Work Text:
Hello, listeners, it’s me, Jonny. You know, Jonny. From the radio.
[The sound of a pistol shot at close range in an enclosed space is heard — bang. Somehow, the fact that the gun is an antique, lovingly cared for, with a beautifully polished mother-of-pearl inlay is obvious from the register of the sound.]
Sorry about that, listeners! I killed my double a while back, but somehow he just keeps popping back up again. Guess it’s just that we’re in such rollicking good health. Did I tell you I took up jogging this spring? Not for very long, mind, but those three afternoons when I tried did me a world of good. Lyfrassir, can you help me get this out of here? I have a show to start.
So. Where were we?
There are plenty of fish in the sea …for now.
Welcome to Night Vale.
As you may have heard earlier, Night Vale community radio is delighted to welcome Lyfrassir Edda into our little family. The best workplaces are all like families, aren’t they? They support each other, spend each day together, require arcane blood-sacrifices of one another on an approximately quarterly basis, and provide one another with the missing pieces of ancient prophesies which suggest that the family’s newest member has been chosen as a predestined leader ordained to be the one to carry the town forward into a glorious and technicolor destiny. I’d invite our newest intern over here to greet you, but I haven’t seen Lyfrassir since I asked them to, um, dispose of an inconvenience for me. Come on, Lyfrassir, how long does it take to drag a body to a garbage chute?
And now, a word from our sponsors:
“The night is dark and full of terrors.” George R.R. Martin wrote that, and then it entered into the popular consciousness via the popularly and critically acclaimed television adaptation of his work, but it’s only when the creeping hand of a nightmare grabs you by the throat that you really feel it to be true. The night is dark and full of terrors, and you know you will not sleep again until you have reassured yourself by gazing at the sun as it rises again, proving to you once and for all that it will rise again, at least this time.
Don’t try to get back to sleep, you’ll only toss and turn in the agitated darkness of your own agitated mind. Get up, pull on something approximating pants, and drive to us. Drive through the darkness to McDonalds.
McDonalds. I’m loving it.
As the seasons change and autumn comes to Night Vale, I know I don’t need to remind any of you listeners of the monumentous event which is rapidly approaching. I refer, of course, to the tri-city bowling league championship, where your own Night Vale Exploding Bowling Balls will face off against Desert Bluffs’ infernal and nameless team, and also the East Night Vale tarantulas. You know what they say: those arthropods really know their way around a bowling ball!
Teddy Williams, owner of the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex has suggested that the league seek alternate accommodations for this year’s championship, but now way in hell are we — are the Exploding Bowling Balls giving up home-court advantage this time around. This is our year.
Teddy Williams said he didn’t mean it like that. He said, “I hear voices in the bowling alley at night. I hear the faint clinking of metal on metal from under lane five, and the more I listen to it, the more I think it sounds like the gently building sound of a tiny army lodged hundreds of feet below the surface and seething up at us for generations as they finally snap and begin to prepare for war.”
Then Tim said, “How could you possibly hear anything like that? Isn’t it more likely that you’re hearing the sound of the machinery running under the lanes which carries the bowling balls back up?”
Well, you know, Night Vale, Gunpowder Tim’s not from around here. He doesn’t know that the tiny and murderous underground city which hates us for the way we walk over their heads, uncaring, and will one day rise up and take its revenge on us all, is just a figure of speech. I patted his arm and told him not to worry about it, and I told Teddy Williams to try leaving the bowling alley to go home and sleep a couple of nights this week.
And now, traffic.
Listeners, I drove to work at the radio station today, and when I went to pull in to my usual parking space, it was occupied. Don’t you hate it when that happens?
In this case, my parking space was occupied by Night Vale’s own Raphaella la Cognizi. “Raphaella,” I said. “What have you got for me for Science Corner today?”
“There’s no time for that,” she told me, and when I looked closer, I could see that she looked tired and harried, unkempt like perhaps she hadn’t slept the night before. Like perhaps she hadn’t slept outside of her lab for many days. “Jonny, people listen to you, right?”
“I have the most loyal audience in over a hundred miles,” I told her, and maybe I was supposed to feign some humility, there, but where’s the fun in that? I told her, “My listeners trust me to deliver them the news they need where and when they need it.”
“Sure,” she said. “Great,” but I got the impression that she hadn’t fully taken in the magnitude of the relationship between you, my lovely audience, and me, so I went on, “My listeners trust me with their lives, and more than that, they trust me with their deaths. I am with them from their first breaths to their last—”
“We need you to call for an evacuation, Jonny,” Doctor Marius yelled from the passenger’s seat of Raphaella’s gently used new Subaru — courtesy of Nastya’s Auto Repair and Dry Cleaning, which holds its Happy Hour on Thursdays, drop by for an excellent deal — “For most of the south-west quadrant of the town, we think. The seismiographic activity is—”
There he cut himself off, turning back to Raphaella. “Seismic,” she corrected him absently. “Although we don’t think it’s an earthquake, unless it’s one that is somehow moving in slow motion.”
“It’s good to see you, Marius,” I told him. “I haven’t seen you since your duel with Brian to the not-death a few weeks ago, I was kind of wondering if you’d died.”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “I mean, I kind of did, or I would have, if I’d gone to the duel instead of sending my—”
“We’re on the radio,” Tim hissed into Marius’s ear, snaking an arm from where he was sitting behind Marius in the back seat of Raphaella’s beautiful new-old mostly unrusty blue-green-orange Subaru — bet she got a great deal for it at Nastya’s Auto Repair and Dry Cleaning — to cover Doctor Marius’s mouth, cutting off his probably-irrelevant and certainly municipally approved sentence.
“We are?” Doctor Marius asked, puzzled, when Tim released his mouth.
“You have to say ‘off the record’ before you start,” Tim said, peering up at me through the curtain of his perfect hair. “Or it’s all on the radio.”
“Which is fine!” Raphaella said, and she sounded a little frantic when she said it. “We need this on the radio because we need to begin an evacuation before we can really begin to investigate what’s going on under that bowling alley.”
“Bowling alley?” I asked. Actually, the punctuation on the end probably sounded more like ‘!!?!??'
Tim put his hand over his eyes and shook his head. “I told you not to tell him that part,” he told Raphaella.
“Absolutely not,” I told all of them. “The bowling tournament next week must continue as planned! We’ve got shirts and everything, this is our year, those spiders won’t know what hit them!”
And you know what, listeners? I’m right about that.
This has been traffic. More on this story if it develops, but you know, I have this feeling it probably won’t.
Next week will mark the beginning of the Toy Soldier’s trial for high crimes, misdemeanors, and impersonating a dragon. When approached for comment about who would be representing it in court, in absentia, of course, since the Toy Soldier is currently a fugitive from the law whose whereabouts are unknown, it told me, “Oh, I’m going to let that be a surprise. I love surprises, don’t you?”
When I told it I didn’t, it just said. “Well, you’ll definitely love this one, it’s such jolly good fun. Pip pip!”
And that’s the end of our show, listeners. Until next time, make sure you keep your weapon of choice beneath your pillow, and keep your heart light and full of hope — that way, the government’s heart-reading surveillance sensors won’t know what you’re planning.
Good night, Night Vale, good night.