RADIO OTHER 16

V: Welcome wanderers and travellers, tramps and traders, vagrants, vagabonds and vigilantes, merchants and urchins… and of course, listeners and non-listeners. It's me. The one known far and wide as Vikki Other. From my timeline to yours? This is Radio Other.

[INTRO MUSIC PLAYS]

Hello everyone! How is everyone’s weekend going? Good? Well that’s weird, considering it’s a Wednesday. But to each their own!

Let’s start out with the news!

The submissions period has ended for the Uncanny Valley Billboard Blitz, which is the current contest the City Board is holding through the Schools to replace the giant billboard at the edge of the woods, where the smooth asphalt of the main highway turns to temporally challenged gravel!

For those who have yet to vote, here are the slogans in the running, and the little critters that submitted them!

Josie Greaves, 8, submitted “Welcome to Uncanny Valley! We always dismember a friendly face!” Aww! Now that’s one for the books!

Aleksander Kowalski, 14, submitted the idea of “A blank digital board that flashes the full name, age, IP address and social security number of anyone in a 10 metre radius”. Now that certainly is a creative way of community building!

Filsan (Fil-sen) Abdi (Ahb-dee), 16, proposed the word “Teeth” in giant flashing rainbow letters, with no change. Now that sounds savvy.

Nikolay Ivanov, 8, suggested a picture of his cat’s face, with the cat’s name in block text. To those wondering, yes, I am looking at the cat right now, and he is a magnificent creature. His toe beans are perfect, his belly is round and furry, and his eyes are large and devoid of thought. And from this sample image, it seems his name is Augustus Vladsivlav. If this cat goes missing in the next few weeks, do not check my basement. I do not have one, and it is cat-free.

Zhang Lin, 10, suggested we print the words “This Content Has Been Restricted By The Uncanny Valley City Council Due To Security Issues. Zhang Lin is Not Real. Close Your Eyes And Forget Your Middle Name.”... huh, a bit confusing, but I can see it. Maybe I’m just not a true enough appreciator of the arts to understand.

And that’s all I’m legally allowed to look at, according to this. Wowza! They really stepped up their game this year, didn’t they? I’m excited to see who wins! You go, kiddos!

Next up: the Uncanny Valley Gardening Society wants to remind you all that gardening is in fact, meaningless! “I just. Wanted a purpose,” said Diana Brown, in her weekly newsletter she sent out to every single town resident. “But that’s the thing. There is no purpose. In anything. Our lives are just meaningless trips we take, leading nowhere. There’s nothing out there. Only pain. Only suffering. Only loss. I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore.”

She then ended with a few links to sites with helpful tips on properly making an optimal space for peony season! So, if you’re interested in gardening - go give her a talk!

Now, what’s scheduled for today? Well, first of all, I got a little sound effect board to spice up my ranting!!

(Cheesy “TADA” sound)

Wahoo!

So, my darling listeners, I’ve prepared something special for you today. My friend Ogma was out sick with Munchansen’s Disease, so she sent me some of her script so I could do her show for her! Well, actually, it was less a passing of torches, and more of a “me breaking into her office and taking them”, but either way - I have her spare key now, and she can’t stop me.

So, we have a true crime story today.

[SPOOKY SOUND EFFECT]

I know, I know. Settle down. But it’s exciting, right? I’m excited. So, the papers are here-

[PAPERS RUSTLING]

-And the time is nigh! Let’s begin our dark descent into the depths of the Uncanny Underbelly… shall we?

[SPOOKY MUSIC STARTS (don’t make it cheesy, this is not part of the sfx board gag fin)]

Hello, and welcome back my little learners. How are you doing? Last week, we took a look at the horrors of the Hillary House, the old hotel that used to house residents travelling to Atlantis, and the murders that occurred there from 1972 to 1979. This week? It’s something a bit different.

Now, many of you may have watched the recent horror film, Carlita, starring award winning actress Rita Ramirez. But while the film has reached critical acclaim, many still don’t know the story behind it. So that’s what I’m going to tell you today.

The exact details of this story are hard to track down, as it was first reported on in the 1920s. But I’ve done my best to piece it together - mostly thanks to Charles Lopez-Asher’s report of it from Suspect Your Elders: Big Crime In Small Towns, and Denise Jensen’s book on the matter, Serial Killing Kids: The Flower Girl. Some of you older listeners may have heard of Charles before, as he came onto my show in the 50s to give an interview on Seraphim politics, as he himself grew up on Elysium Reservation Territory. You may also recognise his name from his wife, Lorraine Lopez Asher, who lives just East of the Station, and worked as a Secret Agent back in the 80s and 90s, before the death of her daughter, Lauren Dowell. She’s given us some excellent insider information over the years, so I thought I’d take a second to shout her out. Now, moving on.

Carlita Ramsey was born to Donald and Adalia Ramsey on the fifth of april, 1910. In 1926, she would disappear off the map… forever.

[CHEESY DUN–DUN-DUN!!!! SOUND EFFECT]

From a young age, Carlita’s parents had noticed her obsession with alchemy. For her seventh birthday, Adalia got her daughter a beginners alchemy set, which Carlita spent hours pouring over. Leslie Richards, who was interviewed by the National Newspaper in 1997 in an article covering the killings, said that her mother had been friends with Carlita as a young child, and had described her as highly intelligent. This sentiment was reflected in stories told by both Carlita’s parents and teachers - Carlita, to the outside observer, was a prodigy.

Tsukuru Satoya says in his article, “However, cracks in Carlita’s facade didn’t start showing until she was about twelve. At this time, Carlita’s parents began noticing their daughter becoming increasingly withdrawn into herself. At first, they attributed it to normal teenager attitude. Later, they would start to suspect that was when things got much, much worse.”

In the fall of 1925, Madeline O’Kelly was reported missing by her parents, after she didn’t come home from school. They had waited four hours by that point, and their daughter still wasn’t there. They were worried sick. But the police told them, hey, just wait it out. She’s probably just out with her friends.

The problem was that Madeline’s parents were not the type to let their daughter just, go out with kids after school and play. They were, in general, strict parents, and Madeline was normally a very good rule-follower in that regard. She did her chores, got her schoolwork done, everything you’d expect of a model student. That’s why it was so worrying to them when one day, she just… stopped.

But, you know, things do happen. So they thought they’d wait it out. By Midnight, Madeline still hadn’t come home. But they kept waiting. Finally, it hit 6 in the morning, and they decided they needed to take things into their own hands. They got together a search party with some of their neighbours, and went out looking.

You see, they had a bigger reason to worry. Something that went beyond just their opinion of their daughter. This wasn’t the first kid in the community to go missing. It was the fifth in three years. You might be wondering, why hadn’t those been investigated in the same way?

Well, it mostly came down to where the O’Kelly’s lived. Adalia and Donald lived in a roundabout, about thirty minutes away from the school. In order to walk there, she just travelled down the road near the Deja Vu zone, and would pass south, across the main street shops, and down to the school. This meant that Madeline had nowhere to get lost in. There were no big patches of forest or obstacles, which are what many of the other kids' disappearances had been attributed to - as we all know, Uncanny Valley can be very dangerous. So Madeline would’ve had to go off path in some way.

Sadly for them, hope was not turning up. As Charles Lopez-Asher said so gracefully in his book, “No matter how many people they got on their side, time fought them all the same”. It didn’t seem like their girl was coming home. That was until they got a tip from Sasha Gears at the repairs shop - she told them that she’d seen Madeline walk past her place the day before. This meant that Maddie had, in fact, not gone to her house, but instead had turned off the road, towards the westward side of the Valley - the mountains in the distance, and the great looming forest between.

(DUN DUN DUN)

Feeling scared, they followed the path. The road went on for seven miles, before exiting out the other side of Uncanny valley.

About two miles in, they reached a small building. Now, it’s unclear in the sources exactly what the consensus for this building’s purpose was, but the idea we get is that this was a sort of off-campus school lab. Students working on bigger projects could book rooms, and in return, donated ten percent of their dreams, both physical and metaphorical, to the college that was helping fund it.

The thing that made them stop here, was the thing they saw. The first thing that Maddie’s parents saw was her backpack, lying on the ground outside the lab. Mrs. O’Kelly immediately ran over and picked it up, opening it to look through the contents. Inside, they found all their daughters' things. This included the money her parents gave her before sending her to school.

They knew then that a best case scenario would be most likely finding a body.

At this point, the police finally got involved, though the investigation work was… shoddy at best. Most of this was probably due to the sheer under-preparation done on the end of the cops, though, and you can judge for yourself whether that makes you more or less sympathetic to them.

For a quick explanation, the police were used to kids going missing, usually due to the woods or the great forest beast or even the laughing lake. So they showed up to investigate one of those. They didn’t show up prepared for what they did find.

The police report here can tell us some of the biggest details, though. The first being that a total of seven dead bodies were found there. Five girls, one boys, though one of the bodies originally identified as female was later confirmed to be James Meadowes, a twelve year old boy. So four girls, two boys.

Only one body was never really found: Carlita Ramsey.

We know that she had been working there. She had left behind a string of journals, detailing her experiments, with the last one dated the same day that Maddie went missing. Unfortunately, after reading the contents, the families were so disgusted they burned them. I completely respect their decision there, of course - but in the end, I wish they hadn’t. If they hadn’t, we might know for sure what happened there.

In the movie, Rita Ramirez plays Carlita as an innocent girl, driven mad by obsession. While it works well for the film, the reality was much darker. Carlita knew what she was doing.

Every single of the bodies was found to have died of the same type of brain haemorrhage, due to a large tumorous growth that had begun sprouting from the centre, spreading out. As some of you already know, this is the most prominent symptom of Watcherflower Poisoning. And don’t worry. It doesn’t end there.

(OOOOOO SPOOOKY GHOST NOISE)

Several of the police on duty that day grew ill in the next few years due to what they saw that day when they arrived on scene - inside the laboratory Carlita had been using, were rows upon rows of Watcherflowers, all swivelling to stare at them through the dark. Now that? That’s an image fit for a horror movie on it’s own.

In the end, the theory that’s been agreed upon is that Carlita had been leading students to her laboratory after school, to work on a project, where she would then restrain them and do… whatever she did. So why had Carlita been doing this?

Well, it’s a long-standing myth that eating Watcherflowers can grant you immortality, or even higher powers. Similar to the Sorcerer’s stone. As a budding alchemist, just flowering into her true potential, it would make sense it might interest her. But it’s not the interest that killed her. It’s the twisted way she went about it.

Which leaves the final question: What really happened to Carlita Ramsey?

Her body still hasn’t been found to this day, and the laboratory was torn down in 1936, to pave way for more useful infrastructure. While the most logical conclusion is that she died, logic tends to be public enemy number 1 around these parts. Some enthusiasts believe firmly that she survived. And is still there. Waiting.

But I’ll leave that decision up to you. What do you believe? Call in and tell me, at [REDACTED].

We’re always happy to hear from a friendly mind.

Until then, though… stay safe. And keep learning.

(CLAPPING NOISE)

This has been Ogma, and you’re listening to the Uncanny Public Radio.

V, normal voice: Or actually, it’s been Vikki! Yeah, yeah. Call me a show-stealer… I mean, I have the radiant smile for it. Prince Charming ain’t ready for these pearly whites! I mean, no disrespect to the late Frederick Charming II of Gaul. I pay my respects fully there.

In other news…

Well, next episode is going to be a very special one. I’m gonna have another guest!!!

(DUN DUN DUN)

You’ll never guess who.

I mean. It’s Axel. I haven’t been really discreet about that.

So from my timeline to yours… this is Radio Other!