot as he remembered what Roman had said throughout the day.

Logan had done some rudimentary tests around town to see if there was anything of interest. He found a surprising amount. The screams at the post office, the ghost cars, the house that doesn’t exist, and the pit behind the Ralph’s which wasn’t so much scientifically interesting as just weird. He also met a very kind Faceless Old Woman who was secretly living in his new apartment. He called a press conference (you could just do that here by thinking about having one) and explained what he found out about the house in the Desert Creek housing development. No one had seemed… concerned. Which was, in itself, concerning.

After the press conference, Roman had slipped him his number, explaining, (with a wink that made Logan glad his skin was too dark to show a blush), that it was his personal number, and that he was welcome to call whenever he wanted. Logan left the conference feeling dazed and wandered back to his lab.

He started unpacking. He needed something easy to do while his mind churned away at the strange town he had found himself in. And of course, there were chemicals to place in their exact spots, whiteboards to set up, computers to plug in... all the usual work that went into getting a lab ready for work. He hadn’t paid much attention to the radio, but he stopped his work when he heard his name. How did Roman know his name? He tried to remember everything Roman had said. Something about the Secret Police. Secret Police? Monitoring him? That’s how they learned his name?

He glanced down at his watch. He almost went back to work before he realized that it was nine o’clock. Logan glanced out the window to see that the sun wasn’t even close to setting. He pulled out his phone and looked up the time of today’s sun set. 8:33.

Logan furrowed his brow. He pulled out the piece of paper he had carelessly shoved into his coat pocket. Beneath the hastily scratched numbers was a barely legible name "Roman Palmer." He punched the numbers into his phone and held it up to his ear.

"Hello?"

"Is this Roman?" Logan asked.

Hey all! This crossover is happening due to the amazing Local Carlos Stanon! They proposed the idea and I had to write it. This will consist of a series of oneshots, hopefully deviating from the original material a bit more than this one. Please. Please. Please listen to Welcome to Nightvale and talk about it with me! It’s an amazing podcast with very queer characters (in both senses of the word).

If you need a warning added, would like to be added to my tag list, or have any questions or requests shot me an ask or message!

Taglist: @katelynn-a-fan @dwbh888 @royal-stormcloud @thefivecalls @dragonleesupporter @emo--nightmaree @7-slights-at-virgil @lokiamorstuffs @underthesea73 @smileyzs @robinwritesshitposts @thatgaydemigodnerd @callboxkat @k1ngtok1 @somehow-i-got-an-account @silverobsidion-speaks @a-fandom-trashdump @averykedavra @k1ngtok1 @potatsanderssides @sign-from-god-complex

(Some of these are from @the-taglist-repository. Just ask if you’d like to be removed.)

#sanders sides #welcome to nightvale #wtnv #wtnv fanfic #wtnv fanfiction #sanders sides fanfiction #sanderssidesfanfic #ts fic #ts roman #ts logan #sanders sides crossover #welcome to nightvale crossover #mild gore

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monsterboyes · 5 years

Text

Welcome to Night Vale Fan Episode: Curly Fries

I wrote this Welcome to Night Vale fan episode for fun. I had a lot of fun writing out an outline of the story and coming up with ideas for dialogue. I might not have built up the outro as well as I wanted to, it’s kind of emotionally discordant with the story, but I had fun writing it all anyway. Honestly the entire story is based on me hearing the song I chose for the weather three times in one day, associating it with a concept from the series, and imagining Carlos and Cecil driving while it plays in the background. I wrote around that idea and this is what I came up with. I don’t promise official quality but I hope you enjoy! -------------------------- Cecil: Not all who wander...are lost.

...But, uh, we are. We are very lost. Please help. Welc-

Carlos: Ooh, let me do it! Carlos: Welcome...to Night Vale! Cecil: Listeners, today’s broadcast is very special, because as I’m sure you’ve already deduced, we have a special guest in our midst- my husband, Carlos! With whom I am hopelessly lost in the desert. Carlos: Hi everybody, really glad to be here! Cecil, we’re not hopelessly lost. We’re talking to Night Vale right now! They’ll help us! Cecil: I’m...sure they will. Not terrified in the least. We’re definitely not going to wander this hellscape for eternity. Anyway, uh, Carlos, what brings you to the show today? Carlos: Well, Cecil, as you know, we were out on a date at the Night Vale Harbor and Waterfront Recreation Area, on a sunset stroll across the boardwalk, when we came across a vendor renting out metal detectors.

We rented one, went down to the...uh, beach...or, as much of a beach as it can be, considering there’s no water, and the ocean is only visible from the boardwalk itself, and started searching for treasures.

Cecil: Untold treasures.

Carlos: Yes, excuse me, untold treasures. Of the deep, you know, that sort of thing. But we wandered too far from the boardwalk and were swept out to sea by the phantom ocean, and we woke up...uh, here.

And now we’re stuck here, and we don’t know how to get home, and it’s very boring, so we’re putting on a broadcast together!

Cecil: Oh, it feels so good to be back on the air. Listeners, I don’t know how long we’ve been trapped here. My portable radio equipment doesn’t seem to be broadcasting, and my phone is dead. So I couldn’t reach anyone for help. Help we desperately need. Or we’re going to die here.

Carlos’ phone is fine, but he’s got no signal at all. He’s been trying to play Pokemon Go all morning and it’s just not working. It just shows his cute little trainer standing there in a big empty void of space, which is normal for the desert, but none of the Pokemon are showing up and it’s just been very frustrating for both of us.

Also, I wore these new boots, and I’m very upset that they are hurting my feet. They’re 6 inch high platform boots with a goldfish swimming in a little fish bowl embedded permanently in the platform with no hope of escape and no source of food, and after days of trying to break them in they still just aren’t comfortable for some reason. All things considered, this has not been a good morning for us.

Carlos: At first I thought we may be in the Desert Otherworld somehow, but that was quickly disproven when I realized my phone had no signal. Also, there are no mountains, or lighthouses, or crippling post traumatic stress reactions, or masked armies, or geographical loops. But mostly no cell phone reception. That place had incredible cell phone reception. Cecil: Really, the only thing here is lots and lots of sand, and also old televisions, refrigerators, mysterious piles of magnetic shavings, all sorts of neat stuff. It really takes my mind off the inevitable bleached skeletons we’re going to leave here in the desert. I’ve been playing with this metal detector and honestly, this place is a gold mine for neat junk that if we ever manage to find our way out with, I’m going to take home and then put in the garage, and every time I look at it I’ll think “Why did I bring this home with me? What was I thinking?”, before formulating plans to organize or dispose of it, only to keep it there forever as a monument to my obsessive need to collect mementos and symbols representative of my experiences in an attempt to create a physical record of the fact that I did something, went somewhere, was someone, even if they pile uselessly in a corner serving only to remind me that I opted for material goods and trinkets in lieu of crafting meaningful personal memories of events and loved ones that only I could ever truly understand that would die with me rather than be thrust upon whoever is saddled with the task of organizing my affairs after death, walking into my garage, seeing my pile of junk, and not grasping for even a second the depth of what I wanted it to mean and represent and communicate about my life, tossing it into the trash and along with it any dreams I may have had in the back of my mind of being immortal by way of inspiring others with my personality made manifest by collected worldly goods. Oh! And radio equipment! We found some radio equipment that seems to be working just fine, unlike mine. And to elaborate on this phenomenon, it’s time for the Children’s Fun Fact Science Corner! Carlos? Carlos: Cecil, and kids at home, my running theory is that we are trapped in another time entirely. You see, we’ve dug up a lot of stuff here. But all of it is from the past. When scientists do a lot of digging- it’s called Earth Science, by the way- they often find things underground organized in layers of sediment, one on top of the other. As you dig further down, you find older things, and that’s how we know which fossils are older than other fossils. But here, no matter where we dig, we seem to find things at random, completely disorganized. It’s very unscientific of these random objects to appear all in the top layer of dirt. Meanwhile, Cecil’s portable broadcasting equipment seems to work, but based on how none of you came out here to rescue us during our first several broadcasts, it doesn’t seem to be reaching you. I believe that it can only broadcast to the present day, and- because we are surrounded by anachronisms, we are not in the present day. It’s 2019, I think. So we should, in theory, only be surrounded by things people use in 2019. But we’ve dug up several Furbys and at least one toot-a-loop, which indicate that it is not 2019, wherever we are. We’ve found such a wide range of things there’s no telling what year it really is! But this set of radio equipment we found is timelessly elegant in its design, and so I believe it probably broadcasts to any point in time. Also I can pick it up on the portable radio we brought with us to the beach, so it’s definitely working. Cecil: It is true that my equipment only seems to broadcast to the present day. I know my phone back at the studio sometimes makes and receives calls through time itself, but I don’t know that I’ve ever broadcast to another era...but it is also possible that our listeners just plain aren’t feeling very helpful today. Maybe they’re busy. Maybe we’re doomed. Maybe we’re just doomed. Carlos: Cecil, nobody is ever too busy to listen to your show. And we’re not doomed. Cecil: Oh, Carlos, you’re embarrassing me. And we’re probably doomed. Carlos: I’m sorry, but it’s true. And it has to be, otherwise my theory sounds ridiculous. And we’re not doomed. Cecil: Fair enough. It sounds very scientific to me! Anyway, this has been the Children’s Fun Fact Science Corner. Also we’re doomed. Carlos: Cecil, I’m going to go run some tests with the metal detector and see if I can find anything to help us figure out where and when we are. And maybe a refrigerator that still has food in it. So far, besides the radio equipment, everything’s just a bunch of junk. I’ll take my radio with me so I can hear your broadcast, be sure to call me back if you need anything! Try to stay calm, alright? Cecil: Good luck, Carlos! Listeners, in the meantime, let’s get to the news. Local radio host Cecil Gershwin Palmer was reported as saying that despite the suffocating fear of eternity or the dark void of ceased existence, he doesn’t really mind being trapped in an endless mysterious desert, as long as it’s with his husband Carlos. He could, quote, “Do science here forever”, as long as it was with his handsome husband. Aw, isn’t that sweet?

Meanwhile, we’ve got...uh...there’s...hm. I’ll level with you, Night Vale. This place is booooo-ring. Nothing’s happening at all. There’s barely any plants. I’ve only seen one animal, and it was a lizard, and it was a very boring lizard. It only had 4 legs, and it just kind of sat there on a rock for a while. The fish in my shoes died, so their senseless agony is no longer a viable source of tragic entertainment. I can’t check my tumblr. It’s just dirt and sand and rocks and sun and junk. If we were going to be whisked away to a mysterious time and place, couldn’t it at least have been an interesting one? I do have to admit...I’ve tried to keep a strong, stoic face about this whole situation, but I’m getting a little worried. We don’t know how long we’ve been here. Carlos claims it’s only been a few hours, but you know how he is with time and perception and facts. There’s never any wiggle room with him for senseless anxiety and baseless assumptions of doom. I shouldn’t make fun, I’m sure he’s worried too. At least we’re here together, I suppose. Better than being lost in the desert alone... Oh, uh, looks like it’s time for Traffic.

A car, gliding effortlessly across the sands of a vast desert. The man inside turns up the radio, and hears a familiar story- familiar because it’s literally happening, right now. The radio describes his every action. The way he glances at the radio as if it is another human being to make eye contact with, questioning its words with his eyes. It describes the way he turns the dial to increase the volume. The way he furrows his brow, attempting to understand how the voice on the radio knows what he’s doing. The way he pulls out a set of beakers and places them carefully on the dashboard, normally a reckless act while driving, but completely safe in the flat, closed-course, car commercial style desert he’s driving on. He sends some colored liquids through swirling crazy straw tubes from one container to another, a bunsen burner aflame, attempting to science some sort of sense out of this disembodied narrator. The liquids are turbulent and sloshing, but he does not care. He looks out the windshield and stares at a dot, in the distance- and the dot stares back. He focuses all his energy, all of the vehicle’s horsepower, the entire weight of his leg on the gas pedal, and every photon receptor in his eyes on that tiny...little...dot. He stares with such intensity that his eyes start to lose track of their own interpretation of the light that enters them, blurring into one solid color, forcing him to focus on something else to be able to focus back on his goal. He blinks furiously. The dot becomes bigger, and bigger, and bigger, until finally- he sees that it’s me! Hi Carlos! This has been, Traffic. Carlos: Cecil, look! The metal detector came through! I found a 1987 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am 2-door coupe! And a renewed interest in those psychic energies I told you that you sometimes give off and that I really need you to let me probe into! Cecil: A car, that’s wonderful! We can use that to get...home. Assuming it’s...nearby, and that we’re...in the same timeline as home, and...in the same year. Maybe we’ll even be back by dark! The sun is starting to set... Carlos: Cecil, I know how to get back home. We’re going to be okay. Get in the car. Wait- first, help me take the t-tops off. On the drive back we may as well enjoy the weather. [THE WEATHER] Cecil: Listeners, we are home. As we drove dramatically with sweeping camera angles and rolling hills through that sudden downpour of mysterious flashes of light, pink clouds, psychedelic wind, nostalgic VHS fog, and laser beams erupting from the desert floor, the sun set and we could see in the distance a guiding light. As we drove towards it, we reached an old dirt road, and down that dirt road, we found a fence, and a gate, and a sign. I turned around in my seat to read the sign, and...well, you remember a few years ago, when we got the new landfill, which doesn’t accept any physical items? Carlos: My theory had one major flaw. I thought based on all the anachronisms we had found in the dirt, all at the same layer of sediment, we must be in some sort of mishmashed timeline, outside of the linear time that we’re normally outside of, but also outside of the non-linear time we’re normally not outside of. Some third form of time never before seen. But they...well, they weren’t anachronistic. There weren’t any items from the future. That would be anachronistic. Everything we found was from the past. Which is...normal. That’s just normal. That’s how time works, even here. Cecil: Yeah, we were...just...in the old landfill. Also my portable radio equipment was working fine, I just...forgot to...plug in the microphone. I was very stressed. I forget to plug in microphones when I’m stressed. Carlos: I guess the sand blew over top of it over time and hid it entirely, and the phantom ocean must have created a phantom beach next to the raised sands as a result, and we washed up on top of it. But, hey, even if my science was flawed, at least we got to spend the day together, and I got to be a big part of your show! Plus, it was my day off, so I really didn’t want to do any accurate science anyway. Cecil: Yes, we’ve never done a show together like this. It was a lot of fun even if I was terrified the entire time. Carlos: Cecil, I was scared too, but I didn’t want you to worry, so I tried to be strong, for you. And you know, despite the suffocating fear of eternity or the dark void of ceased existence, I also wouldn’t really mind being trapped in an endless mysterious desert, as long as it’s with you. I could, quote, “Do radio broadcasts there forever”. Cecil: Aw, you were listening! And so intently. That’s almost word for word, with adorable changes in perspective. And it’s a good segue into an inappropriately sappy closing statement for tonight’s broadcast. Listeners, Steve Carlsberg, my brother in law, speaks often of lights and guiding markers in the sky, telling him exactly how the universe works. I’ve never really believed in any of that stuff. But today, some lights in the sky showed Carlos and I the way home from the old landfill. As soon as we crested the horizon I saw them- and I’d recognize those lights no matter where they were, Arby’s or not. Sometimes I wonder if maybe they’re part of something bigger, too, like the lights in the sky Steve talks about. They lead us home today. And they lead us to each other years ago. Carlos, I’m glad we have each other. I’m glad we have this place. I’m glad we have delicious roast beef sandwiches and curly fries with horsey sauce. We have not eaten in days. I love you.

Carlos (mouth full of curly fries): Aw, Cecil, I love you too.

Cecil (mouth full of curly fries): Today’s broadcast is sponsored by Arby’s. Not officially, it’s just, (swallows), we’re currently eating Arby’s and I don’t know how to end the broadcast. I don’t normally do broadcasts off the cuff like this. Carlos: I know how to end it! Can I end it? Cecil: Well, I mean, it’s my show...I always...um. You know what, sure, it’s fine. Go ahead. Carlos: Good night, Night Vale! Carlos and Cecil: Good night.

#welcome to night vale #welcome to nightvale #WTNV #nightvale #night vale #cecil palmer #carlos the scientist #fanfiction

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weaverlings · 5 years

Text

Every Episode of WTNV with Carlos Mentioned

No, I did not keep track of how long I spent on this. Anyway.

Total series count: 89 episodes

In the main podcast, anyway. The list includes at least partial context; however I wasn't counting the number of times Carlos was mentioned per episode, just if he was mentioned at all. So if he came up more than once I didn't necessarily record each time. Still, there are definitely spoilers.

I can't like… guarantee that I didn't miss something, unfortunately. However, I used both "Carlos" and "scientist" all the time, and I additionally used "boyfriend" from 26 onward and "husband" after 100. So it should be pretty close, at least.

I might go through and do live shows later. However, the answer for them is (almost) always yes, as most of them at least have a segment that Dylan Marron performs at some shows, so it'd be more a matter of checking for mentions of Carlos outside of that.

The reason I did this was to see if I was at all correct in my sense that Carlos has been mentioned less over time. My conclusion: well… sort of?

There actually was less of him than I thought in both year 1 and year 2 (year 1 in particular). However, years 3 and 4 had a LOT of him, and it has gone down from there through the end of year 7, when Carlos was only mentioned in 7 episodes total, with very few casual mentions by Cecil (vs when he had a particular role in what was going on).

So the problem (or at least, I consider it one) hasn't been going on for as long as I thought in the grand scheme of the series. I now believe that a significant part of the issue is just… Well, it has at this point been almost three years since that decline. Plus listening live makes everything feel drawn out, so there's a lot of perceived time in between individual mentions.

That being said, I think the actual conclusion is: it's maybe not as I thought, but I also wasn't completely imagining it, especially not looking at very recent events. We don't know what this year will hold, but year 7, as mentioned above, had the least of Carlos in it so far. There are also some significant gaps - Cecil mentions Carlos in episode 91, and after that the next time he comes up in year 5 is in 100 (!!!!)

He is mentioned in a solid majority of the series, but it's pretty front-loaded at this point. Also he has a few appearances in the first novel, and he's a central character in It Devours!

Finally, thanks so much @cecilspeaks because this wouldn't have been possible to do at all otherwise.

The complete list is as follows:

Year 1

episode 1: yes (well of course)

episode 2: no

episode 3: yes (the Telly thing)

episode 4: yes (dissenting at the PTA meeting)

episode 5: yes (Cecil tried to ask him about the moon but couldn't find him)

episode 6: no

episode 7: no

episode 8: yes (Carlos wants to talk about lights in Radon Canyon, not dinner or weekend plans)

episode 9: yes (but in the context of Telly wandering the desert)

episode 10: no

episode 11: yes (Cecil asked about tectonic activity - Carlos is "distracted yet beautiful")

episode 12: no

episode 13: no

episode 14: no

episode 15: no

episode 16: yes (basically the central plot of the episode)

episode 17: no

episode 18: no

episode 19 A+B: no for both

episode 20: no

episode 21: no

episode 22: no

episode 23: no

episode 24: no

episode 25: yes (absolutely)

Total year count: 9

Year 2

episode 26: no

episode 27: yes

episode 28: no

episode 29: yes (Carlos has opinions on subway riders' DNA)

episode 30: yes (checking out the house that doesn't exist)

episode 31: yes (Carlos "promised a certain person dinner")

episode 32: yes (Carlos gave Cecil the watch for their 1-month anniversary)

episode 33: no

episode 34: no

episode 35: yes (Carlos is being industrious!)

episode 36: no

episode 37: arguably (Cecil mentions finding "someone that might make [him] feel better about what has happened today" which probably means Carlos, but he's not mentioned directly)

episode 38: yes (Carlos has scientific opinions about orange grove growth + Cecil almost texts that he loves him but just knocks the imposter out instead)

episode 39: no (but fun fact: Dylan Marron originally did the pre-episode announcements for this one. I don't have the file anymore sadly.)

episode 40: yes (Lauren brings him up though)

episode 41: no

episode 42: no

episode 43: yes (Carlos is looking into the house that doesn't exist again)

episode 44: no

episode 45: no

episode 46: yes (he's on the phone w/ Cecil about the oak doors)

episode 47: yes (but it's Lauren and Kevin talking about how they haven't found him)

episode 48: yes (Cecil doesn't know where he is)

episode 49 A+B: yes (and I don't wanna talk about it :( )

Total count: 14 (ish, because 37 is subject to debate and 47 is different as noted. So maybe 12.)

Year 3

episode 50: yes (people have been asking Cecil about Carlos)

episode 51: yes (he spends most of it on the phone with Cecil)

episode 52: yes (Cecil's been getting calls and snapchats)

episode 53: no (but Steve mentions Cecil had "softened in the right places" over the past year)

episode 54: yes ("A Carnival Comes to Town." that's it.)

episode 55: yes ("The University of What It Is." again. that's it!)

episode 56: yes (Cecil's been isolated w/out Carlos, Cecil talks to Diane about Carlos, and then Cecil has a dream about being w/ Carlos again and sleeps well…)

episode 57: yes (Cecil wonders if Carlos knew the list, and then discusses the "current context" of their relationship - a matter of space)

episode 58: yes (Carlos doesn't want Cecil to say he's trapped in the other world + Cecil misses him)

episode 59: yes (Carlos is on the phone w/ Cecil)

episode 60: yes (Cecil considering whether or not he can visit Carlos)

episode 61: yes (Cecil mentions Carlos to Earl and also wonders if science can help him process the events of 59)

episode 62: no

episode 63: no

episode 64: yes (this episode has the watercolor painting in it)

episode 65: yes (Carlos leaves a voicemail)

episode 66: yes (considering the logistics of the Dog Park)

episode 67: no

episode 68: yes (Cecil talks about visiting Carlos)

episode 69: yes (Cecil announces his "last" broadcast to move to be w/ Carlos)

episode 70: A; yes (but again, context - it's got Carlos still in the otherworld). B; yes, Cecil describes Carlos' return

Total count: 17

Year 4

episode 71: yes (Carlos "participates" in the heist and is safe at home later)

episode 72: yes (Carlos can apparently sleep through anything!)

episode 73: yes (Carlos apparently tells Cecil not to worry about even catastrophic or paradoxical mistakes)

episode 74: yes (certain local radio hosts and scientists may have been using the Dog Park to go back and forth between Night Vale and a desert otherworld)

episode 75: yes (matching lycra shorts)

episode 76: yes (Carlos makes delicious fruit salad! also he's working on a solution to the flamingo problem)

episode 77: no

episode 78: yes (Carlos likes the gory parade + Earl is invited to dinner w/ Cecil and Carlos)

episode 79: no

episode 80: yes (Cecil tells his boyfriend he wants a beret)

episode 81: yes (Cecil spent time w/ Carlos between reeducation sessions)

episode 82: yes (sort of. Cecil mentions knowing what it's like in a long-term relationship, which is cute, and it's obvious who it's about, so I'm counting it)

episode 83: yes (Carlos does the shopping because Cecil has trouble with auctions)

episode 84: yes ("Hey there, Lonely Boy…")

episode 85: no

episode 86: no

episode 87: yes (Cecil considers the possibility of a tropical vacation w/ Carlos)

episode 88: yes (phone conversation, bunny nickname)

episode 89: yes (what Carlos is up to w/ the stranger situation)

episode 90: yes (Carlos is in the crowd against the dog/strangers)

Total count: 16

Year 5

episode 91: yes (Cecil reaches out to Carlos about the train, but he doesn't know :( )

episode 92: no

episode 93: no

episode 94: no

episode 95: no

episode 96: no

episode 97: no

episode 98: no

episode 99: no

episode 100: YES

episode 101: no

episode 102: yes (Carlos who Cecil is closest to other than Josie)

episode 103: yes (they're excited about going to the beach w/ family + they visited Josie together)

episode 104: yes (Cecil and Carlos go together to pay respects to Josie)

episode 105: yes (Carlos discusses dinner + TV viewing plans and has some concerns about the Smithwick house)

episode 106: no

episode 107: yes (Carlos arranges a task force regarding sounds heard under the earth)

episode 108: yes (tied into broken-reality weirdness)

episode 109: no

episode 110: yes (Steve brings him up - asked Carlos about space and Carlos skips away because he's so excited about science)

Total count: 9

Year 6

episode 111: yes (Carlos worries about having grown too used to Night Vale + the material testing in ep1 was an excuse to talk to Cecil)

episode 112: no

episode 113: yes (everything makes Cecil think of Carlos. Also he's out of town at a science convention)

episode 114: no

episode 115: yes (Cecil isn't concerned about robberies at labs or radio stations, but is concerned about librarian attacks on his family)

episode 116: yes (Strip uno… also "just the most vicious outfits")

episode 117: no

episode 118: yes (Cecil knows science… heck yes of course!!)

episode 119: yes (Carlos' hair is used to calibrate equipment)

episode 120: no

episode 121: no

episode 122: no

episode 123: no

episode 124: yes (A Door Ajar pt 1)

episode 125: yes (A Door Ajar pt 2)

episode 126: yes (A Door Ajar pt 3)

episode 127: yes (Carlos and Cecil plan to hold a blood matter viewing party)

episode 128: yes (the viewing party starts + Cecil and Carlos have a houseguest)

episode 129: yes (everyone, including Carlos, is surprised by the depth of the blood matter)

episode 130: no

Total count: 12

Year 7

episode 131: yes (Carlos texts Cecil about a matter of scientific accuracy)

episode 132: no

episode 133: yes (Carlos has a concern about the time situation, and also there's the Telly ending)

episode 134: yes (Cecil and Carlos attend a high school football game together + with the rest of their family)

episode 135: no

episode 136: no

episode 137: no

episode 138: no

episode 139: no

episode 140: no

episode 141: no

episode 142: no

episode 143: yes (Cecil tells Carlos he's coming home but, y'know, no one can hear)

episode 144: no

episode 145: no

episode 146: no

episode 147: yes (Carlos has been studying the moon and… there's other stuff that happens)

episode 148: no

episode 149: yes (once again a lot of stuff but Cecil remembers by the end. It's "already forgotten" apparently)

episode 150: yes (Cecil discusses their anniversary; also Carlos discovers his clock working)

Total count: 7

Year 8 (ongoing)

episode 151: no

episode 152: no

episode 153: yes (Carlos' experiments get messy so he ends up working at Steve and Abby's place)

episode 154: yes (Carlos is continuing to run experiments at Steve and Abby's and is taken in for questioning when Steve is arrested)

episode 155: yes (Carlos is really the one who figures everything out tbh)

episode 156: yes (Cecil is anxious about death/separation from Carlos, and then gets excited when he thinks there's a way for them to be together forever)

episode 157: yes (Carlos has some concerns about the proposed solution and wants to talk it out w/ Cecil)

Total count (so far): 5

#welcome to night vale #wtnv #wtnv ramblings #carlos the scientist #i mean as far as the time question #the answer is more than i probably should have #so

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alchemist-shizun · 5 years

Text

A song to fix what’s wrong (Take what’s broken make it whole)

Read on Ao3!

Word Count: 4,525

Taglist: @max-is-tired @bookwormscififan

Characters: Cecil, Carlos, (others briefly or only mentioned)

Pairing(s): Are you even asking. Cecilos

Warning(s): Crying, Negative thoughts (not too deep), Blood mention, Death mention (minor), Kissing, Swearing (once, during narration)

and yours truly, heavily projecting

Summary: A review of a relationship, a retelling of a story already told. You know how it goes, all you need to do is … dive into the symphony and let yourself swim around the sweetest and hardest events.

A/N: Me? Putting 4 songs in a single fic? More likely than my fake originality makes you think. Song lyrics used for the fic is the english cover of Fuyu no Hanashi by Nordex, I recommend you listen to it. (Original can be found here.) Alright so this basically leads up to the 70th episode, there might be some references to the first episodes too, let’s say it’s a very tiny review of a large amount of time. There’s a moment towards that is not chronologically put compared to the scene after it but yeah, just think of the points of view as their own little stories. Also the more I wrote this the more I didn’t realize I was typing down some exact feelings and thoughts I didn’t even remember they had. I’m basically connected, help. Well without any further ado, hope you enjoy~

✾

❝ I’d die for you any day My life’s over anyway Lets go to the empty park And talk ‘til it’s really dark. ❞

✾

Just like the snow that won’t completely melt away

I keep with me these feelings deep inside.

Just let me know the words.

How dare he? How could he have done that to him?

Cecil was pacing down the hall heading towards his workplace, with a hand through his hair and a huff forming on his lips.

There was literally no need for him to be able to do that and yet he still had the audacity to turn his heart into a puddle of overwhelming sensations.

He had to come there, with his perfect hair, perfect coat, and perfect being, claim he was a scientist with his perfectly smart words and arguments and ruin the peace for his and the town’s heartbeats.

But mostly his.

The frequency with which his flow of thoughts constantly derailed from his regular ones to the most admiring observations about the scientist couldn’t help but grow with every week he spent in their town.

Cecil was happy to report any news or confirmed rumors about Carlos, anything would have resulted in creating a joyful aura around the recording room. And the citizens were definitely noticing a smile in his voice whenever they heard him talk about Carlos.

It was like a blow of the wind during a blazing hot day in the middle of the warmest summer day. Not only satisfying, but also you don’t realize how much you had needed it until you notice the way it makes you feel so much better.

And the great amount you miss it when it’s gone.

But how could Cecil express that if he yet had no clue of the other’s considerations of him?

Sure, they had talked more than once, he had even left him his phone number, but … there hadn’t been any significant turns since there.

No talk of weekend plans either, sadly.

Should he have just … shoved it all down? What kind of nonsense was that? There was no way he would have succeeded. With so much increasing appreciation, he was only going to explode.

And then, something finally happened.

The voicemails, the ones he had shared with his listeners. The squealing he may or may not have recorded right onto the mic, too.

Out of all people. Carlos had decided to call him.

It was when time had started to stop. Slow down … restart again? He could not tell.

Furthermore, they had even talked on the phone and agreed to meet up the day after, it all sounded like Cecil was finally getting the shift of his life.

As much as he sounded so ingenuous around Carlos. But hey, he was panicking, okay?

It could happen even to the best of the radio hosts who’s able to talk to a multitude of people at once without failing a beat.

He could do this, he had the words.

Should I just close now the door that guards strongly this love?

You’re my everything and now my soul keeps calling for you

There was something Carlos most definitely didn’t notice.

All he had done until then was partaking into all the experiments and research he could have, studying one of the most scientifically interesting places he’d ever been to.

He thought that was all that it was to him.

And yet …

After that one day, he kept going back to him.

They had met, they had talked, Cecil had been certainly useful in giving him some fundamental information on the town and other important contacts he still didn’t have.

It was also nice because … well, with his team of other valuable scientists, it was easier to get lost in confronting each other’s thoughts and hypothesis. With Cecil, on the other hand, he could have done that for hours, rambling about things he loved and his interlocutor probably didn’t understand and still feel like he was listened to thoroughly.

It was kind of endearing when Cecil kept nodding, but with a confused expression adorning his face.

He kept going back, again.

But, as we mentioned, there was something he didn’t notice about himself.

More than often he called with the excuse of using him as a mean of reaching for all the citizens to get the word of a discovery out, or looking for some of their knowledge.

He liked his excitement when Cecil answered.

He also liked his name, he had thought to himself once. It was like a melody.

Nonetheless, he had no idea where that came from. Did he hear that in a musical? About another town … way down somewhere?

Anytime he confronted his feelings, that was what happened. He involuntarily diverted them; his process of thinking had always been pretty fast, so much that his talking was unstoppable during an epiphany or breakthrough.

Eventually, his subconscious would have arisen, slapped him in the face, and yelled at him to face those feelings for once instead of solely focusing on science.

Which finally happened during the attack of tiny men at the Bowling Alley. He knew he was going to put himself in danger acting that way.

There was nothing to fear, huh?

It would have been grave danger too, if the Apache Tracker hadn’t jumped and taken the hits in his place.

This is something that makes you wonder. About your condition, about how you could have died in a matter of seconds if the projectiles had been that tiny bit more to the left.

About your life and where you are now and how it could have drastically changed. It was like a near-death experience. It fueled his deepest impulsive thoughts to burst at once.

If he had died back then, be wouldn’t have finished his research. He wouldn’t have known anything more about the town, anything more about the bizarre happenings around it. About the citizens. About Cecil.

Cecil. He needed to see Cecil, even if it meant ripping him from his desk, he needed the comfort he was sure he could find in him. He needed to let him know he treasured him.

Not many words came, in the end.

They just stared into the distant nothingness, Cecil’s head resting on his shoulder.

And Carlos, who had imperceptibly sighed, finally found the place to smile.

And now I am completely in love

Just walk right now along with me

Through all the ways that we can go

I ask right now: don’t let me go?

Cecil still couldn’t believe he had had a date with the most stupendous scientist he had ever met. He was still baffled by the fact that he had met him at all.

And yet there they were, filled with pleasant food thanks to the Italian restaurant, walking around town with their arms sometimes linked, fingers sometimes intertwining, eyes going to the sky and smiling as they caught blinking lights or each other’s stare.

Wonderful, a wonderful night indeed that couldn’t have ended better. Or so Cecil thought.

Because when he had driven him home, Carlos had hesitated in his seat. Cecil was about to ask him what was the matter, when the scientist turned to face him and leaned forward, placing a hand on his shoulder that was too soon torn away.

Soft lips were placed on his for a brief moment that didn’t even feel real.

Cecil could only stare in Carlos’s direction as he bid his farewell and disappeared behind closed doors.

All too soon.

Were he to be more lucid, he would have probably begged him not to let go in such a short amount of time. He didn’t even want him to go just yet …

Cecil could have even gotten out of his car and knock on his door, wrap his arms around Carlos and never, ever, leave his side.

Instead, he turned on the engine and shook off those musings from his mind. That was when he had realized he had fallen even deeper in love all over again.

With no goodbyes or moving on

Just stay with me wherever I go

Don’t let me be alone

Carlos knew it was disappointing.

Their relationship had been going wonderfully and having distance separate them was one of the worst things that could have happened, especially now that they were so used to living together.

He couldn’t count the times Cecil had warned him to be careful in that Desert Otherworld where everything seemed to work for a reason he was still working on.

He was by Dana’s side one of the first times he had been able to pay a visit as a hologram.

Such a mess had been going down in Night Vale right then, with all that Strexcorp issue to be solved.

Yet, he was still the one to be reminded of mindfulness.

« Don’t worry Cecil. » he had told him, the ringing of his words still clear in his mind. « A scientist is always fine. »

He firmly believed that was going to be true, in the long run. Not too long would have passed before he could have been back.

Loneliness couldn’t be a thing when they still could call each other and digitally see each other, right?

The spell or maybe curse has not been broken yet

I’m still holding the baggage that I had

Just please relieve this pain

It was so hard. So so hard, on Cecil’s part. He couldn’t help but still feel like Carlos was trapped in that desert, never to find or trust old oak doors again.

The more time he spent away, the more Cecil’s mind wandered about other thoughts than what he should have been focusing on.

Focusing was something impossible, at the time.

Everything seemed impossible, burdening, complicated.

Things he loved doing, forgotten. Uncared for. He felt so off any suggestion wouldn’t have been a good enough distraction.

He couldn’t stop the tension in his body, the lingering feeling of restlessness, waiting for something that never came, disappointing himself for dreaming of things he couldn’t obtain just yet.

Yes, obviously, he should have been happy Carlos was going to make the most important breakthrough in his life, but … not having him by his side every now and then was simply painful.

It was as if some kind of malevolent deity had been watching him and laughing by themselves at his misfortune.

And yet, their love seemed to be growing forevermore, not an inch too little or too much, but the exact amount both of them needed. It was soft and enough and they knew, which was everything that sustained them and told them to carry on and store their strongest feelings for the moment in which they’d have been able to finally see each other again.

If only … if only there could have been an easy way to get rid of all the doubtful and unhappy feelings that stuck to his brain.

He didn’t trust himself to be able to get through the days with the same attitude anymore.

Didn’t trust his mind, most of all.

Wasn’t there a service to get read of his thoughts in the most brutal manner for at least a small amount of days?

Hey, what’s our future?

What should I keep on waiting for?

What am I supposed to find in this cold place, let me know?

It was all going so smoothly.

Sometimes it happened. You think you’re doing just fine and then, one day, the world comes crashing all at once.

A multitude of good days eventually results in one of the worst ones of your life and you’re left to think “Where did I go wrong? Why do I deserve this? Do I even deserve this?”

Carlos had been basically running around all day, chasing Doug and Alisha down with their army of giants, who were continuously charging other beings who dared to wander around the limits of their land.

No moment of peace could be found, no place to rest, no listening to him!

It was insane, they still attacked even when their conditions appeared to be grave and unbearable.

The kitchen counter had already been torn to pieces when the group decided to head for the battle again, Carlos resigned to sigh heavily and not follow this time.

It had been much better when Cecil stayed there. Maybe … he should have stayed even later.

What was even bound to happen there anymore? Could he have carried on with his research when he had to tend to an entire army that was there to protect and help him, in their own ways?

Lately in those days he had felt off. The excitement for his work was still there, of course, but the emptiness from when he had woken up still lingered.

Was taking Cecil there a good idea?

Looking outside, he saw the army retiring to his place, some completely covered in blood, some severely injured.

Doubt came in.

For a moment, he tried to ignore it.

He picked up the phone and got back to Kevin’s reporting.

The tears are falling from my eyes

They’re freezing everything inside

How much could someone fool their mind before the world came crashing down on them altogether, on the verge of falling apart and with nothing and none to stop the feeling of impending doom upon them?

It was a question Cecil had been wondering for quite some time by then, in all its varying forms.

And how much longer until the minimal inconvenience was going to break him apart?

He had been … so proud of that painting. Few were the times in which he took one of his works with him at the radio station, they were mostly things that reminded him of Khoshekh.

But then, yeah. He needed to be reminded of happiness. Joy. Carlos. All the feelings that he brought him and never ceased to twist his insides in a pleasant manner.

And as he looked at the painting while sitting at his desk, the more he felt like he could enter that dimension and reach him if he were to brush the surface of the canvas.

His feet moved by themselves: it was the weather report anyway. He had time for some musing; he held his hand out and stretched to the landscape.

Yet, the colors only warmed under his touch. And nothing else happened.

Except for a loud crash against that same wall as soon as he had stepped away from it.

Wide eyes went over the destruction laid upon them, steps still slowly retreating to the desk.

Cecil gripped its surface tight to steady himself. His mind was emptied for a second as he processed the scene in front of him.

Not only was part of the room demolished, but also his painting had completely and inevitably torn to pieces too.

The one that followed was the longest moment of silence Cecil had ever experienced.

Everything was nothing for even a sole instant.

Then, nothing became all he had ever tried to do, because nothing mattered anymore now that fate wanted to delete all the traces of happiness left in his body.

So the first tear came. Then another. And another, another, another, so much that he fell to his knees and his blurred vision turned away because he couldn’t just bear the sight any longer.

He felt betrayal, but not his own.

It was as if, with the work of art, part of his heart had died. Part of his love, denied. Part of them and their relationship, completely discarded.

He had spent so much time perfectioning the details, so long daydreaming Carlos’s gorgeous figure and stopping to think back at how he was dating the best person in the world.

Now it felt like that didn’t happen at all.

He simply wanted to be confident in his own work again. He only needed a goddamn moment to reassure himself when none else could be there for him.

A way not to disregard it all and look for a way to find his peace again.

It was like a gift. He had been so proud …

An hour or so had passed before he noticed the weather report was about to end.

Cecil got back to his feet and headed towards his seat, ignoring the breeze that tickled his skin.

He sighed deeply, his chest aching with every sob that had escaped his lips in the past minutes.

The last notes of the melody echoed within the room, as he wiped the tears away from his cheeks and regained his composure. Not even reporting made him feel better anymore.

When silence filled the chaos around him, he took a few beats to stabilize his voice. His eyes opened and so did his mouth. And the words started flowing.

But he couldn’t hide his torment any longer.

He told them what had happened. He told them of the debris, of the veiled pain, of the safety.

« It’s fine. Yup. Everything’s fine. »

Cecil? Well, he blatantly lied. To himself and all his listeners.

And maybe, for the time being, that was for the best.

Of course, before, once the recording had finished, he broke down again.

Under this beautiful blue sky

They’re just pretending to be kind

« No. » Carlos’s face fell. « No, no, no. »

His eyes searched his lab for a sign of any single object or the smallest of notes that could have been saved.

Everything had shattered to the ground covered in fur, everything had been crushed to pieces and there was nothing he could have done.

He found none.

Carlos let out the breath he had been holding as he entered the room and was met with that disastrous mess.

He forced himself to approach his workplace, his eyes filled with tears over stress, the frustration and disappointment of having lost an entire year worth of research.

All his sorrow couldn’t fit in his chest.

As a hand flew to his mouth, the other trailed over the papers on the desk, staining with blood with every brush of his fingertips.

He felt sick.

He felt sick of blood, sick of fights, sick of distance and this situation he couldn’t bear anymore.

What was even the point of staying when his discoveries didn’t matter anymore? Just for the clear days and nights above him? When he wondered if Cecil’s stars were the same as his?

Carlos blinked back the tears that didn’t have the time to fall.

He found the only blank sheet of paper, picked up a pen, and started writing.

Time passes by and I can’t stop crying out loud just like a child.

Cecil could say … it only got worse with time.

As the weeks passed, as the air surrounding him only got heavier and heavier with every single second weighing down on his whole body, like as if he could literally feel the aging and passage of time on his shoulders, it only got worse.

He did hope and almost believe his vacation would have been of any kind of help. He resisted the voices in his head telling him it wouldn’t have been of significance, like any other method he had tried.

Cecil had spent time with Janice too before that, to see if he could feel again or if he really just had to give up on it all.

It worked for the few hours they were together. After that, the complete void once again.

It wasn’t like the void wasn’t friendly, but … even the closest of friends could grow excessive if they stuck with you the same way the void was doing.

And the emptiness.

And the sadness.

The one that hit during night, or when you’re craving hugs, the one that makes existing an aching experience because all you’d need is comfort but you can’t have it the way you desire.

Those moments in which you seem to cry for no reason when you’re actually trying to convince yourself you have no idea why this is happening to you, but you know exactly what’s wrong deep inside.

But you don’t give voice to your emotions in fear of hurting someone or concerning someone else. So you keep everything in a little corner of your mind and you let it explode at once.

Maybe with silent crying, maybe in an empty room.

Maybe nowhere at all, just in some indefinite time. Maybe it’s not happening.

Or you’re not realizing.

That you’re falling apart in front of your very own eyes.

The two of us have now been torn apart.

Carlos had stepped into the radio station of the Desert Otherworld when a wave of queasiness hit him yet again just like it had earlier that day, after he had turned off the call to stop the masked giants.

Was that … blood? Bones?

He was so tired, so much the once so-called paradise had become a burden itself.

He couldn’t live like that anymore.

He shouldn’t have lived like that at all.

And he convinced himself of this the more his conversation with Kevin prolonged.

An entire year spent away from where he belonged, from whom he belonged to. He needed to remedy that.

Kevin just kept smiling the same way he always did, too wide and too happy to be real. It made it just that tiny bit harder to deliver the letter.

Being aware you’re going to hurt someone else’s feelings wasn’t exactly the most ideal thought.

But there were others he had been hurting while staying there.

He pretended he didn’t notice all those little different behaviors when Cecil had been there.

His hand held a bit tighter, the hugs a bit longer, lips lingering just that much more both of them needed. How he never left his side, how he insisted on those five more minutes before getting up.

And it wasn’t like Carlos was complaining, he knew Cecil was trying to make the most of his time, but he just knew there was so much more than that underneath his demeanor.

He only didn’t have the heart to ask him.

Sometimes, he did capture Night Vale’s radio-waves, a couple of figments of what Cecil reported about the news, the usual stuff, and … his discomfort.

Everything felt wrong ever since he told him to move to the Desert Otherworld.

Then everything went wrong, like a message from a futile destiny ahead warning him about the wrong possibilities, which are always too many to dwell on them instead of taking action.

Which was why, after so many signs that day, he was there to leave that letter on Kevin’s desk.

«Choose not to be sad, Carlos. » Kevin had said. « In fact, choose to be happy! »

That was probably what fueled him to leave even more. He would’ve understood, once he had read through the letter, as painful as it could have been for him.

It was true, he was doing that for his own happiness. There was nothing left of it in there anymore, if not the ghost of joyful memories that were ripped from his hands the moment they ended.

Memories didn’t make you feel with the same intensity of when you experience something.

A quiet melody sang in the middle of the desert’s silent symphony. « Keep smiling through just like you always do. 'Till the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away. »

He was going to change everything. Make one final travel to where he was going to stay. That one thing, he was sure it did feel right.

« So will you please say hello to the folks that I know? Tell them I won’t be long. »

Especially the freedom no longer waiting outside of that utopic land …

« They’ll be happy to know that as you saw me go I was singin’ this song. »

… of when his feet almost basically sprinted outside of the dog park.

And now I am completely in love

and nothing else will matter now

through all the ways that we can go

I ask right now: don’t let me go?

The sense of familiarity and liberation dawned on Carlos as soon as he had stepped into Night Vale after so long away.

Along with it, the anticipation of seeing his lover made a buzzing feeling take over his stomach. It wasn’t anxiety, it was what he learnt to name “that one sensation that makes you fully comprehend what 'I can’t wait’ truly means”.

He was late for the opera, fine with him, anything would have made do if it ultimately led to Cecil.

It was when he finally found himself right beside him that he forgot everything he knew apart from the fact that, yes, he had been completely, fully and ineffably in love with him this whole time and he wasn’t going to deny it anytime soon.

In fact, he was going to take that into account and love him even more if possible, nothing else existed other than his absolute admiration.

« We’ll meet again. Don’t know where, don’t know when. But I know we’ll meet again some sunny day. » he heard a quiet voice sing.

And when their eyes met after such a long amount of time that he felt like he was going to turn Cecil’s head himself, there was no space for rational thoughts.

Therefore, none of them were able to form rational arguments either.

So Carlos went for an embrace he honestly never wanted to end.

A single whispered line escaped his thoughts before he gave word to his musings.

« Please, don’t let me go. »

Their hug grew even tighter.

With no goodbyes or moving on

You’ll always be right here with me.

Together forever.

Words upon words flowed in the night between them, so many Cecil had been hardly able to take them all in.

Right then, though, he knew his earlier uncertainty had now a reason. Everything always had a reason when it came to Carlos. Everything started to make sense yet again.

They talked about all and nothing and the entirety of their situation, but briefly and with sweet resolutions.

It was all starting to be back to normal, and his family and friends were there to make sure it would remain that way.

There was no place to leave.

But to stay.

And that was a thing both Cecil and Carlos could do together, the oblivion they had been living in for the past year soon put behind their shoulders.

The certainty of waking up next to their loved one, the motivation of going through the day excitedly because you may never know what waited for you at home, the comforting of a cuddle pile on a rainy day with your favorite person and your favorite pet.

It was all that filled their minds.

And, for the time being, it was also all they needed.

#wtnv #wtnv fanfic #cecil palmer #cecilos #wtnv cecil #wtnv carlos #carlos the scientist #read the warnings #long post #purp's writings

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this-is-a-podcast-fanblog · 5 years

Text

ok here’s my really long night vale meta

(I want to just start by saying that I love Welcome to Night Vale more than any other show that I’ve ever listened to or watched. I’m not sure if I would even still be here without the positive change it brought to my life and the art form it introduced me to. So although this post is critical of recent story develops, please understand that I critique with love, and that I have nothing but the highest respect for the writers and cast.)

So let’s get into it.

This turned out way longer than I meant for it to be.

Since the beginning, each season of Welcome to Night Vale is basically self-contained. The things brought up in them can stretch across seasons, but for the most part any conflict or Big Bad brought up will be resolved when that season ends, which typically is on June 15th.

Let’s look at the first five seasons and their overarching in-season arcs.

Season One: The introduction season. This season laid the groundwork for all the seasons to come and established Cecilos. The arc of the Apache Tracker was resolved within this season.

Season Two: The Strexcorp season. This season taught us a lot about the characters, and about Desert Bluffs.

Season Three: The auction season. This is also the long-distance relationship season for Cecil and Carlos. Both plotlines are resolved beautifully by the end and relate well to each other.

Season Four: The beagle season. Also known as “Who’s a good boy?”. The evil beagle puppy was defeated by the end of the season. I felt like this season’s arc felt very natural and was enjoyable to listen to.

Season Five: The Huntokar season. A lot of things that have been building slowly come together. We finally meet Huntokar after hearing a lot about her throughout the show. The small arc of converging timelines is resolved, but as we will see, it later comes back.

So that’s the first five seasons.

Now, as far as writing styles go, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor are pretty formulaic. (This is also evident in their other shows, Alice Isn’t Dead and Within the Wires). I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. Quite the opposite - I think one of the reasons why Night Vale is so endearing to so many people is because you always know what to expect: the complete unexpected. The world is weird and it doesn’t make sense, but it’s consistent in its inconsistency. You’ll get a community calendar or sponsor, you’ll get deep thoughts about life, and you’ll get a weather. Similarly, with the seasons, you’ll get a problem introduced over the course of the season, and then it will be resolved.

But as you can probably see from the list I’ve written out, the seasons don’t exist in a bubble from each other. The things that happen affect each other. The arrival of Strexcorp in town was what eventually drove Carlos through into the desert otherworld, which set up the conflict for season 3. The tiny city under the bowling alley in season 1 was revisited to teach us more about Huntokar in season 5. Each season has a different flavor, but they’re all ultimately the same dish, if that metaphor makes any sense.

And this is where we get into the issues I’ve been having with the most recent three seasons. My biggest problem is simple. They just don’t have a distinct flavor like the other seasons do. They don’t have anything that stands out to me.

Let’s take a look at seasons six and seven, and then the first episode that dropped today of season eight.

Season Six: The guest writer season. This season was mostly written with guest writers that would do a mini-arc of two to three episodes.

Season Seven: The Carlos’s Double/Blood Space/Lee Marvin/Thanos-Snap season. Not sure what else to call it.

The basic premise of season six was that it would be a bunch of character-driven stories set in the world of Night Vale, most of which were written by guest writers. To me, worldbuilding and characters are more important than plot every time, so I didn’t hate this as a concept. It was just... the execution honestly wasn’t all that interesting to me. I feel like the way the characters were discussed moved their placement within the world, but it didn’t actually change anything we knew about them. Tamika’s episodes, for example, didn’t really show us anything new about her, they just showed us how she acted as a city council leader instead of a militia leader (spoiler alert: pretty much exactly the same).

My biggest problem with season six is that it set up a lot without actually doing anything. All of the best moments from season six were things I thought we would revisit later: who will be the mayor now that Dana stepped down? What is it Carlos is still keeping from Cecil? What’s up with the shipwreck? But then all of these things were totally forgotten in season seven. It was like the writers didn’t care. That may be because they were established by different writers, but it still feels... I don’t know, *Cecil voice* Incomplete?

Now let’s talk season seven. I think season six was definitely the weakest of all Night Vale seasons, but this was a close second (and that shows you how much I love this show, because even the weakest seasons had moments that blew me away, and I’ve relistened to most of the episodes at least once, if not more.) Season seven, like season six, just had way too much going on. For the first few months there was no plot whatsoever, just a bunch of disjointed episodes with seemingly no relation to each other.

And don’t get me wrong - I think a lot of these episodes were amazing. Are You Sure? was thrilling, totally game-changing for podcasts. Save Dark Owl Records was a really great look at Maureen and Michelle. I’ve relistened to UFO Sightings a bunch. But there’s a difference between enjoying episodes alone and thinking they fit in a larger story. And so while I really like a lot of the episodes of season seven... they’re kind of pointless story-wise. What disappointed me the most was the Kevin mini-series near the start of the season - Kevin is one of my favorite characters, and so while I liked to see him happy, I was annoyed that they forgot about him again after the arc ended and they moved on.

That’s because season seven didn’t really have a story - it had a bunch of stories. The problem is that they weren’t introduced until near the very end. We had the Lee Marvin arc that started somewhere in the middle, and I did like that. I thought it was cool to take what seemed like a throwaway gag and turn it into a story, especially one that seemed relatable. But running this arc concurrently with the Blood Space War arc didn’t make any sense to me. There were a bunch of times that I thought the two could relate - linking time travel to being trapped in time would be pretty easy, I thought. But that never happened.

Then the Blood Space War arc nosedived into a pit of emotion after both Cecil and Carlos were erased from history, and I was ecstatic. Not that Cecil and Carlos had been erased - but that the show was taking such a drastic emotional change. It felt like a shift in tone, but also consistent to the show’s format, hitting that perfect sweet spot. I was even more excited when I found out that the resolution to this was that Leonard Burton would have to die again. That seemed like the perfect end to his (albeit brief) character arc, and a great emotional high for the season.

And then the next episode was just... Cecil saying everything had been fixed.

That really disappointed me. It felt so anticlimactic, especially considering the heights some of the other season finales had reached (I’m especially thinking of the dog’s ominous barking right before the finale of Who’s A Good Boy, and the town almost being destroyed). The ending to the Blood Space War arc felt rushed to me. I liked the close of the Lee Marvin arc, but everything else seemed a little off-beat.

I think a big problem with season six and seven is they try to take us to new things within the world of Night Vale, but they do that in a way that doesn’t actually show us anything we need to learn. Eunomia hadn’t been in any other seasons and her backstory was minimal, so her death in season seven had no real impact on me.

So why are they doing that? I don’t know. But it seems like the writing team has made the decision to utilize Cecil more as a voice for the town than an independent character, and are trying to let other people take the spotlight. However, because Cecil is by far one of the strongest and most beloved character, and because he drove most of the story for the first few seasons, this doesn’t work as well as you might hope.

I hoped that season eight might go back to the old format. However, the first episode was another self-contained episode (although I do love Josh Crayton), so that has me worried.

I guess I can say, there’s a difference between a story podcast and a storytelling podcast, does that make sense? Those might overlap, but they aren’t really the same thing. While a story podcast exists to have an overarching plot, a storytelling podcast just wants to put you in a world and let you look around. What I love so much about Night Vale is that it has always been able to be both. It has a plot, but it isn’t just a plot like many other shows are - it can let you walk around, run from government satellites, and NOT enter the dog park.

However, it seems to me that Night Vale is forgetting it does have a story, too. There are still SO many things from past arcs that haven’t been resolved yet. What’s more, the show doesn’t seem all that interested in resolving them. You can have floating cats and five-headed dragons, but you can’t give up an essential part of your show. That doesn’t mean the show can’t still be fun to listen to, if they decide the plot no longer matters. But I think it will be a little less rewarding.

And to finish I’ll just share my biggest fear: I really really really hope Night Vale isn’t going to become normal. At the end of season seven, time started working again. I’m so scared that they’re going to slowly convert the whole town to being normal before the show ends. And I think that would really suck, because it would change what Night Vale means to a lot of people, and what the town really is.

TL;DR: although it is one of the greatest shows ever, Welcome to Night Vale has recently started to stray from its established formulas, tropes and characters, especially in seasons six and seven. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, I feel like the way it’s been executed has weakened the recent episodes. Seasons six and seven also tried to fit too much in without actually doing anything to advance certain arcs or plot points. Nonetheless, it is a great show, and I’m optimistic about the future.

I’d love to have a dialogue about this so if you are the one person alive who’s going to read this, please don’t hesitate to comment or send an ask! Again, I absolutely love this show, these are all just my opinions, and my ability to critique the show exists outside of my adoration for it.

Now I should sleep.

#It's one am #this is not beta'd #and my formatting is all over the place #but here you go #please someone read this #welcome to night vale #night vale presents #podcasts #meta #my meta #cecil palmer #carlos the scientist #cecilos #all hail the glow cloud

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video-killed-the-radio-host · 4 years

Text

My Love, Come and Save Me Ch5

Warning for slight grossness at the end of the chapter. If I need to tag any other warnings, let me know

Carlos drags a hand through his hair as he paces back and forth. How could he be so stupid? Cecil was right there and Carlos just let him go. What’s worse is he provided what was likely critical information to Cecil’s safety. He’s the reason Cecil is going to get hurt. How can he fix this? Charles had his hands on Cecil in a way that made Carlos’s blood boil.

“Uh boss?” Jason’s voice breaks Carlos from his thoughts.

Carlos stops pacing and looks up. “Hey Jace. How can I help you?” He asks with a tired expression.

“When was the last time you slept?” Jason moves closer and puts a hand on the older man’s shoulder.

“I’ll sleep when he’s home safely.”

“You aren’t any good to any one if you’re too exhausted. Go at least take a nap. Please. I’m worried about you.”

“But-”

“Don’t make me pick you up.” Jason threatens. Jason had been a Marine, forced into early retirement due to injury but he was still more than strong enough to carry Carlos around easily.

Carlos puts his hands up in surrender again. “Fine. But I’m getting up in an hour.” He starts to walk away before stopping and turning back. “I have to find him Jace. I have to save him.”

“And we will but you need to take care of yourself. You know Cecil would be disappointed if you aren’t taking care of yourself, even if he was kidnapped. It wouldn’t make for a good reunion if you look like a hobo and pass out when you finally get him back.” Jason points out.

“Alright. Okay.” Carlos puts his hands up in surrender. “I’m going.” He leaves the room.

Walking slowly down the hall, Carlos runs a hand through his hair again. He should have been paying more attention…. If he had, Cecil would be here right now. He can’t help but wonder what was happening to Cecil at this moment. Was he hurt? Locked up? Dead? Something worse? Would Cecil even want him back after Carlos was dumb enough to let him go?

He gets into bed, pulling the blanket up around his shoulders, staring into the darkness. He should have known something was going to happen. His life was dangerous and Cecil…. Cecil teaches kindergarten. He wore pastel cardigans and scrunchies. He wasn’t cut out for this life. And yet he chose to be a part of it. Because he loves Carlos and he’s grown attached to the others. Failing to save him...Carlos wasn’t sure he could survive that. He pulled the blanket over his head and closes his eyes, finally letting his body give into the exhaustion.

When Carlos wakes up, sunlight streams from the window, across his face. He blinks in confusion for a moment before bolting upright and checking the time. Shit. It’s after ten. In the morning. He throws the blanket to the side and makes his way to the kitchen quickly. He finds Jason and Rochelle talking over coffee. “Why did you let me sleep for so long?” He demands.

Rochelle puts her mug down before facing him. “Because you needed the sleep. Cecil’s been gone for nearly two weeks and you’ve slept maybe a full eight hours in that time.” She points out. “We need you at your best and not sleeping hinders that.”

Carlos starts to retort but is cut off when Jason shoves a piece of begal into his mouth. He glared at him, but chews and swallows anyway. “Was that necessary?”

“Completely.” Jason nods. “Because I know you aren’t eating.”

“I do eat.”

“Once every few days doesn’t count so shut up and eat the begal.” Jason pushes the begal into Carlos’s hands. He turns back to Rochelle. “I’m going to scope out the area, see if I can find anything. We are going on nothing so we need something.”

“I want to go with you.” Carlos brushes his hands off. “I need to stop being useless. I can’t just keep being useless.”

“Carlos no. We can’t risk it. If he sees you, he will hurt Cecil more if not kill him. Let me check it out first.”

“I-”

“No Carlos. You’re staying with me. He’s right. We will work with Riley and see what we can do here.” Rochelle puts a hand on Carlos’s shoulder. “It’s the safest alternative.”

Carlos studies both of his teammates, slowly coming to realize there was no way he could win this argument. He sighs softly. “Fine. Alright.” He looks at Jason. “Be careful. If you get hurt I’ll smack the shit out of you.”

Jason smirks. “Boss I’m offended that you think I’d be so reckless.”

“I mean it.”

-----.-----

Cecil wakes slowly, wincing when he moves, the burns from the cigarette still healing.Instead of sitting up, he curls up into a ball. He was alone and he felt it. The silence of the empty room was heavy, pressing down on Cecil’s shoulders. He had seen Carlos ...was close enough to touch and yet so far out of his reach. He hears the door open and holds his breath, waiting for the worst. When the bed dipped behind him, Cecil squeezes his eyes shut. Here it comes….

But then a gentle hand touches his shoulder. Cecil jumps before giving a soft cry of pain. Turning his head quickly, he realizes it’s only Kevin and not Charles.

“Hey.” Kevin puts his hands up. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Kevin?” Cecil squints a little at the man in yellow. “What are you doing in here? Won’t Charles-”

“Shh…” Kevin hushed him quickly. “He’s not here right now. I figured you’d like a shower or something. Y'know...without the huge risk.”

“Why…”

“We don’t have much time and that needs to be cleaned out before it gets infected.” Kevin stands and offers his hand to Cecil.

Cecil studies the outstretched hand for several moments before taking it and standing slowly. “Okay…” He lets himself be led out of the room and down the hall. He looks around as they walk. This is the most he’s scenes of the house, as when he woke up that first day he was already in the room and wasn’t allowed out since, other than the lunch. The walls were a light blue, lighter than those of the room, with a green floral print. The floor is a beautiful hardwood, cold under his feet.

FInally they get to the bathroom. The walls are lined with light grey and yellow tiles, with both a shower stall and a large elegant bathtub. The floor in this room are some kind of brown stone. Cecil looks around the room. There’s a cabinet next to the toilet which Cecil assumes holds towels.

“You can use either on you like.” Kevin offers.

“Will you sit with me?” Cecil asks softly. “I ...don't want to be alone.”

Kevin looks surprised at this but nods. “Of course I’ll sit with you.” He perches on the toilet.

Cecil nods and slowly strips down, not really caring that he was naked in front of practically a stranger. It didn’t really matter at this point did it? Charles would either break him or kill him so what was the point? Deciding to go with the bathtub, Cecil fiddles with the knobs before getting it to be the right temperature. FInally stepping into the tub, Cecil puts in the plug in and sits down, closing his eyes. “Kevin?”

“Hm?” Kevin looks over, fidgeting a little.

“You don’t have to sit all the way over there.”

“Oh…” Kevin stands and shuffles over, sitting on the floor next to the tub, facing Cecil.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.” Kevin smiles.

“What were you like before….”

“Before he got me?”

“Yeah…”

“I was…...at the tail end of my divorce. My wife and I….we had fallen out of love. Better off as friends y'know? I have a son. HIs name is Donavan. I love him deeply but I don’t know if he even remembers me. I was taken six years ago. I resisted for a long time. But I think I have Stockholm Syndrome. I’ve…..grown to love him. That doesn’t mean I support him. I don’t. I want to help you. Keep you safe and eventually help you get out. But ...I don’t think I’ll ever be truly free of him.” Kevin trails his fingers over the surface of the water in the tub. “I want to help you before it hurts you like he’s hurt me.”

“Oh…..” Cecil pushes stray hair from his face. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I just ...let me help you.”

Cecil is quiet for a moment before nodding and smiling a little. “Thank you Kevin.”

“Thank me after you’re home.”

-----.-----

“Hey boss!” Rochelle calls through the house. Jason still wasn’t back yet and he had left three days ago.

“What?” Carlos calls, moving from the office in the back of the house to the den. He looks around. “Have you seen Jason?”

“No. I was going to ask you.” She looks around where there’s a knock at the door. “Maybe that’s him?”

“No ...he has a key. Jason doesn’t knock.” Carlos moves to the door and opens it. On the porch was another box, much like the one he had gotten containing Cecil’s hair. He feels his stomach drop. Oh god…what now? Carlos crouches and opens his pocket knife. Rule nine. He cuts open the box and slowly looks inside.Looking inside made Carlos’s blood run cold. “Santo infierno…” He whispers, falling back and dropping the knife.

“What is it?” Rochelle asks, leaning forward. “Oh god…”

Nestled inside the box was a bag…..containing Jason’s head.

#Welcome to Night Vale #wtnv #wtnv cecil #wtnv carlos #wtnv kevin #Jason the scientist #angst #mlcasm #fic wip

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cecilspeaks · 4 years

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170 - To the Family and Friends

Love the winner, hate the win. Welcome to Night Vale.

I start today with sad news. I must inform you of the passing of Intern Victor. To the friends and family of Intern Victor, we extend our condolences. Oh, that reminds me. Our intern program has a new open spot available. Hours are flexible, as is time itself. You must be fluent in at least three languages, although one of those can be your own dream language, and another can be a future language that doesn’t yet exist. This is an entry level position. All applicants must have 30 years experience in the field of community radio, and have been the managing director of at least 2 radio stations, or equivalent unregistered stations broadcasting coded messages to our brave spies in the field. This is a non-paying position, but we do give you 4 credits to the institutions of your choice. Please apply in person by groveling before the Station Management door and crying: “Choose me! Choose me!” as their tendrils draw you slowly toward them. I look forward to meeting whoever is hired. Always so fun when we get a new intern.

And now for a look at the day’s news. The Night Vale Medical Association has ordered a review of the management of Night Vale Asylum, after a number of irregularities have cropped up involving a transdimensional missing plane and a pilot who could control people’s thoughts. “Honestly, we had a lot of cases like that back in the 60’s,” said Lonnie Chapman, chairman of the Medical Association. “Mental institutions used to be cruel places, where the fragile rift between dimensions was regularly breached and telekinetic powers were exploited. And people were treated as less than people, for the simple crime of having an illness that could not be found in the blood or the bile.” Lonnie settled back into the sagging comfort of his old arm chair, sighed and rubbed his forehead. “We endeavour to help, not to other,” he whispered. “It should be common sense, this kindness. Why is kindness not common sense?” He said this last so quietly that no one heard him. Dust motes circled tirelessly in the afternoon sun through the window. The Night Vale Medical Association is looking to shut down the outdated asylum and replace it with a brand new state of the art treatment center, located near Grove Park. More on this story as the story has more to it.

I guess I should get into a little more detail about how Intern Victor died, since some of you might be curious. You know, I think the story starts back in my very first days as host of this radio station. After the previous host, Leonard Burton, after – umm… ehhhh.. Once I took over as host of this radio station, Victor was one of my first interns. Eager and earnest and always helpful. He was first in the station in the morning and last one out at night. His research was impeccable.

“That’s not true,” he would say every time I said something that wasn’t true. “That’s not true either,” he would say. He would say stuff like that a lot. He was very diligent. It kind of felt like we were starting this great adventure in radio broadcasting together. I thought that some day after I… after… ehhhhh.. ummm… once I was no longer host of this radio station, perhaps Victor would be the one to take over. “Some day, Victor,” I would murmur in the quietest hours of the night shift, “Some day maybe you will be where I am now.” “Maybe, Cecil,” he would say back into the intercom from the producer’s booth, “But for now, please stop murmuring that into the mic. We’re live right now. Then one day he told me he was leaving. That he appreciated all the time he had spent as an intern, that he had learned a lot, but that he felt his place in the world was not with radio after all. [sputters] “Not with radio?!” I sputtered. I simply did not understand the concept. “If there is not community radio, then what is there? What is there besides that? Will someone tell me what else there is?” “Thank you for our time together,” he said gently, and then he left. It would be the last time I saw him for many years.

And now a word from our sponsors. Today’s sponsor is White Claw’s new line of non-alcoholic alcoholic Seltzer beverages. Listen, everyone loves a good carbonated beverage. On a hot day, out at the beach, or not at the beach, the two places it is possible to be. It’s great to just pop one of those bad boys open and really let that water with bubbles rip on your gullet. But not everyone likes to drink alcohol, for a variety of reasons that are never ever your business. Just don’t ask or bring it up. It’s so easy to not do that. That’s why White Claw is proud to announce the newest version of our alcoholic Seltzer beverage, now without alcohol! It’s everything you loved about Seltzer water, but for the first time, you don’t have to get intoxicated. Flavors include blackberry, wild nettle, wet stone, and one we’re just calling “Tumbleweed Crush”. Even we aren’t completely clear on what that one tastes like, but hey, it’s water and it’ll make you burp without making you drunk. White Claw’s new line of non-alcoholic alcoholic Seltzer beverages. Available wherever you buy your alcoholic Seltzer beverages. This has been a word from our sponsors.

I didn’t finish with the story of how Intern Victor died, I guess. Ummm, let me quickly wrap that up. So, a few years after he left, he came back again. He was older than me now with salt and pepper hair and a stiffness to his walk. When he had left, he had been several years younger than me, but time changes us all, I suppose. “Cecil! I didn’t know if you’d still be here,” he said. I bristled at this, hearing a perceived implication that I should have gone on to something larger, that by staying put I had allowed him to be pull ahead of me in some intangible way. So I responded with manic friendliness to compensate. “Still here!” I shouted. “Great to see ya, buddy wo-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-how! What have you been up to?” He told me that he had left Night Vale, gotten an apartment just outside of somewhere called Fresno, that it was difficult at first, and that he felt lonely much of the time. But that he had slowly made friends, so many friends, and had found a job that became a career that became part of his life. He worked with teenagers who were going through a tough time, seeing them through to better times. He was very well liked for what he did, and he was very good at it. “But I’ve decided to retire,” he said. “I’m getting up in the years, you know? But wow, you don’t look like you’ve aged a day.” “I haven’t,” I said. He was so much older than me then. I wondered where the years had gone and what I might have accomplished, if I had aged as well. He had retired to Night Vale to be with his family and friends and the people who knew and loved him best, and relax into the soft years of his latter life. So that… wait. Well, that’s not how he died, but I have to get to this next report. I’ll finish it in a second.

And now traffic. There was a song once sung by sailors of an island in the west, where the sun would shine forever and not a minute less. They say that on that island a sailor could find their rest, finally let slip shut their eyelids on that island in the west. But I’ve been searching, and been searching all my life, as though some cruel test, and have never found my way to that island in the west. There was a song once sung by sailors and I believed it, I confess. A foul lie I still believe in, my sweet island in the west. This has been traffic.

Intern Victor lived in Night Vale for many years more. He was active in charities and volunteer groups, continuing to offer counseling to students at the local high school. He lived in the Hefty Sycamore Trailer Park, watering a garden of flowers that he kept in pots around his trailer. It seemed that Victor was even more busy in retirement than he had been in his long career. Returning to his community seemed to invigorate him. He helped Carlos with experiments at the labs, donning goggles and lab coats and writing down numbers with hearts around them, all of that science stuff. Carlos said he was surprisingly good at it for someone without training. He worked with Dana at City Hall, creating the No More Pit initiative, which strove to keep one teen a year from entering that pit on Clement Street and disappearing forever. Now, the initiative was unsuccessful and the pit continues to devour but they, it was the attempt that matters. He acted as a volunteer lifeguard at the Waterfront Recreation Area, at which he saved a record five people in one day from drowning! A truly astounding record when you consider that there is no water at the Waterfront Recreation Area, Night Vale having an entirely arid climate.

Yes, Intern Victor was accomplished and well liked. He would have made a fine host at this radio station some day, but he never showed much interest, which is a pity. Because after I… After, well… Who will take up that mantle? Not Victor, not anymore. Well, I guess I still haven’t told the story of how he died.

Uh, let me do that just After the weather.

[A List for Spring” by Joseph Fink https://josephfink.bandcamp.com/]

Victor was in bed. The curatin over the window shifted slightly in the breeze, so the sun flickered in the room, shadow and bright, like a message from the world outside that he would never live to understand. His breath felt like a finite quantity, slowly drawn out of his chest. He knew that the last of it was coming soon. He wanted to use the drags of his breath for words that would sum up his life, but he couldn’t think of any. He could only think of “I am tired”. He could only think of “Thank you for being here.” He could only think of “I wish I had more time”, although eh didn’t know what he would have done with that time if he had any.

Around his bed were the people who had known him throughout his life. There was his sister Carly, and his brother Herman, and his aunt Ronnie, ancient and brittle but apparently destined to outlive him. There was his friend from college, Norm, whose hands shook as he looked into Victor’s eyes. There was former mayor Dana and her brother, leaning into each other in sorrow, keeping each other upright as a family creature of grief. There was Carlos in an understated lab coat, frowning. There was nothing more scientific than death, and yet Carlos hated the fact of it. And he wrestled with the contradiction within himself. Some natural processes feel unnatural, no matter how many times they occur to us, they are a surprise that our whole life spends telegraphing.

In the corner was Rosario, one of the teenagers Victor had worked with back in Fresno, who had eventually moved to Night Vale after getting lost in the shelves of a strange antique shop and waking up in the vacant lot out back of the Ralphs. She was middle-aged now, her face glistened with tears. “Everything I am is because of you,” she said. Victor snorted. “Don’t blame me,” he said with one of those last precious breaths. And she grinned despite herself. “You were the first person that cared about who I was,” she said. “I’ll never forget you.” “Already I’m in past tense,” he said, but he grabbed her hand and clasped it in a fervent silent thank you. Because she was testament that he had been useful, and there was nothing more important in a human life than to be useful to other people.

I was there too, and I stepped forward. “You were the best intern I ever had,” I said. “I know,” he said, and he winked.

It can be… strange when we first meet someone when they are young and just started out, and are in the entry positions in the career they want, to realize they have the potential for an entire life. Victor ended up a great man. A man with deep roots in the community. A man who went from 10 years younger than me to several decades older than me. And I… well, I still think of him as an intern, and I suppose I always will, but his potential was realized upon the lives of everyone in that room, and many other lives still.

A strong breeze came through the window and the flickering of light increased, as though that incoherent messenger was getting more frantic to be understood. Victor knew that his finite breaths had reached their last few. And he did not use them to say anything at all. He smiled, and met each of our eyes, and then… And then after…

To the family and friends of Intern Victor. To the family. To our families, blood or chosen. They are the net on which we can fall again and again. To the friends, to our friends. The people who make life worth living. Who help us when we need help. Who we help when we need to help.

Intern Victor was a good intern. He was a good person. He is gone. We are here. Let’s make ourselves useful. To all families. To all friends.

Stay tuned next for a tall glass of water greedily, drunk by a person who did not realize they were thirsty until the liquid hit their lips.

Good night, Night Vale, Good night.

Today’s proverb: Earth is technically a sandwich, where the upper bread is stars and the lower bread is stars and the filling is rock and lava and a few incidental humans.

#welcome to night vale #wtnv transcrfpts #episode 170 #to the family and friends

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internnormaloak · 4 years

Text

Things That Make It Warm-Cecilos

Fandom: Welcome To Night Vale

Genre: Fluff

Warnings: Cecil’s Secret (Which Is A Spoiler For Spy In The Desert’s Bonus Track)

Pairings: Cecilos, Abby/Steve Carlsberg (Mentioned)

Characters: Cecil, Carlos, Steve Carlsberg (Mentioned), Abby (Mentioned), Janice (Mentioned)

Read On AO3

Summary: “Life in Night Vale was...dangerous. Incredibly so. But he felt so lucky that he had moments such as this, where could exist comfortably and with his family, a family he never imagined.”

Cecil picked up Esteban as his son had raised his arms up, a nonverbal ask to be held and carried. Cecil happily did. He loved holding his son, he was a physical reminder that he was real, that this life he had with Carlos was real (Though he also knew that even physical things could deceive you.

Esteban cuddled up into his dad’s chest, the three-year-old loved to be held. Cecil carried Esteban to the living room where he turned on the TV, the classic anime Cells At Work was on. It was classic Night Vale television as it combined blood and education!

Carlos came in and saw the two. He sat down next to them though not cuddling (he wasn’t in a touchy mood today, today was more of a coexisting day). Aubergine ran into the room as fast as his tiny dog legs could allow. He jumped on the couch on the other side of Cecil.

Carlos faintly followed along with the show, Aubergine napped next to them, and Esteban sang along to the theme song as well as any three year old could. Cecil smiles at the scene.

Life in Night Vale was...dangerous. Incredibly so. But he felt so lucky that he had moments such as this, where could exist comfortably and with his family, a family he never imagined.

Growing up, family was weird. He never knew his father and his mother was always doing her own thing. He and Abby were distant from each other until Janice was born and even then he was often caught up in work.

Now he had Carlos, who was so brilliant and so sweet. Who was very handsome of course but was also so endearingly excited. His voice was so nice and despite the fact that they were different people who saw the world differently, he considered himself lucky to be able to come home to him every day.

Then there was Aubergine- the sweetest dog in the world! He is such a good boy and is very protective of their family. Cecil had always been a dog person and that most definitely hadn’t changed with age.

Then of course was Esteban, the light of his eyes. He loved his son so much. Esteban was so very smart and was very sweet. He was very vocal and quite eloquent for a three year old if you asked Cecil. (Granted if you asked Cecil about Esteban, prepare for a rant about how much he loves his son, the same happens if you ask Carlos about Esteban)

Cecil was pulled out of thoughts by Carlos speaking.

“Pride month is next month Cecil.”

Cecil nodded excitedly. “I know! I’m excited to take our annual trans rights photo with Steve and Abby”

It had become tradition that every year Steve, Abby, and Carlos would wear there trans merch and Cecil would wear his non-binary things and they would yell trans rights very loudly while Janice took a few photos.” Cecil would also join Sam and other non-binary citizens for the enby photo.

Carlos smile was bright, he start flapping his arms excitedly, “I can get out all of my pride things and we can wear flags like capes, and I could do pride themed explosions, which are scientifically proven to be gayer than regular explosions, and it’s supercool!!” He continued to ramble and stim happily and Cecil listened. He glanced down at Esteban who was absorbed in the show.

As Carlos spoke and Esteban laughed at the show, Cecil thanked whoever or whatever was up there for this, because he was so lucky.

A/N: I hoped you enjoyed! I love them. The the title is from “The Things That Make It Warm” by cavetown cause if you can’t tell I’m not straight.

Please let me know what you think! It you ever want to chat feel free to PM me or send me an ask!

#my writing #welcome to night vale #cecils secret #esteban wtnv #esteban palmer #cecil gershwin palmer #carlos the scientist #cecilos

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angelinarecs · 5 years

Text

Welcome to Night Vale Recs

One of my favourite podcasts! You can follow the full rec page here.

Organized by pairing (or gen) and then alphabetized by title. Summaries (which have been copied from their respective stories) and descriptions are provided. Notation at the end of the description indicates if a story is completed or a WIP.

Cecil/Carlos

An Accident of Science - Cecil announces something on the air and Carlos is the most surprised of them all. Romance/Family. Carlos tries to navigate the weirdness of the Night Vale medical system when he learns that Cecil is expecting. Oh look, I’m reccing another mpreg fic. Gee, I need to get a better coping mechanism for the ‘ovaries don’t function’ shit and stop posting these things. But they’re just so cute and my unnecessarily hormonal ass wants more. One-shot.

A Radio Host is Always Tenacious - It had already happened to Carlos, so Cecil really should have seen it coming. But then he was out reporting on the sudden torrential downpour and it was nearing Night Vale’s cooler season and honestly, Carlos was so cute when he was doing science that Cecil didn’t want to bother him with something so insignificant… Sickfic. In which magic rain reveals the truth to the citizens of Night Vale and causes mass pandemonium. Cecil is forced to confront the memories he buried after Cassettes and Carlos tries to keep everything together long enough to get them both out of danger. Slightly weird, oddly written, but fitting of Night Vale. Complete.

for the way across - Cecil is jumped while walking home from work, and Carlos takes him to Abby’s for help. Fluff/Hurt/Comfort. A blind!Cecil story. It’s not the most original plot, but I did enjoy the look at disability and bloodstone circles in Night Vale. One-shot.

Four Years Later - It’s been four years since Carlos first arrived in Night Vale, and he is planning to propose. Meanwhile, Kevin finally escapes the desert otherworld and decides that the only way he can be with Carlos is if Cecil is out of the picture—permanently. Angst/Hurt/Comfort. A take on the possibility of Cecil being immortal as well as an explanation for his fear of mirrors. This is one of my favorite fanfics and I really love how it ties into and plays with several parts of cannon so well. A must read for angsty Cecilos fans. Complete.

Offspring - “Listeners, I can’t stand it any longer. I have the most exciting news and I just can’t hold it in anymore. Carlos, my beautiful, perfect husband, I hope you’re listening, because this announcement is mostly for you. As some of you might be aware, I experience a cycle every six years and while that would usually be an embarrassment to admit, this time it brings me nothing but joy. After a visit to the Night Vale General Hospital this morning, I discovered that I’m carrying six eggs, all of them occupied. That’s right listeners, I’m pregnant!” Family/Fluff. Cecil is pregnant in only the way Night Vale could allow, but he and Carlos are excited to start a family. This is cute and fluffy and I need it in my life right now. One-shot.

The Night of the Silver Teeth - The sex that started it all is sort of Carlos’ fault. No, that’s not fair. It takes two to tango, they say. Except that in Nightvale they’d say, “It takes two to spawn a vicious, toothed, screaming hell-creature that will chew its way out of your insides in the middle of the night and leave your boyfriend working far above his medical qualifications to save your life. But oh, isn’t it the cutest little button!“ Horror/Hurt/Comfort. Cecil unexpectedly has a child in the middle of the night or, more accurately, the child chews its way out of his abdomen. Poor Carlos has to figure out how to keep everyone alive and in one piece. I love when crack and horror intersect in fun and terrifying ways! Also, some really well done characterization with Cecil’s radio show. One-shot.

Night Vale’s Newest Citizen - The City Council declares Night Vale a “disaster zone,” and puts all citizens on strict rations. Except there isn’t enough food to go around, and Cecil decides that Carlos is more deserving of their food than he is. Angst. Cecil makes stupid decisions, Carlos is oblivious until it’s almost too late, and Night Vale’s emergency systems screws everyone over. Angst in the beginning turns into delightful fluff at the end. One-shot.

No One Said Possession Was Pleasant - “…she turns to look back, and we all see her face and we…” Cecil paused, though not entirely by choice. He felt a push at the back of his mind.

“We….” He struggled to continue speaking, he felt himself floundering in his own mind. Somewhere in his fleeting consciousness Cecil registered panic, a tightening in the vocal chords, which were normally soft and loose. His voice scraped across his throat. He could feel his pupils contract painfully, his skin rippling. “we…. The Woman From Italy, Oh! Merciful Goddess!” Hurt/Comfort/Fluff. Episode tag for The Woman From Italy, mostly just a guilty pleasure excuse to see Cecil affected by the horrors that Night Vale regularly goes through. One-shot.

Palmer, Cecil G. Sertraline - Set sometime before Condos. (31.5) Cecil has certain preferences for transportation and date nights and unusual sleeping habits. Carlos is very accepting of it all, but a little confused. My theory of how Carlos found out his boyfriend has a chronic illness. Fluff. Am I reccing this because I also have a chronic illness that my spouse has to contend with, maybe. But it’s cute and very in character, so here it is. One-shot.

Red Flagged (Or, Five Times Cecil Saved Carlos from Almost Certain Death, and One Time Carlos Returned the Favor) - Does what it says on the tin. If this is terrible, I am not responsible. If it is okay, then yeah. I take full responsibility. Fluff/Romance. Cecil is always there to save Carlos, mostly from himself, as the scientist tries to figure out life in Night Vale. I’m always a sucker for 5+1 because I love the variations on a theme and this did not disappoint even if most of the individual plots are drabbles. One-shot.

Scientific Reasoning - Earthquakes in Night Vale have never been real, have never been felt…until today. So what does that have to do with the radio station, and why can’t anyone contact Cecil? Hurt/Comfort. Carlos has to rescue Cecil after an earthquake nearly destroys the community radio station. Much drama and just the right amount of hurt-comfort ensues. This story was written fairly early in cannon and so some Steve Carlsberg hate, but still a cute read. Carlos is an indulgent boyfriend and Cecil is a workaholic. One-shot.

This is Good - After a particularly vicious punishment from Station Management, Cecil returns home to find a welcome surprise who isn’t as nonchalant about what happened as he is. Angst. Carlos tries to patch Cecil up while coming to terms with the how horrifyingly normal violence is in Night Vale. Oh look, another guilty pleasure fic! One-shot.

You are a Mystery to Me - Carlos has an accident. Cecil causes an accident for himself. Thus, side-by-side hospital beds and a front-row seat for your partner’s suffering. Hurt/Comfort. No matter how romantic matching hospital beds might be, both Carlos and Cecil are just happy that the other one is alright. One-shot.

#welcome to night vale #night vale fanfic #cecilos #cecil palmer #carlos the scientist #weirdness #general shenanigans #these boys are so cute #angelina's recs

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davetheshady · 5 years

Note

🌟 how about chapter 4 of waiting for the bus in the rain 🌟 and only partially because i showed up to yell about the last few paragraphs when it first dropped. also just because i love Julie content and it's the very middle of that fic

::blows dust off inbox:: So! Now that I’ve back from traveling through three countries and recovered from trying to leave most of my arm skin in one of them (PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: don’t go so fast you flip over on the Alpine Slide, particularly if you’re in the actual Alps) here’s some DVD commentary on Chapter 4 of Waiting for the Bus in the Rain! It’s chock full of my stylistic hallmarks, i.e. way longer than I expected.

(Note to my sister: THIS IS FULL OF SPOILERS. GO READ MY STORY FIRST YOU LOSER)

There’s a Sheriff’s Secret Police officer outside Julie’s window. Considering she’s in her office on the second floor, this is fairly impressive. But when they scream and scrabble against the glass after accidentally kicking over their ladder for the third time, Julie’s had enough.

Even when they’re not under suspicion of using the scientific method, Julie has to deal with WAY more (attempted) surveillance than Carlos ever does. This is partially because she doesn’t have amazing hair, but also because Cecil doesn’t narrate large chunks of her life over the radio that the SSP can copy down and submit as a report.

vulnerabilities include fire and cold iron

and according to the literature high velocity cheese wedges but i’ve never seen anyone test that

My hand to God. Probably my number one complaint about fantasy as a genre is that everyone takes stuff from Celtic mythology so seriously when half of it is just. Completely bonkers.

Originally, most of the relevant exposition about fairies was provided by a different character entirely: Carlos-f’s misplaced smartphone, an AI who Julie called Hex (yes, like in Discworld, hell yeah science wizards) because she refused to give Julie her name. Hex provided such ringtones as “Dark Horse” and “Double Rainbow” and would occasionally get distracted by lists of numbers. Hmm…

I changed it back because 1) it was a detour and this chapter was long enough already, 2) Julie and Carlos’ friendship is one of the main throughlines and having them talk to each other was better for the story, and 3) him texting during the middle of a battle is hilarious. But as far as I’m concerned, Hex is still canon.

Andre yawns on the other end of the line and asks, “What time is it?”

“Quit whining, it’s only—” Julie looks at the clock.

Shit.

“—3:00 AM,” she finishes defiantly, because she still has her pride. Embarrassment pricks at her like flying embers settling on bare skin, because now Andre knows she was so out of it she didn’t even bother to try keeping track of the time, and he’s going to think she couldn’t sleep because of feelings, which is both correct and incorrect, because she wasn’t even trying to sleep since distracting herself by going over the minutiae of their data while the Sheriff’s Secret Police scream and fall in the bushes is better than listening to her cats prowl around while lying in her quiet apartment by herself, and any moment now he’s going to feel bad and decide to humor her and answer her in a voice filled with cloying pity and say—

“Would Hiram McDaniels count as one respondent, or five?” He yawns again.

A good chunk of Julie’s inner turmoil just, like, boils down to a recurring loop of that Tim Kreider quote about “If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.” She doesn’t consciously WANT the rewards of being loved, it just kind of… happens… and then she’s stuck with incredibly loyal life-long friends… and now she not only has to deal with her own feelings but theirs too, which is pretty much her worst nightmare…

Fortunately, since she’s already gone through the mortifying ordeal of being known, they do frequently pull through and offer the kind of support she knows how to accept.

“Give TV’s Frank a kiss for me.”

“I’m not kissing my cat for you,” says Julie.

I mean, she’ll kiss the cat. Just not on request.

And yes, all her cats are named after the Mad Scientists’ sidekicks on Mystery Science Theater 3000. ~foreshadowing~

When she opens the door of her workshop later that morning, she finds that someone has been by to leave her a breakfast tray. Well, “tray”, in that it’s a textbook, and “breakfast”, in that it’s a French press, a stale churro, and her blood pressure medication. But the French press is completely full with still-warm coffee, so overall she’s going to count this as a win.

This appeared pretty early in my drafts: it’s just such a funny mental image to me and also encapsulates Julie and Gary’s relationship pretty well, i.e. a string of question marks who somehow get along.

The naturally suspicious part of her wonders if he deliberately provoked her reaction to the flamingo to gather more information about it. The naturally analytical part of her points out that Carlos is more likely to gnaw off his own hand than put someone in danger, especially when he could just put himself in danger instead.

Julie is just a tad cynical, so she’d definitely think of potentially negative interpretations of her friend’s actions. But it’s not actually a possibility she dwells on in any real sense, and every time she interacts with Carlos-f (not to mention Carlos-0) she trusts him implicitly. She wouldn’t admit it in a thousand years, but she considers Carlos one of the few genuinely good people in the world: not because he never makes mistakes or creates personal disasters, but exactly because of those things. She knows he’s a flawed person, and that everyone is flawed, so that makes him genuine – which means every time he’s tried to do the right thing at personal cost, over and over, that was genuine too.

Basically, there’s a reason why in the last chapter she automatically references “scientist means hero” with “Fuck, I’m turning into you!”

“So,” she says. “Nilanjana. Do you need new pronouns, or anything?”

“Does anyone need any pronouns?” asks Gary contemplatively, which Julie takes as a ‘No’.

“Should I drop ‘Gary’ entirely? Do you want me to change your name in our paperwork?”

He thinks about it for a moment. “I don't know, man,” he concludes. “I don’t really believe in labels.”

Gary has galaxy-brained from “gender is a social construct” straight to “identity is a social construct” and beyond.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asks Julie.

“I think so, Dr. K,” says Gary. “But how will we get three pink flamingos into one pair of capri pants?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-xrnIXQ3iQ

What happens when the wave function ψ is the same as the physical system it describes, and what happens when that physical system collapses?

i.e. what would happen if common misperceptions of the Observer Effect were actually the correct perceptions?

Julie can’t help it: she snorts. “Passionate? Me?”“Well, yeah,” says Romero. “You really care about the things that interest you. You get really involved and angry and never quit or back down.”“Oh,” says Julie, then blurts, “You like that I’m angry?”“I… don’t like it when you’re unhappy?” says Romero. “But – it’s part of you, so… yeah, I guess I do, because it’s how you are. Why? Is – is everything okay?”She’s spent a lifetime having people tell her to stop being angry. No one’s ever told her she’s fine the way she is.

There have been many, many, MANY thinkpieces about how women are socialized not to express anger, often even to themselves. That was never going to work for Julie, who after all is powered by constant low-level rage, but that just means she had to deal with the backlash from not adhering to social programming instead (on top of additional backlash from being a woman in a male-dominated field). Of his own free will, Romero not only rejects that social programming, but also clearly spent time thinking about her empirically to determine that her anger is a positive force instead of a random and horrible personality trait.

He’s a Good Dude.

When she was in elementary school, her third grade teacher had been fond of saying, “If you’re bored, it means you have no imagination,” at least until Julie had decided to deal with her boredom after finishing her science assignment, her homework, and the rest of the textbook by seeing what happened if you jammed a paperclip into the electric socket. (The answer was certainly not boring and, in fact, probably the most exciting and practical thing they learned that year.)

That used to be my aunt’s favorite saying. I personally did not copy Julie’s response, but it is based on research done by one of my friends. (It’s okay, he was very careful about safety and made sure to use rubber-handled scissors to poke random bits of metal into the outlet. Apart from a classmate’s socks catching on fire, everyone was totally fine.)

She wakes to the sound of Cecil talking about the other week’s marathon, which may or may not have been mandatory, whoops. Carlos has texted her an emoji of various hadrosaurids gathered around a campfire singing “We Are the Champions”.

PREVIOUSLY IN NIGHT VALE:

EXT. - THE LABS

Thousands of citizens stream down Main Street, driven relentlessly forward to the Narrow Place. The Harbingers of the Distant Prince hurl themselves towards the building again and again, only to be rebuffed by the wards. Charred corpses lay scattered around the perimeter. Green storm clouds gather overhead as their anger grows.

INT. - LAB ONE

ANDRE

Did you hear something?

JULIE

[not looking up from her welding]

No.

Carlos, meanwhile, has NO idea his emojis are not in fact standard.

“I liked him,” says Josie. [...] “He was trying to do… something, I forget what. I hope he figured it out.” At Julie’s incredulity, she says, “Some people, they’re rough around the edges, but they try. They hope for something better and keep going. That’s important.”

“What if you go where you’re not supposed to?”

“Then you come back and fix what you can,” says Josie.

“What if you can’t?”

“Then you find someone to help you,” Josie replies. “Oh! I love this song.”

She turns up the volume of the radio and treats everyone to the aria from Shastakovich’s Paint Your Wagon.

Vocals by L. Marvin

Angels chilling at your house are, of course, part of the standard retirement package for former Knights of the Church. Old Woman Josie used to carry Esperacchius and passed it on to the Egyptian, after which it went to Sanya. She and Shiro were buds and saw Elvis in Vegas (and also, interestingly, several times in the Ralphs).

Anyway, if you want to suggest that a character is subconsciously mulling over an issue, I recommend having them ask some leading questions without describing their reactions and then change the subject.

“It’s come to my attention,” she begins, then has to stop and clear her throat again. “It’s come to my attention that we have a pretty good thing going on. So I was just wondering if you’d like to keep doing this, you know. For the indefinite future. With me.”When he doesn’t say anything, or look at her, or move at all for that matter, she removes her hand from under her thigh where she’s been sitting on it and points at the lease. “I highlighted where you have to sign,” she says, somewhat unnecessarily. “If you wanted to.”

I think this is the only time we see Julie nervous about anything when her life is not actively in danger.

You can’t write a romance arc without including some degree of emotional vulnerability – it just wouldn’t be satisfying. On the other hand, how that emotional vulnerability manifests is REALLY dependent on the person, and if you don’t base it firmly in their character it wouldn’t be satisfying, either. (I’m REALLY picky about romances in part because of this.) Julie’s not the type to pine or swoon or be filled with self-doubt*, but she is bad at feelings, and unfortunately, she’s determined that an equitable relationship with Romero requires some kind of tangible, committed expression of them. So she does that as best she can. It’s not actively harmful to her, but it does require a stretch out of her comfort zone.

* ::cough::Carlos::cough::

Yes, Julie has technically registered their equipment with City Hall, in that they’re listed as alternatively “electronic abaci” and “databases” and she’s claimed they only use the internet for checking email. Until now, they’ve coasted on general good will towards Carlos/his hair and the fact that all authority figures have been functionally electronically illiterate since the Incident in the community college’s Computer and Fire Sciences building.

Look, I could have SWORN there was an Incident at the Computer and Fire Sciences building specifically mentioned in canon. Can I find it anywhere? No. Did I listen to an episode that was subsequently erased from history? Possibly.

This time, someone picks up. There are a few seconds of sleepy fumbling, followed by “Hello?” in more vocal fry than voice.“Cecil!” she says. “Is Carlos there?”“Are you in fear for your life from the long arm of the law?” Cecil mumbles.

her current ringtone

“Julie, I said hold on!”“I am holding on,” she snarls as the rumbling stops. “It’s a diagnostic. 75% efficiency? Am I the only one who cares about proper maintenance in this town?”

This combines two of my favorite things: people focusing on hilariously inconsequential details during a stressful situation, and Julie lowkey engaging in supervillainy. Nikola Tesla did not design earthquake machines so Night Vale could install shitty ones they can barely use. STANDARDS.

“I probably wouldn’t have destroyed Weeping Miner,” she says eventually.

“I know,” says Carlos.

“I could have, though,” she says.

“I know that too,” says Carlos.

[...] Carlos shifts. She looks over; he briefly catches her eye and says, “So could I.”It’s not the same. Carlos would probably feel bad about it, for one. But she feels some of her anger dissipate anyway. At least she’s not the only one dealing with this bullshit.

Subconscious concern --> conscious concern! Getting back to Julie’s cynicism: she doesn’t think there are very many good people in the world, and that excludes her too. Sure, she’s risked her life to save others, fight baddies, and make sure the dangerous technology she’s developed doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, but she knows she has selfish reasons to do them, like protecting her friends and making sure the town/world isn’t destroyed so she can keep doing her research.

But at the same time, the fact that she has been dwelling on the ethics of her situation ever since Chapter 19 of Love is All You Need, that she is genuinely bothered that she’d consider destroying a neighborhood, and that she’s talking about this with Carlos, who considers them to have a similar dilemma, suggests that deep down she is dissatisfied by her cynical model of the world because the data isn’t quite matching up. Which, of course, means she needs more data in the form of Chapters 6 and 7.

On one side is a large picture of Carrie Fisher giving everyone the finger

I think Space Mom is mandatory at protests now.

This whole section (especially the rain) was heavily influenced by the March for Science, which both Ginipig and I went to in 2017. You too can make a difference and also give yourself writing material!

“Any more words of wisdom, Usidork?” she asks instead.

USIDORE, WIZARD OF THE 12TH REALM OF EPHYSIYIES, MASTER OF LIGHT AND SHADOW, MANIPULATOR OF MAGICAL DELIGHTS, DEVOURER OF CHAOS, CHAMPION OF THE GREAT HALLS OF TERR'AKKAS. THE ELVES KNOW HIM AS FI’ANG YALOK. THE DWARFS KNOW HIM AS ZOENEN HOOGSTANDJES*. HE IS ALSO KNOWN IN THE NORTHEAST AS GAISMUNĒNAS MEISTAR AND HAS MANY OTHER SECRET NAMES WHICH YOU DO NOT… YET… KNOW.

* Hoobastank

He blinks at her in polite incomprehension. “I don’t want to miss the Life Raft Debate,” he says. “It’s important to support your department.”

Several universities hold yearly Raft Debates, where representatives from the different disciplines have a debate about which of their respective areas of study is the most vital for humanity and thus should get to take the one-person life raft back to civilization from the desert island they’ve all gotten stuck on.

I should inform you that at my alma mater the Devil’s Advocate, who argues that none of the subjects are worth saving, has won multiple times.

Without taking her eyes off her opponent, Romanoff thrusts out her hand. Dr. Aluki Robinson (Associate Professor of Ornithology) passes her a harpoon, its ivory barbs almost glowing in the dim light.

Nauja and Aluki are both from Cold Case, because no one deserves to be stuck in Cold Case where we’re apparently supposed to be deeply concerned about the main character’s sexual experience but only vaguely perturbed by the powerful white and white-coded women stealing Native American children to brainwash them to their culture so they can be fed to the system seriously WHAT the FUCK Jimbo

ANYWAY, in this universe the Winter fey of Unalaska are discharging their obligations to help the Winter Court against Outsiders by sending some of their people to monitor the prison in Night Vale. This also gets to highlight the fun of an unreliable narrator! Julie is generally not one of those, because she’s a smart and observant person who will happily question everything, but even she has her limits when she’s out of her element. In the case of this story, there are several minor details to suggest there is some Winter and Summer court drama going on in the background (the chlorofiends, an entire academic department of shapeshifters, Molly and Mab personally overseeing bus routes) and most of it just goes completely over her head.

During his undergraduate career, Gary had elicited a considerable amount of interdepartmental discussion about his desire to be exempted from lab regulations for wearing appropriate – or any – footwear in the lab, which evolved into a considerable amount of interdepartmental discussion about whether wrapping your feet in duct tape immediately before said lab time constituted appropriate footwear.

This was based on one of my mother’s students, who eventually resolved the situation by commissioning a handmade pair of moccasins he placed on his feet immediately before entering the lab.

“The scientific method is four steps,” says Carlos with a cheerful inevitability as the officers start shouting panicked instructions into their walkie talkies. “One, find an object you want to know more about; two, hook that object up to a machine using wires or tubes; three, write things on a clipboard; four, read the results that the machine prints.”

This is a direct quote from the book. Was this entire subplot about the scientific method ban designed just to come up with a plausible retcon for why someone with actual scientific training would announce this over the radio? It sure was!

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD:

1. “Step one, cut a hole in the box,” calls Wei.2. “No, step one is collecting underpants,” says Gary.3. “Step four: make a searching and fearless moral inventory,” says Julie.4. “And then step five, acceptance,” Andre finishes.5. “You see, the first level is ennui, or boredom. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific – nostalgia, love-sickness… At more morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for. A sick pining, a vague restlessness. Mental throes. Yearning. And at the scientific method’s deepest and most painful level, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause.”6. “It’s how you decide whether to fix the problem with duct tape or WD-40,” says Julie.7. “I think,” says Osborn, “that it’s a divine machine for making flour, salt, and gold.”

8. “Don’t be absurd,” says Galleti. “The scientific method is two vast and trunkless legs of stone standing in the desert!”

9. “And they say the scientific method is—”

“—the quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality associated with sitting around a fire in the winter with close friends,” puts in Dr. Chelsea Dubinski, Assistant Professor of Chemistry.

10. “Or is it the special look shared between two people, when both are wishing that the other would do something that they both want, but neither want to do?” asks Galleti.

This section was also a chance to write about the rest of Night Vale’s scientists, of whom we still know so very little. There’s enough of them that there’s a whole science district, and the community college seems pretty well staffed, but the fact that Carlos made such an impact when he rolled into town suggests that they were either pretty lowkey or indistinguishably weird from the rest of the town.

“I don't feel alone,” snaps Julie. “I feel like shit, and I know why I feel like shit, and the thought of outlining that in excruciating detail is, oddly enough, not making me feel any better!”

One of the things I wanted to address in this story (inspired by Ghost Stories, which I uhhhhh did not care for) was the shortcomings of a lot of narratives about grief. Because many of them are not only oversimplified, but also not everyone processes grief in the same way. It’s not necessarily a linear narrative of where you go through the five steps and then you’re totally over it: it might take a long time, or you might be fine until some other, unrelated setback triggers you, or it might be a cyclical process as anniversaries roll around. Grief lingers. Related to that, helping people deal with their grief isn’t always as simple as sitting down with them and offering a sympathetic ear. Some people don’t process their feelings well verbally, and the emotional labor of formulating all your grief for another person’s consumption can be nearly as traumatizing as grieving in the first place, and VERY difficult to do when you’re already feeling down.

On top of that, I think general American culture is just. Real bad at dealing with grief. Which means we don’t have many positive models to base our responses on, either as grievers or as people supporting the grieving, and if you don’t fit those models at all it just makes the process that more difficult because everyone’s stumbling around in the dark.

“Does it always feel like this?” she asks.“Which part?” asks Carlos.“We won,” says Julie. “Methods have lived to science another day. We can do our work without interference. All we did was lie about what the name meant, but…” She taps the lab table with a pencil. Another secret violation of the law. “It still feels like we… lost something.”“We did lose something,” says Carlos. “It was just a name, but names are important.”

One of the reasons I love writing Carlos and Julie’s friendship so much is because it’s such a relationship of equals. They’re both hypercompetent, pragmatic, and a little ruthless; their skill sets don’t have much overlap (at least, not yet) and their personalities aren’t at all similar, but they get each other and it’s so sweet. When they wander out of their respective areas of expertise, or stumble across some kind of dilemma, they feel comfortable asking each other for guidance – they can admit their ignorance and drop their public facades of Having Their Shit Together because they trust each other.

“I want—” Her mouth opens and shuts again, wordlessly. Her scowl deepens.Then she narrows her eyes and says, “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.”

Molly being a huge Trekkie is pretty much my favorite thing from Ghost Story (not to be confused with Ghost Stories)(although thinking about it, swapping their plots would be kind of amazing??), so of course I wanted her and Julie to interact in a way that showed off what huge nerds they are.

But yet another element I wanted to include in this story is the background detail that ~the masquerade~ must be maintained because it’s too dangerous for humanity as a whole to be fully cognizant of the supernatural – which tends to get a little lost in the sauce, because the supernatural is consistently super duper powerful and our heroes (most of them pretty supernatural themselves) generally avert disaster by the skin of their teeth. But here’s Julie, just a regular human who’s capable of producing terrifying technology, has no concern for the rules and traditions of ancient regimes unless they’re inconveniencing her, and who would be perfectly fine with upending the status quo just to see what happens. Regular humans just aren’t more flexible about change than the supernatural, they’re even curious about it sometimes – which must be terrifying to something like the Winter Court, which has been devoted to maintaining the same strict balance since forever. Regular humans can do stuff like tell a story so well it inspires the Winter Lady to subvert her magical restrictions and remind her of her own humanity.

Julie grumpily emails him a rough summary of her thoughts on Troy Walsh and her conversation with Molly and heads up to her office to pull up everything she has on both the bus garage and the man in the tan jacket.

Bullshit secretkeeping (“I can’t tell the other main character this important plot point, it’s better if they don’t know”) is one of my least favorite tropes and I avoid it at all costs. It’s such a stupid way to add tension. It can maybe work once, but after your character has inevitably watched it backfire spectacularly, you can’t repeat it ever again unless you want to imply they’re a dumbass who never learns from their own mistakes and apparently doesn’t care that it clearly puts everyone in more danger. ::looks pointedly at a certain book series::

Also, it’s almost always much more interesting to have characters try to share important information. If they don’t succeed, it coats everything in ironic horror as the outcomes one person tried to avoid happen despite their best efforts. If they do succeed, it means everyone is fully cognizant of the potential danger even as they are still prevented from acting on it properly, like because they (e.g.) get kidnapped in the middle of the street.

King City is not in the correct dimension. The man in the tan jacket seems to know something about this, but up until a year ago he wasn’t drawing attention to it. He was busy poking his nose into everyone’s business, ingratiating himself with the powerful and the influential, dealing with them in secret…basically, the SOP of your typical Night Vale authority.Like the Night Vale Area Transit Authority, with its bus route to… King City.They had a job and they chose to keep it, Molly said.“Fuck,” says Julie. “He was working for them!”

In retrospect, it’s hilarious to me how much of this fic was powered by spite. Ghost Stories and Cold Case both really bothered me. The resolution of the Man in the Tan Jacket storyline, meanwhile, felt pretty underwhelming – not because what Finknor came up with wasn’t interesting, but because it barely engaged with the few plot points they had already established. Like, when TMITJ shows up in the podcast he interferes with the Mayor, he’s connected to the city under Lane Five, he surfaces during the Strex Corp arc, he interacts with a whole bunch of series regulars in an ominous fashion… Yeah, that probably came from Finknor dropping him in more or less at random, but the end result was that during the first several years of the show it seemed he was an active driver of whatever his plot was supposed to be. In WTNV: The Novel, though, he’s much more reactive and impotent. This wouldn’t necessarily be bad if this change was acknowledged as part of his storyline, but… it’s not…

(And I get that it can be difficult to come up with a plot for an element you didn’t intend to be plotty at all, but like: there wasn’t THAT much material they had to account for. I should know, I had to look it all up to write THIS story.)

I think this was especially frustrating because it ends up feeling like a “have your cake and eat it too” on the part of Finknor: it’s not automatically bad when fans care more about the show’s continuity than the creators (creators have different concerns, and a lot of time that means they’re using the creative latitude to do something neat), but the novel was very much presented as “finally, a resolution to that one mystery you find cool!” which is… pretty much a direct appeal to the fans’ care about the continuity. So to then ignore or retcon so many aspects of the continuity without any story payoff for it feels like a cheat.

(Ultimately, though, my inspiration to actually sit down and write mainly sprang from 1) all the lovely comments about how so many people loved my OFC, which as someone who started lurking in online fandom in the early 2000s was both mind-boggling and heartwarming, and 2) lol those ladies have the same name. I learned nothing.)

She gets the call at 21:27. She goes to the hospital, although there’s not much point. The human mind is the most powerful thing on the planet and it's housed in a fragile casing of meat and bone.

I’ve mentioned a few times (possibly more than a few)(probably more than a few) that I didn’t like the WTNV live ep Ghost Stories, and that’s because the ~big reveal~ is that Cecil’s story was actually about a personal family tragedy, and once he’s able to admit that, everything is hunky-dory. As I recall, it went something like this:

WTNV: hey remember that time your mom died and your family was thrown into chaos

ME: WELL NOW I DO

WTNV: and on that note, good night everyone!

Needless to say, everything was not hunky-dory.

But on top of being emotionally compromised for the whole following week, I was also professionally annoyed. Prior to this live show, we’d had a few cryptic references to Cecil’s mom and could reasonably infer that his relationship with his sister was strained. Critically, though, neither was their own clearly-defined character (compare to the treatment of Janice or Steve Carlsberg), these were not frequently recurring elements that would suggest they weighed heavily on Cecil’s mind, and it wasn’t even obvious that their backstory WAS particularly tragic. So the emotional lynchpin of this live show was mostly new information about Cecil regarding characters the audience had no connection to.

Tragic narratives are powerful not only because they evoke intense emotions, but also because those emotions are supposed to go somewhere and do something: provide catharsis, reinforce the artist’s philosophy, make the audience ponder the meaning of life... In using a tragedy as a plot twist, your ability to give it the proper emotional arc is very limited, because you have to misdirect from its existence while building it up, and then quickly progress from upsetting emotions to those more appropriate for concluding the story. That’s not impossible, but Ghost Stories immediately throws a wrench in the works by splitting the audience’s emotional journey away from Cecil’s: he already knew about the tragedy and the people involved with it, so the plot twist acts as his emotional catharsis... but only his. When the twist itself is the first time the audience realizes there ARE emotions, and that the first 85% of the show was completely unrelated to them, there’s simply not enough time for the audience to have them, process them according to the story’s weird ramblings that kinda imply fiction based on real life is more important than genre fiction like horror (PS: that’s a WEIRD take for a fictional horror podcast), and reach their own kind of catharsis without it being horrifically rushed. Particularly when they’re having a WAY more emotional response than the character due to their own personal tragedies which they were not expecting to have to think about during a fun podcast live show about ghost stories.

As stuff like this points out, you can’t just sprinkle in character deaths and expect quality entertainment to sprout: there has to be a purpose to putting the tragedy in the story (even if that purpose is to highlight how purposeless tragedy can be in real life). I’ve always been VERY critical of the assumption that tragedy is ~more artistic~, both in historical lit and modern pop culture; sad emotions aren’t inherently more meaningful than happy ones. Merely including tragic events isn’t deep; you have to do the work and make it deep, in its context and development.

So: on to ::gestures proudly:: probably the worst thing I’ve ever written!

From an aesthetic standpoint, I leaned into the Night Vale house style in this section because I found it to be really effective at conveying the enormity of the tragedy for Julie: it’s pretty blunt, just like her, but the focus on oddly specific details, the narrative distancing, and the lurking sense of existential horror seemed a fitting demonstration of how badly the emotional gutpunch disrupted her narration/life.

And I really wanted it to be an emotional gutpunch. (But not a surprise: even if I hadn’t warned for it specifically, Julie mentions Romero dying all the way back in Ch. 10 of Love is All You Need.) This is in part a story about grief and mourning, so the loss that caused it needed a central place. I wanted it to be powerful enough to retroactively fit in with how upset Julie is in the opening chapters and to add real tension to the devil’s bargain the feds want to make with her in the next chapter. But most importantly, I wanted it to be so significant to both Julie and the audience that the end of the story has an impact. Loss doesn’t get “cured” – but it seems to me like it’s not supposed to be. Loss is a part of life; love, in whatever form, helps give you strength as you grow and change from the experience into someone new, and this is also a story about the love in friendship.

I think a lot about the ethics of writing tragic stuff, because when you get right down to it, ultimately art boils down to poking your fingers in someone’s feelings and stirring them around. People get really invested in the stuff you are responsible for creating, and making someone feel bad for no reason isn’t being an artist, it’s being a dick. But I’m very happy with how this turned out, and hopefully didn’t traumatize anyone who didn’t want to be traumatized.

(I do feel bad for everyone who was reading as I posted that had to wait an entire year for the next chapter, though. I wanted to get something up sooner, but I had to wait until I sorted Chapter 6 and Chapter 6 was just. The worst. WORDS ARE HARD. People who read WIPs are braver than any Marine.)

hmu for more dvd commentary!

#muggle-the-hat #love is all you need to destroy your enemies #ask dave #welcome to night vale #the dresden files #fic #writing

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