Basic Background

2010-2012

Fortean Events skyrocket in frequency.

• A flock of passenger pigeons, ten thousand strong, darkened the skies above New Jersey for the first time in over a century.
• A man began ranting and raving at a store in San Francisco when they refused to accept his payment in "Colonial Pounds". His driver's license was issued by "The Crown Colony of California". The quality of the clearly prop license was excellent, including expensive details like multi-layered holographic insets, the kind used for anti-counterfeiting purposes. His fingerprints, and the name on the license, matched those of a California citizen who had died three years earlier.
• Dozens of witnesses, most with cell phones to corroborate their story, reported a Tyrannosaurus roaming the outskirts of a small Georgia town. It was covered with mottled grey and white feathers, and was wearing the remains of what could only be called a harness and riding tackle. It vanished into the fog and could not be found. Stool samples were recovered.

2013

A rippling field appears in Potterston, PA. Most pass through it without effect. One man enters and vanishes. He returned a minute later, saying there was another town on the other side, with all the store signs in German and the fashions, cars, and so on all looking different. After much cajoling, he agreed to pass through again, and this time he stole a newspaper. Extensive analysis of the articles, written in a German dialect, revealed it came from a world where the dominant culture and language of North America was Germanic, though it was not obvious how history had changed, as the daily paper failed to helpfully include a timeline of events. The "field" stayed visible for 14 hours, then vanished.

Other such fields began appearing rapidly. Sharing of information about the fields, between nations, was hampered by mutual suspicion and recrimination. In August 2013, the United Nations formed the Task Force for Para-reality Assessment & Investigation, or PAIN. All five nations of the UN Security Council shared equally in oversight and management of PAIN, but all had also been forming their own "above top secret" organizations for several years. NATO had formed BREACH , the Bureau of Reality Exploration, Access, and Containment of Hostiles.

2014

CERN successfully created, and stabilized, a reality breach. Self-guiding drones were flown through. They returned with images of a region later identified to be where Paris stands in our reality (although the breach was opened in an empty field in Canada, a hundred miles from any towns), but instead, there was a city with 19th century technology and Moorish styles. Signs and posters showed writing in an alphabet somewhere between Latin and Arabic characters, written right to left. One drone was shot down by a rifleman (the wreckage re-appeared a few hours later) ; the other returned through the breach, which was positioned in the middle of a busy market. Seconds later, a woman stumbled through, nearly fainting in shock and fear. The breach was immediately shut down before anyone else could pass. The drone had recorded dozens of people standing around or walking through the heat-shimmer effect of the breach, but the woman was the only person to pass through it. She was secured without harm, though she was justifiably by turns terrified and aggressive. Attempts to communicate were futile with the resources on hand, and she vanished before a translator could be found. (When linguists listened to recordings, the language was not known to them, and of course the speaker was not trying to educate her captors. Consensus is that it was a mix of Arabic and Romance roots, much as English mixes Germanic and Romance.)

2015

The "destabilization", whereby people or things that pass through breaches would return, was partially solved. Artificial breaches created by the CERN device could have a stabilizing effect; things passing through could remain indefinitely. There was, however, an oddity, in that only a few people could pass through at all. Most people stepped into a breach field without effect, some reporting slight discomfort or dizziness, others nothing. About 1 in 500 could transfer across the breach, along with their clothing and items. No defining factor has ever been found for this. No genetic trait, personality quirk, astrological sign, or other commonality. Many suspect there's an as-yet-unknown pan-universal rule in play. For now, though, those born "breachers" are in incredibly high demand even if they have no other skills.

(After multiple well publicized tragic incidents were assorted middle-aged accountants, high school dropouts, bored housewives, etc., were dumped into dangerous, unexplored worlds with minimal training and few useful skills, most nations and legitimate businesses instituted stricter policies about what jobs could be assigned to breachers. While, as noted, anyone who can cross a breach is of value if they can reliably perform even the most mundane job, those with strong academic, military, survival, or other skills -- ideally crossing fields of expertise -- are exceptionally welcome.)

2016-2017

Late in 2016, gigabytes of technical details about breach detection, creation, and stabilization were posted to WikiLeaks, ironically via a hacked administrative account so that the data could not be vetted first. By the time the hack was detected and corrected, tens of thousands of copies of the information had been downloaded and then uploaded to uncounted file sharing and mirroring sites. By March 2017, well-connected governments, businesses, and criminal groups had managed to acquire some of the necessary materials to build Breach Stabilizers. The world began to be flooded with items from alternate worlds, and more rarely with people from them. Extinct species, and wholly new species, began to appear... as did new plagues. Sydney, Australia, suffered "the three day dieoff" in which fully 30% of the population were killed by a sort of super-measles.

Containment of the technology was no longer possible. It became necessary to shift from trying to stop all "unauthorized" use to focusing on the most dangerous uses, and the creation of safety guidelines and protocols.

2018

The "Attuner" was developed, based on analysis of some anamolous experiments in stabilization and destabilization of objects. Individuals who could not normally pass through a breach could be 'attuned' to a single frequency. This would let them pass easily into the world to which they were 'set', and back to Baseline. The attunement would fade after 4+1d3 months on Baseline with no breach exposure. Attempting to 'overwrite' attunement simply fails; it must fade naturally.

Those capable of entering any breach are sometimes called 'autotunes' or 'natural breachers'. They are essential for any form of exploration and discovery, as well as providing skills needed on many worlds. The attunement process allows for more in-depth work (as well as tourism or resource extraction) on individual worlds. It was at this point that long-promised benefits of world hopping began to materialize, with pressure growing for more commercial activity. It was also when the "Interdimensional Cold War" began to heat up, with the capacity of nations to begin staging larger operations in other worlds.

Reflecting this, the BREACH acronym was changed so that the last two letters now stood for "Control and Homesteading", reflecting the desire to make use of those realities that were seemingly empty of sapient life.

2021

The first "G2" stabilizers are perfected by CERN and made available to PAIN, BREACH, and others.

2022->

The breaches have changed Earth, or Baseline Earth, or simply BE. Industrial exploitation of "lifeless" worlds, rich in resources, is considered the new frontier. Dozens of alternate histories have been discovered, and beyond that, alternate physics. There are worlds where people practice what can only be called magic. There are worlds where telepathy and telekinesis are proven and used. There are worlds where the technology is decades ahead of Baseline Earth's, and worlds where it followed alternate paths that defy what ought to be possible. There are worlds that are not even remotely like Earth, and worlds that are nothing like anything.

All major population centers have Breach Shields that prevent the random breaches that began in 2010. There are not enough to cover the globe, though, so new gateways occasionally pop into existence, with agents of PAIN ever alert for a call to action.