application 2.0 ( ruby city )

[saccades]

PLAYER
Name: Anne
Age: 26
Personal Journal: fataler
E-mail: tavrosno[at]gmail[dot]com
AIM/MSN/etc: passiones

CHARACTER
Name: Cecil Gershwin Palmer
Canon: Welcome to Night Vale
Age: Simultaneously in his mid-to-late 40s and over 100. Possibly ageless? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Timeline: Episode 59, Antiques
Items with character at canon point: Two black felt-tip pens and a stained coffee mug.
If playing another character from the same canon, how will you deal with this?: N/A

Personality:

Everything that Cecil is comes from the city of Night Vale.

Part of explaining him involves explaining Night Vale, which is hard to do. It is by nature a mysterious, circuitous, almost innavigable place, and knowing that is part of understanding why Cecil is what he is and does what he does. As a citizen of a municipality that teaches its citizenry to question nothing and trust its government implicitly - or risk the consequences - Cecil is a unique example of symbiosis. That is, he upholds for the most part the facade that Night Vale is a perfectly ordinary place to live, just another town just like (better than!) all the other towns out there, and for the most part, he is safe from the various eldritch abominations that parade through town every other day. Safer than most people, anyway. Safer than his interns.

Like many if not most residents of Night Vale, Cecil responds with conditioned positive, even patriotic or prideful responses to the horrors he sees on a regular basis. He doesn't, in fact, register things like regular government-sanctioned kidnappings as horrific; they are just a thing that happen sometimes, a thing that's probably deserved. I mean, the government wouldn't kidnap you unless you deserved to be kidnapped, right?

Occasionally a panic response will break through during times of total catastrophe - especially government-unsanctioned catastrophe. However, when this happens, he generally manages to calm himself down within a half-hour period. This implies that not only is he used to awful things happening, not only does he see them as par for the course and probably deserved or at least part of the natural order, he on some level sees a panic response as maladaptive. As such, his panic response seems at times to have difficulty breaking through his radio-persona positivity, and he even feels the need to couch his fear in coded terms.

As a teenager, while Cecil was in training to become a radio host, something (we never do find out what, and probably never will) attacked him while he was conducting a practice recording. As he has no memory of this event and later reacts with fury at being reminded of it, it's very likely that he was significantly changed in an unearthly, supernatural way - and it's also heavily implied that this change was required for him to become the Voice of Night Vale. Thus it's probable that the inherent nature of being a radio host in the city of Night Vale make him both incredibly perceptive (as discussed in the Powers section) and psychologically unstable. He demonstrates dual demeanors - please note, not personas or personalities; they are neither disingenuine nor separate from his main personality. He can, in the space of a moment, switch from cheerful, optimistic radio host to grim-voiced prophet of doom, then switch back with no indication whatsoever that anything weird has happened. While he is very clearly one person - one damaged, confused, and very weird person - these switches are indicative of a schism in his psyche that both stems from the aforementioned trauma and is a means of coping with the existential uncertainty presented by Night Vale, a town where reality only occasionally matters.

The psychological instability inherent in the position of the Voice is not just due to childhood trauma, though. There appears to be a heavy burden on Cecil, stemming from both external (town and government) and internal (conscience) sources, to not only be what the town needs but behave in a way which is most beneficial to the town. This likely also contributes to his rapid demeanor switches. The Voice is the first window most people of Night Vale get into crises, and these people do not need to be panicking. If they start panicking at the reality of what's out there - at the horrors that Night Vale sees on a regular basis - they'll never stop. Night Vale won't function. No one will be safe. So he doesn't panic. And when he does, when that panic response breaks through, he subconsciously switches tones, not only to cope, but to cover his own insecurity in the face of the unknown - to protect the people of his town from their own insecurity.

Most citizens will spend their days solely reacting to the City Council's edicts. Cecil, however, strikes an interesting balance, unique in Night Vale, in that he is both active and passive. Being the Voice gives him a surprising amount of opportunity to be the dominant power and the actor in his vocal expression; he gets to express his opinion and exercises that right to the best of his abilities. Furthermore, while he is censored - and re-educated - repeatedly by station management and City Council, the little freedoms that he's allowed eventually give him the courage to rebel against Strexcorp. Not well, not efficiently, not with huge success - but he does it. His growing experience of a world outside his strictly Night Vale upbringing lead him to rail against passivity, too. Notable among these experiences are the influence of Carlos and his team as well as the presence of forces and worlds long denied by City Council - angels, the realm beyond the dog park that Dana experiences, and the simple resilience of humanity.

However, even while doing this, he defers in a major way to the City Council. On the whole, he is very passive towards even their most egregious exploitations and transgressions of human rights and utterly blase at their transparent efforts to cover up weird shit happening. He seems to have a "better the evil you know" attitude with regard to the conflict between Strexcorp and the City Council; while he doesn't believe in the City Council's propaganda to a complete extent, he's been conditioned his entire life to trust them, whereas Strex is a new and unknown entity with unknown practices and, therefore, implicitly more dangerous.

On a more day-to-day level, Cecil is just a pretty weird guy. To some extent because of the nature of his job, he is always one hundred percent of the time up in everybody's business. He has no concept of public versus private affairs: everything that happens seems to be public information to Cecil, and he shares his personal life freely and exuberantly. The infamous example is, of course, his relationship with Carlos the scientist. Many people develop crushes on cute new scientists who roll into town, but most people don't announce every single detail of that relationship on the town's radio. Cecil does, though, and he does not see anything strange about this.

And since we're talking about Carlos, let's talk about how Cecil forms opinions. Not all to the same extent that he does with Carlos (one cannot, after all, fall in love instantly with everyone), but he seems overall to form very quick, very lasting impressions. The people he hates, he hates a lot, and the people he cares about, he cares about so much he will tell you all about it, in long-winded detail, all the time, until you explicitly tell him to stop.

Finally, Cecil is not brave. He is not an innovative dude. Mostly, he's just a weird guy in a weird town who really likes his weird floating cat. Most of what Cecil does that can be described as revolutionary, he does by accident and/or only after screwing up several times. The fact is that Night Vale doesn't really breed rebellion. What Cecil is is dedicated to his town and, more even than that, to the people in it. This is due to a combination of brainwashing and true, unadulterated, human connection. He doesn't just like Night Vale and the people in it, he loves them. The reason he goes above and beyond canonically is because of people. On his own, he's just a guy. But surrounded by the people he loves, Cecil can almost, kind of, sort of be a hero.

With Cecil's new canonpoint, while his core personality is largely the same, there have been some significant and negative changes in recent months. Carlos is stranded in the desert otherworld, and with the loss of Cecil's most positive emotional connection, he has fallen into depression and alcoholism. This, unlike most aspects of Cecil's personal life, is only alluded to on the radio rather than discussed explicitly, but snippets of horoscopes and other sideways hints make it clear that Cecil is very lonely and very sad and coping very poorly.

In the wake of Night Vale's victory over Strexcorp and subsequent return to the familiar, comfortable terror everyone is used to, Cecil became complacent and, it must be said, a bit smug. His certainty about Night Vale's superiority led him to overlook its flaws even more than usual, holding on to its status as the best and most stable thing in his life given Carlos's absence. When this all came crashing down, Cecil became incredibly disillusioned--with Night Vale, with its unquestioningly obedient citizens, and with himself. Truthfully, Cecil has fallen into a deep pit of self-loathing, which he rarely discusses publicly but which is fairly apparent in his demeanor. He is particularly disillusioned with his own lack of personal responsibility, something he's only beginning to be aware of but which was brought to painful light at the demise of Intern Hector.

Finally, Cecil is beginning to experience episodes of both lost time and lost agency as a result of Lot 37. He doesn't yet know the source of these losses, but he has begun to notice them, and they understandably confuse and scare him. Should he lose time or black out or anything along those lines in Ruby City, he will definitely become increasingly upset and agitated.

Background: Here!

Abilities:

Cecil is human! But he's also . . . not. Exactly. Human. Because the facts are these: when he was younger, an eldritch creature crawled out of a cassette recorder and attacked him, making him both more and less than human, and thus significantly better suited to public radio!

. . . All right, that's less fact and more conjecture. But something happened, something that forever changed him, and now he is different from the other citizens of Night Vale in the same way that they're all different from each other: weirdly. The assumption easiest to make here - and safest, since we're likely to get no straight answers out of this town - is that people in Night Vale generally start out human, until something happens. Whether that something is knowable or unknowable, government or privately-owned business, eldritch or cassette tape, only time tells.

What can be pretty clearly determined is that Cecil has some kind of extrasensory perception. He's able to watch things happen all across town in real time; not only can he see them, but he can perceive what people are thinking and feeling at the same time as things happen, implying that he has a way of psychically tapping into other people's perspectives. By all appearances, the range of this ability is miles wide and doesn't weaken towards the outside of its radius. Cecil also never bothers to explain it, so it's either always been with him or - more likely, since he never mentions it in 'Cassette' - it was quote-unquote gifted to him by whatever attacked him in the shadows at age 15. An important note: Cecil doesn't really control this. He can't, for example, say, "I want to see what Bob's doing right now," and get a good solid glimpse of Bob. It just kind of happens.

Network/Actionspam Sample: a post!!

Prose Log Sample:

( based on prompt 8 from here )

Cecil didn't like becoming who he was, once, for a while, again. Once, a week ago, he became who he was once, as a child, and now, currently, he is upset about it.

It's very difficult, he thinks, to say it so boldly, even to himself. I am Cecil Palmer, the Voice of-- Palmer, and I am upset. Angry. Sad? Possibly. Even he isn't sure himself. He is Cecil Palmer, and he isn't even always certain of that. He is Cecil Palmer, and he is.

Awake. Here, now, at--he checks his watch--1:24 AM. Not that it matters; time isn't real.

Does he remember being a child? He doesn't think so. It happened, he does know that. Everyone is a child. People don't just hatch from eggs. Except for the ones that do, and that's something different. Those are monotremes. But he, he had a mother and, presumably, a father. He has a sister. He is sure Abby would have said something if he had been hatched. Hatching doesn't have anything to do with it anyway.

He wants a drink. He thinks there isn't anything here anymore; Carlos put it away. So here and now, his options are: wake Carlos up and ask for help, or go for a walk outside, in the middle of the night, with the monsters. Here There Be Dragons, that's what Ruby City is; he knows, he does know, but what else is new?

He glances at the door, then at the hallway leading to their room. There are too many choices in his life. He is too good, he knows, at making the wrong ones.