Carlos sighed into his forearms, feeling the heat of his breath fogging the top of the table in his lab. He had been awake for 18 hours already, having woken up obscenely early to chase a hunch about seismic activity manifesting itself as the glowing light in Radon Canyon, but it that hadn't panned out. The radio droned on in the background, and he knew he should be listening more closely, but he couldn't focus.
He knew the team was making progress. The new data they'd collected was behaving much better than what they'd had before: there had been no signs of the mucous membranes reappearing, and the fires were minor, and down to less than once a week.
But when it came to actually analyzing that data, Carlos and the team had hit a figurative wall.
It wasn't so much that doing science IN Night Vale was challenging. Carlos had found that with an open mind, a healthy disregard for his own safety, and a bad sense of humor, he was actually able to get the result he was going for 89% of the time. But that was beside the point.
The challenge was trying to get Night Vale science to connect to the outside world's science, to the scientific facts that they'd established in the rest of the known universe. Even now with their improved and more accurate data, Night Vale stood in absolute defiance of all of their collective scientific knowledge. None of their regular Newtonian constants seemed to work – in theory or in practice. (One of the scientists had nearly had a fit when they tested acceleration due to gravity, but Carlos felt there was something satisfying about watching a 2 oz weight float towards the earth a few seconds behind a 1 lb one.) And, while it was difficult to prove in practice, considering their methods for measuring it, Carlos thought things weren't looking so good for the speed of light either. If they couldn't count on that….what on earth were they supposed to use as a baseline? And how the hell were they supposed to get anything published that didn't sound like some bad Lovecraftian fiction?
"And now, the weather"
Carlos groaned and picked his head up off the table. The weather was always music, every night, always some song with words he didn't know from a band he'd never heard of, and doubted anyone else had heard of either. He wondered vaguely where Cecil found them. Did he pick them himself? Maybe the interns scrounged them up? For once, he'd just like to hear something he recognized…some Pink Floyd, maybe….
A breathy melodic voice accompanied by what sounded like a tin whistle filled the lab while Carlos absentmindedly returned to the task of transferring some plant samples that Rakesh had discovered out in the sand wastes into agar-filled petri dishes, and he wondered, not for the first time, how on earth Cecil managed it.
Cecil never missed a show. Not ever. Wednesdays were cancelled, the constellations roamed freely about the sky, nobody could feel the earthquakes and time itself was a moving target, but Cecil's show was dependable - it was one of the few things, maybe the only thing, you could count on in this town.
Hell, Carlos lived above his lab and half of the time between sentient cookware and portals opening in his walls he couldn't get downstairs, let alone get any actual work done.
Either Cecil was just that good at managing Night Vale, or there were other forces at work there. The consistency of Cecil's show, the fact that he was somehow allowed – or, possibly, compelled – to deliver it with such consistency - Carlos was certain it was significant, and the fact that he didn't know how irritated him. He faced anomalies and impossibilities on a daily basis here, to the point where the possibility of a constant, a control group, was almost irresistibly enticing.
Carlos ran his hands through his hair, which was slowly growing back, starting to curl out again at the base of his neck. The idea nagged at him more and more every time he ran into Cecil – which was actually pretty frequently. It was rare for Carlos to go more than a week without bumping into him somewhere – at town hall meetings, or sheltering in the same abandoned building from a deluge of blood rain, or on a midnight trip to the library. It had been worrying, at first, for obvious reasons – even in a seemingly small town one doesn't like to run into one's potentially murderous stalker on a semi-weekly basis - but eventually he had had to accept that the town was going to throw them together quite a bit just by the nature of their chosen career paths*. A reporter and a scientist – they both had that slightly deranged habit of rushing headlong into the new and/or unexplained.
Carlos snorted. Like Pliny the Elder, he thought. He could totally see Cecil running into Pompeii.
The petri dishes giggled softly back at him.
"Stop that." He said, thumping them sternly.
At any rate, Carlos hadn't given up on learning what was going on down at the radio station. Far from it. In fact, he found himself reopening that strictly metaphorical mental file more and more often lately.
Terrifying as it was, part of him was dying to charge back into the station armed with Geiger counters and camp outside station management's door until he had an answer.
There was just that one catch.
Night Vale needed that radio show.
Warnings about upcoming holidays, alerts about changing laws, Cecil's horrible PSAs – they gave people a fighting chance to stay alive. Night Vale listened carefully, and they'd been listening for so long, they'd hung so often on Cecil's words, that even the things he notably didn't say, or the retractions that they knew better than to believe, were played a pivotal role in people's daily lives. Since he'd started listening, even Carlos had found himself identifying the subtle shifts in Cecil's tone – the rich resonance of a true warning, the crisp articulation of a formal government-mandated message, the lilting cadence of a reminder that they probably didn't need to take seriously.
Carlos didn't like to think what Night Vale would be like without the semblance of order and normalcy Cecil's show projected out to the community.
But that semblance of normalcy would have a price – and Carlos suspected that Cecil might be the one paying it.
And Carlos found he didn't like to think of that either.
"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." he reminded himself, "The whole town's safety would be at risk if I started an investigation. Cecil can take care of himself."
"Of course he can. Of course!" whispered the petri dishes. "You're doing the right thing."
Carlos frowned at them.
"You look great, you know" they continued, "That shirt fits you really well…"
Carlos sighed, pulled out the acetylene torch from under his desk, turned up the gas, and unceremoniously torched the whole desk. He would have to apologize to Rakesh tomorrow, but he wasn't keeping anymore sentient plant samples in the lab. Not after last month.
A deep, resonant voice wished him good night from his portable radio.
Carlos stretched, carefully closed his notebook, and went upstairs.
...
*Carlos accepted this for 3 reasons: first, Cecil looked like Christmas had come early every time they ran into each other, which Carlos suspected meant he was as surprised as Carlos was; second, the incidents hadn't increased in frequency, and seemed to correlate directly with the number of newsworthy/scienceworthy incidents; and third, Carlos was still wearing his own skin and hadn't been chopped up and hidden in a crawlspace by said radio host. Yet, at least.