The realization was both a key and a lock. They stood in the heart of the beast, understanding its anatomy, yet utterly powerless. Retuning the Chamber would require bypassing or subverting the very constriction bands that were their jailers' source of power.
They began a new, clandestine project within their sanctioned research: modeling vibrational harmonics. Officially, it was "exploring damping solutions for Core resonance." Unofficially, Valentine calculated the precise frequency of the original, healthy Note—the base resonance of the unadulterated Aqua Vitae before the bands' distortion.
"It's not a single tone," she explained, lines of data scrolling on her screen. "It's a harmonic series. A chord. The constriction bands suppress every harmonic but one—a raw, brutal frequency they can easily split into W.E.R.M. They've turned a symphony into a single, shrieking note."
Sage's imagination, now fed by a firehose of data, saw it. "We can't break the bands. But what if we could… sing along? Introduce a counter-vibration, perfectly tuned to the original chord, into the Chamber itself? It might not shut down the scream, but it could reintroduce the other notes. Create interference. A cacophony that breaks their clean, violent extraction."
"It would require an immense amount of stable, pure Vitae," Valentine said, already running calculations. "Channeled through a resonator shaped like the Sigil. And a point of injection directly into the Chamber's housing, bypassing all their filters."
They both fell silent. They had the theory. They had the shape. They had the location.
They had none of the means.