Aside from the weekly lunches his team organized to get pizza next door, and one unpleasant but necessary trip to get his haircut (the desert was hot and it was becoming a nuisance) Carlos didn't really leave the lab for the next few weeks.
He was processing the data he'd collected, and frankly, he still had a lot of compartmentalizing to do.
For example - he had taken his memories of his first evening in Night Vale, put them neatly into a special folder in his mind, and had clearly labeled it as something that he would Deal With Later. He didn't have an acceptable answer for why they hadn't all died of radiation poisoning that night. He couldn't explain why his equipment had stopped registering the radiation shortly after he'd left the building, and he couldn't explain why, driving away from Night Vale at breakneck speeds, he had repeatedly found himself coming to a halt in front of his new lab.
He couldn't explain what he'd seen reflected in the flickering form of the radio host, as the Geiger counter had screamed in the background – and he really, really didn't want to think about it.
He mentally added a warning sign to the file, and added some police tape for good measure. He needed to get his bearings here, in this bizarre town, and until he knew what he was dealing with, he needed to avoid blatantly exposing himself to imminent danger – and that meant staying far, far away from the Night Vale Community Radio Station, and from its host.
Carlos sighed, tucked away the strictly metaphorical mental file, and refocused himself on the first, most manageable seeming challenge – how to get some accurate readings out of Radon Canyon.
...
After a few weeks of doing measurements, Carlos had learned that there were two types of technology that worked in night vale. The first was old technology – mechanical things, and analog devices – like tape recorders, or mechanical clocks, or Cecil's equipment at the radio station. The second was very, very old technology – ritualistic sacrifices, and things bordering on dark magic – like the protective charms sealing the entrance to the library, or the Bloodstone circles, or their cell phones.
It made sense to him now why everyone's radio's looked like props from an old Hollywood set, why Cecil's recording equipment was all so retro. It wouldn't work, otherwise.
When Carlos pointed this out to the other scientists, that their perfectly functioning digital equipment and their piles and piles of mutating, gelatinous data was flawed, not because it was rebelling against nature but because it had actually been taken on faulty equipment – they didn't take it very well.
Carlos had seen some pretty catastrophic breakdowns when people's experiments had failed back in grad school but, well…this was worse.
Eventually, he scraped together the scientists that were still coherent and started developing a plan. Digital thermometers didn't work at all, he found, but alcohol thermometers did*, more or less, and Galileo thermometers were useful for air temperatures, and long as you adjusted them based on barometric readings.
Measuring time was harder. Carlos figured he'll start with a sundial, and a waterclock, and go from there.
Bit by bit, they started building up an arsenal of home-grown measuring devices. Carlos became the de facto leader of the scientists, in a way, mostly because he was the least likely to freak out when confronted with…well, with Night Vale. Carlos was secretly a little disappointed in the objectivity of his fellow scientists, but he didn't mention it. It wouldn't be helpful. After a few weeks under his guidance, they'd rebuilt several machines, and had all of the basics in place, and some of their readings were becoming a bit more consistent. His coworkers were looking a bit better, too – eating a bit more, shaking a bit less, forming more grammatically sound sentences – and in short, scientific progress in Night Vale was starting to look up. Carlos was pleased.
Their new measuring methods couldn't explain everything, though. Far from it. The earthquakes were still there, notably not shaking the town apart, even with the new seismograph they built out of supplies they got from Ralph's and Home Depot. The old house, for all practical intents and purposes, still didn't exist. And Radon Canyon defiantly glowed on in the distance.
...
Radio was omnipresent in Night Vale. Everyone listened to it – not just in the background, the way people had the radio playing in the background of shopping malls or on long road trips. They listened to it like people listened to old radio dramas – intently, huddled around the radio staring off into the middle space, their eyes glazed as they switched all of their attention to taking in the sounds reaching them over great distances of empty space. When Cecil's show came on, the crowd inside of Big Rico's went hushed, the clatter of plates stopped, and people REALLY listened. When their eyes met across the table, it was in mutual recognition. A shared joke, or warning, or a slowly building panic.
Carlos couldn't avoid hearing Night Vale Community Radio – he heard it in the hushed aisles at the Ralph's, and the booths at the All Nite Diner, and, worst of all, in the lab. The first time, Carlos had been with his team, up to his elbows in their newly reconstructed spectrophotometer. He'd recognized Cecil's voice almost immediately - slower and calmer and more articulate but still decidedly Cecil - and had deliberately tuned it out, getting a death grip on his needle-nose pliers.
It was slightly harder to ignore the other scientists' furtive glances through the bulbs and wires of the machinery as they worked.
When he actually heard his name, purring out of the radio, Carlos's stomach bottomed out. Cecil was talking about his haircut - he saw the other scientists catch each other's eyes nervously, and felt a rush of humiliation, his fingers fumbling at the base of his newly bared neck. Why was Cecil talking about his haircut? What had he done to deserve being singled out like this? How the hell was his haircut news? He felt exposed – like that dream you're wandering the crowded halls of your high school naked, praying nobody notices. Then, with dawning horror, he'd realized what Cecil was doing, heard Cecil's voice dripping with menace as he repeated the barber's name, saw the darkening expressions of his coworkers as they heard it repeated over and over, and rushed to shut the radio off.
In the months to come, Carlos would get used to hearing about himself on Night Vale Community Radio, if only out of self-defense – his panic reflex just wore down over time**. It was another weird Night Vale thing, another set of alarm bells going off in his head that he eventually had to just put to the side so he could buy groceries and pay the rent and progress with his experiments. Another reason to keep his distance from this town, to remain the objective outside observer.
In the months to come later – much, much later - he would wonder why, of all of the things he'd find he couldn't explain about Cecil, his need to compliment Carlos had struck him as the most disconcerting, the most unnatural, and the most unhinged.
...
*The more common mercury thermometers DID work, but they also whispered things to the scientists at anything lower than 50 or higher than 103 degrees fahrenheit, so Carlos wasn't trusting them for now.
*The adrenal system can only take so much strain before it overloads, and shifts to only activating the fight or flight reflex in cases of extreme and imminent danger. Carlos knew this – but some part of him still felt wrong about the way he couldn't even be bothered to run from an angry mob or unthinkable horror if it was more than 4 blocks away.