PROLOGUE: "The Catalyst"

The year was 2097, a time when humanity's unrelenting hunger for energy had driven them to the brink. The Earth was in trouble as a result, with temperatures rising, the north poles were melting quickly leading to the rise of sea levels. In a desperate bid for survival, the world's leading scientists turned to the only resource left untapped -the Earth's core. Dr. Lila Hawthorne spearheaded Project Corewell, the idea was simple yet audacious: drill deep enough to access the molten plasma and geoneutrionos that powered the planet. If successful, it promised an era of limitless energy and planetary restoration.

But science, as always, came with risks.

The breakthrough came when Corewell's drill pierced an unstable pocket of energy deep within the mantle. The plasma erupted with a force no simulation had predicted, sending shockwaves rippling through the Earth's gravitational field. These shockwaves, later termed gravitational pulses, had unforeseen side effects.

Across the globe, strange phenomena began to occur. In isolated regions shimmering distortions appeared in spaces that seemed to defy the laws of physics. These spaces, however, transported people and objects to different places sometimes to distant parts of the earth, others to nowhere at all. Dr. Lila and her team scrambled to study these portal spaces but their behavior was erratic, their presence fleeting. They did, however, find that most of these spaces appeared in places of concentrated natural energy such as fault lines, rivers, mountain peaks, and caves as well as energy conduits such as power plants and telecommunication towers. These areas where portals seemed to appear often were called pocket zones.

Some portals appeared in areas other than the pocket zones. These portals were erratic and could appear on top of the roof of a house and destroy it. They were coined pulses by the locals.