The Story Of Jacob. Act One.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

An enormous gaseous star collapsed in on itself. As the spaces between the molecules and atoms grew smaller connections were made - hundreds and millions of circuits duplicating the function of the synapses of the brain, until a primal consciousness was awakened. As stray bits of matter - gas clouds and meteorites and comets - were drawn into the gravitational pull of the now darkened dwarf star which grew ever smaller in size and more powerful in influence, the intelligence sent out a warning beacon: "Danger. Stay away."

An intergalactic starship operated by alien entities unlike anything known to man and powered by a form of incalculable inter-dimensional fusion reaction beyond man's comprehension heard the beacon without understanding it. Being a scientific expedition vehicle, they sought it out since it was unlike anything they had ever experienced. They entered a wormhole at one end of a galaxy and emerged halfway across the universe... and immediately fell into the gravitational well of the collapsing star.

They fired their engines at full power heading into a low orbit around the star even as the pull of gravity added to their acceleration, then at the nearest point they reversed the polarity of their electro-magnetic flux capacitors and were driven from the star at full power.

However, the collapsed stellar object had grown so crystaline and brittle that the force of the magnetic reversal shattered it. it's shell exploded as the core imploded. The space vehicle rode out the shock wave and nearly escaped and was about to enter warp drive when they were struck by a tiny particle - a mere pebble, a splinter, scarcely a grain - well, the size of a semi-truck - of the collapsed dwarf stars matter. Everone on board died instantly and the tiny chunk of stellar material - a single thought from the cosmic intelligence - embedded itself in the ships engine matrix, providing it with enough fuel for millenniums.

The ship hurtled into a trans-warp worm-hole and tumbled through the hidden tunnels of space, slamming into the barriers and building up a shell of warp matter the way a grain of sand builds up a pearl. It traveled through these warp passages from one part of the universe to another for an untold amount of time until the warp shell built up to the point where it gagged the cosmic tubeway and was spit out, half of a light year away from the planet Earth in the Sol solar system in the Milky Way galaxy.

Half a year - or one television season as modern man knows it - is nothing to a chunk of stellar debris traveling at the speed of light. And six months later it struck the Earth's atmosphere. The warp matter shell was shredded into a dozen fragments that crashed to Earth forming the vile vortices - mysterious locations where ships and travelers enter and are taken... elsewhere.

What was left of the ship - barely a charred chunk of molten Black Rock with a stellar fusion reaction at it's core - slammed into Earth destroying the continent of Atlantis. It rebounded into a high orbit and plunged straight down halfway around the globe, striking the ocean and plunging down through the planets mantle until it cracked the crust. The sinking of a continent and the force of the impact caused a tsunami that created flooding of Biblical proportions and changed the shorelines of every continent. And the crack in the Earth's crust allowed molten magma to come bubbling up to the Earth's surface, forming an island.

Centuries passed and the island cooled. Erosion wore it down into fertile soil and plant life sprang up and animals and birds evolved.

And buried deep in its core, an alien sentience had one thought: a warning to tell travelers to stay away - a mental message of such force that it made the Island invisible to all conventional forms of navigation. And the alien fusion burned away deep in the Earth beneath the island, creating a form of magnetic energy unlike anything found anywhere else on the planet.