The Oscillator is an Altered Item that the Federal Bureau of Control obtained in Korea on July 28, 1954 during the agency's earliest years of operation and now contained in the Oldest House's Panopticon.
Summary[]
Description[]
An "The Oscillator" brand electric standing fan with protective grille.
The item in question robs the immediate vicinity of all oxygen. The range seems to be variable.
Background[]
While on assignment in post-war Korea, a foreign investigator associated with the Bureau had learned of several strange deaths in a unnamed part of the country, for which the local residents believed an electric fan was responsible for causing. To test the object's possible anomalous nature, he seized the fan from the home of one of the more recent victims before placing it in a small room with an animal. When the creature was found dead, the investigator's suspicions were confirmed. He then went to a journalist to offer a pseudoscientific "explanation" for the deaths, claiming that electric fans operate at speeds so fast that they can suffocate people by overly disturbing the air. While on his way back to the United States, he booked two rooms on the ship for himself and the fan.
Upon learning about how the investigator's lie had become widely believed in the region, the head of the Department of Public Knowledge and Diversions (a predecessor to the FBC's Communications Department) William S. Powers had filed a compliant criticizing the investigator's handling of the situation, seeing it as a "misstep" and calling for agents in the future to create better cover stories for paranatural phenomena that provide the public with a "sufficient yet vague rationale that will affirm their certainty that ours is a stable, controlled world".
Powers also expressed concern over the speed of information in the modern world, worrying that it will become increasingly more difficult to hide the existence of the paranatural world before arguing that the Bureau must be be cautious and allow his department to handle all public affairs and cover stories.
Containment Procedure[]
Water placed on the item prevents it from exercising thaumaturgical force.
Trivia[]
- This Alter Item is directly adapted from the real-world notion of "fan death", a South Korean urban legend dating to at least the 1920s[1] in which people are mysteriously found dead in a closed room with no apparent cause, supposedly killed by an electric fan left running. Within the Remedy Universe, however, it was the Bureau itself that spread rumors about the so-called "dangers" of electric fans in order to cover up AI13-KE's paranatural properties.