application / synodiporia
P L A Y E R;
C H A R A C T E R;
S A M P L E S;
NAME: Anne
AGE: A THOUSAND. no. 23.
PLAYER JOURNAL:trustme_imthe
TIMEZONE: EST
CONTACT:porphyrogene or tavrosno[at]gmail[dot]com
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED: Lila Zacharov (
C H A R A C T E R;
NAME: Cecil Gershwin Palmer
CANON: Welcome to Night Vale
POINT IN CANON: Episode 46, Parade Day
AGE: Haha. Um. Utterly unknown. Probably mid-to-late-thirties, but since time is a fictitious construct in Night Vale, does it really matter? (Probably. But I still don't know.)
APPEARANCE: That is the question!
. . . but really: there are a few things known about Cecil's appearance and much more not known. Definitive statements include "he is not short or tall, fat or thin" and wears a tie in one particular photograph. He is probably human! Almost definitely human. But beyond that, we just don't know.
Here is what we will settle on. An adult man with eyes, ears, hair, and skin. Common fandom assumption includes an assemblage of tattoos on his arms, from wrist to upper arm and probably extending down the back. These tattoos frequently change in shape for no apparent reason. Other than these tattoos, his appearance is unremarkable and hard to pin down one way or another.
CANON HISTORY: At last, we are alone. At last we are, all of us, alone together. At last, every human, alone together, on this earth.
CANON 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.
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.
INVENTORY; A microphone, which will be utterly useless and which he'll probably lose, as well as the clothes on his back.
ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW? A lot of what I've put here, in terms of appearance and abilities especially, are by necessity headcanon. If any of it seems out of whack or doesn't work for modly purposes, I am cool with it; just let me know and I will tweak whatever needs tweaking posthaste.
S A M P L E S;
FIRST PERSON:[The voice is sonorous, though not ominous; precise, though not loud; pleasant, though not cheerful. It's a voice that sounds like it has something important to say, even when it doesn't, the kind of voice that belongs to a man who steeples his fingers before the microphone and weaves words into pictures in other people's minds.]
Well, Travelers.
[A brief hesitation, as though he's unused to the word.]
Well, Travelers; we have come back.
Not all of us, of course, have come back. Many of us have stayed behind, for reasons that escape those of us who have come back, who see their absence as an abscessed wound or as a barely-noticeable splinter. Or even less. Some of you are happy to be fewer in number, to have enemies gone and complicated relationships unequivocally ended.
[Soothing:] That's all right. It's all . . . all right.
Because we're rewarded. Every time, we're rewarded. We get a few days in which our minds, all of them, are as wholly ours as minds ever belong to any of us, and that, Travelers, is a great gift. You should all be grateful.
[Dark:] We should all - be grateful.
[And then, like an utterly different man, or a child who's just caught sight of a particularly fluffy puppy:] Did you see they've got cotton candy in the hallway by the entrance? And candy corn just a few feet down from that! This place is amazing. I wish we could take pictures. But they wouldn't last, I suppose; we couldn't take them with us.
THIRD PERSON:Cecil would feel better if he could see them. The Trumps, that is - and is that so strange? In his opinion, all things, even the impossible, are more comprehensible when tangible.
He finds himself daydreaming on occasion about them. Whether they keep themselves hidden, as he suspects, because they are grander and greater than a collection of by-and-large human beings can handle, or for some other reason. Maybe they experience some strange and inexplicable version of shame because of their ugliness or awesomeness, or because they aren't perfect. Maybe they're afraid of being mistrusted.
Maybe, he wonders in the most secret parts of his mind, they are angels.
It feels like a betrayal of all that they've done, inscrutable as it is, to miss Night Vale. But he experiences his loss as a gaping hole sort of feeling in the place where his heart is (probably is), as though a few weeks ago every soul in his city was wedged neatly beneath his ribs, a many-headed bird in an ivory cage. Now they have all at once vacated their cage, or rather it has abandoned them. Are they cold at night? Unsure? Undirected?
Sometimes he says, "I'm sorry," out of nowhere, in the middle of conversations. He doesn't know why. He shocks people with it. He shocks himself. He wonders if the Trumps can hear him, or if his voice carries back to the microphone, or if he says it loud enough, Carlos might hear.
All he knows is that once the words spring without permission from his stumbling lips, he feels a little better. Lighter. As if somewhere, by someone, he is forgiven.