Sargasso-3
This may be the answer to a mystery on a world we haven't yet found.
Green Water
Normally, breaches open in relatively safe spots -- at ground level, in open air, on a solid surface. This is a strong trend, not an unbreakable law of physics, as was discovered when the first-in team entered the breach for Sargasso-3 (as yet unnamed) and found what had seemed to be a verdant field was, in fact, a massive seaweed colony, far less solid than it appeared. Fortunately, a more stable surface, in the form a badly overgrown warship, was nearby. The explorers clambered aboard, and found, from their higher perspective, that they'd landed at the edge of a field of such ships, a dozen or so clearly visible.No one was aboard. The overall technology was late 19th century, but the surviving documents, in Spanish, indicated it was 1760, and maps were found showing territories on the west coast of North America marked with transliterations of Japanese names. These, and items recovered in haste from a few of the other ships, provided the frame of what was found; a battle between highly advanced (for the putative year) Spanish and Japanese fleets, meeting in the mid-Pacific.
No survivors were found; not even bones. The dominant theory is the fleets became trapped here; they fought as long as possible; the survivors slowly ran out of food and water, and scavengers picked the remains clean. This theory has a lot of holes in it, but it's the most plausible working model. Of course, 'plausible' is an odd word when infinite realities are involved.
For one thing, the maps certainly do indicate the ships were sailing in the Pacific. However, calculations of latitude and longitude showed the area they now occuied should be, roughly, Kansas.
The sun was a little too bright. The moon's craters were all wrong. And 'seagulls' were, as it turned out, toothy six-limbed reptiles -- little dragons, with four limbs and wings. Some sea-life was caught, equally alien -- a mix of jawless creatures something like lampreys, armor-plated predators, and five-limbed cephalopods. However, images on-board the ships -- a sailor's carved wooden figures, decorative fixtures, a cookbook -- showed very recognizeable Baseline creatures.
The contradictions and oddities kept piling up, and although there was no obvious threat, the team leader grew increasingly anxious. He ordered an emergency exit, hauling back everything found thus far, with plans to return with better gear, including some watercraft not susceptible to the dense, sticky, pseudo-seaweed that was actually holding the ships mostly out of the water.
A good choice. The stabilizers destabilized when they exited, shorting out quite spectacularly. Attempting to re-open the breach (in another chamber) failed. According to the stabilizers now. the frequency they'd found was null -- nothing there. (The infinity of non-viable coordinates is far larger than the infinity of viable coordinates.)
CERN has been given all the relevant data, and the best that's been released is that they suspect a natural breach had opened between whatever yet-to-be-found alternate the fleet was from, and the world that had been briefly explored. Rather than destabilizing, the fleet remained trapped, and this, in turn, caused the merged world to shift in frequency over time.
Much as with Tranquility, the tale of this lost fleet has resonated with Baseline, especially in Japan, where a saga of Japanese heroes setting forth from New Edo (in the same area as Baseline's San Franciso) to repel a Spanish armada, only to be lost and have endless adventures in an alien world (along with their mustache-twirling enemies) has spawned successful manga and anime series. (The series relies on ignoring the likely fact everyone in the fleet died horribly; instead, the two sides work togther to escape the sargasso, there is a sudden and inevitable betrayal, and a strange new continent is found, as each group pursues a route home.)
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