Night Vale Unsolved

45

"The Night Vale Scorpions scored yet another victory today against the Desert Bluffs Vultures. According to my niece, Janice - who plays basketball, not football, but still did her best to explain the rules of the sport to me..."
Cecil's phone began to vibrate on the desk next to him. He checked the caller ID; it was Ryan. Cecil briefly debated answering over the air, but decided against it, remembering the many talks he'd gotten from Carlos about doing so. Instead, he declined the call and sent Ryan a quick text: "Can't call now," followed by the customary emojis of flailing tentacles, a dark sun, and the Glow Cloud (ALL HAIL THE MIGHTY GLOW CLOUD).
Pleased with his "more professional" response (as Carlos put it), Cecil continued on with his broadcast.
"The refs, as Janice put it, must have been 'blind as a naked mole-rat to make that call' - which, to be fair, they were. Mole-rats, that is."

Back at the hotel, Shane and Ryan had moved to the complementary dining area to get farther away from the chanting mob outside. Ryan's phone buzzed with a text message. He read it, and stared incredulously at what it read.
"What?" Shane asked.
Ryan read the text aloud. "Can't call now, followed by...seaweed, a dark circle, and...a blob of color?"
"...What?"
"I don't know!" Ryan snapped, leaning back against the wall.
"What about Carlos?"
"I sent him a text, he hasn't answered."
Suddenly, the hotel's doors swung open and the crowd streamed in. Catching sight of Ryan and Shane, they moved in.

Carlos had gotten Ryan's text. In his defence, he'd been in the middle of going over new findings with his team, and the text simply read "Help, at hotel, hurry," and while of course that could be something actually worrisome, they were strangers in Night Vale. If they didn't find themselves in potentially but ultimately not threatening situations, they weren't really getting the full experience.
By the time Carlos finally had all the data recorded (to the best of his ability), he'd forgotten about the text. When he finally checked his phone for the time, about five minutes had passed since Ryan had sent the text.
Carlos decided just to make sure that the two were still ok.
"Sorry, had important scientist work to do. What's up?" He sent.

Ryan's phone buzzed. He almost didn't notice it, as the more pressing issue at the moment was the crowd surrounding them and jabbing at them with fingers and, in a case or two, some kind of cane, wing, or rolled up newspaper. The word they'd been chanting was now clear; "Interloper! Interloper!" Although some other things were thrown in. These were mostly questions, ranging from supposedly on-topic ones like "what do you want with our secrets?" to more confusing ones such as "how much of reality is a self imposed fantasy?" Shane and Ryan tried to answer these questions - the more normal ones, anyway - as civilly as possible, but if anything, their answers only seemed to enraged the crowd more.
So when Ryan's phone buzzed, he almost mistook it for a wayward poke. He didn't, and picked it up to see Carlos' text.
"Carlos?" Shane asked, having to yell a bit.
"Yeah," Ryan responded "He had 'important scientist work' to do, apparently."
"Well, tell him to hurry it up and come help!"
Ryan typed at his screen, the jostling not helping at all.
The message he meant to send was: "There's a mob of angry people here, come save us now."
Thanks to the circumstances, the message that Carlos received was:
"That's a kid is angry pole here cone save is now."

Carlos, upon receiving the text, called over one of his team, by the name of Gail, to help decipher the text. While the exact message was unclear, the two of them worked out that there was an angry kid at the hotel, the kids anger had something to do with a pole, and Ryan wanted his help to save a cone.