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Carlos blinked. Then blinked again. He turned around to stare at the front door of his bottom level apartment. He turned back around and couldn't help blinking for the third time.
"When did that get there?" he wondered aloud.
All of the sudden the wind picked up and something white and rectangular slapped into his face. Carlos pealed the paper off and read the neatly typed out words:
'Tim's Cafe has always been there. There has never not been a Tim's Cafe. You will forget a time when it was not there.'
It was signed Sheriff's Secret Police.
Carlos glanced up at the new cafe that had apparently always been across the street from his apartment. He looked back down at the paper when it started to smoke slightly. The old message had disappeared and in lavender letters a new message had replaced it.
'Go to Tim's Cafe. Order a tentacle latte. HE makes the best ones.'
Carlos had a moment to ponder who 'HE' was before the paper spontaneously combusted and Carlos dropped it hastily.
Carlos stood nursing his singed fingers and continued to stare at the cafe thinking he should probably make a note to study it further. He wondered if he would end up putting it in the 'New Building Appearance' notebook or 'Buildings that like to Appear and Disappear on Certain, Specific Weekdays' notebook. Those seemed to be the only two categories the buildings in Night Vale fell into. Carlos had never actually seen a building being built. They weren't there one day and the next they were. It was really quite fascinating.
Carlos watched as Old Women Josie, flanked by two nine foot tall celestial beings, walked into Tim's Cafe. Carlos crossed the street and followed her in. He knew it was never a good idea to not follow the orders given by the Secret Police. It still made him shudder when he thought about the sheep incident. On the other hand, being a scientist and all, he was honestly curious. It's not every day a cafe appears across the street from your apartment. Even in Night Vale.
The door made a soft screaming noise when it shut behind Carlos. The decor of Tim's Cafe seemed to be a lot of light purple with white mixed in. The chairs looked very plushy and comfy, although they seemed to glow faintly. Carlos was itching to test just why the chairs, and on further observation, all of the furniture in the cafe glowed.
Carlos was just about to steal, no, borrow a chair cushion to run tests on back in the lab when he noticed the windows.
The windows, which he should have been able to see his apartment building through, were showing the static you see when your trying to get a channel on your tv back when tv's had antennas.
Carlos reached out a hand to touch the window pane when he heard an awfully familiar rich, deep baritone.
"Here you go, Old Women Josie! It's good to see you again Erika and Erika!"
"Oh thank you Cecil, dear. We must get our bowling team back together."
"Oh yes! That would be great fun."
Carlos turned slowly around to see the Voice of Night Vale handing Old Women Josie a cup of red boiling something.
Carlos had actually never seen Cecil Baldwin before. Although he had heard every show of Cecil's radio broadcast since he'd come to Night Vale— despite not actually owning a radio. Cecil's voice just seemed to emit across the whole town. It had been quite a shock to Carlos when he had first arrived in town. It had taken him a few days to figure out that it was a normal occurrence— though he still blushes madly whenever Cecil starts on a tangent about his hair.
Carlos was a bit surprised when he saw that Cecil was actually really, very attractive—granted in a strange way. He was pale, skinny, and close to six feet tall but still shorter then Carlos himself. He had lovely blond hair that was styled to perfection. Behind his thick, hipster-ish glasses where violet colored eyes. He had light purple, swirling tattoos that crawl up his neck and dance down his arms. The most interesting tattoo was the light purple eye that was placed dead center in the middle of his forehead. Every few seconds it would blink, seemingly making up for the fact that Cecil's two human-looking eyes didn't.
From across the counter Cecil and Carlos' eyes met. Cecil's eyes went wide and his tattoos seemed to darken in color.
"Oh, Carlos!" Gasped the Voice of Night Vale just as Carlos yelped:
"Are those bloody hand prints on your apron?"
Cecil stared at him a moment before looking down at his apron then looking back at him, "Yes." he said matter of fact.
"Oh." Carlos mumbled awkwardly.
"So, Carlos," his tattoos darkened again when Cecil said his name, "would you like something?"
"Ah," Carlos glanced up at the menu that was hanging above Cecil's head. It seemed to be written in some form of hieroglyphics. So he just stuck with what the Sheriff's Secret Police had suggested.
"Tentacle latte?" Carlos couldn't help putting the question in at the end. It just didn't seem like a real drink.
However, Cecil smiled brightly, "Of course! I make a wonderful tentacle latte if I may say so myself."
Huh, so Cecil was the 'HE' that the message had referred to, he thought as he paid for his drink.
"Why do you work here? Don't you have enough work at the radio station?" Carlos asked Cecil as he made his drink.
"City Hall assigned me this job and you can't argue with them." Cecil's baritone dropped to a more sinister tone, "You really can't. If you do they'll take you underground to rehabilitate you." Then his tone lighted again, "I really like this job! It's very fun."
"Are you still the Voice of Night Vale?" Carlos asked worriedly.
"Huh? Oh yes, of course I am! This is just my day job."
Carlos sighed in relief, "Oh good. I'd miss hearing your voice every night."
Cecil jerked his head up to stare at him and his light purple tattoos darkened so much that they were almost black. The latte he was in the middle of making slipped from his fingers and exploded on the ground. Cecil didn't seem to noticed.
Carlos' face burned red. He couldn't believe what he had just said! It had just slipped out. Oh god, he felt like an idiot. He wanted to crawl under a table and hid forever.
"Uh well. I mean... Um. I just.... Really love the show?" he finished lamely.
"Neat!" Cecil squeaked and his tattoos became even darker, if that was even possible.
"Right. Yeah...." Carlos trailed off. He decided that it would be best if he didn't speak any further, less he say something even more mortifying.
Cecil seemed to jerk out of his own mortification. He glanced down at his empty fingers that had been moments ago holding Carlos' drink and set to work making a new one.
The next few minutes passed in a horribly awkward silence.
Cecil handed him his tentacle latte that did indeed have tentacles hanging out of it, and was an alarming shade of lime green. Carlos stared at it in horrified fascination. He glanced up a Cecil who was looking at him expectantly. Carlos took a tentative sip.
"This is really good!" he gasped in astonishment.
Cecil positively beamed, "Thank you!"
Carlos took a larger gulp then said hurriedly, "Well I should be headed over to the lab..."
"Oh yes! To do science," Cecil nodded seriously.
"Yeah. Uh... See you later?" Carlos said awkwardly.
Cecil smiled warmly, his tattoos going a deep purple color. Carlos found it rather adorable. "Have a good day, Carlos!"
"You too, Cecil," he said as he walked out of the cafe.
///////((((((&&&&&;://;)$
The broadcast that night was probably one of the most horrific Carlos had ever sat through. Oh no, I wasn't because a giant spaghetti monster had tried to eat John Peters, you know, the farmer's whole crop of invisible corn. No, it was because Cecil had spent almost the whole broadcast recounting the events of their disastrous encounter at Tim's. Carlos had had to relocated to the very back of his lab in the most isolated corner so he could bang his head against a lab table in peace and also be spared the snickering of his assistants and interns.
The next morning Carlos spent a good ten minutes standing in front of Tim's torn between going in and getting to talk to Cecil (thinking of which made his heart flutter in alarming ways) subsequently making an ass of himself, as he know he would, or walking past and dealing with the self-loathing that came with not having the balls to go in.
Carlos finally did manage to muster up the courage to step inside. And it actually went rather well. Carlos chose safe topics that were as far away from topics such as how beautiful Cecil's voice was or how much he wanted to run his tongue along the swirling tattoos on Cecil's neck. He instead chose to talk about the giant spaghetti monster that had run rampant through Night Vale the previous night.
So began Carlos' new habit. Every morning he would stop by Tim's Cafe, partly because the tentacle lattes were delicious but mostly because he looked forward to talking to Cecil every morning.
He discovered that on Tuesdays the cafe played a recording of past customers coughing and sneezing. On Sundays the whole cafe would disappear. (Carlos had spent close to twenty minutes that day standing in front of where the doors of the cafe would have been trying to deal with the crushing disappointment that he wouldn't be seeing Cecil that day. That was until John Peters, you know, that farmer had open up an apparently invisible door and walked into the equally invisible cafe).
Carlos also discovered that the chairs had very sharp teeth and liked to bite, that every other day something in the back room would let out a blood curdling scream, and that Cecil Baldwin had the most gorgeous laugh he'd ever heard in his whole life.
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Carlos leaned against the counter, sipping on his tentacle latte and watching Cecil as he puttered about, behind the counter, making Big Rico's crocodile blood tea. It was an unusually quiet Saturday morning and Carlos had given himself the day off. He was half listening to Cecil's ramblings— instead he found himself being memorized by the smooth richness of Cecil's voice and the way his tattoos would darken and how he would smile shyly whenever he caught Carlos' eye.
Cecil turned his back on Carlos to give Big Rico his tea, as he did a piece of smoking paper drifted past him to land on the counter. In neat lavender letters it read:
'Oh my god, just ask HIM out already. This is starting to get painful for everyone.'
It was signed the Sheriff's Secret Police.
Cecil turned back around to find Carlos staring blankly as a small pile of flames.
"Are you alright Carlos?" he asked.
Carlos jerked out of his trance and looked up at him. A previous thought drifted through his brain, it never was a good idea to not follow orders given by the secret police.
"You want to go out with me? You know, for personal reasons?"
Carlos had never seen Cecil's tattoos darken as much as they did that day.