Canon Update and Revised Application
Oct. 12th, 2014 08:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
goodnightlistenersName: Pen
DW username:quirkypeanutblu
E-Mail: tripwire015@gmail.com
IM: pendragon237 but I’m honestly never on
Plurk:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
talkingsoup
Other Characters: A.J. Crowley
Character Name: Cecil Palmer
Series: Welcome to Night Vale
Timeline: Current (episode 55)
Canon Resource Link: wikia
main site
Character History: Note: considering the medium, a whoooooole lot of this is headcanon.
Here’s some things you should probably know about Night Vale. First of all, it’s in a desert, probably the Mojave. Second of all, it’s the weirdest place on the planet, and proud of that fact. Everything mythical, fictitious, legendary or ridiculous has the potential to exist in Night Vale. Every conspiracy theory is both true and general knowledge. The City Council is both a single entity and several, and is probably some kind of eldritch horror. In fact, a lot of authority positions seem to be filled by someone who resides on the eldritch horror scale. Normal humans live alongside decidedly non-human creatures usually in peace. Citizens of Night Vale both accept and ignore the strangeness and horrors of their everyday lives. Night Vale itself is probably semi-sentient.
Night Vale is surrounded by sand wastes and scrub lands, and the only neighboring city is Desert Bluffs. We don’t talk about Desert Bluffs. Desert Bluffs is terrible.
Cecil was probably born in Night Vale, and probably had a pretty normal Night Valean childhood. That is to say, he would have grown up carrying weapons to school regularly, would have gotten used to non-human (possibly arachnid) classmates and teachers, and would have studied things like transmigration and black magic. He also grew up with a healthy wariness toward mirrors, black helicopters and hooded figures. He also would have learned early to be wholly accepting of the inevitability of death and that in the face the enormity of the universe it’s kind of pointless to worry about how there are different kinds of people. It’s just much better to embrace community, as knowing you’re not alone is a good way to stay sane.
He went to college—somewhere—and during his college years he went backpacking in Europe. Most of his time there was spent in countries that, like Night Vale, are kind of hard to find on a map. After what may have been ten whole years or simple temporal displacement, he returned to Night Vale and got into the radio business. It wasn’t long before he was hosting his own evening radio show. One might even say it was his destiny. Who knows?
His show, “Welcome to Night Vale,” became not just a hit in the town but also one of the few constants. In a world where you can fall into a wormhole or be killed by pteranodons at any moment, you grab onto whatever anchor you can. Cecil broadcasts every evening without fail and takes his job as a reporter very seriously. His calm, charm, excitability and existential introspection have all made him rather beloved in the community. It’s a good thing too, as he can touch on some pretty controversial topics on his show that, if anyone else were talking about them, would land them a few days in the abandoned mineshaft or a reeducation chamber.
In the last year, there have been some changes in Cecil’s life and in Night Vale proper. The city constructed a new forbidden dog park where Night Vale’s population of mysterious hooded figures resides. Dogs, people, and everything else are not allowed in or near the dog park. A waterfront was also constructed and subsequently abandoned when people remembered there’s no actual water at the waterfront. A vast underground city was discovered beneath the pin retrieval area of Lane 5 of the local bowling alley, and its citizens began to grow hostile toward the surface world. The angels revealed themselves to Old Woman Josie out by the car lot, and her home became a sort of safehouse for all beings of an angelic nature.
Also, a team of scientists came to town to study Night Vale. The leader of these scientists is a man named Carlos, who is perfect in every way, and who Cecil is madly in love with. Carlos, interestingly enough, has survived his year in Night Vale still sane, still scientific and mostly unharmed, almost as if forces are conspiring to keep him safe. After all, things in Night Vale always seem to go Cecil’s way, to a point.
The station lost five or six interns of the course of the year as well, except for the most recent intern. Intern Dana, or possibly her double, has survived the Night Vale Community Radio station, only to vanish into the dog park for some time. She managed to find her way out and became now lost in time, space, and a vast desert populated by enormous masked figures and a mountain with a blinking light at the top. Occasionally she was able to reach across time and space to contact Cecil and update him.
Things have gotten fairly...intense in Night Vale over the past year. It started with the harrowing Summer Reading Program, which brought a young girl named Tamika Flynn to the forefront. Since conquering the Summer Reading Program and slaying a monstrous librarian, she has become something of a leader for the children of Night Vale. Her fortitude, and indeed the fortitude of the entire town, have been tested time and again by the creeping influence of Strex Corp.
Seemingly based in the odious Desert Bluffs, Strex Corp began as just another corporation, kind of like an extra evil Walmart, but more yellow. Over time, though, they managed to get their claws into every corner of Night Vale--the school board, the transportation office, and even the radio station itself. As Strex's influence grew, it became more and more obvious just how evil they were. They drove the angels and Old Woman Josie to parts unknown and slowly but surely took over all of Night Vale, before anyone could stop it.
The only ones who still stood against Strex were Tamika Flynn and her child army. Cecil secretly broadcasted Tamika's plans to the rest of Night Vale, hoping that when it came to open battle, the rest of the townsfolk would join in. But when Tamika and her army went up against Strex, the rest of the town just stood by, even when Tamika needed help the most. Tamika and her army were captured and imprisoned, Cecil was deposed as the Voice of Night Vale, and Carlos went missing.
The citizens of Night Vale were immediately herded into labor camps. Kevin Free, the radio announcer from Desert Bluffs, took over the Night Vale radio and turned the broadcast into something even more horrible. For awhile, it seemed there was no hope left for Night Vale. But then, Carlos, who was lost in the same desert as Dana, finally found Dana. Dana organized the local masked warriors, Carlos created a way for the army to reach Night Vale, Cecil escaped from the labor camps, and Josie and the angels all reappeared to lend their strength. With the masked warriors, the angels, and Tamika's child army, the Night Vale citizens finally found the willpower to fight back. Tamika defeated the StrexCorp CEO, Cecil defeated Kevin, and the Smiling God itself was pushed back beyond the edges of time and space. StrexCorp was driven from Night Vale and slowly, everything returned to normal. Well, almost everything. Unfortunately, Carlos was trapped in the other world with no way to return.
A few months have passed since then. Carlos is still trapped in the other world, but is able to contact Cecil via cellphone. Carlos has discovered many interesting things in his time there, but he hasn't yet found a way home, nor has he been trying all that hard, to Cecil's chagrin. Things have settled back into normalcy since the defeat of StrexCorp--the angels have actually taken over company but are leading it in vastly different directions. Pamela Winchell has retired, under some duress, and Dana has been elected as the new mayor. There have also been some random earthquakes.
Most recently, some staff members of the University of What It Is have arrived in town, looking for a missing professor named Carlos.
Abilities/Special Powers: Cecil, by virtue of being the Voice of Night Vale, is something of a remote viewer, in that he can see and experience things that he’s not technically there to witness. This isn’t omniscience, since this “ability” does have its limits, but he has been known to describe in detail things as if he was there to witness them, when in reality he’s in his recording studio the whole time. He seems to need to actually be “looking,” however, instead of him seeing everything all at once. Whether he can control it beyond where to “look” is unknown.
Cecil has a rather uncanny ability to get to the truth behind things, and to talk about stuff that, in Night Vale, is technically considered taboo. Whether this is luck, naivety, or an actual ability is unknown, but he has a knack for not getting into as much trouble as he should when things go wrong. Just the fact that he has survived to adulthood in Night Vale could probably be called a special power too, since a good portion of the population dies or becomes transmuted on a regular basis.
Finally, and this is less an ability and more a quirk of Cecil’s existence, he has no set appearance. Everyone sees him differently when they see him at all. He’s a human male, he’s not short or tall or thin or fat, he wears ties, he probably wears glasses, he might have tattoos, he may or may not have a third eye somewhere. Cecil is whatever the viewer make of him, and who can say he even exists corporally when no one is looking?
Third-Person Sample: The worst part was that Cecil was starting to get used to life without Carlos.
Life Without Carlos was not to be confused with Life Before Carlos. Before Carlos, everything had generally made sense, or at least the things that were city-mandated to make sense made sense. Cecil had been perfectly happy to abide by the rules of an existence in Night Vale, which mostly consisted of not asking too many questions and not thinking too hard about things. But then Carlos had arrived, and he had started breaking rules by doing all his science, and studying and thinking and eating wheat and wheat by-products. Cecil hadn't realized until then just how rebellious scientists were, and the funny thing was that Carlos never even really seemed to notice.
Now Carlos was gone, and Cecil had started to see all the cracks and flaws in Night Vale. Or, no, that wasn't true. He had always seen them, but he had also been very skilled at using cognitive dissonance--he'd earned all the merit badges, even--to not actually notice what was wrong with the world. Now he was noticing it. Now he was noticing just how...different Night Vale really was. How isolated from the rest of reality it seemed to be. And Carlos wasn't here to talk to him at night, whisper scientific facts and make everything sound so good and interesting until Cecil felt safe enough to fall asleep. He missed Carlos. And more and more, he was starting to wonder whether his boyfriend would ever actually return.
And even if he did return, would he be able to actually stay? It was easy to forget that there even was an outside world when you lived in Night Vale, but then the University members had arrived. With them had come the realization that Carlos really did belong to that outside world--that there were friends and family and co-workers, all of whom knew Carlos, knew about Carlos, probably knew more about Carlos than Cecil did. Cecil had so many questions, but Carlos wasn't here to answer them, and Cecil wasn't sure he wanted the answers anyway. He just wanted Carlos back. He just wished they could go back to before StrexCorp and the war and all of it. He wanted soft kisses and lights above the Arby's.
Time supposedly didn't exist in Night Vale, but not in the way that Cecil wished for.
First-Person Sample: Listeners, I want to talk to you today about quinoa. Specifically, the horrible dangers associated with quinoa. Now, I know what you're thinking. "Cecil, if we can't eat wheat and wheat by-products, what are we supposed to eat instead? The corn is imaginary! The barley is invisible! The rye is actually uranium! Quinoa is all we have!" And you're right, quinoa is a delicious, healthy and seemingly harmless grain food that has been eaten safely for centuries and has only recently been "discovered" by North American people!
But I tell you now, listeners, that's just what quinoa wants you to believe. Indeed, to the people of the Andes, quinoa is just a delicious grain food. And usually, to everyone else, it's the same. But sometimes, after midnight, when the moon is full and not a hologram, quinoa's true nature reveals itself. Quinoa is not from this world, listeners. Quinoa is not even from this universe--no, not even from this reality. Its desires are alien. Its goals--unknowable. It's activities--ghastly. I won't tell you what exactly the symptoms of eldritch quinoa consumption are...they're just too horrible and too graphic to repeat. Let's just say that there are many, many spiders involved.
I urge you to be cautious in your choice of grain-related foods, listeners. Very. Cautious. You don't want spiders erupting from every orifice, after all. You don't want your limbs to turn into spiders either. Did I say that out loud? Forget I said that, listeners. Forget I said anything at all. Forget about quinoa. Forget about all the horrible, horrible things that you shouldn't know about the food that you eat. Forget. Sleep. Eat.
DW username:
quirkypeanutbluE-Mail: tripwire015@gmail.com
IM: pendragon237 but I’m honestly never on
Plurk:
Other Characters: A.J. Crowley
Character Name: Cecil Palmer
Series: Welcome to Night Vale
Timeline: Current (episode 55)
Canon Resource Link: wikia
main site
Character History: Note: considering the medium, a whoooooole lot of this is headcanon.
Here’s some things you should probably know about Night Vale. First of all, it’s in a desert, probably the Mojave. Second of all, it’s the weirdest place on the planet, and proud of that fact. Everything mythical, fictitious, legendary or ridiculous has the potential to exist in Night Vale. Every conspiracy theory is both true and general knowledge. The City Council is both a single entity and several, and is probably some kind of eldritch horror. In fact, a lot of authority positions seem to be filled by someone who resides on the eldritch horror scale. Normal humans live alongside decidedly non-human creatures usually in peace. Citizens of Night Vale both accept and ignore the strangeness and horrors of their everyday lives. Night Vale itself is probably semi-sentient.
Night Vale is surrounded by sand wastes and scrub lands, and the only neighboring city is Desert Bluffs. We don’t talk about Desert Bluffs. Desert Bluffs is terrible.
Cecil was probably born in Night Vale, and probably had a pretty normal Night Valean childhood. That is to say, he would have grown up carrying weapons to school regularly, would have gotten used to non-human (possibly arachnid) classmates and teachers, and would have studied things like transmigration and black magic. He also grew up with a healthy wariness toward mirrors, black helicopters and hooded figures. He also would have learned early to be wholly accepting of the inevitability of death and that in the face the enormity of the universe it’s kind of pointless to worry about how there are different kinds of people. It’s just much better to embrace community, as knowing you’re not alone is a good way to stay sane.
He went to college—somewhere—and during his college years he went backpacking in Europe. Most of his time there was spent in countries that, like Night Vale, are kind of hard to find on a map. After what may have been ten whole years or simple temporal displacement, he returned to Night Vale and got into the radio business. It wasn’t long before he was hosting his own evening radio show. One might even say it was his destiny. Who knows?
His show, “Welcome to Night Vale,” became not just a hit in the town but also one of the few constants. In a world where you can fall into a wormhole or be killed by pteranodons at any moment, you grab onto whatever anchor you can. Cecil broadcasts every evening without fail and takes his job as a reporter very seriously. His calm, charm, excitability and existential introspection have all made him rather beloved in the community. It’s a good thing too, as he can touch on some pretty controversial topics on his show that, if anyone else were talking about them, would land them a few days in the abandoned mineshaft or a reeducation chamber.
In the last year, there have been some changes in Cecil’s life and in Night Vale proper. The city constructed a new forbidden dog park where Night Vale’s population of mysterious hooded figures resides. Dogs, people, and everything else are not allowed in or near the dog park. A waterfront was also constructed and subsequently abandoned when people remembered there’s no actual water at the waterfront. A vast underground city was discovered beneath the pin retrieval area of Lane 5 of the local bowling alley, and its citizens began to grow hostile toward the surface world. The angels revealed themselves to Old Woman Josie out by the car lot, and her home became a sort of safehouse for all beings of an angelic nature.
Also, a team of scientists came to town to study Night Vale. The leader of these scientists is a man named Carlos, who is perfect in every way, and who Cecil is madly in love with. Carlos, interestingly enough, has survived his year in Night Vale still sane, still scientific and mostly unharmed, almost as if forces are conspiring to keep him safe. After all, things in Night Vale always seem to go Cecil’s way, to a point.
The station lost five or six interns of the course of the year as well, except for the most recent intern. Intern Dana, or possibly her double, has survived the Night Vale Community Radio station, only to vanish into the dog park for some time. She managed to find her way out and became now lost in time, space, and a vast desert populated by enormous masked figures and a mountain with a blinking light at the top. Occasionally she was able to reach across time and space to contact Cecil and update him.
Things have gotten fairly...intense in Night Vale over the past year. It started with the harrowing Summer Reading Program, which brought a young girl named Tamika Flynn to the forefront. Since conquering the Summer Reading Program and slaying a monstrous librarian, she has become something of a leader for the children of Night Vale. Her fortitude, and indeed the fortitude of the entire town, have been tested time and again by the creeping influence of Strex Corp.
Seemingly based in the odious Desert Bluffs, Strex Corp began as just another corporation, kind of like an extra evil Walmart, but more yellow. Over time, though, they managed to get their claws into every corner of Night Vale--the school board, the transportation office, and even the radio station itself. As Strex's influence grew, it became more and more obvious just how evil they were. They drove the angels and Old Woman Josie to parts unknown and slowly but surely took over all of Night Vale, before anyone could stop it.
The only ones who still stood against Strex were Tamika Flynn and her child army. Cecil secretly broadcasted Tamika's plans to the rest of Night Vale, hoping that when it came to open battle, the rest of the townsfolk would join in. But when Tamika and her army went up against Strex, the rest of the town just stood by, even when Tamika needed help the most. Tamika and her army were captured and imprisoned, Cecil was deposed as the Voice of Night Vale, and Carlos went missing.
The citizens of Night Vale were immediately herded into labor camps. Kevin Free, the radio announcer from Desert Bluffs, took over the Night Vale radio and turned the broadcast into something even more horrible. For awhile, it seemed there was no hope left for Night Vale. But then, Carlos, who was lost in the same desert as Dana, finally found Dana. Dana organized the local masked warriors, Carlos created a way for the army to reach Night Vale, Cecil escaped from the labor camps, and Josie and the angels all reappeared to lend their strength. With the masked warriors, the angels, and Tamika's child army, the Night Vale citizens finally found the willpower to fight back. Tamika defeated the StrexCorp CEO, Cecil defeated Kevin, and the Smiling God itself was pushed back beyond the edges of time and space. StrexCorp was driven from Night Vale and slowly, everything returned to normal. Well, almost everything. Unfortunately, Carlos was trapped in the other world with no way to return.
A few months have passed since then. Carlos is still trapped in the other world, but is able to contact Cecil via cellphone. Carlos has discovered many interesting things in his time there, but he hasn't yet found a way home, nor has he been trying all that hard, to Cecil's chagrin. Things have settled back into normalcy since the defeat of StrexCorp--the angels have actually taken over company but are leading it in vastly different directions. Pamela Winchell has retired, under some duress, and Dana has been elected as the new mayor. There have also been some random earthquakes.
Most recently, some staff members of the University of What It Is have arrived in town, looking for a missing professor named Carlos.
Abilities/Special Powers: Cecil, by virtue of being the Voice of Night Vale, is something of a remote viewer, in that he can see and experience things that he’s not technically there to witness. This isn’t omniscience, since this “ability” does have its limits, but he has been known to describe in detail things as if he was there to witness them, when in reality he’s in his recording studio the whole time. He seems to need to actually be “looking,” however, instead of him seeing everything all at once. Whether he can control it beyond where to “look” is unknown.
Cecil has a rather uncanny ability to get to the truth behind things, and to talk about stuff that, in Night Vale, is technically considered taboo. Whether this is luck, naivety, or an actual ability is unknown, but he has a knack for not getting into as much trouble as he should when things go wrong. Just the fact that he has survived to adulthood in Night Vale could probably be called a special power too, since a good portion of the population dies or becomes transmuted on a regular basis.
Finally, and this is less an ability and more a quirk of Cecil’s existence, he has no set appearance. Everyone sees him differently when they see him at all. He’s a human male, he’s not short or tall or thin or fat, he wears ties, he probably wears glasses, he might have tattoos, he may or may not have a third eye somewhere. Cecil is whatever the viewer make of him, and who can say he even exists corporally when no one is looking?
Third-Person Sample: The worst part was that Cecil was starting to get used to life without Carlos.
Life Without Carlos was not to be confused with Life Before Carlos. Before Carlos, everything had generally made sense, or at least the things that were city-mandated to make sense made sense. Cecil had been perfectly happy to abide by the rules of an existence in Night Vale, which mostly consisted of not asking too many questions and not thinking too hard about things. But then Carlos had arrived, and he had started breaking rules by doing all his science, and studying and thinking and eating wheat and wheat by-products. Cecil hadn't realized until then just how rebellious scientists were, and the funny thing was that Carlos never even really seemed to notice.
Now Carlos was gone, and Cecil had started to see all the cracks and flaws in Night Vale. Or, no, that wasn't true. He had always seen them, but he had also been very skilled at using cognitive dissonance--he'd earned all the merit badges, even--to not actually notice what was wrong with the world. Now he was noticing it. Now he was noticing just how...different Night Vale really was. How isolated from the rest of reality it seemed to be. And Carlos wasn't here to talk to him at night, whisper scientific facts and make everything sound so good and interesting until Cecil felt safe enough to fall asleep. He missed Carlos. And more and more, he was starting to wonder whether his boyfriend would ever actually return.
And even if he did return, would he be able to actually stay? It was easy to forget that there even was an outside world when you lived in Night Vale, but then the University members had arrived. With them had come the realization that Carlos really did belong to that outside world--that there were friends and family and co-workers, all of whom knew Carlos, knew about Carlos, probably knew more about Carlos than Cecil did. Cecil had so many questions, but Carlos wasn't here to answer them, and Cecil wasn't sure he wanted the answers anyway. He just wanted Carlos back. He just wished they could go back to before StrexCorp and the war and all of it. He wanted soft kisses and lights above the Arby's.
Time supposedly didn't exist in Night Vale, but not in the way that Cecil wished for.
First-Person Sample: Listeners, I want to talk to you today about quinoa. Specifically, the horrible dangers associated with quinoa. Now, I know what you're thinking. "Cecil, if we can't eat wheat and wheat by-products, what are we supposed to eat instead? The corn is imaginary! The barley is invisible! The rye is actually uranium! Quinoa is all we have!" And you're right, quinoa is a delicious, healthy and seemingly harmless grain food that has been eaten safely for centuries and has only recently been "discovered" by North American people!
But I tell you now, listeners, that's just what quinoa wants you to believe. Indeed, to the people of the Andes, quinoa is just a delicious grain food. And usually, to everyone else, it's the same. But sometimes, after midnight, when the moon is full and not a hologram, quinoa's true nature reveals itself. Quinoa is not from this world, listeners. Quinoa is not even from this universe--no, not even from this reality. Its desires are alien. Its goals--unknowable. It's activities--ghastly. I won't tell you what exactly the symptoms of eldritch quinoa consumption are...they're just too horrible and too graphic to repeat. Let's just say that there are many, many spiders involved.
I urge you to be cautious in your choice of grain-related foods, listeners. Very. Cautious. You don't want spiders erupting from every orifice, after all. You don't want your limbs to turn into spiders either. Did I say that out loud? Forget I said that, listeners. Forget I said anything at all. Forget about quinoa. Forget about all the horrible, horrible things that you shouldn't know about the food that you eat. Forget. Sleep. Eat.
