Chapter Text
When he was finally left to his own devices, the first thing he noticed, annoyingly, were the radios. Not his kind of radios. Not the sleek transistor beauties, bakelite with chrome trim and neat circuitry arranged like jewelry. Not the elegant little machines that whispered in crisp fidelity, each one a polished promise of a future only he could see.
No. These were the old monsters: hulking vacuum-tube relics sealed in polished wood, fat glass bulbs glowing inside like tiny suns ready to collapse. Their rounded dials glowed a warm amber, soft as a harvest moon.
They sputtered to life with all the charm of a dying furnace: crackle and hum, faulty tubes whining, capacitors coughing like old men. The sound hit him harder than he liked. It dragged him straight back to Virginia summers he never talked about, those evenings on his grandmother’s porch, the air syrup-thick with humidity, buzzing with cicadas and lightning bugs. They’d sit there in the wicker chairs, listening to variety shows until the sky disappeared into a blue-black void, the screen door rattling every time the breeze pretended it could break the heat.
One of those lazy summers was the final one, without warning or fanfare, as is often the case. Endings rarely announce themselves. They just happen. And ever since, the hum of a failing vacuum tube had always hit him like a bruise, the past pressing its thumb into him, carrying that same sting of inevitability. And now here it was again, humming in his ears, uninvited, unwelcome, and impossible to ignore. He scowled at the nearest radio as though it had personally wronged him.
To his mounting disbelief, he discovered that most people here didn’t even recognize him as anything more specific than a “picture box”. A picture box. In a place as vicious and cutthroat as The Pit, the sheer quaintness of it was almost insulting. Still, he wasn’t blind to the opportunity baked into that ignorance. If they thought he was some harmless novelty, then no one had invented what he could become yet. No picture boxes meant no broadcasters. No televised icons. No networks, no channels, no parasocial empires, no televised scandals or primetime meltdowns or orchestrated outrage cycles to make a crowd lose its mind. In other words: no competition.
It was a blank market, untouched and perfectly perfectly primed for him alone- if he could bend it. If he could pry their loyalty away from their provincial fixation on radio. The stuff infested the city like mold, humming to life in every dingy corner bar, spilling out of back-alley card games, rattling in the parlors of every new demon who decided they wanted to waste his time with introductions. Even the demon DMV. He couldn’t, for the unfiltered life of him, understand the appeal. The captivation. The loyalty. What could a glowing dial and a crackling voice possibly offer that a screen, his screen, could not eclipse a thousand times over?
Still, he’d needed an in. Beggars, even ambitious ones, couldn’t be choosers.
He felt like a sell-out the moment he applied for an internship at PCBR, predictably, and embarrassingly, 666 on the dial. The station was a joke: a cramped, underfunded shack whose broadcast tower barely rose above the neighborhood’s depressing collection of neon signs. The surrounding “entertainment district” was really just a glorified strip mall glued to a casino where sinners yanked slot machine levers like they were trying to restart their own hearts.
Prime broadcast hours were dominated by some dull, beige nobody droning out what counted as “news” down here; no style, no flair, no bite. He had once mimicked the host behind his back, complete with flat affect and limp hand gestures, until another intern walked in and he had to pretend he’d been stretching. And the music? Hopelessly outdated garbage. Clearly, Hell’s entertainment ecosystem suffered from a critical flaw: no cross-pollination with the living world. No innovation. No evolution. A fatal oversight. One he’d remedy the moment he had the leverage.
For now, though, this dead little internship was a stepping stone. Not glamorous, but foundational. An audience was an audience. And entertainment? Entertainment was universal, predictable, malleable… once people were properly instructed on what they should want. And more importantly, what they should think.
The real mystery was the second station, if it even was a station. No call sign, no branding, nothing but a signal tucked away on the 1933 frequency like it was hiding from the world on purpose. It played mostly jazz, bright and bouncy in a way that made no sense for Hell’s target demographic. The hiss and crackle gave away the format: old shellac pressings, lovingly transferred from records that should’ve disintegrated decades ago. Or maybe not transferred at all, if the medium he suspected was correct.
Every now and then he’d catch the announcer’s voice: tinny, over-compressed, clearly funneled through some antique ring-and-spring microphone, equipment so ancient he suspected it had been stolen off the Titanic. And stranger still, what seemed to be a live piano sometimes bled around the host's voice - rarely, but enough to be unsettling. Someone was playing. Someone there. It was absurd. It was deranged.
He told himself he didn’t care. He absolutely cared. What captured his attention, what dug into him like a hook, was the question of where the signal originated. He scoured the city for it; he really, genuinely tried. Crawling across rooftops. Digging through abandoned basements. Stalking the city’s power grid for anomalies. Holding his antenna just so while spinning dials like some kind of dowsing rod. If the studio existed, he’d find it. He always found what he wanted. He searched for the tower, the studio, the antenna, his next stepping stone, whether its owner liked it or not.
The damn frequency slipped away every time; It was like trying to nail down a shadow. That, more than anything, made him want it.
It wasn’t until a late night in the booth, running cues for the next day alongside the other interns, that he finally understood the real potential of radio. They had the miserable jazz station droning in the background, the mysterious 1933 frequency staggering toward its sign-off hour. As usual, the presenter’s voice ghosted through the static: tinny, compressed, undeniably archaic… yet somehow hypnotic. He rambled in that peculiar cadence of his- chatty, conspiratorial, as if speaking to a room full of dear friends.
“-which seemed very poor manners to me, don’t you all agree? I don’t hear any nays,” the voice chuckled, soft and self-assured. “So I assume we must be, as ever, in agreement. Alas, the hour has grown quite late, and as much as I have enjoyed catching up with you all and sharing our foibles and follies, it is a most auspicious Wednesday and there is more work to be done. Until we meet again.”
He watched the interns around him: all of them, without fail, stilled mid-task, eyes unfocused, listening. Actually listening. Jealousy pricked through him. Why the hell don’t people do that when I talk? In that moment he saw it clearly; The medium wasn’t the key. The voice was. The broadcast wasn’t just noise. It was influence. Reach. Gravitational pull. It was power he didn’t yet possess in this world.
But someone else did. Someone down here knew exactly how to use it.
The broadcast dissolved into static, a long, needling hiss that flooded the tiny studio. One of the interns moved to turn it down, but the dial refused them, crackling louder as if offended. The buzz wormed its way into his chassis like it was laying claim to real estate. “Could we…?” he snapped, gesturing sharply at the set, broad, imperious, as if he had seniority instead of a name badge that still said intern. The gesture should have been enough. It was enough, everywhere else. But the room didn’t move.
Tension tightened the air. Wide eyes flicked toward him. Every intern froze, exchanging wary glances, shoulders tightening in a collective flinch. The silence stretched until one of them- Tom, or Tim, or something equally inconsequential- finally spoke up, voice thin and apologetic. “It’s Wednesday,” he said. “We’re… we’re waiting for the symphony.”
The way he said it- like a rule, like a ritual- set something uneasy crawling up his spine. What was he supposed to do with that information?
He rolled his eyes so hard that the tracking on his faceplate stuttered, a thin mechanical tremor betraying his annoyance. He still wasn’t fully in control of this form, not the way he wanted to be. Not the way he should be. Some days he wasn’t sure he ever would be.
Rather than let the thought chew through him, he angled the flat of his face toward the tabletop, shutting the others out and forcing his attention back to the cues, the schedules, the tedious little tasks that didn’t argue or hesitate or judge him for not knowing some local superstition. Work he understood. Work made sense, even when the rest of him- wires, nerves, whatever hybrid mess he was now- pitched and spun in directions he couldn’t quite steady.
Something finally broke through the wall of static, a sudden shift in tone that snagged his attention and dragged it back to the glowing dial. Not the grand, pompous swell of classical music he’d been bracing for, no, It was that voice again. Familiar. Too familiar. Only sharper now, like it had leaned closer to the microphone.
“Salutations,” the presenter greeted, warm and precise, slipping into the room as if he’d been invited. “The subject of tonight’s symphony developed quite by happenstance - not even a chance meeting, but a stray thought. Faithful listeners, of course, know what a gourmand I can be, and it should be no surprise that I found myself in need of a new jacket for an upcoming dinner invitation, which inevitably led me to Sew And Sew Tailors on Grackle Street-not a sponsor- where they made my seams come true-”
There was a subtle shift at the end, a soft, smug little lilt. The kind someone makes when they’re proud of a pun they know they shouldn’t be proud of. The interns around him tittered, as if on cue. He hated that he almost smiled too. He could feel the hairline crack of irritation splintering up his spine. The voice wasn’t just speaking. It was performing. And worse, it was performing to an audience that willingly, eagerly, leaned in.
His interest flagged again as the story meandered, eyes sliding back over the ad copy in front of him, adding sharp notes and trimming where needed; no one in this city had an ounce of showmanship, and it showed. He could fix that, at least. Just as he settled into the monotony, the broadcast snagged his attention once more.
“Perhaps you can understand, then, why my mind went to the Weaver Overlord. Who is he, I mused, to attempt to pull all the strings?” The presenter’s voice carried that faint chuckle again, like a cat amused by its own cleverness. “Are we not the architects of our own destiny, immune to the threads of fate?
It is my great pleasure to introduce tonight’s performer: The Weaver Overlord, rather tiredly self-styled as ‘Moirai,’ but once as human as any other sinner, then called Wallace Roscoe.
Shall we see how quickly the Weaver unravels?”
The question hung in the air, teasing.
And against all reason, he felt his fingers pause, caught between notes, just long enough for the broadcast to tighten its grip again.
The screams that tore from the radio speaker were inhuman: savage, raw, drenched in a primeval agony that made a spark of electricity dance between his antenna. Around the table, startled gasps and nervous murmurs rippled through the interns. Whispers of the Radio Demon floated in the air, wild-eyed glances betraying panic and uncertainty.
But Vincent? He remained rooted, eyes locked on the glowing dial with a fixation deeper than mere fear or curiosity. The voice, the presence, had hooked him in a way nothing else had. He was transfixed by revelation. By the thrill of hearing someone wield influence like a weapon and art form in one, someone who knew exactly how to hold an audience by the throat and make them beg for more.
Finally.
Someone who understands show business.