Carsanquay - Cleft Origin Stories: Carsanquay's Recollections
Mar 11 20:26:01 2005

Carsanquay's Log: 31-5F-A2-01

Hi. I'm Carsanquay and I know everything.

Well, practically everything. If I knew everything, it wouldn't have taken
me so many days to get this hunk of junk computer system up and running. I
don't know if this log will ever be read by anyone, but, as a scientist,
I've always considered it good practice to keep records of everything.
Professional state of affairs and all that. I'll keep this log updated
until the batteries run out. Or until I die. Most likely one of the two.

Hmm... but where to begin? An awful lot of stuff has been happening, what
with the end of the world and all.

---

It all started back in Portravia, where I worked as a theorist in the local
research laboratory. Moogles weren't very common back there, especially as
scientists. We had a very big project going on. Great funding, legitimacy,
everything a scientist could hope for. See, our world was fraught full of
adventurers. Adventurers, being the type who traveled a lot, needed to
carry things with them. Lots of things. The solution? A bottomless
backpack! By utilizing a miniature pocket dimension, we could make
backpacks to hold practically infinite amounts of objects at virtually no
weight.

Well, it seemed brilliant at the time.

Have you ever heard of something called a Verneshot? It's a geological
phenomenon involving a supervolcano. See, somewhere, a volcano erupts with
massive force. Such massive force that it sends a small chunk of the planet
hurtling into the atmosphere, which then acts as a meteor and slams into the
earth elsewhere. Horrible stuff. Creates mass extinctions, global
devastation, and so forth.

It really was just a bad coincidence. There we were, testing our pocket
dimension generator for the first time, when a rather large chunk of the
South Ocean crashed into our laboratory.

Unfortunately for mostly everyone back in Portravia, that was the end of
the world. Although I didn't see it myself, my world was likely soon
covered with an impenetrable cloud of dust, darkening the world and ending
all life. Massive seismic disturbances would rend the planet apart. A
horrible end for the masses. Fortunately for some of us, something peculiar
happened.

The exact physics of the event... well, I'm still investigating that. It's
very confounding. But the immense kinetic force of the inbound Verneshot
combined with the dimensional flux from our experimental apparatus created
a... let's call it a 'flaw' within reality. A gap between dimensions. Space,
where there was none before. An empty place between universes. We eventually
began to call it the Cleft. A chance occurrence that rightfully should never
have happened.

Now, you see, this dimensional 'flaw' caused odd phenomena. Rifts opened
across the world (and, as it would turn out, across dimensions), sucking
matter into them. There'd be a flash, and a tree was gone. Or a person, or a
continent. In this fashion, some people were saved from the armageddon of our
world, transferred to the Cleft between dimensions. Most of my research team
survived due to this - our laboratory was ripped out of Portravia and into the
Cleft. We were the lucky ones.

...I have to cut this short. Something's wrong with the gravity monitoring
system, and it needs my attention.

Carsanquay, signing off.