(This episode was co-written with Glen David Gold.)

Time is irrelevant and imaginary, and yet somehow it seems we are out of it. Welcome to Night Vale

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Listeners, I have just returned from an odyssey. As you know, a case of Canadian Club whiskey was hidden in Night Vale over forty years ago as part of a contest, and now eGemony, eGemony, eGemony [struggling to say it correctly] that tech start-up wants it back so they can drink it and thus drink the soul of Night Vale. But it turns out that the alcohol was spirited away by -- ooh 'spirited' good one, Cecil -- by baristas.

I knew I had to warn them before the Corporate Prize, Contest and Sweepstake Buzz Marketing Street Teams located them, but that would mean going to a place from which no one has ever returned: the remote cavelands of the baristas, deep under the earth where Eritrean pour-over drips gently from stalactites & latte foam rivers froth and bubble in cool stone cracks.

We're all pretty sure the cavelands are under that grate behind the Ace Hardware, but no one goes down there because of the stench of espresso & the chilling sounds of Carly Simon's greatest hits CD.

The underground society of the baristas is an insular one, and no outsider has met their king -- did you know baristas have a king? I didn't, but my niece Janice knows all about which professions have monarchs and which, like ride-sharing services, only have serpents wearing crowns.

Janice still has her barista costume from last year's careers parade. So in order to investigate the cavelands, I cloaked myself carefully in the necessary animal skins, as Janice directed, and slung over my shoulders the ceremonial spikey coffee hammer, and the sweater vest with the correct number of arm holes.

Janice and I took a quick on-line course in Latte Art. Janice was great at it. She made a photo-realistic Asplenium nidus fern. I, uh, I made a, uh, rock of some kind.

Janice said she knew exactly how to finish my disguise. And she was right. I regarded myself in the Ace Hardware window, and I knew that I was meant for that boldest, unruliest, most outlaw of mustaches, the Rollie Fingers - the final touch of a true barista. Rollie Fingers was the most famous king in barista history, and now every barista grows a long, thick mustache that swirls at the ends, just like the former King Rollie. From these curls, baristas often hang sweeteners and spoons for customer convenience.

I flexed all my facial muscles tight, and within minutes, I had finessed my new thick mustache into lovely coils.

It was sunset, the time when all the baristas return to the Ace Hardware parking lot from their day labor jobs, or as they call them, “gigs,” throughout greater Night Vale. My plan was to simply blend among them -- blend! oh Cecil, you've done it again. And so, one by one, as they arrived, I smiled and waved at them, and we teased each other with sprays of hot steam, as is the way of baristas at the end of a long day. There were ten of us, then fifteen, then perhaps twenty, then thirty then forty then a hundred baristas, baristas as far as the eye could see. So many baristas, all laughing and scalding each other with joviality.

When a very tall barista whose animal pelts were dusted with silver looked at me with suspicion, I put her mind at ease by calling out one of their familiar jokes. “Your mother is so tasteless, she orders her eggs ristretto,” I cried. The barista's hardened face softened into a laugh as she called out "TIME TO RIDE!"

Our steeds made quick work of the steep mile and half descent below Ace Hardware. I could hear the faint echoes of Norah Jones as we passed cuneiform-style sketches of French Presses on the rocky walls.

Once we were in the caves, by the lights of torches dipped in pitch, the baristas ambled to their bedrolls, their knapsacks, their bindles, and all around the cave I could see them unwrapping and dusting off and rosining their instruments. I saw harmonicas, violins, ocarinas, banjos, mouth harps, mouth pianos, mouth banjos, lip scissors, and those who had nothing to play brought out pots and pans to keep time. And we began to sing.

[Cecil sings]

I'm dreaming of someone

Whose love is so sweet

Like Guatemalan Coban grown at 4000 feet

Oh my perfect love

Gives me endless bliss

Never wants the wifi password without purchase

[end song]

And then, without warning, one of the baristas made a gesture and the rest fell silent. They were all looking at me, listeners.

“He doesn't know our anthem,” she said.

“No, I totally do," I said. “I mean I was definitely singing something."

The baristas closed in on me.

"Don't talk to me till I've had my coffee. Am I right?" I pleaded.

From the back, I heard a quiet but authoritative snarl: “It's Cecil.”

The baristas parted, all of them, and in the silence I heard the shuffling of leather shoes, and I was face to face with the King of the Baristas.

Listeners, we are all made up of goodness and not-so-goodness. We have conflicting impulses and we struggle to do right. We care to a lesser or greater extent whether our actions are moral, and if they will strike other people as immoral. This is true for all of us, you and me, corporeal and otherwise, everyone -- except the King of the Baristas. When I saw him I knew immediately he had never once hesitated to do right.

How did I know this? Maybe it was his beard, as his beard seemed kind. Or it was the way his eyes, his purple eyes, crinkled with empathy, or it was how the light glinted off his horns. In any case, listeners, he reminded me a little of a buffalo, and it's hard not to trust a buffalo.

“Cecil,” he said, “we have been waiting for you. And by 'we' I don't mean the royal 'we,' as we don't believe in that, and I didn't mean the royal 'we' that second time, either. All of us have been waiting for you and not one of us believes in the royal 'we.'”

"And I love your mustache so much," the King added in a baby voice, as he pinched my cheek.

I explained that I came to the cavelands for the booze.

He said, “We'll talk about that, but first we need to talk about something more important. Your new sponsor.”

I said “Our sponsor? You mean money? Did you know it's available in twenties now?"

He said, “Do not speak to us of the attractiveness of money. Money is cursed. And of course, everything that is cursed is attractive. Otherwise, the curse wouldn't be a problem.”

He said that, and I thought it was pretty smart. All of the cursed objects around the station are really fun to play with, until an intern gets hurt, like Gustav the other day, who found a radium squishball from one of our old station promotions.

Quick aside: To the family of Gustav. He was a distracted intern, and he will be missed.

The King said, “How many times has a person done something awful, and you can't understand why it happened, only for the reason to be -- money? If there were a drug with the same side effects money has, it would be illegal.”

“Maybe we can talk about this later,” I said, “There are eGemony Corporate Prize, Contest and Sweepstake Buzz Marketing Street Teams heading this way even now. You'll be defenseless against them. They'll round you up into tech campus RelaxationZones, and make you play video games and drink energy shakes and learn PowerPoint. You'll be trapped for eternity.”

He said, “Oh, Cecil. They came already. There was a squadron of them, hideous and flickering shadows with smiles of black fire, driving branded cars with terrible posture and all of them were cheery and wearing shorts and saying things like DEV OPS”

I asked if the Street Teams found what they were looking for.

The King of the Baristas said, “We have taken care of them.” And with his big hands, his big, nimble hands, he reached into the matted animal skins on his chest and he sorted through necklaces made of tiny bird skulls and Splenda packets.

He fished out a tin badge that was embossed with the eGemony logo. It still had the rampant weasels and the cheerfully crossed amanita phalloides mushrooms. But the name, the name on the badge, was ground away.

“This,” the King of the Baristas said, “is all that's left of them.”

And he let out a little chuckle. If I could grade it on a scale between mirthful and mirthless, it was on the mirthful side of things, but there was also a bit of self-knowledge in it, as if the person chuckling were aware that to completely abandon himself to pleasure was to be unmoored from the realities of existence.

He said the Street Team had covertly arrived over four years ago, in the dead of night, and worked their way to my desk. They recovered the case of Canadian Club. And in celebration, they opened a single bottle. They passed it around, and each one drank from it. But when they drank the soul of the town, they became infused with it.

By the time each had finished a single sip, they had become a part of this place, and the place had become part of them. "Do you understand, Cecil," he asked.

And I exclaimed, "I get it! Rather than absorbing Night Vale's soul, Night Vale's soul absorbed them. So we're all good. Problems always solve themselves. Thank you King of the Baristas!"

There was an uncomfortably long pause. Every barista was staring silently at me, and I worried that maybe this was a disrespectful way to address the King. I coughed a bit and then tried again with a classic barista joke to lighten the mood: "Your mother's so overcome with ennui that she-"

“Cecil," the king interrupted, "We, the baristas, ARE the eGemony Corporate Prize, Contest and Sweepstake Buzz Marketing Street Team.

“Once we had become a part of Night Vale, we knew what we had to do," he said.

And I said "Ooh, I can't wait to find out, but can I check the weather report real quick?"

And he said "Sure. Go ahead."

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WEATHER: "Glitter" by Charly Bliss

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The King repeated, “We knew what we had to do!" He cackled a bit.

"Have you ever noticed how, at one point, there were no baristas here, and then, suddenly, there were many, many baristas? Did it seem strange to you that every cafe now had a barista? And every restaurant and market, pawn shop and dry cleaners? And how the vacant lots are no longer truly vacant because they are populated by baristas?

"Have you noticed baristas at the Antiques Mall, in the DMV, and close to but not in the Dog Park, and the ones who run alongside cars as they're leaving the highway, to offer drivers shots of espresso?

"Have you noticed how no new building passes the City Planning department unless there's a four foot by four foot space for a barista to stand. Didn't that strike you as strange? Did it strike you as strange that your choices at any coffee establishment were only espresso or espresso with a shot of Canadian Club?"

The King said to me, wisely, carefully, giddily, “Cecil, after being absorbed in the soul of Night Vale, we knew we needed to save our city. So we served it to you. We served Night Vale its own soul. Night Vale has drunk itself and in the process become as much itself as any town could ever be.”

By then the sun was starting to rise, and some of the baristas had settled down and were cuddling and grooming each other in their little barista beds as the fire in the cave was now turning to embers and there were small ashes flittering like moths around the Sierra cups and Chemex carafes and wind-powered aeropresses that cluttered every surface.

I felt relief, knowing the baristas were safe, and also confusion, knowing they had once been a tech company social influence marketing effort. But also civic pride, as Night Vale is darned good at defending itself against people who want to steal and drink our souls. But also itchiness because of the animal pelts and long twirly mustache.

"The time of worry isn't over, Cecil," the king said. "In fact, it is only beginning. eGemony won't care that Night Vale's soul is safe. They'll send another Street Team, and another, until they've figured out how to distill our souls. And do you know why, Cecil? It's because of...money.”

Listeners, this was terrible news, mostly because I really don't like to hear bad things said about our station sponsors.

“Cecil, we need you to renounce money as a sponsor. Do you know what's more important than money? We do. We have taken steps this night, while you were here. Your show is now sponsored not by money but by...love. Love is the way forward against eGemony.”

I said, “uh-huh,” but I said it with skepticism, exactly the way a cashier would if someone were about to buy something clutching a handful of love. Then I said, “suuurrrre,” but really sarcastically, like you do after a poetry reading.

He said, “Your battle is not yet over. eGemony wants that case of Canadian Club, even if it no longer exists. They're going to use every one of their tools. They'll use violence, intimidation, social media, dreamfluencing, viral marketing, even science. They will win unless you figure out a way to repel them.”

I said, “Pardon me, did you say they'll use science?” And he thought about it and agreed that he had at some point said that. Science, he said, was one of eGemony's mightiest weapons. And the King of Baristas said that he wished he knew of some way to fight against it.

As soon as he said this, I stood to my full height, which is one-third taller than my three-quarters height. Listeners, I must admit I was moved enough to actually put my hands by my hips, and my hands were fists, listeners, FISTS. And I said, “Oh, I know how to fight back. There is only one weapon mightier than science, and that is MORE SCIENCE.

And the King looked at me with amazement, as if I had unsuspected depths, and said, “Do you know science?”

Do I listeners? Do I? Next time I'll answer that question, but spoiler alert, gosh, heck yeah, of course.

Stay tuned next for Adolescent X-Team Karate Bedbugs, the show your grandma thinks you like because she never understood you.

Good night, Night Vale, Good Night.

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PROVERB: Why would you want to think outside the box? The box is steel and locked and buried deeply underground. It's so safe here. Why would you want to leave?