Chapter Text
Change was coming in Night Vale. Hideous changes as the dog park was opened. At least, it was opened to properly licensed dogs. Who never came back.
Nobody mentioned that the hooded figures who lurked the town were now followed by smaller hooded figures who bounded on four legs and seemed to make a lot of panting and sniffing noises.
Still, change was coming.
Among the protests, among the work and the day to day stresses, among the new hooded figures running up to citizens and nosing their crotches while seeking head pats, the little things tended to be overlooked.
Like the envelopes.
Carlos trudged home from the lab. It hadn't been a difficult day, merely long. A vial decided to explode and release some sort of mist that coalesced into the first thing it touched. Which of course happened to be a spider. The mist-spider had spent the whole day hidden in a crack in the ceiling, oblivious and immune to all the best brooms that could be shoved at it. In the end it took a complex rigging of scrap and stuff to stick a can of air up into the ceiling to blow the mist-spider down to where it could be captured.
He unlocked the apartment door... and slipped.
Ow.
Carlos looked up at the sky, at the last few rays of sunlight giving way to void. Or perhaps the void was consuming the sunlight, reaching its long voidy fingers to devour the sun.
He sat up and looked around for what he'd slipped on.
Oh hey, an envelope. He tried to pick it up but he couldn't seem to get any kind of grip on it. Weird. It moved along the floor well enough, he just couldn't pick it up.
Fine. Another sciency thing that wasn't going to cooperate with him today. He settled for simply looking at it. It was the same color as the void, a black so dark it appeared to have colors within it, colors he might be able to see if only he came closer and stared, stared forever. A glyph shone faintly through the blackness, almost oppressed by it. Like the stars that tried to shine past the void of the sky. This glyph shone like those stars.
Carlos squinted at the glyph. He couldn't read it. He wasn't even sure if it was a glyph or just a drawing of something or even a meaningless scribble.
He could almost see the colors...
“Carlos? Are you all right?”
He dragged his eyes away from the colors of the void to see the sky was black and empty, the moon hung on the far side of the sky, and Cecil was standing on the steps looking worried and bemused. “Wha?”
“Carlos? What's that? Oh.” Cecil nodded in understanding. “Sorry about that, love. I got a bunch more at the station today. My intern lost five hours staring at one of them before I got to it.”
Carlos realized he was sitting on the floor of their entryway, door wide open. Anyone could have walked past and seen him staring at the floor like it held all the secrets of science. His back ached and his butt had gone numb. His stomach rumbled and he was exhausted. “How long was I...” He shook his head. No, he didn't want to know. It was long enough, far longer than that, that's all he needed to know. “What is it?”
Cecil held down a hand to help him up. “It's a letter.”
Carlos grasped his hand and pulled, climbing to his feet. Oh how he ached... “A letter? But I tried opening it and...”
“And you couldn't?”
Carlos shook his head.
Cecil laid a hand on the void envelope and slid it along the floor. Floor turned to end table turned to tabletop turned to wall and still the envelope slid along the surface, never once bending or lifting off. Cecil then placed both hands on the envelope and started pulling outward, stretching it like a pizza crust. Slowly the envelope grew bigger, the void more colorful, the glyph clearer. Finally he stepped back.
A glance at Carlos and he put his hand over the scientist's eyes. “Thanks,” Carlos said. He'd been staring again, the world starting to fall away... “What is it?”
“As I said, it's a letter,” Cecil said. “The letter 'nnnn-gaiiii'. It's just hard to tell because the envelope is two dimensional and therefore it's hard to see the proper depths.”
Carlos reached out for the wall. He could feel the texture of the wall but where the envelope started all texture stopped. To call it smooth wouldn't have been enough. It wasn't even Nothing, because Nothing implied that there was something to be missing to make it Nothing. It was like his fingers decided to Not as his hand slid right off. He reached up for the envelope again and the same problem, his hand sliding right off.
“How is this possible?” Carlos whispered, reverent.
“I dunno,” Cecil admitted. “It just is. I've always gotten these letters. Sometimes they have different letters, sometimes the envelope is a different void, but I've always gotten them. I admit it's been awhile...”
Carlos pulled away, turning to look at Cecil. Again he was struck with a sense of otherness as he looked at his boyfriend, a strange sense of wrong that curled in the pit of his stomach and clawed at the back of his throat. But Cecil was the same as he usually was. Right? I mean, he was wearing puffy elizabethan breeches with tights and a long red cape. His black and white hair seemed more like white and black today, almost like the colored strands had switched places. The wax eye on his forehead was looking at the letter and seemed worried, or maybe haggard, or maybe like it had been wearing off and was only half-drawn.
“Are you okay?” Carlos asked. “You're not in trouble, are you? I know, I mean, well, I heard that city council was mad at us for talking about the dog park and the desert otherworld in it. They're not going to do something, are they?”
Cecil shook his head. The wax eye still seemed worried, so much more so than the confidence Cecil was trying to project.
“I mean it, Cecil. If this is them saying they'll do something I want to know. I have that right since I got us into this mess, don't I?”
Cecil smiled. He placed his hands on the edges of the envelope and slid them inward, letting it stay on the wall as it shrank back down to its normal size. “I promise, Carlos,” he said. “This isn't city council at all. I'm not in trouble. You're not in trouble. I just... There's someone I have to talk to. That's all. I promise.”
Carlos was not convinced.