Misunderstanding the Collapse
While the term "Collapse" is commonly believed, by the uneducated public, to originate from famed catastrophist Dacel Tin 33's best-selling book "Collapsing Realities Across the Multiverse" (or for younger generations, Sapphire Sunburst's ballad of the same name), in truth the term was coined by pre-Agency explorers who witnessed irregularities in the probability calculations used to traverse shards. An unexpected "Collapse" occurred in dimensions where possibilities should be near limitless but instead were quickly diminishing toward one; where the fate of that universe could become locked. "Collapsing" shards were deemed unsafe for travel due to the high risk of being stranded. Outside of vague warnings on rarely read navigational charts, the term "Collapse" was essentially unknown. That all changed when Shard 11 began to rip itself apart.
-Excerpt from An Unauthorized History of the Travel Agency, Chapter 4: The Time Between; Unregulated Travel and the Rise of the First Domain
