Previously, in Indigo Springs:

What we know for certain, so far:

145 years ago: Wildfire at an illegal potlatch kills nineteen celebrants, including popular leader Godfrey Walks-in-Shadow. The fire effectively ends a dispute between townspeople and the Chinook Nation over expansion of town boundaries beyond Indigo Ravine.

122 years ago: Elizabeth Walks-in-Shadow disappears after filing a lawsuit claiming ownership over artifacts recovered from potlatch fire.

3 years ago: A chronically under-employed gardener and handyman named Albert Lethewood dies in the Indigo Springs Hospital, of apparent liver failure.

2 years ago: Albert Lethewood's daughter, Astrid, moves into her father's old house with childhood friends Jackson Glade and Sahara Knax.

Eighteen months ago: A minor tremor in Indigo Springs is registered by Pacific Northwest Seismic Network in Washington, Oregon and British Columbia.

Seventeen months ago:

A hostage siege at house formerly belonging to Albert Lethewood ends with one dead, one missing, and three taken into custody. Images of Images of Sahara Knax escaping the scene the scene on a a flying carpet are broadcast by news agencies around the world.

Indigo Springs is epicenter of a 6.3 Richter quake. Building are reported destroyed and there are multiple fatalities. Dozens of people are missing.

Massive release of magical energy concurrent with earthquake causes vegetation and animal to mutate and suffer from giantism.

Widespread panic spreads across the world as news footage and social networks continues to spread word of magical contamination.

Sixteen months ago:

Evacuation of Indigo Springs begins

Sahara Knax declares herself source of magic at Western Music Festival in California and founds the Alchemite cult.

The forest surrounding Indigo Springs is declared uninhabitable; search for missing residents is ended. Town is cordoned off and fire crews patrol the boundary, burning everything that comes out.

Falling stock markets trigger global recession.

Alchemite membership suspected to top 100,000.

Fourteen months ago:

Alchemites sink USS Vigilant and distribute video footage of the sinking worldwide via the Internet

Alchemites attack government facility in Washington. Key witnesses from hostage siege escape, but Sahara Knax is is arrested

Nine months ago: Caroline Forest, wife of Portland Police Detective William Forest, is arrested on charges of terrorism and treason. The Forest children, Carson and Eleanor, remain missing despite a substantial reward offer.

Six months ago: Sahara Knax and multiple co-defendants charged in Federal Court for terrorist acts and treason

Wendover Air Base to rise again

The government's plan to try cult leader Sahara Knax and a number of her high priestesses for treason took another step forward today with the announcement that a former air force base in Wendover, Utah, will be home to a temporary Federal Courthouse and a short-term U.S. Air Force operation.

Wendover Air Force Base was the training site for the B59 unit which dropped atomic bombs on Japan in the latter days of World War II. The base had been given to Wendover City and converted to a civilian field, but many of the original military buildings and two long runways remain. The runways are key to the continuing efforts by the USAF to suppress magical contamination in the town of Indigo Springs, Oregon.

Authorities have been tight-lipped about the move, but it seems apparent that setting up a temporary courthouse on a military base is a strategy to prevent attempts to rescue Knax, by bring a concentrated security presence to bear on the trial. Federal authorities lost considerable face last year when two of Knax's co-conspirators, Astrid Lethewood and Mark Clumber, escaped from a base in Washington State. Since that time, Alchemites have clashed with the Navy, Coast Guard, National Guard and numerous state and federal police forces. Though a number of highly-placed Alchemites have been arrested in these clashes, the price has been high: at least 200 police officers, federal agents and soldiers have been listed as missing.

Skagway to head up Alchemite Trial?

Rumor has it that Federal Judge George Albert Skagway of Reno, Nevada has been tapped to preside over the trial for treason of Sahara Knax and seven high-ranking members of the Alchemite cult.

Skagway, was born in 1946 the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia, Canada, but has been a resident of Nevada since 1962. He attended the University of Nevada in Reno and graduated from Stanford Law in 1973. He was nominated to the bench by Ronald Reagan in 1987 and is frequently referred to as a 'moderate' in the press. He has made no public statements about the mystical outbreak or the Alchemite cult.

In 1976, Skagway, his wife Stacy and their daughter June were travelling to Carson City when their car was struck by an oncoming motorist. Skagway, the only survivor of the crash, has been confined to a wheelchair since that time.

Though this rumor has yet to be confirmed, it raises a number of questions: will the trial be held in, or near, the state of Nevada? And will authorities allow the media full access to proceedings, as was promised when Sahara Knax was arrested in December of 2009?

No Confirmed Photo Evidence of July 4th Sightings

A young man riding bareback on a brown and white horse was spotted in U.S. towns across the nation as July Fourth celebrations concluded with latenight picnics and fireworks displays.

Described by most witnesses as a teenaged Native American male with long black hair, clad in khaki-colored camoflage shorts, the apparition was spotted at around sunset in towns in at least nine states, mostly in the Midwest, including Illinois, Kansas, North Dakota, and Nebraska.

Mistaken by many celebrants as a performer, the rider did not participate in or interfere with fireworks displays, and was nowhere to be seen after the fire shows concluded.

Digital photographs of the rider have been posted online, but due to low light conditions most show a featureless silhouette on horseback. At least one such image has clearly been doctored to bolster an unsubstantiated claim to have seen the young man. Another image, captured on film, shows a dozen additional riders of various ages and genders, in the background behind the apparition; this shot has been discounted as a hoax by witnesses who insist he was alone.

Easing into another magical summer...

Everything seems to be in a bit of a holding pattern, doesn't it? The mystical forest has stopped expanding, thenks to the fire brigades working its perimeter. The first wave of refugees from Oregon has mostly been settled. Clashes between rogue mystics and law enforcement have become almost routine, as have the reports of contaminated animals turning up outside the firebreaks.

The government says it is going to bring Sahara Knax and the Alchemite leadership to trial, and are quietly prepping their case. The promise is that the trial will be open, on TV for everyone to see.

Just so you don't get too complacent, here are a few things from the magical rumor mill as we wait for the legal festivities to start:

• Online video services are voluntarily pulling any and all posts by anyone claiming to demonstrate or explain the magical objects known as chantments.
• A hot spring in Yellowstone Park and much of a square mile surrounding it were found frozen solid, a sure sign that someone drew heat for a major casting.
• A certain Congressperson's talk of a law requiring all US citizens to go out in public emptyhanded but for glass objects and consumer electronics--both of which seem to be magically resistant--won't quite die out. This despite the fact that such a restriction on personal freedom would be both unenforceable and ineffective.

Schism looming for Alchemite Leaders?

A former Alchemite has gone into police protection to escape vengeance of her former fellow cultists.

This blog has learned that the Prima known as Breeze has been a gold mine of information on how the cult has managed to stay out of police custody.

Breeze has told authorities that the cult's leader, self-styled goddess Sahara Knax, has hidden caches of magical objects in locations throughout the United States. The location of these caches is revealed to senior Alchemites, who retrieve them for use in their ongoing rebellion against the Federal Government.

Rumor has it that competition for the various chantments is fierce. If Breeze is to be believed, bickering has broken out among the faithful over dispensation of the most powerful objects. Though no Alchemites have come forward publicly to accuse their leaders of hoarding or misusing magical objects, another sign of dissent within the cult may be a photo that has been widely distributed on the Internet this week.

The picture appears to show two missing children at the heart of the government effort to repress the Alchemical cult. Ellie Forest and her brother Carson have been missing since their mother Caroline joined Sahara, shortly after the original mystical outbreak in September 2009. The image of the two children, which immediately went viral, is dated March 21st and shows them posing with the Alchemite known as Passion. Its source has not been traced.

The children's father, former Portland Oregon police detective William Forest, has made no official comment as yet on the image. The Bureau of Mystical Affairs has confirmed, however, that the reward for the children's safe return was increased, last week, to $75,000 U.S.

Magic to clean up Great Pacific Garbage Dump?

An individual using the alias "Rumplestiltskin" claims to be removing tons of plastic garbage floating in the North Pacific Gyre.

According to an e-mail sent directly to this blog, Rumplestiltskin possesses a magical object, a chantment, that extracts pollution from seawater without damaging marine plant or animal life. According to Rumplestiltskin, the object, a baby's teething ring, was a 'gift' and came with written instructions on how to use it safely.

"Nothing on the materials provided says whether this object came to me from Sahara Knax and the Alchemites, but I am not a believer in the Alchemite cult," writes Rumplestiltskin, who added that some of the plastic is being burned in a home-built generator to provide power for their effort to clean the ocean.

The North Pacific Gyre is located in the Northern Pacific Ocean and is reputed to be heavily polluted with small particles of plastic garbage, over an area twice as big as the State of Texas.

Rumplestiltskin is not the first chantment user to claim to have successfully turned ordinary electricity into power for magical objects, a claim that has yet to be verified. The proposition that people use some form of recitation, sometimes referred to as "cantation," to channel power into their mystical objects is becoming widely accepted. Cantations have been said to allow mystics to draw power from their surroundings: including the life energy of nearby animals and people. This last procedure, known as vamping, has been used to deadly effect by Alchemites in their clashes with law enforcement.

The fact that magic requires energy has been well-documented, and in one well-publicized experiment, physicist Ravi Sharp has shown that a candle and a light-generating chantment use the same amounts of energy to produce comparable amounts of light. Sharp argues that this implies that magic cannot be used to simply reverse climate change and other devastating effects of human habitation on earth. This runs strongly contrary to claims made by Sahara Knax and her followers.

"If the power requirements are comparable, we will still need fossil fuels to accomplish large-scale effects, just as we would through the use of technology. This implies that using magic to combat pollution might simply beget more pollution."

In a related story, Sharp went missing from his home in Brooklyn, New York, two weeks ago.

Rumplestiltskin's e-mail message includes a call for a volunteer video-blogger and a marine biologist to witness and document the use of the magical teething ring. The e-mail message promises future communications, including a schematic of the power generator and information about the cantation used to turn electricity into magical energy.

The Canadian and U.S. Coast Guard have statements to the effect that individuals caught using magic in coastal waters will be arrested and prosecuted under the increasingly strict anti-mystical laws.