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Follow your heart. Sneak past your lungs. Use psychological trickery on your limbic system and speak sternly to your kidneys. Your body is an obstacle course with no finish line, but as the only runner in this race, you are also always winning.
Welcome to Night Vale.
We’re reporting live today from the Night Vale Elementary gymnasium as you, citizens of Night Vale, filter through to cast your votes for the hotly contested mayoral election. Since the revelation that mayoral challenger Hiram McDaniels is not, as previously supposed, a literal five-headed dragon, but is instead just the Toy Soldier armed with a high-tech projector and a surprising talent for ventriloquism, the question on everyone’s lips is, will anyone vote for Hiram when the threat of being burned to a crisp by dragon fire is removed from the equation? Only time, and a sneaky look at the raw ballots before the ceremonial tampering with the vote and fixing of the election, will tell.
It’s early in the day yet, but already the scientist Raphaella la Cognizi has had to be removed from the premises for distributing political propaganda in the form of her informational, self-produced brochure entitled, “Dragons: Not Actually Real.”
It’s actually a pretty well-produced little piece of work, listeners. It not only covers dragons, but also dinosaurs — once real, apparently! — unicorns, giant squid, and spaceships, which, she says, are real, but don’t function or look at all like whatever it is Nastya just married in a beautiful, heartfelt, illegal civil ceremony this morning. Of course, Raphaella should have known better than to try to distribute such blatantly partisan literature at the voting site, but she seemed pretty agitated, muttering about, “What the hell does this school system even teach? Got to get a look at their curriculum.”
If you’d like your own copy of this whimsical and imaginative little work of art, I can still see her now — hi, Raphaella! — she’s currently distributing them the requisite fifty feet away from the entrance to the building.
More on the election as it develops, but first, I’ve got a very important announcement from Scout Master Carmilla! The scouts are back from the children’s wilderness scouting trip, and they’ve returned with a record low number of casualties and amputations amongst the scouts! Credit for this truly impressive showing goes to new wilderness scout Lyfrassir Edda, whose keen eye for spike traps kept the troop safe and on the move. When approached for comment, Lyfrassir expressed an interest in putting those scouting skills to good use in the summer reading program next month. Congratulations and good luck, Lyfrassir.
I’m not the only person stationed within sight of scientist Raphaella la Cognizi, of course, listeners. On the other side of the square, I can see her habitual shadow, the sniper Tim, who likes cats, and who has taken to wearing his perfect hair pulled back as he makes his way around town. It’s still perfect, Tim.
Oh! He waved back. That’s — oh, wait, listeners, presumptive mayor elect Ashes O’Reilly has just finished casting their ballot. Let’s see if we can get an interview. Ashes! As the town’s main bookie, what kind of odds have you given yourself for winning the election today?
Why, do you want to make things interesting?
Things are always interesting, but I learned better than to bet against you when you were running that tooth fairy racket and came for all my baby teeth.
Hey, we made a great return on that investment. But have it your way — I’m not running the book on today, anyway. That would be a total conflict of interest. You can go the Heracles for that bet.
So, Ashes, how do you feel your chances have changed since the revelation that Hiram McDaniels is not, as previously supposed, a five-headed dragon, but actually just the Toy Soldier doing a lot of voices?
I don’t know, man, it’s hard to say. On the one hand, the public doesn’t like to find out that it’s been lied to. But, on the other, Night Vale loves a hands-off mayor, and you can’t get much more hands-off than a mayor who’s in federal prison.
Thank you for that assessment, presumptive Mayor-Elect O’Reilly! We’ll check back in with you as the day progresses! Next stop, let’s talk to Ivy Alexandria, actually human Librarian and amateur statistician, about her projection for the election results based on exit polls. Hello, Ivy!
Jonny.
I presume that, as always, you’ve been taking a representative tally of the self-reported votes for an exit poll?
Of course.
Well! Do you have any insights for our listeners about what we can expect from the election?
It’s fairly early to tell, but if I had to make an assessment, I’d say that the youth vote is going to have a big impact on this election, so it’s really going to come down to how well Brian manages to forge voting documentation for the cult full of teens he’s trying to stack the vote with.
You mean Drumbot Brian the necromancer?
Of course. Do you know any other Brians?
You know, now that you mention it, I don’t think that I do. Fascinating. Thank you, Ivy, our listeners appreciate your diligence and commitment to local politics. And now, a word from our sponsors.
Hematite.
This word was sponsored by the society for under-appreciated minerals.
It’s a beautiful day here at the polling station, listeners, and I’ve been delighted to see quite a few of you come through to cast your votes and participate in the venerable and ichor-encrusted system we call democracy. So many of us only come out to vote for flashy, national elections, like the presidency, or the secret brotherhood of the silent ones, but it’s local elections like this one that will have the biggest and most visceral impact on my life and yours. It is the mayor, after all, who works to allocate funds for public services like the parks service and the owl reassignment program. We owe a civic duty to ourselves and to our neighbors to show up for what we believe in, and to honor our commitments to our community, both explicit and implicit. We owe—
Bang!
Oh! That’s — oh shit.
Apologies for that break in my professionalism, listeners, but I’ve just— but—
Okay, here’s what just happened. Tim the sniper, after long and careful surveillance of Raphaella as she distributed pamphlets about the non-existence of dragons all morning, has finally taken his shot. She went down, crumpled into a heap, and Doctor Marius ran to her side. He checked her for a pulse and looked up with an expression of utter, heart-rending despair on his face. And then, before all of our very eyes, Raphaella began to glow, and when the glow reached a pitch that was nearly blinding, she began to float. When she was ten feet in the air, eyes burning with an unearthly light, her mouth fell open, and both light and a chime of pure sound began to emit, and we all know what that means.
Her local voter registration has gone through! This means that she can cast her ballot for either mayor-elect O’Reilly or the fictional five-headed dragon played by the now-imprisoned Toy Soldier before the polls close for the day! And, in exchange, of course, now her eventual death, whenever it comes, will be determined by the town, rather than any external forces, which means that, as long as she stays within the city limits, the bullets from Tim’s rifle, as well as any other violence inflicted by anything not of the town can do nothing to harm her. As the Night Vale NRA slogan says, “We are all invincible to bullets and it’s a miracle!”
Doctor Marius looks delighted. Brian is using the commotion as a cover to sneak his teens into voting booths. Mayor-Elect and crime-boss-god Ashes O’Reilly looks impatient. Librarian Alexandria looks a little bit turned on. Tim has vanished from the window. He’s creeping down the back stairs, but he’s still holding the little, portable radio which has kept him company all the long and lonely nights that he has staked out his target since arriving in this town. He’ll be a bit sorry to leave this station’s radius, but with his job here done, he has little choice. However, when he reaches the bottom of the stairs, he’ll see that his job here is never done. But then, no job that is worth doing well is ever fully completed. Perhaps he’ll just have to stay and stake out the lab a little longer
Good night, Night Vale. Good night.