Chapter Text
They weren’t really sure where she came from. That wasn’t odd though. Children often appeared out of the blue. Intern Rachel had a brother who appeared for a week before spontaneously combusting at breakfast one morning. She had been laying in a box made of obsidian with the words eat fresh carved into the side in runes. Cecil figured the best thing to do when he found her on his way in was to bring her inside and of course announce her arrival over the radio. After blowing Intern Maria’s eardrums out with her crying he decided to take the baby home with him and name her Sylvia.
Sylvia was a happy, healthy baby. She giggled when she was sad and cried when she was happy and moved small objects with her mind like any other child. Her eyes were a blinding ultra violet and her hair was best described as dynamic. If pictures could be broadcast on the radio Cecil would have shared one of the many he took with Night Vale to show them just how cute she was. He couldn’t have been a more proud parent.
Until she was three the only noises Sylvia would make resembled the sound of nails being dragged across a chalkboard mixed with knives being shoved into a blender. On her third birthday at the exact moment she been found those years before she began speaking in full sentences and then chanting in a long dead language. Cecil recorded the event with a proud smile on his face. These noises got especially loud and caused ears to bleed in a mile radius around her when Cecil tried to leave her with a babysitter when he went to work. Instead he ended up taking her to work with him when his neighbors complained.
The station management seemed to like her when she would stand outside their door and babble in that sweet voice of hers. Everyone liked her. Intern Maria thought she was so cute she didn’t even care that she could no longer hear thanks to Sylvia’s cries. For the most part the interns looked after her while the show aired, but if she was very good Cecil would get out a little red stool and let her sit with him as he talked on the radio.
When she was five Cecil sent her off to kindergarten. He double checked her backpack to make sure she had her school supplies including her school issued nerve gas canister and automatic pistol, which he had picked up for her early the day before, and kissed her forehead before he let her go. With luck she would survive her first day ok. The survival rate of kindergartners on their first day was seventy-six percent so really he shouldn’t worry. But he still worried about her so he did what any good parent and reporter would do and went to every PTA meeting he could.
She would come home from school and tell Cecil about everything. About how they learned to conjugate sentences in Math class or how Max Dobson received a red letter from the Boy Scouts that morning. He would listen to her and encouraged this kind of behavior like any good father. Unlike that Steve Carlsberg... They were a happy family and Cecil could no longer imagine a life without her. Literally. He had tried accessing those memories and he got a headache.
The day Carlos came to town Sylvia was seven and she was very happy about it. When Cecil asked her why (not that he was doubting her reasoning as he liked him very much to) she said that she had been talking to Old Woman Josie’s angels and they were very fond of him already so he must be important. From then Carlos was a popular topic of discussion. Sylvia would chatter about how the scientist had come into her class that day to tell them about mountains, which everyone knows don’t exist, or some such thing and Cecil would chatter back about how he had seen him at Big Rico’s; his hair was growing back in quite nicely. She often asked her father when he was going to go on a date with Carlos and helped him pick out his outfit when it finally happened. It was a well known fact that furry pants were the perfect not too casual not too fancy in between for a first date.
Though they talked and talked and talked about Carlos and though he had come to speak in front of her class, Sylvia had never properly met Carlos and Carlos had never properly met her. Cecil thought this needed to change. So he invited Carlos over to dinner at their apartment. He cooked one of his mother’s secret recipes and Sylvia wore her best dress made of of one part prairie grass and two parts camel skin. They set the table with their finest dishes, the nonradioactive ones, and folded the napkins into little origami hooded figures. There was no doubt in Cecil’s mind the night was going to go off without a hitch.