Glitched

From time to time, beings, creatures, or objects mysteriously appear in Mirielle — obviously from other worlds. During a few of the first encounters, someone speculated that some crossover mechanism had "glitched," and it's now the commonly used term for the phenomena.

Researchers have studied this phenomena for hundreds of years, but have been unable to determine any pattern of when, how, or what might appear (or why) although they have observed a few commonalities.

Beings (or anything that can communicate with words) speak the common language of wherever they appear although often with odd phrasing or accents — as non-native speakers often do. Those who have been questioned (not all beings and creatures are able or willing to communicate) report they have no memories of their previous lives. They usually retain their skills, general knowledge and (often) their name, but nothing specific about the world they came from.

Not all the glitched arrive with simply no memories. Some glitched insist they have been changed although they usually can't explain how. There are reports of incorporeal beings (who may have been corporeal in their original worlds). And, reports of "things" that probably once lived, but are so contorted that they did not survive the shift. Legends and myths also describe beings and objects that, if they existed, were probably glitched, but arrived with significantly different abilities and appearance.

Sages think that whatever process the Deities used to bring the initial peoples to Mirielle weakened the boundaries between it and other worlds. And over time, as the Deities brought over even more groups of peoples, creatures, and other objects, the boundaries became unstable. The Deities found they could no longer reliably shift anything to Mirielle — sometimes nothing happened, other times the wrong thing appeared or was drastically changed, and (rarely) the shifting occurred as intended.

Type

Metaphysical, Multiversal