07/09/2013 12:50:00 ¶ ●

## Episode 23 - Eternal Scouts

We report only the real, the semi-real, and the verifiably unreal.

Welcome to Night Vale.

Here at the station, we have been receiving many calls and emails over the last several months asking us about Khoshekh – the cat found hovering in the men’s bathroom. Well, he is doing just fine, and thank you very much for your concern. In fact, he recently gave birth to an adorable litter of kittens. How does a he cat give birth? Well, how does a he cat hover in an immobile spot in a radio station bathroom?

Some things just aren’t meant to be questioned. Most things, actually.

We slipped a note under Station Management’s door, asking if we could keep all those adorable, floating kittens. Management responded with a great thrashing behind the closed door of their office, and a localized rain storm in the break room. We are still working with the station oracle to understand their message, and we will let you know soon what we do with the kittens.

Exciting news from the Night Vale chapter of the Boy Scouts. Two of their members – Franklin Wilson and Barton Donovan – have achieved all the necessary requirements to advance from the rank of Fear Scout to that final and most terrible of ranks: Eternal Scout. The ceremony will take place at an unspecified time today, in the Hole in the Vacant Lot Out Back of the Ralph’s, and anyone is invited to attend.

Those who wish to view the ceremony should wear loose-fitting clothing and tell everyone they know that they will be going on a long trip – oh, just somewhere, to clear their heads, you know? And that they don’t know when they will be back, but it won’t be for a long time, probably.

“I just really have to find myself, and I think the open road is the place to do it,” you should say. “Don’t look for me,” you should continue, taking hold of your loved one’s shoulder and maintaining an intense eye contact. “Don’t look for me.”

The City Council voted this week to make death a meritocracy. “For all of human existence, death has been a communistic sort of event,” the Council said in a prepared statement, and that “we live in America, where it is not the government’s job to give death to every single citizen.”

The Council noted that from now on, death would be earned through hard work and productivity, not just as a handout for every resource-sucking freeloader on the street.

“If you want to die,” the Council said, “you will have to achieve death yourself. Not everyone gets to die, and that’s just how it will be.”

The vote won by a small margin, with the opposition split between keeping death universal and others pushing for banning death altogether.

Listen, Night Vale, I don’t know about you, but I am for this new merit-based system of death. If everyone gets to die, then no one will really value death. I used to be young, and idealistic, and think that death was a human right, that everyone deserved to die. But now, I realize that dying is very hard work. I’m working hard every day, trying to die, but you don’t hear me complaining, “Oh, government, where’s my free death?" No. When I die, I want to have earned it.

I don’t mean to sound insensitive to those less fortunate, who don’t have the means to die without government help, which is why I support our local non-profit shelters, that will help ease our more ‘down-on-their-luck’ brothers and sisters toward the death they truly want, but just can’t afford.

At her regular daily press conference today, Mayor Pamela Winchell extended a warm congratulations to Franklin and Barton for their Eternal Scout achievement.

"Fire is actually cold!” she shrieked. “It is the cold that burns you!”

She went on to produce several colorful balloons from her mouth, which she presented to strange, mute children in the audience – children whom none of the reporters remembered having been there just seconds before, and whom none of them recognized.

The children thanked the mayor by vibrating and dissolving.

The Scouts, meanwhile, have continued preparations for their ceremony. The Vacant Lot Out Back of the Ralph’s is now covered by a thick burlap tent, and the scout leaders were seen rolling several oil drums into the tent, drums that rattled as they moved. They also have put up streamers and a hand-painted banner over the tent entrance that reads “GREAT JOB, FRANKY AND BARTY!”

Great job indeed! Oh, this is so exciting! What a wonderful little town we have.

After a long battle with parents over the controversial soda machines in the recently-reopened Night Vale High School, the School Board has finally capitulated to pressure from the PTA. While the School Board – led by the ethereal and menacing Glow Cloud – refused to remove the machines because of the much-needed extra revenue, they concurred that so much corn syrup was simply not good for students’ health.

As a compromise, the School Board agreed to booby-trap the machines with swinging blades and an electrical maze to promote healthier drink choices and physical activity – which can help burn off all that sugar.

To make up for the potentially lowered income from fewer purchases, the School Board said they would raise soda prices, remove all water fountains and sinks in the building, and double up the salt in all cafeteria dishes.

The School Board concluded their announcement with the following:

“All hail! All praise! All submit before the Glow Cloud!”

Then they sprayed themselves, and reporters, with shaken-up two-liters of warm Sierra Mist.

Agents from the Vague, Yet Menacing, Government Agency are having their annual recruitment drive at the Abandoned Missile Silo Outside of Town next week. Those interested in joining whatever vague but important work it is that they do should submit resumes and head shots into one of several secret drop spots around town.

At the event itself, the candidates will be ruthlessly interrogated to determine how they found out where the secret drop spots are, what exactly they know about the agency, and who told them.

A representative for the Agency, speaking through a representative, who in turn spoke through a heavily-drugged proxy, said, “Oh, you know, it’ll be a lot of the standard job interview stuff. Asking you to name your greatest weakness so that we can use it to turn the screws on you even tighter, breaking you slowly through a series of hypnotic light pulses and disruptive sound patterns…stuff like that.”

Those who make it through this rigorous process will vanish forever from our lives – presumably to join the Vague, Yet Menacing, Agency in some capacity.

Those who fail the process will also vanish.

Eventually, given enough time, we all will vanish – even the memories of us corroding and fading.

The recruitment drive includes a potluck lunch, and the Agency mentioned that they are usually overstocked on desserts and do not have enough main courses, so…keep that in mind.

If you want to witness the Eternal Scout ceremony, now is the time to run to the burlap tent over the Vacant Lot Out Back of the Ralph’s. Scout leaders indicate that the ceremony will be starting any second now – although much of the ceremony is out of mere human control, and so they could not give a specific time.

Scout Master Earl Harlan said, “I’m proud to be the first Scout troop to achieve this rank. I’m also terrified to be the first Scout troop to achieve this rank. The two emotions are mixing inside my body and it’s confusing. It’s confusing." He shivered.

"We could have had something, Cecil. Always remember that,” he concluded, clutching my arm before walking, head bowed, out of the studio.

Well, I think we’re all both proud and terrified most of the time, and that’s because we live in the best town in this county, in this state, and in this nation. That’s where the pride comes from! The terrified part is because life is terrifying. It just is.

And now a word from our sponsors:

Losing hope? Hard to see a way out? Hope: losing it? Lost? Lost in a cave? Lost in a cave that spirals around a single obsidian column, lit dimly by a source that does not seem to be either above or below? Hard to see? Scrabbling amongst the rocks for any landmark that might tell you from whence you came, to where you should go? Depressed? Suffering from depression? Suffering? Tripped on a rock and tumbling for a painful eternity down the evenly-lit featureless spiral? Losing hope?

Six Flags Desert Springs. Just off Exit 64, in Night Vale.

The Night Vale Medical Board announced today that they can’t help you. Not if you’re gonna keep screaming like that! They also asked that you clean up a bit before you come in. They don’t want to get sick!

“One of the major problems we face as doctors is the sheer amount of blood,” said Suzanne Thurgood, Publicity Director for the Medical Board. “We get so much blood all over our floors and jeans and copper magnet bracelets – it becomes nearly untenable.”

Thurgood added that the best thing to do if you are unable to stop bleeding is to first take a few breaths. Calm yourself. This should help you concentrate on not bleeding. Then, once you have finished bleeding, come to a doctor’s office.

“It’s not a matter of medical training,” Thurgood said. “It’s simply a matter of respecting other people.”

Thurgood then lit a cigarette and placed it expertly into the mouth of a low-flying hawk. As the bird flew away, a distant clock tower chimed the quarter hour, and a gentle rain began to fall.

This has been community health tips.

Reports are coming in that the Eternal Scout ceremony has started, and that herds of strange, mute children are streaming out of the burlap tent, filling all public and private spaces and standing silently, as though awaiting an order from some unknown higher source. The Sheriff’s Secret Police advise that the children are creepy and that they are creeped out by them. I myself count five in this recording booth with me – exactly half of them boys, and half of them girls.

Who knows for what purpose these children have come to us, and to what end their actions will take us?

Who knows anything, actually, for sure?

Let’s go, surrounded and confused, vulnerable and trembling, to the weather.

[“Too Much Time” by John Vanderslice]

The ceremony is over, dear listeners. The children are gone.

It seems we have come through this crisis, as all crises before, safe and sound – the alarm only a false alarm.

The children that had surrounded us were not the threat we imagined. After their period of ominous silence, all they did was attack, savagely, dragging many citizens with them into the tent over the Vacant Lot Out Back of the Ralph’s.

Secret Police indicate only ten or so people were taken, and maybe a dozen more killed.

How foolish we were to worry.

How much of our lives we spend building complex prophecies of fear, when the world itself is just the world we have always known and gotten along in.

Scout Master Harlan was one of the ones taken. I hope that he continues to be both proud and terrified, in whichever new reality he finds himself. I think often about the last moments with him, and the things that were said.

I think often about many things.

Other things, I think less about.

Franklin and Barton, now and forever holding the rank of Eternal Scout, have been preserved and placed in glass cases out front of the City Hall – a reminder, to all who pass, of the risks and rewards of bravery. Of loyalty. Of being a Scout. May all children who see them feel a swelling of pride.

Except that horde of mute children from some other world – those children, hopefully, we will never see again.

Listeners, listeners out there, listeners out in the vacant night clinging to my voice as a simulacrum of companionship, remember: fear is consciousness plus life. Regret is an attempt to avoid what has already happened. Toast is bread, held under direct heat until crisp. The present tense of regret is indecision. The future tense of fear is either comedy or tragedy. And the past tense of toast is toasted.

Stay tuned now for more voices. More reassuring noise in this quiet world.

Goodnight, Night Vale. Goodnight.

Today’s proverb: Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys. Show them pictures of cows when they’re young, and administer brief electrical shocks.