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Welcome To NightVale Attempts
Disclaimer: I don't own anything.
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Speaking to Brockton Bay (created November 2015)
Taylor the Radio-Host (created March 2018)
Elle the Listener (created February 2020)
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Story: [Speaking to Brockton Bay]
Summary: Taylor sees weird things, and decides to vent about it on a broken microphone.
Crossover: (Worm) / (Welcome to Nightvale)
Genre: Humor
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When the vortexes first appeared, nobody saw them.
It was strange, seeing people pass through the vortexes as if they weren't there, seeing them greet each other through the vortexes of nonexistence as if it was less than even mist.
She mostly got used to it though. She simply needed to not look at them, which was pretty easy actually because looking at them usually made her head hurt, and she always had that unsettling feeling that the more she looked at them the more they looked back at her. Insubstantial eyes or no.
In the beginning, she'd thought that she'd lost her mind. It wouldn't even have been all that strange.
Spend a few days in a locker filled with bio-hazards, knowing that nobody would come to your rescue, knowing that the father – who's only just begun to recover from his serious stint of depression in the wake of your mom's death – waiting for you at home is probably going to break entirely. It wasn't difficult to imagine that she might've gone a bit loopy, that she'd start hallucinating just for an excuse to keep her thoughts away from the certainty that her death would be the final straw to send her father over the edge.
So, when the vortexes first started to appear, invisible to everyone around them, she simply decided that she was seeing things and wrote it off.
It wasn't as if the things even seemed to do anything except hover endlessly, anyway.
Still, she couldn't quite suppress the feeling that she needed to talk about them, to inform other people about them. Except, doing so was pointless, and she wasn't going to risk her dad figuring out that she'd gone crazy by venting to some concerned therapist or something.
So she came up with a plan, to talk about it with someone who wouldn't actually listen to what she was saying. Like a teddy-bear, or something like that.
Unfortunately, she didn't actually have any teddy-bears available, and she wasn't going to humiliate herself by letting her dad figure out that she was so messed up after the locker that she needed a stuffed animal to hug in her sleep. She might be crazy, but she still had her pride.
Needless to say, writing in a diary was out of the question – it could be discovered and turned against her far too easily – talking to herself didn't seem to be enough, talking to some pet in the streets felt too open and exposed, and-... well, she didn't actually have anyone else to talk to.
She did however have a broken microphone that she'd found whilst digging through some old boxes – in the hope of locating a suitable stuffed animal. It looked old, and possibly expensive, if it hadn't already been so obviously broken. The button on the side of it still worked though, clicking on and off in a surprisingly satisfying manner. And it still had a kind of contraption that would allow her to simply put it down on a table somewhere and pretend that it worked.
So that's exactly what she'd done.
She'd waited until her dad was off at work, and then she'd sat herself down and – with a brief bit of nervous ceremony – clicked the microphone to 'on' and started speaking.
It was a bit like slipping into a warm bath after a long day of winter-themed exercise. An uncomfortable tension that she'd grown almost used to, now seeping away. She wasn't even entirely sure what she was talking about, just rambling to herself about the vortexes and the vague certainty that the vortexes led to somewhere, and that whatever was on the other side was watching them. Always.
It helped that she was sitting next to a window, through which she could easily see a few of the vortexes in question. One of which seemed to actually be following around a cat, trailing in its wake in a way that actually looked a bit like it was trying to flirt with it. Poor silly vortex.
Shaking her head at how hopeless it was to try and court attention from a cat, without the use of properly licensed catnip, she turned her attention back to the microphone.
"If your cat is in the risk of being romantically seduced by one of the small vortexes of nonexistence floating around our dear city, please be responsible and don't pour out all of your catnip across the floor. You can easily convince it to stay behind in our somewhat-boring reality by using only a little bit of it, listeners. It isn't good to feed your cat's addiction to mind-altering substances." She told the nonexistent people on the other side of her broken microphone.
It helped when she addressed them as if she was a radio-host or something. Made it feel as if they were definitely listening to her, and that she wasn't just talking to herself with a few props strewn around.
Finally though, the urge to talk was satisfied. The 'public' had been informed of the vortexes, and she really didn't have much left to ramble on about inanely. So, with a pleasant and suitably radio-show-like polite 'goodnight', she turned the microphone off.
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"Good evening, listeners." She smiled a little, satisfied to be able to 'scratch' the itch by talking like this once again. "The vortexes into nonexistence have taken to flickering in different colors." She paused, glancing out through the window. "I'm fairly sure some of those colors should be regulated by law as they appear at least mildly harmful to the retinas of the unsuspecting."
It was a shame that you couldn't forbid certain laws of physics from working. She would've at least been able to file a complaint about how the vortexes were giving her headaches, even if she didn't exactly trust any authority to actually deal with the problem. It would've been nice to just have someone to blame for it all.
The worst part was that she was fairly sure that some of those damn colors shouldn't actually be visible to the human eye, and that it was probably those which were giving her headaches when she stared at them for too long. That or just from keeping her eyes out of focus, staring into nothing, because the vortexes were simply figments of her imagination. But this wasn't the time for doubts, it was the time for inane rambling in radio-show format.
"It's likely best to keep an eye on your cats, still. But I again implore you to ration your catnip-usage." She said. "We still have no word on where the vortexes came from, or why they're here. It's also uncertain what they actually are, and if they're planning on sticking around. But they certainly have some very unorthodox appreciation of the color-spectrum. No word has been received from the Brockton Bay city-council in regards to whether or not this unusual color-flickering will be restricted by law any time soon."
Not that there ever would be, because even if this was an actual show, Taylor wasn't stupid enough to think that the city-council would contact her for any other reason than to growl at her for using up the city's radio-network somehow. Some crazy girl rambling on about nonexistent things and possibly upsetting people? Yeah, they'd definitely not approve of it, no matter how seemingly harmless it was.
Grinning to herself, Taylor pulled over the newspaper and the ad she'd caught in it earlier today. "And now, a word from our sponsors." She very deliberately forced down the grin. "Has your cat been acting strangely lately? Has your cat been hanging around a bad crowd? Have you caught your cat smelling like cigarette-smoke? Worry no longer. Claws 'n Paws, down by the corner of Jerry's, has got all the solutions to your needs." I paused, the grin beginning to break out once again, as I continued in a 'small print'-voice. "Claws 'n Paws will not be held responsible for any case of catnip-abuse, or for the unusually handsome vortex loitering out back and who may try to chat up your feline."
Which was silly, of course, because the vortexes all looked very much the same. Not to mention how they were very much a figment of her imagination, and how said pet-shop would likely be very upset with her if she was actually on air. After all, they hadn't sponsored her, and she was kind of making fun of them by dragging them into things.
The whole thing was ridiculous. But for some reason, it really helped to have a specific time to look forward to when starting her 'show'. Something to look forward to in a long day of school, and something to sort of... plan around, when it came to her dad and all the other things in her life that she really needed to get a handle on. Like the homework that she hadn't been able to do, because she'd been stuck in the hospital for weeks after the locker.
Oh, sure. They were definitely doing all kinds of things to help her after their abysmal failure at keeping the bullying in line. Why, look at all the homework that they were piling on top of her the moment she was deemed 'healthy'. And a handful of teachers had at some point sent a considering eye her way before continuing to blissfully ignore her entirely.
Thankfully, the trio were keeping their distance for now. They were willing to wait another month or so until the faculty returned entirely to their usual ways and began purposefully ignoring her again. It wasn't as if there was any need for them to rush it, since Taylor sure as hell hadn't been able to demand a transfer to another school, meaning that she'd be stuck with them for at least another two years. A month, in comparison, was no time at all.
One of these days, she might seriously try burning Winslow to the ground. Not whilst there were still people inside, obviously. But it wasn't as if anyone would be able to force her to go to school when the school in question wasn't standing anymore.
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Taylor took a deep breath, then turned to stare at the microphone in her room.
There were rumors in school of a radio-show using tinker-tech or something to hijack every single speaker-system in Brockton Bay. As in, a voice that'd interrupt anything and anyone, whether it be tuned to another station, turned off, incapable of picking up radio-signals, or straight-out broken.
Regardless of everything else, there was a woman's voice that would talk about stuff that nobody else could see, and the quality was the same for everyone regardless of how bad their speakers were – in fact, it apparently also included headphones of various kinds. As of yet, nobody had managed to record the voice either. Only finding a bunch of white noise when they tried replaying the recording.
A woman's voice, stretching all across Brockton Bay, speaking at a specific time of day, and doing it in a distinctly cape-like manner. Most were convinced it was either a prank, some kind of advertising, or a tinker-cape that was completely nuts.
The microphone wasn't plugged in. The microphone had never really worked in the first place. The only thing on the microphone that worked was the on and off switch, where she could see a small light suddenly lit up. Despite the fact that the microphone didn't have any batteries.
Taylor took another deep breath.
She was a cape. It was the only thing that made sense. Her urge to speak into the microphone, her ability to use the microphone, the strange vortexes that nobody else could see. She wasn't crazy, she was a cape.
And she'd apparently made her appearance by accident, by illegally hijacking the broadcast signals of the entire Brockton Bay area. Repeatedly.
Taylor took another deep breath, very carefully regulating her breathing. She wasn't going to start hyperventilating over this. No way in hell.
She was a cape, and her powers apparently revolved entirely around being a radio-host.
Sure, maybe she could do something else, but Taylor really couldn't imagine it. Even the strange vortexes might simply be related to her powers trying to give her something worth talking about on the air. Something that would let her ramble on about things that weren't actually related to her own life, because nobody really wanted to listen to some kid whining about being bullied for however long it took the broadcast to finish.
She was a parahuman radio-host.
But that didn't make any sense at all, because weren't capes supposed to go around fighting it out in the docks and stuff? Capes weren't supposed to have ridiculously mundane powers like hers, right? So why were her powers entirely centered around being a radio-host?
Glancing at the clock, Taylor nodded to herself. There was still plenty of time before the show started, the show that she even now couldn't quite bring herself to give up, no matter how illegal it might technically be.
She needed to research this. She needed to research capes, and she needed to research radio-laws, and she needed to research cape-laws.
What was she even supposed to call herself? It wasn't as if anyone would connect the mysterious woman's voice with that of her own. She was just a teenager, no matter how the microphone and her powers distorted her voice when on the air.
Should she even have a secret identity at all? What would be the point? What enemies would she really get by running a radio-show? It wasn't as if she had any real plans to talk about political things. Then again, she kind of got the feeling that the trio would make her life miserable if they ever found out about it.
Except... being a radio-host was a job, right? And people who worked got paid for it. So, as long as she actually managed to grab real sponsors for her broadcast, then they'd be willing to pay her for it. A way for product-placement to reach every ear in Brockton Bay at a given time was certainly nothing to scoff at.
And, if Taylor was working a well-paid for job, she wouldn't need to go to school, right? She wouldn't need to get educated, or make friends, or any of that stuff. She just needed to talk into the microphone and rake in the cash. Absolute freedom.
The thought nearly made her giddy. But she was still hesitant. Better to go out with an alias and then reveal them to be one and the same, then to go out with her real name and discover that she'd missed a very dangerous memo somewhere along the road.
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It'd taken her some time to set up a anonymous mailing address for people wanting to get in touch with her, but she was quite satisfied with it.
She'd used a public computer to register the address, carefully dodged all surveillance in the area surrounding it – which amounted to a single decade-old security camera – and put see-through duct-tape over her fingerprints so that nobody would be able to identify her through any fingerprints she could've left on the keyboard either. All in all, she felt like she'd used a respectable – though fairly frugal – amount of safety-checks.
It probably would've been a bit too noticeable if she'd arrived in full anonymity-gear, even if she really ought to have done it like that. There was a certain way these things ought to be handled, and big trench-coats, sunglasses, and large-brimmed hats was the way to do it.
Taylor paused, not entirely sure if that was true or not, before dismissing the thought. It was a very good disguise, but it would probably also draw a bit more attention than she really needed to. The point was to not be seen, tracked, or remembered, not exactly to conceal her identity.
Besides, it wasn't as if she knew where to buy something like that. Brockton Bay didn't have a proper anonymous-outfits store. Which was kind of a shame, all things considered. It might not be the biggest city around, but there were surely enough people around that one could make a good profit catering to those types of needs.
Why, everyone needed a good anonymous outfit for when they decided to do some espionage or similarly comfortable pastimes. And children always outgrew their clothes so quickly. The untapped demand for those outfits must be immense, locally. Though perhaps people nowadays were becoming a bit too big on e-stores for more local ones to really be able to compete.
Still, there was a tradition to these kinds of things, and it was strange how Brockton Bay in general seemed so apathetic towards it.
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Story: [Taylor the Radio-Host]
Summary: Taylor decides to start up a radio-show as a hobby to escape from her bullies.
Crossover: (Worm) / (Welcome to Nightvale)
Genre: Friendship?
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Taylor wasn't really big on radio-stuff, or electronics in general. She'd always been more of an arts-and-crafts kind of girl.
But that was sort of the point.
Everything in her life seemed to revolve around Emma in some way, and though once upon a time she'd been perfectly happy with that arrangement, now it never ceased to rub her the wrong way. So Taylor decided to branch out a little bit.
A long-term project that Emma had nothing to do with.
Radio had finally been settled on simply because nobody cared about the radio anymore. The only people talking about radio-broadcasts were closer to her dad's age than her own, and with good reason. Internet had made all of those broadcasts a lot more easily available than someone having to tune in to actual radio-channels, and if you were on the internet anyway the news came with recognizable faces or well-written articles.
The days of the radio were numbered, and Taylor's generation paid very little attention to it. Hell, her dad's generation didn't much care either, preferring the TV over the radio or the smartphones being carried around everywhere.
Building her own radio-broadcasting-station was therefore the perfect solution to finding something in her life that Emma literally had nothing to do with. It wasn't even all that expensive, what with the parts being more secondhand junk than anything new.
The microphone crackled sometimes, and it didn't pick up her voice without distorting it a little bit. The actual broadcasting-antenna didn't exactly have the best reach in town, what with not reaching more than a few kilometers – if that. And the rest of the setup was so bare-bones that there wasn't much point in talking about it.
Still, it'd taken her a long while to sort out all of the different pieces and how they were supposed to fit together, so she'd had plenty of time to figure out what she wanted to say when she was finally 'on the air'.
Which was why she'd made sure to copy a bunch of different community-calendars across town, looked into the news – both local and not-so-local – and looked up both weather-channels and traffic-issues.
"The bright sun is hidden by smog, the loud noises you're hearing probably aren't fireworks, and the clerks of the corner-stores are as happy to see you at midnight as they are at noon. Welcome to Brockton Bay."
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Nothing much changed after that. Taylor didn't suddenly become famous after a single night talking into a microphone on a radio-channel nobody was listening to. Though, even if she had somehow become famous, it wasn't like her listeners would be able to contact her back, what with her not owning a phone, and not wanting to give out her home-phone on the chance of someone connecting the number back to her.
It was a situation that Taylor didn't exactly feel very enthusiastic about rectifying. They didn't have cellphones in their house for a reason.
In the end, Taylor's solution to it was to open a PO-box. It hurt her wallet a bit, but no more than the radio-equipment had, and it was a much better option than the alternatives, in case anyone ever wanted to contact her little amateur radio-station.
It'd be a lot more dated than having people calling in on air or something, but Taylor wasn't sure if she would've been nearly as enthusiastic about using her radio-broadcast as an escape from her school-life if it'd included being forced to be polite to whatever loon might call in. No, a PO-box was a much better alternative.
She didn't really expect much from it, and she was right in assuming as much. The PO-box remained comfortably empty, as Taylor continued to read out various community-calendars and news-worthy stories, and life continued on.
Until someone with very cursive handwriting sent in a community-calendar of their own that did indeed match what Taylor had seen pinned to a billboard in the neighborhood. From their note, they'd thought Taylor's radio-show was a good idea to 'summarize the full community of Brockton Bay's various events'.
Apparently, it was a much better option than forcing people with aching bones to run around looking at billboards across town, or to – heaven forbid – actually try to understand what those dratted computer-contraptions had to say about things.
It was a startlingly touching little gesture of faith, and Taylor was more than happy to make sure to mention the event in question. She hadn't really expected anyone to really pay attention to her, so it was a little bit embarrassing, but at the same time it was extremely satisfying.
She was doing something that she'd never have imagined doing back when she was friends with Emma. She was doing something that was helpful to people, and-... and okay, it was still very much something that'd cost her to set up, something that was still costing her money, and something that she was highly unlikely to ever make any money off of, but it was hers.
That meant everything.
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It was kind of amazing, the things you picked up after a while.
Taylor had reached the point where she knew dozens of names of older people who were more than happy to send in their billboard-posts to her instead of having to run around town to spread the word of a new get-together.
A lot of those people tended to also leave something of their own personalities in their letters to her, so it wasn't just that she was picking up on their names and hobbies.
She knew that John Peters was a farmer, in that he was technically retired but still wandered around a few fields outside of town whenever he had time for it, just so he could cluck his tongue at the youths of today.
She knew that Josefina Ortiz was still campaigning to rebuild the old theater, much like her own father was campaigning about the old ferry, with an about equal amount of success. Though she was retired, so it probably wasn't as stressful as trying to work at the same time, she also had high hopes of a good placement in some kind of amateur bowling-league.
She knew that Steve Carlsberg was a bit of a conspiracy-nut, who wrote books about 'things the government didn't want you to know', and did manage to actually sell a few of those books, even if it was apparently more for people to laugh at him than to agree with him. He didn't seem to mind, as long as the 'truth became known', and didn't really seem to expect anyone to agree with him either.
It was an eclectic collection of individuals, though it was rather obvious to Taylor that all of them were old enough to be her grandparents. Radio-shows clearly weren't for young people, which suited Taylor just fine. The less people her age with an interest in radio, the better.
She learned their names, she learned their stories, she learned a lot of their schedules by heart – mostly on accident and constant repetitions of 'we meet this week too', but still – and she continued to be nothing except a convenient voice behind a small amateur radio-broadcast to the lot of them.
Ignoring Winslow and the Terrible Trio, life was pretty okay-ish.
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Taylor's first clue that something important had happened was the not-bang she heard that made the windows not-rattle in their frames. It was a highly disturbing sensation, and she was endlessly thankful that it was distant.
She'd heard some theories about there being a bomb-tinkerer who'd joined the ABB, but she hadn't really paid much attention to it. Her radio-broadcast wasn't about cape-stuff, for all that it did try to mention if any roads had been closed off or not in the latest cape-fight.
Taylor's second clue that something important had happened was the cat.
It was monochrome, less in the sense that it was a single color, and more that it was flickering in between see-through and a kind of present blankness of existence. As if the cat itself had been so busy willing itself into existence that it hadn't gotten around to willing a color into existence as well.
A floating cat, staring at her with eyes that didn't really look any different from its supposed fur.
"Listeners. I'm not sure what that not-explosion was, but there's a floating cat in front of me. I'm fairly sure that cats aren't meant to float, or flicker out of existence like a worn-out video-tape, but there it is." Taylor took a deep breath. "I'm not sure if that means I've gone insane, or if the not-explosion I just not-heard did something bad to the laws of physics."
The cat yawned, or perhaps it was trying to meow at her. It was perfectly silent.
Taylor reached out and poked the floating cat.
It flickered. Twitched and twirled, and there was fur underneath Taylor's fingertip, until there wasn't. The floating cat danced slightly out of her reach, before moving back towards her.
"Ah. Well, it seems to be solid. Mostly. That's... maybe good?" Taylor frowned, turning back to her microphone. "Listeners, despite my own reckless behavior, if you see any floating cats that flicker out of existence, you should probably not try to touch them. Cats are known to be very enthusiastic about biting and scratching, and I have no idea what might happen should they flicker in or out of existence at an inopportune moment."
Dancing in front of Taylor's mind's eye was a cat burying its short but sharp claws deep into somebody's internal organs, scratching away without being stopped by human skin or muscle. It wasn't a good image, and it made Taylor somewhat hyper-aware of the floating cat in front of her.
Still, despite what might very well classify as a rather substantial emergency in regards to physics as they understood it, Taylor wasn't actually finished with her show yet. Though the first thing she was going to do once she was off-air would be to check the news to see what the hell was going on.
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Turns out, Bakuda – the ABB bomb-Tinkerer – had decided to create something she called an 'anti-reality bomb'. How it worked was the topic of much debate with a bunch of physicists, but the actual impact of it was that... physics were a bit wonky in Brockton Bay.
Whether that'd clear up within the week, or if it'd permanently pierced a hole into space-time and alternate planes of existences, nobody could tell for sure. What they could do was document some of the things that had gone wonky.
One of the things were the flickering cats that apparently showed up around radio-transmissions. Another was of one of the local Wards called Vista who'd figured out the trick to flight overnight, and was refusing to come down from where she was gleefully zooming around the city with all of the mature restraint that could be expected from a preteen.
Another Ward, Clockblocker, claimed to have nearly had a heart-attack because someone he'd frozen had sort of just... walked out of their own body? It hadn't been permanent, and the person in question had later described it more as a kind of terrifyingly muted out-of-body experience than anything truly harmful, but at this point everyone were really unsure of how much of anyone with Shaker-powers were affected by Bakuda's bomb.
There were a few confused reports about people calling in, completely convinced that the roads were moving on them, but all of the choppers that'd been sent to record the phenomena had come up empty of proof.
As for Bakuda's reason for triggering the bomb in the first place, it seemed to have been an argument within the ABB itself. Lung was understandably not available for a comment, what with being a Villain rage-dragon, but he had been spotted afterwards so any insurrection had likely been thoroughly dealt with by now.
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Story: [Elle the Listener]
Summary: Taylor runs a tiny home-made radio-show that tells stories about a tiny little nonexistent community. Elle listens.
Crossover: (Worm) / (Welcome to Nightvale)
Genre: ?
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Elle liked listening to the radio. Or, rather, she liked listening to a very specific radio-show.
It was a silly show where the world was a bizarre place and parahumans were quite outdone in odd-ness by everything from terrifying creatures called 'librarians' to skies entirely cluttered with invisible arrows.
The others didn't really understand her fascination, but they were willing to indulge her as long as they were in Brockton Bay. It was a very local radio-show. It was in fact local enough that the person holding it was probably doing it illegally from home or something.
It wasn't like it was exactly a high-priority crime if that was actually the case, and even if they were, Faultline's Crew couldn't exactly point fingers. Mercenaries could rarely claim a moral high ground.
Regardless, Elle really liked listening to it. It was a bit like it'd been, back in the beginning when she'd needed to be hypnotized into seeing a non-nightmarish world.
Less actual fear, and none of the risks, but that same feeling of confused wonder. Of feeling like something unfolded in front of her, and she could finally begin to see the wonders hidden behind the scariness.
They'd talk about people who Elle was pretty sure didn't even remotely exist, and strange things happening that defied the laws of reality in a way that obviously didn't happen.
It was funny. There weren't any parahumans in their stories, but it always felt so nostalgic to Elle's mind. As if she'd be able to remember her own adventures in that strange town that wasn't quite Brockton Bay, if only she breathed in deeply enough and let the radio-voice fill her lungs.
Elle didn't have the best control over her powers. On some days she could function better in reality, but then her powers worked less, and other days she'd barely be able to respond enough to eat, but suddenly she could do amazing things with her powers.
She knew that that was just how her powers worked. She didn't really like them, but they were a part of her. Had been for so long that it was hard to remember a time when she hadn't had them.
In some way, she was jealous of everyone else for having powers that didn't make them... like her. But she'd learned to live with it a long time ago.
Listening to the radio however, it felt like she really could just let go one day, go sideways-left somewhere along the path and find herself in that same bizarre town. She couldn't imagine what she might do from there, because she wasn't sure what she could ever do if she for example ever came face-to-face with a literal five-headed dragon.
Even if it was unrealistic though, it was still a nice feeling. And Elle had long since learned to appreciate nice feelings where she could get them.
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A/N: As you can probably guess, these many crossover-attempts were inspired by "Go Gently" by Shana the Short. Which is an amazing (albeit also unfinished) fic.
Unfortunately, I'm apparently not well-suited for writing slow-paced character-driven fics where people work together with their community to overcome various challenges and threats. So they all kind of fell apart.