Shimmer

From Viranos
Jump to navigationJump to search
The 2009 Hallanaw Shimmer.

A shimmer is a cross-dimensional event in which the boundaries between the dimensions of Halla and VIranos temporarily break down due a sustained Renn level of 100 or more.

A shimmer is characterized by the eponymous "shimmer" which marks its boundary - an iridescent, translucent "veil" located in a perfect circle steadily expanding out from the origin point. The rate of expansion and total size varies heavily between shimmers, with the largest recorded shimmer, the Great Wailevu Shimmer of 1927, having a radius of nearly 500 kilometers achieved over the course of roughly three weeks; the longest-lasting shimmer ever recorded was the 1810 Kamei Breach, which lasted for nearly seven years and rendered the Oseki city of Kamei uninhabited despite only being 2 kilometers in radius. The veil of a shimmer heavily distorts light, sound, and radio waves traveling through it, often redirecting them to unlikely locations or changing them in some way.

At the origin point of a shimmer, the two dimensions meet directly, with one, in theory, being able to travel through into Halla. However, the sheer concentration and deluge of Mu radiation which pours out from the origin is so intense that very few living things are able to endure it for long, although the intensity of the Mu drops of very rapidly as one moves away from the origin. All lifeforms within a shimmer are subjected to severe mutagenic effects, with their genetic code effectively being sampled and rearranged with aspects of other lifeforms' for the duration of the shimmer. The precise cause of this is unknown, but a shimmer can radically alter or even destroy a regional ecosystem and result in thousands of new species which exist outside of Viranos's traditional evolutionary paradigm being created.

A shimmer has the potential to become a breach should the Corruption take notice of and travel through it, hijacking its mutagenic effects to be overtly hostile to Viran lifeforms and turning the iridescent veil opaque and black.