The lines of separation that made up the world flexed, bulging outward, straining, until they broke under the intense pressures being brought to bear. As reality itself shattered, thought, material and energy became one and madness descended upon the world.

From our monitors we watched how a sun rising out of Venice was heralded as the coming of Christ. Simultaneously it set in Japan, causing fifty thousand suicides in minutes. That was only the beginning.

Few people outside our conclave had trained to hold their thoughts in rigid check. Those free thoughts that flitted rapidly across minds of people who had barely learned to discipline their tongues but not their minds remade reality in a patchwork of tiny oases, bubbles of sanity for the one person that controlled that area. The only similarities from one reality to another and the places in between, were the nightmares that stalked freely, loosed by fears and diseased imaginations.

“Gentlemen, stage I is a success. Now it’s time to save the world.”