The town of Night Vale had been growing steadily. At that point, it had been only a few decades ago that the village had been nothing but a sleepy hamlet hidden away in the desert, so small that some maps left it off entirely rather than bothering to devote any space to chronicling its existence. Some of the town elders waxed nostalgically about the beauty of those days, when everybody knew their neighbors and the community get-togethers attracted every last resident, no matter how unassuming the pretense for their meeting was. But the younger generation appreciated having their own grocery stores and arcades to go to in town rather than being forced to travel half an hour away to the larger city of Desert Bluffs for even the most minor of errands. As speculation grew that the once-overlooked town could soon rival Desert Bluffs in size, all could agree that it was an exciting time for the community of Night Vale, for better or for worse.
And then the earthquake hit.
The area had never been prone to earthquakes, being nowhere near a fault line, so town residents had been entirely unprepared for such a natural disaster. And the earthquake was a mighty one, the most powerful one that occurred that year world-wide, with its epicenter right in the heart of downtown Night Vale. Worst of all, right when it had seemed as though all the damage had been done, as government-funded scientists and aid workers alike descended onto the area en masse, an aftershock came that was almost as brutal as the original earthquake, and this second impact made the damage that had been done exponentially worse, greatly adding to the chaos that the disaster had caused.
The town was devastated. Hundreds of residents lost their lives, and most of the rest lost their homes, their jobs, their livelihoods. What had been an up-and-coming area was soon practically a ghost town, as all but the lucky few who had survived the earthquake relatively unscathed flew to other locales.
Amid the wreckage lay the ruins of Night Vale's first and only radio station headquarters, which had been completed only a few weeks earlier. Many had seen the arrival of a community radio station in Night Vale as a sign that their town had come into its own, no longer in the shadow of its neighboring city but an entity all its own. The opening ceremony had been widely attended, with some of the community's older members reflecting on how such a mass meeting reminded them of the olden days of Night Vale.
The radio station headquarters had been built for aesthetics over practicality, and its construction had been rushed under pressure from the more impatient and ambitious city council members. As the first earthquake struck, while the energetic radio station employees were in the middle of a broadcast, several structural beams of the building failed simultaneously, and the structure came crashing to the ground, the impact contributing to the collapse of several other nearby buildings.
Of the radio station employees, there were no survivors.
Life went on in Night Vale- it always had, and it always would- but things were never quite the same. The town's name went from a well-known moniker to a mere footnote, an asterisk in the pages of history. A handful of the earthquake refugees eventually came back to rebuild their old homes, but few children chose to remain in the area as they grew up, and little by little, the town's population dwindled as the majority of the younger generation moved elsewhere. A couple of maps returned to their earlier policy of neglecting to admit the town's existence.
They never bothered getting another radio station; what was the point, now that the town was no longer large enough to provide a reasonably-sized audience? Where the radio station headquarters had stood, the townspeople chose to put up a monument to commemorate the earthquake, to ensure that those who had perished and suffered due to the natural disaster would never be forgotten.
Few of the remaining Night Vale residents bothered listening to the radio after that. The only signal that reached their sleepy town was that of Desert Bluffs' resident radio station, and that signal was fuzzy at best and downright inaudible at worst.
So nobody knew quite when the strange broadcasts had started up.
It had taken a pair of bored tourists to tip off the townsfolk to the fact that the Desert Bluffs radio station was not, in fact, the only signal that those in town could receive.
Word spread quickly, as it always did after the town had become so small, and soon all its residents were listening to the strange broadcast that repeated every hour on the hour.
Somebody- nobody could ever quite remember who- identified the speaker with the near-monotone voice as Cecil Gershwin Palmer, who had grown up in town, studied radio communications off in Desert Bluffs, and had then returned to town to work for their ill-fated radio station. He was the one who had been broadcasting just before the earthquake hit.
This information only deepened the mystery behind the radio signal's origins and the meaning of its surreal contents.
As there was little else to do in the town, all of Night Vale quickly began speculating about the inexplicable radio broadcast, analyzing its every word in the hopes of finding some answers.
The start of the first broadcast had described the town as "a friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful," and all that was true. But there were no mysterious lights, no hooded figures, no angels.
The Night Vale that this voice was welcoming its listeners to was distinctly not their own.