eclosion

In the beginning, mankind built great works in an attempt to pierce into God's domain, and and as a result, his world was shattered. Whether it was a tower like from the Babel story, or some gadget like a "particle accelerator," we don't know. There are a lot of different stories of how it went down, all of them completely different, completely contradictory. Obviously not all of them could have REALLY happened, but.. Well. We can't really know anything, not anymore.

Maybe it's best to start with what we CAN figure out... We know that some time ago, maybe a few generations (but even that's not clear), our world was coherent. The sky stayed above our heads, the earth stayed below. Days were the same all over, rather than what we have now where it might be midnight in your backyard and high noon in your front. Things made sense, even over long distances.

People had solved most of their problems-- they were smart, they were civilized. They cared for their elderly while helping their children reach the absolute height of their potential. They were paragons of morality and culture, had reached a zenith of creativity and the search for truth. Unlimited knowledge. Hah! You know people used to think knowledge was good thing? Absolute insanity, man.

Well, they got to asking questions. What are those little specks ACTUALLY made of? What can they tell us about the mind of God, or if there even is a God? They made abominable devices to seek this knowledge, using bigger and bigger mechanisms to ever more and more leverage their powers. To find out what happens when we put more and more of our power on an ever smaller object. Just to see what would happen-- like a shrimp hammering on his own aquarium glass.

God isn't without a sense of humor, though. Because the results were confounding. In the science narrative, particles kept on breaking down into the same three fundamental particles, just on an ever smaller scale. In the alchemic, the soul corpuscles kept advancing from nigrido to... ever more nigrido-ey-nigrido. yeah I don't get it either. Until someone got the idea to run their probe a different way-- we don't know the details, but under this new regime, the new smallest story that was revealed was completely different. Aha! So it's just an artifact of our apparatus! Well, no that can't be true because when we probed it using the old method, it gave us the new story. WHAT?! It's like the way we had asked the question had permanently changed the answer, no matter how we asked it subsequently. We found we could force these new discoveries to conform to either prototype-- or archetype-- depending on which apparatus we FIRST used to prove them. And we found more and more different ways to adjust our probes to manipulate what we would "discover" to our whims...

And alright, alright, I realize that might be hard to understand, so lemme break it down like this-- the universe was being created wherever we looked, and (most importantly) AT the moment we looked, not before. This was the beginning of the end, because the power to change reality at one's own whim was so seductive to the worst kind of people-- you know the type: morons who seek power. It was as if when it was just a matter of curiosity, God good-naturedly replied to his creation "LOOK IN FRONT OF YOU NUMBNUTS!" But when they started using it to slake their greed and their obsessions it became an anathema that defiled His holy realm. And then the kind of morons who seek power did what they do-- and the current state of the world is the inevitable result.

Few now remember how the world ever was. Few remember a world where one person's narrative could be held in perfect accord with anyone else's. All we can do is hold to what we know-- even if two people's stories contradict, they can usually find irrefutable proof of both simultaneously. It just doesn't make sense to try to establish even the most basic of facts. Because the world has become chaos.

Eclosion refers to the process by which a Crann gains connections and access to other Crann- it's a major step in the maturation of a reality, where its inhabitants are allowed to mingle with inhabitants from other realities.

In story, the most commonly referred to "Eclosion" is the eclosion of Terra (i.e. Earth), which is by most of its inhabitants considered to be a disaster. It was initiated by the CIA.