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When Carlos is lying wounded and bleeding on the surface of a miniature city surrounded by very tiny, yet violent people, he realizes that he only, truly, fell in love twice in his life.
The first time was when he was five years old when he dropped some mentos into a bottle of soda and the drink fizzed and shot up out of the bottle and into the air. He asked why it did that and people told him that it was science.
Science did that.
Science.
He fell in love with science instantly.
So years later he packs his love with him and he sets out for a friendly dessert community in the middle of nowhere along with a team of scientists, all determined to figure out why this town has continually caused high levels of anxiety in the scientific community.
The first thing Carlos learns about Night Vale, is that this town does not fuck around.
He and his team sit at a table looking at the desk clock whilst mumbling in various states of distress because there is a house that doesn’t exist, seismic shifts that nobody feels and the sun must have gotten caught in traffic because it set ten minutes late.
And in the background of the impossibly audible unease, there is the radio.
“—they did not offer anything concrete. Mostly they sat in a circle around a desk clock, staring at it, murmuring and cooing.”
There is this low sonorous voice that manages to report everything they do only seconds after they do it. This voice that reports all of these impossible things as if it were a common happening (and it will take a while for Carlos to understand that, yes, they are actually common happenings).
One of his colleagues makes an offbeat comment about the radiation levels in the radio station and since Carlos doesn’t really have to be staring at the clock, he grabs a Geiger counter and drives over there.
When he gets there, the counter just springs to life and starts screeching. He looks at it in disbelief whilst somebody is apparently in front of him, attempting to communicate.
“Oh what a lovely surprise!” A very eager, very familiar voice says. Carlos only glances up for a second because they shouldn’t be here speaking they should be dying from the radiation in some sort of reenactment of the Star Trek radioactive chamber scene.
“You must be Carlos the scientist am I right?” The man said very calmly, in stark contrast of Carlos’ impending panic attack. “That is one absolutely boisterous box you have there.”
He finally looks up from the counter, “Uh you should probably evacuate the building,” He says, taking some quick steps backwards. “We should all be kind of—uh well dead, or in various states of becoming dead, it really isn’t safe here.”
And with those graceful words, Carlos fled the radio station.
Minutes later when he trying to control his breathing in his safe, his non-radioactive car, his radio switches itself on and he hears the last bits of the show.
“—Good night listeners. Good night.”
---
So Carlos is lying on the surface of a miniature city and he’s bleeding out and black dances around the edges of his vision and he realizes that, for a scientist, he can be really stupid sometimes.
---
The person who he had briefly met at the radio station was apparently named Cecil, he was also the Night Vale’s favorite broadcaster (if not only broadcaster), and he also happens to be in love with Carlos and his perfect hair. When they first meet, Carlos doesn’t even really notice Cecil because that happens a little later.
What happens now is him and his team still toiling over the real, yet impossible results they got from –well— everything, the house, the tectonic shifts, the sun.
Carlos wonders what could possibly top these things and he really hopes that he doesn’t jinx anything. He also hopes that he manages to stay sane for at least two months because he’s already lost three of his colleagues (The latest one leaving whilst mumbling “The sun? The fucking SUN!?”)
Sadly, he doesn’t keep much of a record because he only keeps it together until the day when dead animals fall from the sky. He then promptly stands, places his hands under a nearby table, bends his knees, and he just flips the goddamn desk.
Carlos exits the lab with an umbrella that he estimates can withhold, say, ten pounds (the show does say some useful things) as he tries to think of a viable explanation for the phenomenon whilst he can still hear the faint thump of another dead animal against the roof of the laboratory.
Hypothesis:
What if there were just a bunch of animals that died, and this freak hurricane picked them up and the hurricane turned into a cloud which managed to uphold the weight of all the dead animals and maybe due to the decomposition process happening in the air some sort of bioluminescent chemical made the cloud glow?
Oh wait that sounds like a bullshit Sharknado sequel oh god.
But under all the weirdness and newness and Night Vale-ness of Night Vale, Carlos finds himself feeling that same feeling he felt when he first saw a carbonated drink shoot up into the sky, that same feeling of desire. This town is a puzzle and science isn’t solving it as quick as he thought it would, he was just handed a new challenge and it’s amazing.
A particularly heavy armadillo carcass bounces off his umbrella and he decides to go back in, he is then greeted by his team in various versions of screaming “ALL HAIL THE GLOW CLOUD” and/or lying on the ground, frothing at the mouth, and shaking slightly.
See the weird thing here is that he should be really surprised by all this.
But instead he goes back to his station, sets his table back upright and he gets back to work.
Of course, in the background of the chanting and the vague smell of vanilla, there is a radio, somewhere, and it continues to play.
“—Night. Rest. Sleep. End. Good night listeners. Good night.”
---
Carlos is bleeding and he blacks out and he thinks at the last minute oh god oh god I suck I couldn’t even handle tiny people I can’t die now I never even got to go on a date with Cecil stupid stupid stupid you just had to slide into the miniature city huh?
---
The second thing Carlos learns about Night Vale, is that the radio will always be switched on.
It doesn’t matter if you switch it off, or if you remove the batteries, or if you bash it seventy six times with a baseball bat (If you do the third one, the remains of the radio will immediately replace itself with a perfectly functioning counterpart the second you turn away, complete with a yellow post it with a slightly sinister happy face drawn on it).
This makes sure that everybody, everywhere, listens to Cecil’s show.
And that show knows everything about everybody, everywhere. It gets very worrying.
Like Carlos just gets a haircut, such an innocent simple thing. But then later that night he hears Cecil mourning for his hair and maliciously giving details about Telly the Barber and he can’t help but think that he just condemned this man to his death.
Carlos feels a little uncomfortable (but a lot flattered), with how Cecil talks about him because A) They have only spoken to each other a handful of times and B) They have only spoken to each other a handful of times. Carlos would at least want them to be friends first before Cecil goes on destroying people’s lives because of a haircut.
And he guesses that they are friends in some sort of weird, fucked up, Night Vale way. As if Night Vale just got the red string of fate and the town didn’t bother with tying it and it just went and tangled the both of them together.
One day Cecil’s number just pops up in Carlos’ phone and he starts getting texts.
-Hello there! My phone started smoking and when I inspected it a new number has been added.
-I don’t quite know who this is but a little bird came by and told me that it might be Carlos the scientist.
-I don’t say bird as a figure of speech, a literal bird crashed through the window a while ago and screamed its message before dying, the poor thing.
-I am not sure of the species of bird, it resembled a house sparrow but most sparrows do not usually have antennae and a proboscis.
-Nature is amazing.
And they just keep on coming.
(It occurs to Carlos that Cecil is trying to be friends. Carlos is trying too. But this place is different and every time he gets a text his phone smells vaguely like some sort of tea. It’s really nice and it’s really weird.)
-Did you know that 75% of dust in your home is actually your dead skin cells?
-So when you do your dusting, you are actually cleaning away parts of yourself that have broken off.
-Those parts stay in the air and travel to places you will never be.
-We are all breathing in people as we speak. There is people in our lungs.
-There goes personal space.
(He wonders how many friends he actually has and the number isn’t so great because he fell in love with science first and he never let it go and he finds himself wanting to hold onto more)
-Do you ever realize that space is nothingness yet objects are told how to act because of it.
-Things all around us conform to something that isn’t there.
-Really sorry for getting all existential there, Khoshekh’s meow sure makes you think about stuff.
Every time he gets a text he never really replies because he doesn’t know what to say, but he never deletes them because –and he’ll never admit this to anybody –because sometimes, when the impossibilities get too much, he would just read over these texts and marvel at how normal they are in contrast to this town.
He never replies.
Not yet.
---
But then suddenly Carlos isn’t blacking out or dead or in the process of becoming dead because somebody is pulling him out of the miniature city. And since he is perfectly conscious now, he answers his previous question.
He slid down into the city because Night Vale is fantastic and he felt like he was five years old all over again, just dive head first into this new thing that you love and think later.
He should start thinking first.
---
Cecil’s number comes in handy though.
When time goes slower.
He stares at his phone and he wonders if the time difference would be a believable enough cover to call Cecil and for once in a long time, he stops thinking and he goes for it. So he calls and he does this terrible thing where he rambles on and on about the time shift and he worries that he might have killed Cecil with his monologue but then
“Neat!”
Then he’s five years old and soda fizzes and shoots up in the sky and he thinks he might fall in love again and his heart is pumping and his brain is calculating and and and and
He stops himself.
He cuts and rewinds and caps the bottle of the drink before any of it can pour out.
Science is one thing and Cecil is another.
This is different.
On the phone, he hears Cecil mumble something before abruptly hanging up. And that’s one thing Cecil is, he’s different, heck he’s a different kind of different and maybe Carlos has to back up a bit and think this through.
Later that night when clocks don’t exist and he gets visited by a man he can’t remember, he calls Cecil again and does this properly. He’s five and he’s holding a soda bottle patiently because science is one thing and this is another and he should really start thinking first before falling and jumping into things.
“—May you too find love in this dark desert. May it be as permanent as the blinking lights, and as comforting as the dull roar of space. Good night, Night Vale. Good night.”
---
And there is always a radio somewhere.
So when he sits up, he hears the radio and Cecil is saying words that sound so broken.
“Can somebody tell him-“ Carlos rasps out. “—that I’m alright.”
---
They become actual friends. Then Carlos really notices Cecil for the first time.
He realizes that the Voice of Night Vale is an enigma wrapped in an enigma sprinkled with sincerity and eagerness and a velvety voice. And his aura is like tea, a relaxing kind of tea, Chamomile maybe, but then again he doesn’t know what that smells like, let alone feels like.
Years ago, if Cecil had walked past him in a crowd, Carlos would have never noticed because nobody notices him, people really have to look and concentrate and when they do they see something. When Carlos looks at him he sees Cecil. But when he sees other people look at him, they look in far off corners where nothing is there, they tilt their heads when they don’t have to, some look down and some look up and some look everywhere. And Carlos can’t help but think that maybe, Cecil looks different for every person.
But that’s impossible, his voice says in his head.
But this is Night Vale, replies Cecil’s voice, also in his head.
It isn’t weird how he isn’t surprised about this anymore. He just accepts it and keeps on working because he loves science and he loves this town and he’s working on Cecil. He figures he can find a way to hold on to all of them.
---
When Cecil calms down on the radio, Carlos can finally breathe again.
But just to make sure, he texts him too.
“What is it?” Cecil says and he looks like he ran here, that’s one of the most flattering things Carlos has ever seen. “What danger are we in? What mystery needs to be explored?” He says it as if there has to be a reason.
“Nothing, after everything that happened, I just wanted to see you.”
“Oh?”
Then Carlos tries to explain this stuff he feels. He is just rambling again at this point and he isn’t quite sure what he’s saying but it feels right.
“I know what you mean.” Cecil says.
He’s only fallen in love twice and he is really alright with the opportunity to fall in love again.