You have opened a can of worms by allowing me tot talk and I appreciate it so much! ...I accidentally deleted the post but shhh... it's fiiiine.
First please enjoy a quick and easy map of how the Desert is laid out!
The capitalization is deliberate! It is a desert, but this one is specifically the Desert. It has some mild degree of sentience, and is protective over it's chosen Voices.
Each city is connected to route 800 through two exits, and this means that say... people in Night Vale can travel to Red Mesa without going through Desert Bluffs, just near to. Somewhere on the map is a secret, hidden 7th town called Radium Cavern.
A note on all the voices: There are 3 sets of 2. Red Mesa and Cactus park, Night Vale and Desert Bluffs, and Haven Lake and Pine Cliff (Radium Cavern is weird). The same applies to the towns themselves. Additionally, each Voice has two main people in their family, none of which are the same. (Ie. Kevin and Cecil have an older sister, Emory and Edward have a twin brother).
The impossible geography is never mentioned or made a note of. It’s treated as perfectly normal. So onto the the towns themselves!
Towns
Night Vale
Central Horror:
Probably surveillance mixed with some more eldritch aspects.
Emotion?:Suspicion
Voice: Cecil Palmer
Distinguishing geographic feature: Flat, dry scrubland
Common NPCs or other fun facts: Theseus Noble (weatherman— he and Ted are Doubles, Rian is not). More or less canon compliant-- in the particular AU where these cities originate, it falls to Strex.
Desert Bluffs
Central Horror: Business
Emotion?: ...Joy?
Voice: Kevin
Distinguishing geographic feature: sand dunes (The reason why Strex uses Kevin as their Voice, instead of killing him and replacing him with someone loyal is due to this! They nearly did his first re-education, until the city itself started to sink into the sands. Strex decided it was better not to kill him, and it stopped. The Desert is mildly sentient thing and it protects its chosen Voices).
Common NPCs or other fun facts: Vanessa (radio intern), Ted (weatherman), Dan (Vanessa's brother, former intern, current mayor), Maddy (Kevin's sister), Jocelin (Maddy's kid), sometimes Daniel (producer- former human, under Strex made into a biomachine).
Red Mesa
Central Horror: Space, to a smaller extent, aliens.
Emotion?: Guilt (They took in a decent number, but no where near enough refugees and escapes from Desert Bluffs as Strex became more entrenched)
Voice: Pandora (Probably the most well-adjusted one of them to be honest).
Distinguishing geographic feature: Mesas-- the city proper is built on the largest one of these.
Common NPCs or other fun facts: Zadie (would have been Vanessa's fiance. Left DB when Strex came), Pandora's father (schoolteacher), Pandora's Uncle.
Cactus Park/Stone Meadow (Eventually it will become Cactus Meadow, but that's still a ways off-- the art is discordant as a result_.
Central Horror: Beauty (The reason it's split is the town itself is. Half of it values a sort of unnatural beauty-- everything is fake, plastic. There's a massive income of plastic surgery. Stone Meadow values the beauty in the natural world instead. The two sides do not get along).
Emotion?: Disgust
Voice: Persephone (alongside Kevin, they are the most physically altered Voices; she keeps her third eye closed, but can, if so desired, open it).
Distinguishing geographic feature: Cacti
Common NPCs or other fun facts: Persephone's father (Left the city when Cactus Park became more powerful. Stone Meadow through and through), Persephone's Uncle (Agreed with Cactus Park, powerful figure in community). For those who go under the knife, it's tradition to keep a locket of what they looked like before
Haven Lake
Central Horror: Religion
Emotion?: Devotion
Voice: Emory Hable (he and Edward’s tattoos are both still. Edward because he is a ghost, and Emory, in the great flood, died very briefly… and saw nothing. No God, no Heaven. His tattoos didn’t start moving again). His tattoos are grey/white.
Distinguishing geographic feature: The entire city is built on a lake. The original city suffered from a drought one year, and then there was 40 days and 40 nights of rain, creating the lake. The original city is long gone.
Common NPCs or other fun facts: Lisette (Radio engineer), Rian (weatherman, Lisette’s brother), the other two or three (as yet unnamed) people who work at the radio station, Cyrus (Emory's twin and defacto leader of the city. Head of the church), their mother. Has a sort of vintage vibe to the whole city. The city has virtually no cars, but does have an incredibly refined trolly system.
Pine Cliff
Central Horror: Ghosts
Emotion?: Acceptance
Voice: Edward (His tattoos are black vines)
Distinguishing geographic feature: Cliffs! Pine trees! You would never guess it's inside a desert.
Common NPCs or other fun facts: Edward's twin and their mother. The Doubling effect of the cities is why Pine Cliff is a bunch of ghosts and not wiped out, and why Emory is sort of perpetually caught between.
Radium Cavern
Central Horror: Knowledge
Emotion?: Pride
Voices (a set of triplets): Cassius, Elijah, Penelope
Distinguishing geographic feature: bioluminescent phenomena inside the cave the city is built in. The central bell-tower is called the Citadel.
My Spotify: has ones for Vanessa, Maddy, Kevin, Strex, and my OC Voice Emory.
Me: Okay that’s a lot but-
My notes app: has the rough outlines of what one day would have been 8tracks playlists for Carlos/Kevin, Kevin/Cecil, and the three of them together. And also also like 10 saved tracklistings from when 8tracks went down and I thought it important to save them.
“There was a Night Vale in a world that had flooded, and this town floated on the water and thrived, its light spreading iridescent over the waves like an oil slick.”
-A Story About Huntokar, Welcome to Night Vale, episode 109
