The contained objects sat on the analysis table, silent and inert within their shielded pouches, yet holding the terrible recipe for the city's silence.
Elias knew what he had to do. He needed to taste the emotions they held, understand the Architect's formula, and find the counter-frequency hidden within their shared harmonic.
It was dangerous work, intimate and risky, but the city outside demanded it.
He prepared his lab, activating the highest level of psychic dampening fields, reinforcing his mental shields, and setting up a specialized piece of equipment: a Resonance Empathizer, a complex array of crystals and sensors designed to safely (relatively speaking) bridge the gap between raw emotional energy and conscious understanding.
It allowed him to experience controlled samples of contained feelings, filtering them through layers of analysis and shielding.
He started with the music box, the first node, the most refined emotion. He carefully transferred a minute sample of its contained 'Memory Echo' energy to the Empathizer. Activating the device, a wave washed over him – not just sadness, but a profound, bittersweet ache for the past, a gentle longing for things lost, tinged with a resigned beauty.
It was the melancholy of faded photographs and forgotten tunes. He focused, analyzing the specific emotional frequencies, noting their patterns, their unique vibration within the broader spectrum of sorrow. It was potent, but controlled.
Next, the locket. Aggression and paranoia. Transferring a sample felt like handling unstable chemicals. Activating the Empathizer, the feeling was immediate and sharp – a hot, volatile surge of frustrated anger, laced with a cold, calculating suspicion.
It was the simmering resentment of denied justice, the prickly fear of being watched, the urge to strike out before being struck. Fighting against the urge to clench his fists, Elias focused on dissecting the raw energy, identifying the specific blend of fury and fear. It was chaotic, but its components were distinct.
The courthouse model was next. Aggression and frustration, refined by the building's atmosphere. The sample felt similar to the locket's, but with a heavier, more grinding quality – the frustration of bureaucracy, the slow burn of legal battles, aggression born of impotence.
Analyzing this required separating the shared aggression frequencies from the unique frustration signature. It was painstaking, requiring him to push past the resonant irritation trying to settle in his own mind.
Finally, the Split Handshake. Betrayal and distrust. This was the hardest. Activating the Empathizer felt like a cold knife in his gut. Waves of suspicion washed over him, twisting into moments of sharp, aching pain – the feeling of broken trust, of being fundamentally alone, of the world being unreliable.
The whispers returned, faint but insidious, trying to plant seeds of doubt about his own memories, his own identity. He gritted his teeth, his Purpose charm feeling solid and warm beneath his lab coat, using it to anchor himself to objective reality.
He focused on the structure of the feeling – the sharp break, the hollow emptiness left behind, the coldness of violated loyalty.
As he analyzed these core emotions, he ran deeper scans, looking for any trace elements, any subtle frequencies that weren't dominant but were present in the blend.
He found faint echoes that suggested other emotions touched upon by the Architect's tests – a flicker of raw fear, a ghost of ephemeral joy, a trace of deep-seated apathy. The formula was a complex, multi-layered tapestry of human feeling, carefully selected and combined.
Piecing together the formula was abstract, theoretical work. He correlated the specific emotional frequencies he'd identified with the structure of the shared harmonic frequency that linked the objects.
It wasn't a simple one-to-one mapping, but a complex resonance, like a musical chord where each note (emotion) contributed to the overall harmony (the shared harmonic). He theorized proportions based on the intensity of the emotional readings and the perceived strength of their representation within the harmonic.
It was a blend weighted heavily towards Despair and Aggression, with Betrayal as a sharp, cutting edge, and Nostalgia and Fear as subtler undertones, bound together by something else... a core frequency of 'Absence of Meaning' perhaps, inherent in the concept of Oblivion itself.
Based on this complex emotional formula, he attempted to calculate the theoretical frequency of the shared harmonic and, crucially, its inverse relationship to the 'null' frequency permeating the city. If the shared harmonic was A and the null was B, and A + B = Zero/Nullity, then A was the theoretical counter-frequency to B.
He arrived at a theoretical formula for the counter-frequency – a precise, complex magical vibration derived from the specific blend of human emotions.
But the process took its toll. Analyzing the raw emotional energies, even filtered, was exhausting. He felt the echoes of anger, the cold weight of despair, the corrosive bite of betrayal swirling within him.
His headache intensified, his hands shook, and at one point, while analyzing the Betrayal energy, he experienced a brief, disorienting flash of seeing his lab tools as distorted, untrustworthy objects, forcing him to shut down the Empathizer and take a shaky breath.
He succeeded in identifying the core emotional formula and theorizing the precise counter-frequency needed to counteract the Oblivion nullity.
He had the 'recipe'. But translating that theoretical frequency into a physical, city-wide magical broadcast was the new, impossible hurdle. His lab could analyze, but it couldn't transmit on that scale. He had the key, but no door large enough to open.
He sat back in his chair, utterly drained, looking at the complex formula on his screen – a series of abstract symbols and energy readings representing the emotional core of the Architect's Oblivion.
Outside the reinforced, warded windows, the city remained submerged in its terrifying silence, its millions of inhabitants moving through a world devoid of vibrant emotion. The null field was still there, pressing against his wards.
He had the theoretical counter-frequency. He knew what sound to make. But he had no instrument, no amplifier, no power source capable of broadcasting that sound to every corner of the city, to every silenced mind.
The scale of the problem was immense, the means to fix it utterly beyond his current capabilities. He was alone, exhausted, with the recipe for a cure he couldn't deliver.
The daunting task of finding a way to broadcast the counter-frequency to a city of millions, against a pervasive, abstract field, began now, and it seemed like an even more impossible challenge than capturing the objects themselves.