At precisely 10:45 PM on May 9th, 2024, a hole appeared, a gouge in reality, ripping itself into being somewhere within the Saint Paul, Minnesota metro area. By 11 PM, the energy guttering from the hole had suffused most of the Twin Cities, bathing roughly 3,500 square miles and over 4 million people in energy, powerful and mutative and undetectable by any known mechanical instrument but tangible to thousands of particularly gifted individuals across the globe. By the stroke of midnight many of those Sensitives had felt this explosion of power, their subconscious antennae pricking at the smell of it, their hearts hopelessly magnetized to the pole at its epicenter. 

Within a few hours the rent had closed, but the energy remained, soaked irrevocably into trees and concrete and flesh and dreams and space. By the morning of May 10th, all over the world, warlords were convening emergency meetings, opportunists were flocking to the Midwest, mercenaries were boarding private flights. A waterlogged saint was shuffling out of the Indian Ocean. A dead woman was blinking awake in the fuming heart of a nuclear reactor. A demigod was rousing somewhere in low earth orbit. 

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The chain of events sprawled from there, bloody and inevitable. Very few of those involved can be truly blamed for the devastation that followed. The vast majority of the players in the course of the bloody and final game, even those that seem almost obviously evil and power-mad, were, ultimately, nothing more than human beings. They were people, warped by forces far beyond their comprehension, let alone their control. The effort that many of these people made to save themselves, their loved ones, and the unwitting strangers in their crossfire was admirable. Heroic, even.

And, of course, totally in vain.

At precisely 10:45 PM on May 9th, 2024, the end of the world began.