Cheesy cartoons blared from the screen of Cecil's television, which was at least as old as his radio equipment if not older. A bowl of popcorn sat on Carlos' lap; it was lavender-flavored and green, but the scientist supposed it wasn't too bad, considering it was his boyfriend's favorite.

Cecil lifted his head from Carlos' shoulder as a knock was heard at the door. "Now, I wonder who that could be," he mused drowsily. The Faceless Old Woman screeched, rattling the windows, which if Cecil had been more awake he might have recognized as a warning. Instead he unlatched the door and opened it - to see a young man in a blue uniform, with silver epaulettes. This one was blond, with piercings along his upper ear that writhed and slithered in and out of his flesh. He held his hat (a small purple beret) in his hands as if making a next-of-kin notification. Cecil recognized the signs from many, many intern funerals. His stomach tried to climb up his esophagus, and he constricted his air pipe with his hands to prevent its escape.

"Hello, Cecil," the officer said politely. Officers tended to be polite or even friendly to Cecil. Everyone did. It was hard not to like him. But this officer's eyes were trained on the room behind him. The radio show host knew instinctively that this particular officer's business was not with him. But then... it must be with...

Cecil's stomach made a high-pitched shrieking noise and tried to rip its way out of his abdomen. He pressed both hands against his belly, his third eye beginning to roll spasmodically as it usually did when he was stressed or... afraid.

"What's going on?" Carlos asked from the living room, leaning sideways to see around Cecil.

The officer's lime green eyes snapped around to rest on him like a cat's following its prey. He said delicately, "Actually, sir, you are."

Cecil slammed the door in his face.

Carlos stared at his boyfriend, somewhere between surprise and shock. Since his first day in Night Vale, he had noted Cecil as being ridiculously passive. He believed and reported anything his bosses told him. The perfect little drone. This was a man who voluntarily reported for torture. (Carlos's stomach flipped at the memory. He hadn't been able to stop his boyfriend, who was convinced that it was his 'civic duty' to report to the secret police like he had been ordered. The man's crying that evening and tormented nightmares the same night had been almost too much to bear.)

Carlos was shaken out of his wandering thoughts when Cecil tackled him to the floor. Carlos skidded sideways off the couch and landed in a heap on the floor, Cecil on top of him. The radio show host wrapped a few tentacles protectively around him and turned. The scientist was shocked to see his boyfriend pull a six-inch-long machine gun from under his sweater vest, load it, and aim it at the door. His every movement was smooth and skilled. How much practice has he had with that thing? Carlos wondered, still horrified. And where the heck did he get a six-inch long machine gun?

The officer cracked the door like an egg. Cecil began firing. He began to cry in terror as the officer strode easily through the rain of bullets. Of course he did. Cecil himself had the promotional bumper sticker: "Guns don't kill people! It's impossible to be killed by a gun; we are all invincible to bullets, and it's a miracle." He'd bought it the same day he first met Carlos.

The officer, who silently introduced himself as Minas through official NVSL (Night Vale Sign Language), picked up Cecil by the collar of his shirt and deposited him on the other side of the couch, his unnaturally neon lime-green eyes fixed on Carlos. Said scientist of the perfect hair was becoming nervous as it became clear that the officer wanted something with him, something that was not good. No, actually he wasn't nervous. He was more... concerned. "What do you want with me?" he blurted out.

Shock filled both Minas's two eyes and Cecil's three purple ones. The scientist's boyfriend covered his mouth in horror, and Carlos looked around, wondering what he'd done wrong.

Minas swallowed tactfully. "Charming," he commented, sounding strained. "So... direct."

Cecil quickly stood up for his beloved boyfriend, piping, "He's not from Night Vale - I mean, our beloved town. He doesn't understand the procedure for unjust arrests - sorry, alert peacekeeping."

Carlos turned red. Had Cecil - naïve, even childish Cecil - just apologized for him? A man who thought a carnival was a threat to national security had just apologized for his behavior like he was some small child crying in a grocery store. He stared incredulously at his boyfriend, who gave him an apologetic look.

Minas, meanwhile, nodded curtly and resumed his business. "Now. Carlos, is it?"

"Um, y-"

Horrified, Cecil flung out a thin arm and smacked Carlos in the face with his sharp elbow. "Ow!" cried the scientist, startled. What was up with everyone today? He gave a perplexed look to his boyfriend, his eyebrows knitted in a question.

Cecil swallowed.

Carlos stared at his worried and contrite face, third eye squeezed shut, and a horrible realization quietly opened a side door in his mind and dawdled there in the shadows, like an actor who has come late to a performance and guiltily waits where he won't disturb the show. The realization took a step further into his mind. Carlos's brown eyes widened. Another step, into the light where it could not be ignored. No. No, that isn't possible.

The officer in their living room, knocking on the door with the silver epaulettes and his hat in his hands - the terror in Cecil's eyes - the unexpected resistance his boyfriend had put up - memories of nights when Cecil had curled on the couch and sobbed, needle marks dotting his pale skin. It all fit together. They had come for him. They had come for him.

Carlos reacted like any normal, non-Night Vale-raised person would. He bolted.

The scientist tripped over the couch, skidded along the floor, scrambled to his feet and ran for his life. Cecil was shocked; what kind of idiot would run from the Secret Police? Minas strode quickly and calmly towards the desperate scientist. When it seemed that Carlos was about to escape, he simply bent reality and appeared in front of him.

Carlos screamed, out loud, showing his pearly teeth. His dark face was slick with fear, his pupils enlarged as if they were going to make a final bid for freedom and pop out of his head. "No!" he screamed. "This is sick! You're all sick! I want to go home!"

Minas calmly forced his head back and inserted a syringe into his neck. Carlos did not fall so much as relaxed, muscles collapsing in a wave from the tips of his long fingers up his lean arms, cresting at his shoulders, and sighing down to the knuckles of his toes. His head lolled back.

Cecil may have inhaled something that sounded like words garbled through a sob and a gasp, respectively. Minas turned to him, his brilliant, shallow lime-green eyes sparkling with malice in contrast to his slack expression. "Name: Cecil Gershwin-Palmer. Confirm?"

Cecil let his eyes fall shut. "Confirmed," he said dismally.

"Charge: Assault towards an officer. Confirm?"

He should have known this was coming. At least he and Carlos would be together. "Confirmed."

"Come with me."

Cecil had lived in Night Vale his whole life. He knew how things worked. He liked the peace and safety the rules afforded, even if he didn't always agree with the rules themselves. But he knew that Carlos didn't. Carlos was an outsider, someone who could never understand how dystopia could be beautiful. He pitied the naïve youth who still believed in things like justice and the laws of physics. He felt sadder than he ever had while he helped the officer with Carlos' restraints and allowed himself to be strapped in. Leave it to him to fall in love with a scientist.

Minas, unlike Josh, saw no reason to turn off the microphones and have a real conversation with his guest (not prisoner). Minas didn't have enough rank to do so anyway. His long fingers reached spideringly over to a few controls on the dashboard and pulled a lever up. A jolt of electricity, meant to discipline an unruly guest (not prisoner) shot through Cecil's chair and restraints, eliciting a moan of pain. Minas smiled, sharp teeth just barely showing under his lifted upper lip, a merry light dancing in his lime-green eyes.

Most officers liked Cecil. Most officers even respected him. Most officers did their job out of duty and to feed their families, not with pleasure. Most officers were not bad people.

Minas was not most officers.

He was technically a low-ranking officer, just a year out of training, but he had bigger plans than that. Much bigger. As a child, his parents had been taken by the vague, yet menacing government agency, and forced to leave him behind. There was no orphanage in Night Vale. There was no need for one. Without parents, who would supervise the child's learning to use chemical weapons? Who would enroll him in the Boy Scouts? Who would force-feed him his daily slice of Big Rico's Pizza? No, orphans were better off not growing up at all. And so he had been dropped off inside the place that no one ever returned from: the library.

Yet, against all odds, he had survived. He had made no elementary mistakes: stayed in the shadows, out of the fiction section, made no noise, learned to hunt rats for meat and eat the pages of books for fiber. When he was seven years old, he had killed his first librarian. He had grown up in a place most Night Vale residents never dared to look at for too long. So when Tamika Flynn and her tough, well-read band of young fighters came upon him, he was not afraid. He learned from them that he was old enough now to live on his own, if he wanted. Better yet, if he wanted, he could live with them. Upon learning how long he had survived in the library, and the number of librarians he had killed (he had a grand total of four, more than even Tamika herself), she had offered him a life in her army on the spot. He had looked around at the hardened but warmhearted bunch, the way they supported each other and looked after the youngest and respected the older, and he had nearly cried for joy. In celebration, he had offered them the pages of Five Weeks in a Balloon dipped in sugar and soaked to make them moister.

Tamika, horrified, had withdrawn her offer.

They had escorted him to the exit of the library and left him there, alone again, without any hope, without knowledge of how Night Vale worked at all.

Yet once again, he had not only survived, but thrived. He had learned the laws, the customs, the unwritten rules, and worked within them and just occasionally without them to his own advantage. In time, he knew he could do anything he wanted. He always had. But now he had a reason to survive besides survival itself. Tamika Flynn who had judged him and found him unworthy, and the vague, yet menacing government agency which had taken his parents away from him, and the whole sickening town who accepted the sacrifice of terrified children to serve their dystopian sycophancy. They would pay, in time. In time.

Meanwhile, Cecil and his stupid boyfriend would be very helpful. If he played his cards right, he could get the voice of Night Vale under his thumb. Despite any official chain of command, Cecil Gershwin-Palmer really had more power over the people than any officer. Even here, in totalitarian Night Vale, the media always has power over the government. It was only a question of having a reason to excercise it. And thanks to his superior Josh Watson's unrequited jealousy, he had a perfectly good reason to use Mr. Carlos as leverage. Love was so often an excellent motivator.

They pulled up at the secret reeducation facility in the sand wastes. Minas climbed out of the dark van and looked up at the large, weathered black cylindrical building, windowless and with one simple white door in front, giving the impression of being anything but the house of cruelty and pain it was. His expression was one of disgust. Once he had used this unwholesome practice to climb up the ranks, he would get rid of it altogether.

Minas unchained Cecil and hauled him, still blindfolded, out of the van. He threw the still-unconscious Carlos over his shoulder and strode into the facility, pushing Cecil in front of him. Cecil was still crying silently. Carlos was limp.

Inside was a spacious atrium with enormous, graceful statues hooded with black cloth except for clawed stone hands that extended from their cloaks, spilling water jets into vein-shaped networks of basins crisscrossing the room, but Minas paid no attention, and his two guests (not prisoners) were blindfolded and did not notice. His boots thumped towards the tiny, anticlimactic steel door on the far end of the atrium.

Minas kicked open the enormous cat flap at the bottom of the door. He dumped Carlos on the ground (he hit brokenly with a firm "thud" and failed to move or wake) and shoved him through with his boot, then forced Cecil down on his knees and kicked him until he crawled and felt his way through.

The pale, long-nailed hands of the genderless biomolecular engineer crept wonderingly through the cat flap, wriggling in the cool air.

Minas cautiously pulled a clump of thick green grass, spilling soft, dark humus onto the marble floors, out from his blue coat's pocket. He placed it - cool, earthy proof of the sunlit world outside - into the soft, thin hands that had never felt natural light. They closed sensually on the essential, spiritual substance, and were gone. In return, a tiny slip of paper was shoved through the slot. Agreed officer, read Minas silently.

A serene, yet disturbingly contemptuous smile poked its way through Minas' teeth and crawled up his face like a bloodsoaked maggot out of the rotting, diseased body of an old man who died in his sleep, surrounded by loved ones.

The biomolecular engineer pulled Cecil to his feet on the other side. He stood, turning his head from side to side as if he were looking around, despite the fact that he couldn't see anything. He had recovered well from the initial fear and despair of the capture, and was ready for whatever came next - for himself and Carlos. He just hoped that his boyfriend would trust him well enough not to try to escape. He shuddered at what they would do to him if he tried.