The Illumination

Argonaut Hotel Announces Opening of Occult Library

Early Sunday morning, the Argonaut Hotel announced that it would be converting one of its event rooms into a historical and occult reading library. "We at the Argonaut are proud of our fair city's storied heritage as a home to the weird and wonderful and are always looking for new ways to express the nautical theme for which we're known," said Francesca Lavaz, hotel owner and San Francisco entrepreneur. "The surging popularity of beloved local cryptid 'Baboon Child' presents an excellent opportunity for us to both continue to innovate within our business model and provide rich entertainment resources to our community. It's no secret that sailors are a famously superstitious bunch, and it's high time that the intrepid travelers who sail the Argonaut have the opportunity to embark on the high seas of folklore and myth from the comfort of a luxurious, plush, and classically navy reading chair." The Argonaut Reading Room will not only be open to hotel guests, Mrs. Lavaz goes on to explain. "As much as we are dedicated to serving our guests, we also recognize that our hotel exists on the backbone of our vibrant community. We have always been proud to give back to the community, and the library presents an exciting new way to engage with the wonderful people of our city." Library access will be permitted with either a current Argonaut room key or a San Francisco city ID, public transit card, or California Driver's License with a San Francisco address, and will include full wait service to the Argonaut's cafe and bar.

Kubota Gardens Werewolf Investigation

Local Japanese garden in Seattle has discovered that recent bear attacks were caused by werewolves. Two of the beasts were discovered roaming the grounds early morning and were captured and taken to a nearby facility for detainment. Bodies of recent missing peoples were discovered in a makeshift den near the back of the establishment and all families have been informed. The community is planning to come together to grieve in an open candle ceremony event and honor those lost in this tragedy, while rebuilding the gardens back into a safe and respected place. We hope the families who are suffering come to heal in time with the help of their neighbors.

Ricardo Moreno Found

Last week, during the mess on the wharf, one of the people that went missing was a Ricardo "Ricky" Moreno. With the state of the bodies found on the wharf, it was feared that he was one of the deceased. However, the good news is that this body, at least, was found whole! He went back to work for Francesca Lavaz yesterday, and seemed to be no worse for the wear. When asked where he had been, he stated: "I was just taking a little time away, didn't mean to scare anyone! Please check out the aquarium if you get the chance."

Conservation Error Ruins Secret Smithsonian Collection

     Edwin Cooper discovered the leak during an otherwise ordinary walk of his usual rounds early last Friday morning. The building where Edwin until very recently worked is unassuming from the exterior - its corrugated steel walls and blue roof are very much alike any other rural New England industrial warehouse, as is the barbed wire fence enclosing the building's grounds and the small security outpost guarding the only road in or out of the small compound built from portable structures which serve as break-rooms and supply storage for the facility's staff. What the facade conceals, however, is far from ordinary. 

     Edwin's rounds were like clockwork - they began at 3 AM when one of his colleagues would relieve him from the first half of his shift at the guard post, where he would take fifteen minutes to refreshen himself in the break room with a cup of coffee and yesterday's newspaper. After he finished his break, Edwin would exit the poorly ventilated portable structure and make his way into the warehouse - there, he would spend another fifteen minutes doing a cursory sweep with his flashlight. "That's the only time we would ever find anybody, " he explains. "Usually teenagers breaking in on a dare or looking for somewhere to smoke before they had to get to school." Edwin's shift ran from midnight to 6 AM, after which he would return home so he could get his three children - Gabriel, Annette, and Michael - ready for school. When he talks to me, I can see the deep bags under his eyes and the heavy lines in his face: the toll of fifteen years supporting his family on a graveyard salary. "There wasn't anybody that morning - I did scare off a raccoon, though." After sweeping the warehouse, the true purpose of Edwin's job began. 

     He would head into the back of the warehouse to a gender neutral restroom door locked with a combination code lockbox. Instead of entering any numbers on the box, Edwin would key his way through by pressing his thumb onto the men's symbol's head to activate the fingerprint reader hidden inside the tacky signage. Behind the bathroom door was not toilets, but an elevator down to the real facility: a hidden network of sub-levels which constitute a secret storage facility for the Smithsonian museum. "We didn't have authorization to go to the basement," he tells me. "That was just for the researchers - we only ever went there if they needed help carrying something heavy, and we never got to go into the labs." Edwin's concern were the five archival sub-basements and the tens of thousands of artifacts they stored, all of which were neatly packed in wooden crates carefully labeled with manifests of their contents. "My job was mostly checking the walls and the crates for damage," he explains to me. "The facility had lots of problems with mice, rats, snakes, that sort of thing getting in through cracks in the concrete. Anything that got in could damage the collections, so I was supposed to survey all the walls and write up a report of any wear and tear in found." The walls were sectioned off into ten by ten foot squares, each of which had a serial number and a line on Edwin's checklist where he could record any damage. "It was hard at first, but you get used to it over time. It becomes subconscious - your mind gets reshaped into thousands and thousands of little gray squares, like the building is part of you, so that when something is wrong you just know it. There wasn't anything wrong that morning, so I decided to go a bit faster so that I could maybe finish early and get a little sleep in before I had to drive my kids to school." Unfortunately, sub-level five proved Edwin wrong.

     "It was coming from a big crate in the back corner. The panels had burst open a bit, like this," he says and gestures with his hands to show how the front panwl of the crate had come away from the side panels and the lid. "It was this thick, ugly, red brown slime - all gooey and stringy, and it was spilling all over the floor, all over everything." He gestures again, swirling his hand in a wide circle, and his eyes leave my face to get lost in the memory. "There was a huge amount of the liquid, like an aquarium tank had burst inside the crate and blew it open, and it smelled like blood. The smell was powerful - like it was coming from inside my head. In the moment, I forgot all my training; all I understood was that there was a crate of history in front of me and that every moment it stayed how it was, it got less likely any of it could be saved." Edwin ran to the crate, grabbing the edge of the panel and ripping it open with his bare hands. "So many things spilled out - hundreds of small artifacts, all covered and soaked in the slime. I was confused, at first - I remembered the manifest on that crate. It was labeled as being full of unused tank components from World War 2. Then something I recognized hit my shoe, and then I saw the rest." Tears start to form at the corner of Edwin's eyes and I ask him if he wants to stop the interview, but he waves me away and swallows to compose himself. "It was a small cloth doll of an Indian girl - all soaked and destroyed from the slime, but I recognized it perfectly. It was my grandfather's doll, passed down to him by his mother, and her mother, and all the way back to before." Edwin chokes up at this point, and I ask him if he wants to stop, but he insists we keep recording. "The doll was from before my family was called Cooper; it was the last thing my grandfather had left from before we were forced to move to Oklahoma. There were countless other things too: clothing and headdresses and blankets and treaty belts, all stolen, all destroyed." It's at this point Edwin breaks down, but before I can ask, he insists on continuing the interview. "It's important people hear this story," he says. "It's important that people understand that it's not just things, it's someone's friends, someone's family. My grandfather studied anthropology at Harvard - he took the doll with him and he specialized in the history of our tribe. The doll went missing during a trip he took to the Smithsonian as part of his dissertation. He insisted they stole it, but nobody listened. When NAGPRA passed in the 90s, he tried to take it to court, but by then he'd already lost all of his connections in academia." Charles Cooper - Edwin's grandfather - continued to file claims under NAGPRA against the Smithsonian until he died of a heart attack in 2007. "Grandpa was only 67 when he died; the doctors said it was his diet, but we all knew it was stress." Edwin takes a moment to compose himself, and I offer him a coffee. He accepts, and we pause the recording for 15 minutes. "There was only one artifact in the crate that wasn't destroyed - it looked Greek, a big bronze vase with a pair of snakes sculpted to wrap around it. I'm sure it was stolen too, though not from us. I don't remember how long I was down there sifting through the slime, looking for anything that had survived, but it must have been a while because the next guy found me after I didn't come back out. The Smithsonian fired me after that - they said I breached contract when I opened up the crate, threatened me with lawyers and the NDA I signed like they didn't have blood on their hands."

Edwin is expected to appear in court in the following weeks to testify on behalf of the Choctaw nation. In the meantime, if you wish to support him, please....

NPR, This American Life, Interview with Edwin Cooper by Angela Schultz.

Bloodbath at Fisherman's Wharf!

     Tragedy struck one of San Francisco's most cherished cultural icons last night leaving four dead and one injured. In a gruesome example of the escalating mob violence plaguing the city's streets, the remains of three members of the Twin Mirror Triad were scraped off the pier alongside the corpse of Don "Donny" Costanza of the Vegas Costanza crime family. Three civilians - including prestigious marine biologist Dr. Marnie MacNeal - witnessed the violent altercation while attempting to view the bay's bioluminescent wildlife and open a fresh wheel of imported pecorino romano cheese. Miraculously, all three survived, with one unnamed hero preventing the violence from spilling out into the surrounding neighborhoods by driving their father's vehicle into the middle of the gunfight and off the pier, killing the Twin Mirror Triad members. Dr. MacNeal and her friend explained that they had been watching for the bioluminescent algae and attempting to open the cheese crate when the violence erupted and it was the actions of their friend which had saved them - the heroic driver declined to comment.

     While the Triad members were declared dead on scene due to catastrophic impact with a high speed vehicle, Don Costanza was declared dead at Saint Francis memorial hospital at 3:35 AM. Strangely, the cause of death was ruled to have been a heart attack - the only other wound on Don Costanza's body was an incision in the neck ruled by the coroner to have occurred posthumously. The body was also covered in what appeared to be ritual scarification - when questioned, Dr. Valerie Velez said the following: "Donatello Costanza is an example of the ways in which this country's mental health institutions are failing its citizens. Say what you will about his profession, but Mr. Costanza was an American citizen and a man of significant intellect and business acumen who, given the state of his body, has clearly suffered from paranoid delusions for the majority of his life. It's no surprise to me that, living with such untreated illness, his life ended on a lonely pier as a result of cardiac arrest induced by stress during a criminal altercation. I can only hope that we start taking these cases more seriously and stop indulging the public obsession with the supernatural for advertising money - otherwise, I anticipate to see more bodies like Mr. Costanza's at this hospital in the coming months." Local real estate and boutique mogul Francesca Lavaz - descendant of the historic Lanza crime family and known associate of Mr. Costanza - had this to say of his passing: "Donny was a troubled man. While it truly, deeply saddens me to see what happened to him, I unfortunately can't say I'm surprised. He had a bad lot since he was a young boy; while I can't condone the way he did it, I can only deeply admire what he was able to build from such humble beginnings. My feelings go out to his family - if anyone can spare a sentiment for his young grandchildren, I will be raising a fund to donate to his neighborhood so that other young boys in Donny Costanza's shoes don't feel the need to turn to a life of crime to make ends meet and find the same end that he did."

     "The involvement of external syndicates is troubling," says SFPD Police Chief Miguel Lorenzo. "Neither the Costanzas nor the Twin Mirrors are local to San Francisco; we've yet to determine what the two organizations were after, but we suspect that they were attempting to make a trade and that the trade went south." Chief Lorenzo has reassured the community of his commitment to public safety and keeping the peace, stating "whatever these violent criminals want, I will make it abundantly clear that they will not find it in our city - the mob hasn't held power here since the 90s, and I'm not about to let those dark times of corruption and fear return to San Francisco. Whether these threats are local to our city, bleed out from our neighbors, or even travel from overseas, we will not rest until they know that they are not welcome here." As always, please take care when exploring San Francisco at night, and if you see something, say something.

River Otters claim more territory in Greater Seattle Area

The drug runners known as the River Otters have started expanding outside of the city proper, starting to get their "product" all the way down to Olympia, and all the way up to Bellingham. Authorities are not sure what changed, but they're attempting to get to the bottom of the situation and failing. Many are calling that the current police force is corrupt, and accepting bribes or a cut from the runners to let them get away with their devilish work. When asked to comment, the Chief of Police Adrian Diaz stated that her force was doing the best it could, but declined to provide further comment.

Gang War Gets Worse in San Francisco

The gang war came to a head when the Triad entered into a firefight with cops and patrons, leading to several dead and far more injured as people ran from the scene. Details have not yet been released, but there seems to have been a gas leak at the new boba shop, Bobasaurus, which led to the destruction of most of the property as the fighting spread. Stay tuned as the situation develops.

Real Estate Mogul Missing

Edward Nelson, beloved father of his two daughters and millionaire with real estate investments throughout the Bay Area, has gone missing from his hotel in Florida where he was staying while golfing. He was expected home a week ago, and his ex-wife has finally said something to the police. She believes he is just "taking a break from the alimony payments" and states he's done this before - but usually he leaves some hint as to his whereabouts. If you see him or have any information, please make sure to call our tip line.

Violent Crimes in San Fransisco Rising

The italian mafia in the San Francisco Area has started making overt grabs for control from some of the gangs that have footholds in the area. The Triads especially were hit hard, and are retaliating in kind. Authorities are trying to crack down, but have so far been unsuccessful in weeding out any of the new safe houses being used by the mafia, and no proof to tie them to any of the crimes. Their current recommendation is to please stay indoors after dark unless you need to go out, and especially:

"If you see something, say something."

The Seattle Times

The Seattle Times' latest broadcast reads:

Seattle Opioid Crisis at All Time High

By Sara Jean Green

Illicit fentanyl kills at least two people every day in King County, and the powerful opioid was responsible for over 700 fatal overdoses last year, roughly triple the death toll of traffic crashes and gun violence combined.

How did the little blue pills — which were virtually nonexistent in the local drug supply just five years ago — become the most pressing public health crisis facing the greater Seattle area?

Today, The Seattle Times embarks on a collection of stories about the fast-moving fentanyl epidemic. We’ll explore how the dangerous drug has taken hold, why it’s so potent, and the ways it’s overwhelming emergency responders and the health care system. We’ll delve into how elected officials and social service providers are responding to the crisis. And we’ll explain how the opioid has disproportionately affected some of the region’s most vulnerable communities.