Two interns walked down the street. They had names and lives, people who they loved and who loved them, and stories as rich and varied as the one presented here could be told of them. But we do not have the time for their story and in this one, they have but passing importance. They walked down the darkening street and as they walked, they began to speak to each other.
"Who's dead this week?" one asked the other. The other remained silent and merely shrugged. They had been at the station for a month now. Interns died and were replaced with new interns the next day. That was just how things went.
Discouraged by their lack of response, the first intern tried again. "Is this...normal? The death rate, I mean."
The second nodded.
"Oh..," said the first intern, as the pair walked past the school board compound and in unison, offered their praises to the almighty Glow Cloud, to whom all our problems are but dust under its completely metaphorical airy feet. All hail. ALL HAIL THE GLOW CLOUD.
They walked in silence for a while longer before the second felt a shred of guilt. It had not been so long since they had started and asked the same questions. "It could be worse," the second one offered. "We could live in Desert Bluffs."
"Oh yeah, that would be way worse," the other agreed. "Desert Bluffs…ha! I would fight every single person in Desert Bluffs if I could and win too!"
The second smiled at their enthusiasm. "I'd join you in that, they need someone to fight them."
Just then, by coincidence, conspiracy, or the strange ways Fate has of playing with the lives of mortals and breaking her toys, an intern from Desert Bluffs came into view. She had bright sunshine-yellow clothing, only slightly bloodstained, and a smile too wide to be genuine. Her name, if you follow the definition that a name is what people call you, was Vanessa. "Hello friends!" she said, her smile lighting up the street like a searchlight.
The here nameless Night Vale Community Radio interns looked at each other with the same thoughts in their minds. The citizens of the Strex Corp owned town had been coming here with disturbing frequency and acting like they owned Night Vale as well. This state of affairs couldn't continue. "Will the Sheriff's Secret Police be on our side if there's a fight?" one asked.
"Most likely," the other whispered back. "Laws tend to be somewhat arbitrary here."
"I am no friend to you," one intern yelled into the slowly lightening darkness.
"But that's not true!" the intern who was called Vanessa exclaimed. "All of you are my friends!"
The intern, which one is irrelevant, swung a fist at Vanessa, who seemed not to even notice though a bruise began to blossom on her face. She retaliated in an instant, scratching at the interns arms and face, but still she smiled. The other intern joined the fight and though there were two of them to only one of her, it was clear who was winning. Her nails were unnaturally long and sharp, and the pair of interns were already sporting cuts and slashes on their skin. And throughout the whole fight, she never stopped smiling. One of the interns glanced around frantically, looking around for anything that would help them. Winning seemed out of the question now; their only goal was to survive. A neon sign hovered at the edge of vision: Dark Owl Records. The intern ran into the store, and gasped out an incoherent plea for help. Michelle looked up, annoyed. "If you've come about the new Taylor Swift album, why are you even still talking about that? She hasn't been good since World War II."
"No," the intern gasped. They pointed wordlessly towards the door, hand shaking slightly. Blood stained their sleeve and began to drop onto the store's floor.
"Help," they pleaded.
Michelle sighed, but left her normal spot from behind the counter to go see what was happening. Outside, the other intern was still furiously engaged in battle with Vanessa, and getting the worst of it.
Michelle took one look at the situation, and then went back into the store. When she came back moments later, she held a record labeled Best of Queen with razor sharp edges. Michelle looked at the title and shook her head in annoyance. "Why does everything I own end up turning into a Best of Queen album if I leave it in the car too long?" she muttered to herself before turning back to the scene. Intern Vanessa, or so she was called, had frozen and was staring at the weapon. The atmosphere was tense as both parties waited for the other to attack.
"Dark Owl Records, my name's Michelle Wyn, how may I help you? And by that I mean go away so I can listen to this new band I've just discovered who are only halfway in our dimension at any given time. You've probably never heard of them."
Vanessa's eyes darted to the bleeding interns, then to Michelle and the razor sharp record she held in her hand. Slowly, but surely, she began to back away, her smile flickering a bit, but not falling yet.
The interns collectively heaved a sigh of relief. It seemed that they had won that day. However, what seems to be is rarely what is, and their victory was disrupted when a voice familiar to everyone in Desert Bluffs came out of the darkness. "Vanessa?" Kevin asked, "Is everything alright?"
Michelle said nothing, but her hands gripped the record a little tighter than before and she let out a soft gasp as the edge cut her hands. Kevin's eyes widened almost imperceptibly when he saw the blood on her hands, as well as the blood staining the sleeves of the two interns.
"What's going on?" he asked, still seemingly in the same chipper radio announcer tones. However, one of the interns noticed that he seemed to be straining to keep himself under control.
"Nothing," Michelle replied. "It's the Sheriff's Secret Police's night off, so I'm helping to keep the peace."
Kevin laughed, a high pitched we-both-know-that's-absurd kind of laugh. "Keeping the peace with a weapon drawn seems rather contradictory, don't you think? We had a company seminar on just that subject. Mixed messages can be such a huge problem in the corporate world," Kevin said. "Say, for example, that I said that you are a great person and then I did this." Kevin moved like a striking snake and grabbed one of the interns, twisting their arm back at an unnatural angle, farther than any limb was meant to bend. The bone finally let out a sickening crack and the intern screamed from the pain and fear.
"See?" Kevin said with a glistening smile that looked like it had been painted on. "Wasn't that confusing for everyone? Now if I say you're a great person, and then do this…"
Kevin wrapped his arms around the other intern in a friendly hug as they froze in terror. When he pulled away from the embrace, the intern was covered in blood that had transferred from Kevin's clothes to theirs.
"Then there's no miscommunication! I said something and my actions matched my words! Of course, I'm paraphrasing rather badly. Lauren sounded so much better when she did the seminar," he paused briefly and looked at his own arm, which sported a stitched-up cut running down the length of it. "She said I was a great help with the demonstration!"
Michelle took the brief break in Kevin's concentration to throw the record at him. His slim hands snatched it from out of the air, seeming not to even notice that the edges had sliced open his skin, sending tiny crimson rivulets cascading down his palm. After a moment of quiet contemplation, Kevin opened his hand, letting the record fall to the ground, and lapped up the blood up in a catlike motion, savoring the metallic taste of his own blood.
The odds had shifted again and everyone knew it. The interns met eyes, and clasped hands, focussing on each other's presence warmth rather than what they knew would come next. One could barely think straight, the pain in their broken arm was a howl in their thoughts, drowning out everything but an incoherent jumble of terror. The other was frozen to the spot, lost in a featureless sea of paralyzing panic. They had expected death to come; interns, as a rule, did not live long, but they had not prepared for this. They had not prepared for the feeling of seeing their smiling murderer stand before them, the knowledge that any second could be their agonizing last, and knowing the pleasure that Kevin would take in it. No, this was not something they had prepared for at all.
Suddenly, there came a thunderous noise and the sky lit up with incandescent purples and greens. "All hail the mighty glow cloud!" the interns said with more praise and thankfulness than had ever been felt before in their lives. "All hail."
"SILENCE," the roiling mass of colors said from above as dead animals began to rain from the sky. "THE GLOW CLOUD CARES NOT FOR YOUR PATHETIC HUMAN CONCERNS. YOU ARE LESS THAN THE DIRT BENEATH MY FEET. BUT, MORTALS OF NIGHT VALE, MORTALS OF DESERT BLUFFS, THIS IS THE THIRD TIME YOU HAVE DISTURBED THIS TOWN WITH YOUR FIGHTING. THIS IS NOT THE KIND OF TOWN I WANT MY SON TO GROW UP IN. GO HOME MORTALS AND IF I CATCH YOU FIGHTING AGAIN, I WILL END YOUR PUNY EXISTENCES."
"Thank you for your benevolent mercy, almighty Glow Cloud," everyone chorused in perfect unison, dodging the rain of dead animals. Kevin didn't move fast enough, perhaps fascinated by the swirling rainbow that had become a familiar sight to everyone in Night Vale, and got hit in the face by a platypus.
"DISPERSE," the Glow Cloud ordered, and without another word, those present did so.
It was early the next morning when Michelle, cleaning the last droplets of blood off of the floor, heard the chime that heralded the arrival of another customer. She looked up, surprised. Two people visiting in as many days was a rarity; well, apart from Maureen who came there all of the time. Maybe this could be her, Michelle speculated, as a rarely seen smile snuck onto her face. The visitor wasn't her, however. "Hello Leonard," Michelle said to Night Vale's retired, sometimes permanently so, radio host. "Alive again today I see."
"What do you mean? I'm always alive," Leonard said, puzzled.
"Of course you are," said Michelle, and then, cleaning duties and store of small talk both depleted, retreated back behind the checkout counter. A few moments later she realized that she hadn't asked Leonard why he had come into the shop. People normally had a reason, whether it was to talk to her about music so that she could find out what had become too popular for her to listen to anymore, or if they were being attacked by a smiling horde of radio interns and needed her help to not die or whatever. She asked Leonard his reason.
"Well, you see, I'm worried about intern...I'm worried about Cecil," he explained.
"Cecil?" Michelle asked.
"Yes, he's a fabulous radio host, I am proud to have trained him as my successor," Leonard continued. "But I do worry. He's shut himself in the studio all day, I mean, there is dedication, and then there is isolation, and I fear he's gone too far into the latter. Even the most committed radio host needs a life outside the station. Would you mind going to talk to him?"
"Yeah sure," Michelle agreed resignedly. "But I'm not the best at being social either, so I don't know how well I'll be able to bring someone out of their shell…" Michelle paused and looked around, noticing that Leonard had blinked out of existence again.
"See you around, I guess," she said, waving an apathetic hand at the empty space where Leonard was standing just moments before.
After that night's broadcast, she made her way down to the radio station, honoring the reluctant promise she had made to Leonard. She lingered by the door a little while, waiting for Cecil to come out, but he didn't. Well, there goes that, thought Michelle, better just go back to the store. However, she didn't go back, but found herself walking into the depths of the Night Vale Community Radio Station. Michelle walked past the door to Station Management's office, thinking that the unearthly howls and shrieks might make a good mixtape, before arriving at the door to the recording studio. As she pushed the door open and saw Cecil, Michelle could see why Leonard had been worried. He looked like he hadn't slept for days, maybe even weeks. Cecil's head snapped up when he saw her, but then relaxed. "Hello Michelle," he said with a visible effort to form the words, "I'm just looking for news to report on the radio tomorrow. Did you listen to my show?"
Michelle nodded. "Of course I listened to your show, Cecil, you did a great job." Privately she was wondering how Cecil had been able to coherently broadcast at all. "Ummmm...Cecil, quick question: how long has it been since you slept?"
Cecil looked confused. He began counting back under his breath, losing count a couple of times. "About two weeks?" he said, unsure of the answer. "But I take naps during the weather, so..that's good, right?"
Michelle shook her head in disbelief. Looking around, she noticed dishes scattered across the floor and a trashcan overflowing with Moonlite-All-Nite Diner take-out containers. "Have you been in here for those entire two weeks?" Michelle asked. Not that she was exempt from that problem, as sometimes she hadn't left the store for days on end, but it had never been this bad.
Cecil shrugged guiltily. "Maybe?" he admitted.
"Cecil…" Michelle said, understanding now why Leonard had made her do this. "Ok, we're not doing this right now. Go home, get some sleep, and then tomorrow, I don't know, Maureen and I will find something for you to do. You can't just spend your entire life in the radio station."
"Watch me," Cecil mumbled, before his head dropped to his chest and he fell asleep.
"Idiot," Michelle said under her breath, before dialing the number on her phone for the Sheriff's Secret Police to come drag him to his house by his ears if need be.
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