[@Banana] I regret to say that there are a couple of issues with your post.  Aside from the City of Echoes being completely empty (of normal people), nobody is starting there.  Nobody has received a phylactery yet (that'll play a part in the next turn of events), and the College people don't know about the Frenzy.  They're also still studying the phenomena known as Echoes, so they wouldn't tell about that, either.  All contestants are already 'registered' in the Crucible thanks to the ledger.  Lastly, I'll go ahead and spoil the properties of one of the Artifacts, but here's the information on the Lantern carried by the staff: it facilitates warping space through an ambiguous, vision-obscuring element, which can be rain, fog, dust, darkness, snow, foliage, and so forth.  In order to be warped, a non-holder of the Lantern must be consciously following the holder into the unknown.

The Lantern is just one element of a rather expansive subsystem I simply refer to as 'items' that I am eager to introduce later on.

There's one other detail: the Inquisitional College isn't exactly [i]of[/i] the City of Echoes.  Rather, it was established after the city became the way it is, in order to 'inquire' about what happened.  Before that, the building was just a sort of research center.