Ooh!

...and then I spent a while trying to figure out who would be the least likely to come from Night Vale, and trying to decide if their least-likeliness would somehow rocket them back up into likelihood. Though: clearly it's not Neal or Mozzie (because they're the ones with the shadowy pasts and most of the narrative shiny), clearly it can't be Peter or Diana (because they're my go-to characters when I want to add narrative shiny in and not give it to Neal), so we'll just say those guys comprise the core of people you'd expect.

So let's go with Christie.

Snippets!

Diana gets the landlord in their new apartment to install a safe in the place before they sign the lease.

>

but the FBI is neither vague nor menacing.

>

She knows the secrets: none of the clocks are real and no lock is real, either; safes are only safe from heartbreak and themselves, not from prying fingers or searching eyes. A door which doesn't open is no door at all.

Christie knows a lot of secrets. Tucked in her money clip, along with the wad of ones for the vending machines in the hospital, are three full Alert Citizen cards, and the mandatory right to disappear forever.

Past the sandwastes and the apocryphal mountains. Out from the gazes of angels and the shadows of helicopters. All the way out here to the coast.

New York is less like the desert than even DC.

>

More charm than is probably good for him, Diana liked to say. But charm for Christie is Diana's dark skin and perfect hair; is the memory of a voice like a coil of sail rope, tying down the skies.

Inside the safe is a music box; a curious and pedestrian treasure. But when Christie tips the lid open, it plays a song that reminds her of the weather in the desert, on a day when the whole horizon winked lazily before her.