The thing you had to understand, the reason it had taken so long for him to realize what he'd been doing, was that the whole town was just too damn weird. It all seemed really clear in retrospect – okay, not ALL of it, but there was at least some semblance of a narrative - but when you first arrived, no matter how scientific your mind, no matter how obsessively and how actively you were cataloging and cross referencing and back checking, there was just too much weird, too much setting and resetting and readjusting of your constraints, for you to trust any of the patterns that emerged.

He was a scientist, first and foremost, and scientists have a method. Observation, hypothesis, experimentation, data, analysis. Patterns. There was a rhythm to it, a beautiful sort of flow - when you studied something, when you could understand it, when you could draw the elaborate and beautiful patterns of its behavior, then you could truly know it.

Carlos found himself desperately looking for constants – for control groups – but every time he thought he had one pinned down it would teleport, or melt, or develop an unnaturally strong gravitational pull. It made it virtually impossible to do his job. Every bit of data he collected on Night Vale knotted itself into a snarl of fishing wire; every pattern he found twisted in on itself, threw out flurries of interference and buried itself deep inside a Matryoshka doll of outliers and static.

It was frustrating beyond anything he'd experienced before.

And he couldn't seem to get enough of it.