The Glow Cloud's Eye - A Welcome to Night Vale Fanfic

Prologue

The darkness of the humid desert night suffocates a little town teetering on the brink of eternity. 

                                                                        Welcome to Night Vale.

          The void above the lights in the windows of small homes and ramshackle businesses undulates curiously, the dramatic backdrop for the play we tell ourselves is the one we star in. The little town of Night Vale is preparing for another dark summer night. The sweltering air only slightly cooled by the sliver of a moon, just barely peaking out from behind the wisps of what some say are clouds. 

          The Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex is preparing to close after league bowling night. Two men carrying heavy bags are dawdling in the parking lot, sharing a kiss under the twinkling lights scientists call stars. 

          The warm lamplight emitting from the pawnshop windows does not falter, as a young-ish woman, doomed to be young-ish for most of an eternity, props her feet up on the counter, mentally preparing herself for a long night. 

          A teenage boy sits at his desk, his tentacles undulating slowly as he tries to see the sense in the gibberish that makes up his homework. 

          An old man out on the edge of town sets the diorama he has been lovingly crafting all month on the shelf next to his slowly growing replacement collection. 

          A woman in a bright white lab coat gets in her car, tries to smooth down her puffed-up hair, and drives off towards her apartment after a long day of working in the lab on her microbe experiment. 

          A doting father tucks his young daughter in to bed, points out the window to the glowing arrows and dotted lines in the sky that only he can see, and kisses her gently before shuffling out of her room, and switching off the light. 

          The incandescent lights in the community radio station buzz softly as the first of the night's many radio broadcasts comes to life, a story of some far-off land that seems somehow infinitely more interesting than the land you preside in now. 

          The strange throbbing lights off in the desert, mirroring the lights floating above the Arby's, mirroring the lights of alien spacecraft high, high above our sheltered existence, all look upon the little town of Night Vale, and seem to know something that we don't. They know that something is coming. It is coming now. And it will wreak the utmost terror upon the unsuspecting civilization, much like many things before it, but much, much worse. 

          Only a young boy, about one year of age, notices the small figure walking down the street, slightly hunched over, illuminated, for a second, by the light of a streetlamp, their face turned toward his, and then gone. The boy will not remember that night in the Moonlite All-nite Diner, or the figure on the street. He will only remember the face. The freckled face, with normal features. But in the place where their eyes should have been, there were just two large flowers.

                                                          Goodnight, Night Vale, Good Night.