It is the year 15 AU - After Unification.
So great was the change to the world, the Unification, that time is now marked by it - partially out of reverence for the change, but also partially for sake of common reference. Because those Unified come from many walks of life with many, many different ways of telling time…
It began on an auspicious day. Some say that it was caused by a passing meteor. Some say it was triggered by an alien spacecraft in an experimentation. Others, prophetic revelation come to pass. Regardless, the repercussions would rock the Earth for years to come.
They began without number; hundreds upon hundreds of human beings, originally powerless, suddenly gaining psionics to a certain extent. The strength varied, and the phenomenon was throughout the world. Nevertheless, it happened. Their will began being exerted on the planet. Later, they would be known as the Founders.
It was small changes, at first. A building here, a hill there, where they shouldn't have been. A few people changed, or outright vanished. But not unlike a snowball on a mountain, soon an avalanche resulted. The phenomenon took on a life of it's own. Changes cascaded. Reality bent. Reality warped. Satellites - what few survived the change - saw the laws of physics as we know them bend and break. Alternate realities began to seep in - it was merely a trickle at first, but the cascade effect quickly caused it to be sown into chaos. Entire parts of the world were morphed. The circular shape of the planet changed. Over the course of a few days, the world turned upside down.
And Earth was not alone.
Across time and space, hundreds upon hundreds of additional worlds, universes, and planets underwent similar changes. They cascaded. The ripple effect tore through the universes, stitching together large tracts of their contents into an amalgamation that was only now laughingly called Earth, more out of sentiment than anything. The laws of physics? Warped. Magic and technology, once behaving in entirely different ways, now seemed to bend to single laws.
The result was unlike anything ever seen. The "Earth", or so it seemed, had no particular ending or beginning anymore. The curvature vanished, allowing one to travel forever in one direction or another - eventually, however, coming out on the other side, as though part of spacetime was turned around on itself in a loop. Travel out of the solar system seemed to fail, though the other planets, in eccentric orbits, were still accessible, as well as a few others apparently acquired on a whim. Large chunks of other worlds had merged together. Sometimes entire land-masses had merged together; other times, they'd literally repeat themselves a few thousand to a few hundred thousand miles away. The Strait of Americas - a string of fifty North Americas repeating one after another - is one of the more famous examples. The psionic powers of the Founders, of course, had their influence, and many of the universes merged in seemed to be related to popular (and sometimes not so popular) entertainment. Nevertheless, it was rarely a one-to-one copy - one did not find an exact copy of a world reproduced in the new Earth. In fact, many of these worlds had multiple copies, with the implications thereof. Stranger still, random individuals from many universes seemed to be drawn into this new Earth - wanderers on the planes of reality.
For a more full-featured version of the timeline please see the official timeline.
Historical version - here mostly for those interested. This section no longer applies.
((Note- This following section is best ignored in terms of the timeline. ))
Over the next three years, chaos reigned, until many of the assorted governments of the world came to as best an agreement as they could, attempting to forge shaky, but existent political and defensive alliances. Slowly, mega-nations began cropping up, some benevolent, some malicious. Infrastructure was wired together, within the nations and occasionally between them. The most potent was a magitech teleportation system, put together by an unknown cadre of scientists and magicians, allowing one to access hundreds of millions of teleportation points across the land. Studies are conducted in an attempt to find out what has happened to powers, and it seems each universe is roughly equal. Some powers, such as magical curses, have been heavily mollified; still others seem to be amplified. This leads to strange results, not unlike an anime episode, with apparently tiny humans bringing down massive robots, and other unlikely mismatches occurring on a regular basis, with the mismatched often able to hold their ground. Though unpredictable, data was gathered, and the unified society began to grow and mature.
But as the turmoil of survival has ebbed, and the addition of new worlds into this conglomerate slowly becomes commonplace, old grudges have begun to surface. As many in their home universes were at war for opposing ideals - good and evil - the combatants began aligning in vague, but visibly disparate, alliances. As new worlds continue unifying into the collective (though now far less disruptively), and old faces have new scores to settle, the world grows more and more dangerous. The beat of wardrums begins growing louder. And the gears of fate begin turning quicker…
