#420 The Silurion Fuels Incident

Age: 30 Years

Hidden or Lost?: Hidden

History: Despite their former ubiquity as one of the world’s leading oil companies, few people seem to remember Silurion Fuels. A deeply established fuel conglomerate, Silurion operated dozens of offshore drilling platforms, and contributed at least a seventh of the world’s overall supply of raw fossil fuels. That was until the bizarre events of April 23, 1981 took the company down overnight.

The incident occurred on Silurion’s Yokai TLP oil platform. Tethered in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina, the Yokai was Silurion's top-producing platform, successfully drilling deeper and deeper into the seafloor. The crude seemed to have no end. However, as they drilled ever further into the ancient earth, the crew of the Yokai began to report strange phenomena aboard the rig.

After what would prove to be their last extension into another pocket of oil, the crew reported that the crude from their latest procurement had a strange smell. It was sickly sweet, like rotted fruit. Some said it was reminiscent of childhood or a funeral home. In the following days the crew began to catch glimpses of slithering, inhuman spirits wandering the halls of the rig, glowing with a pale sea green light. Some reported rhythmic pounding and animal wails emanating from within the holding tanks. Madness had begun to spread, and the company believed the phenomena to be just that. Hearing the strange tales from the Yokai, the Silurion executives blamed their reports on exhaustion and drunkenness, demanding that work continue.

With no one allowed off the rig until their quota was reached, the bizarre occurrences only continued to grow more and more alarming. The crew began being attacked by the pale sea spirits, knocked overboard or dragged off into the dark corners of the facility to be drained of their lives. As the death toll grew, Silurion could no longer ignore the dispatches from the Yokai. The executives decided to take action before the alarming stories could escape the offshore platform, and delivered a small mercenary unit to the rig to take care of the problems, whether they were human or something stranger.

On April 23, one day after the mercenaries arrived on the Yokai, all comms from the rig went silent, but according to the recordings that were later recovered, things only stranger once they arrived. The unit chaplain identified the things infesting the rig not as sea monsters, but as the ghosts of the fossilized organisms within the fuel. The chaplain attempted to lead the surviving crew and mercenaries in an exorcism of the haunted fuel, but the prehistoric specters were too strong. Freshly angered, the spirit creatures formed together to create a titanic primordial phantom that threatened to sink the entire platform. The monster was only stopped when, against Silurion's orders, the mercenary captain burned the oil stores and destroyed the ancient phantoms.

Following the supernatural incident, management of Silurion Fuels was promptly taken over by government officials and immediately broken up. To this day, it is difficult to find any record of Silurion or the haunting incident that fueled their doom.