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When I first started the Paranormal Hunters Society, we slowly made a side hobby to keep an eye out for supernatural items. Or, at Dean's insistence, SUPPOSEDLY supernatural items such as cursed artifacts, historic antiques, macabre wonders, etc. Whatever had a paranormal history to it and caught our collective interests.

Of course, it wasn't like we hemmoraged money. Our funds weren't an infinite pool, and even with my parents' wealth, we weren't going to spend thousands of dollars. Dean, Laurie, Samantha, and especially Edgar (an old fox friend of Dad's who worked in the background as P.H.S.'s lawyer) were adamant against any large-scale purchases.

Thankfully, I didn't need to spend that much money.

I had been making it a habit to visit antique shops and vintage pawn shops or boutique stores around Nueva Fe, and the surrounding towns across New Mexico. Mainly, it was to kill time or explore amazing things that used to be someone else's once upon a time. Quite a few of the decorations at my parent's place were antiques and vintage items. My dad literally collected old and discarded soda cans as well as old 1950s automaton toys. The living room had an authentic Route 66 sign as a wall decoration, which my parents once jokingly suggested they stole on impulse after their own road trip across the iconic highway. Even my mother and grandmother each loved collecting ancient books. Grandma in particular loved acquiring old books she read in her youth. Or at least wanted to read in her sheltered youth.

Yeah, the itch for finding antiques was strong in my blood. By the time that I dropped out of college, I already owned several items. They included a well-maintained record player that served as a decoration in the family home's office study, a small collection of homoerotic pulp novels that survived from publication in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as a few Native American knickknacks that included a dream catcher. I like to think that the latter item did its job extraordinarily well, following my nervous breakdown.

Unfortunately, from what I could tell, none of them were paranormal or supernatural...except for one: a personal antique purchase that I liked to refer to as 'The Muses' Radio'.

At first, I thought it was a regular old-timey radio. Maybe a replica of an antique. The old AM/FM radio resembled an Art Deco cathedral with a mesh window instead of stained glass. Right above the vintage dial was a symbol that resembled a Sun with nine means of wavy light. It had scratches and chipped paint as well as a few droplets of what I assumed to be dark ink or paint. What didn't look accidental in terms of slight damage were the various words etched into the wooden back. What I could make out were the names 'Urania', 'Clio', and 'Calliope'.

It miraculously worked sometimes as long as I could find the correct station. So, I decided to purchase it as a knickknack in my bedroom, with the idea to switch it to a local music station as background noise whenever I needed to fall asleep. It certainly helped to do to my heightened jackrabbit hearing and the way my parents' home often creaked in the middle of the night.

I didn't think much about the new purchase until half a month later, when I woke up in the middle of the night multiple times to hear a radio program I'd never heard of. The sultry host described itself as an 'after dark program' without giving any names I could properly remember and went on to tell different stories involving hookups and sexual scenarios started to tickle my fancy. I remembered falling asleep with quite the boner between my legs. Plus, erotic dreams that seemed more like intense fantasies projected into my mind as movies.

However, then I woke up the next morning, and it struck me what I exactly heard. No radio station could ever get away with some of the suggestive, downright NSFW tonnage used. It would've been pushed right off the air. Then, it happened a second, a third, and fourth time. Soon, I felt convinced it wasn't wishful thinking or a dream. I knew what I heard on those nights. It wasn't just a happenstance coincidence.

Following a quick bit of search engine research and later using AI to search for online photographs of the radio's design, I discovered something incredible. Supposedly, my radio was one of several randomly sold across different websites on the Internet, usually by someone of the same username-A_Muses_Wrath1194. And in the descriptions, the username described the radio as having the ability to 'play the strings of forgotten masterpieces, to inspire others'. It also described the radios coming with a terrible curse: anybody who intentionally plagiarized whatever they heard directly from the radios would slowly lose their own desire to create new things. Essentially be given a severe writers' block, if I had to surmise.

I also realized the significance of the names etched into the back of the radio; all nine of them were the names of the Muses of Ancient Greek mythology.

I remember speaking again with the owner of the thrift shop I bought the radio from and questioned her. The elderly badger didn't mention names or who to contact, but she did describe being donated the radio by a tired-looking customer who used to frequent her business.

What really made me alarmed was when I found my dad with the radio in the kitchen one day. He was listening to a station neither of us could remember the frequency of, but we did correctly recall a recipe being described by the host. Later that day, he cooked a meal that was absolutely delicious.

As far as I could tell, based on my father's cooking skills still being impressive whenever he volunteered to make a family dinner, the curse didn't affect him. Or at the very least, it didn't take hold of him yet before I decided to put the radio away. My best guess was that continuous plagiarism was required for the Muses to strike. Or maybe the fact cooking couldn't be a plagiarized compared to writing happened to be a factor? Either way, nobody believed me when I tried demonstrating the radio's properties. They all considered everything to be coincidental.

Also, I wasn't planning to keep that thing in my bedroom anymore. So, I decided to keep it preserved in a box within a self-storage facility not far from the P.H.S. office. Along with a few other supposedly cursed artifacts. I didn't plan to keep them locked away forever though. Not only would it be wrong, but pointless.

As soon as I was able to convince the P.H.S. team we needed to gather funds to hire a paranormal scientist to examine them, including the radio, we could study their supernatural properties, and determine what dark secrets they held.