The first Unification took place a little over four hundred years ago, beginning with a foundation of an Earth not entirely unlike our own. Why the Multiverse was formed as a planet, and why it needed to use Earth as its initial building block, remains a mystery to this day. As the planet expanded to impossible dimensions, much of this foundational reality was simply consumed and destroyed by the stitching-together of worlds onto the planetary surface. The population of Foundation Earth was heavily diminished, with the survivors fleeing to more stable portions of the planetary surface or having the random fortune to already having been there in the first place.
Steady additions continued to expand the planetary surface, and the first warpgates began to appear -- or perhaps merely be properly observed and engaged -- within a year or two of first Unification. Alliances began to form between the worlds as they often formed among nations, centered primarily on usage of the warpgate network. Beginning in year 1 of the period now known as B.Z.E (Before Zero Expansion), the Ascendancy came together in an effort to establish hegemony over warpgates. A more ramshackle organization known as the Union formed as a resistance movement, and each of these two represented the initial pan-multiversal governments. This war -- known as the Gate Wars -- raged from BZE 1 to BZE 374, at which time the Ascendancy seemed poised to claim permanent victory over the Union. A battle between the two in a bizarre patch of instability known as the Volatile Wastes, however, caused the Warpgate Disconnection Phenomena which induced two major changes in both the warpgate network and the Multiverse as a whole:
Firstly, the warpgate network itself ceased to be a broad mesh from which any gate could provide access to any other gate. Warpgates gained finite ranges, which immediately ended the gate wars as everyone abroad in the Multiverse suddenly found themselves with a fundamentally different set of parameters for transportation and supply lines. Going from Point A to Point B was no longer a no-questions-asked 20-minute trip, but become a multi-gate-hopping potentially-hours long ordeal, along routes that no one actually understood yet. Many travelers found themselves hopelessly lost, and it would take over a decade and a half for the Great Dispersal situation to be more-or-less fully resolved by Ascendancy and Union pathfinders.
Secondly, what was known as Sector Zero of the Multiverse was previously a relatively stable area in which Unifications appeared 'done', with most Unifications radiating outwards at greater and greater distances. The Battle of the Volatile Wastes completely reversed that trend, causing Sectors 1-10 to experience vastly decreased growth and causing Sector Zero to become the center of change in the Multiverse. This relationship reversal also caused a major period of instability in which Sector Zero went through Re-Unification events, in which the fundamental geography and make-up of the Sector rebooted itself in bizarre ways. This was not experienced in the far Sectors at all, with only Sector 1-4 -- directly bordering Sector Zero -- seeing less severe versions reunification.
As the Ascendancy and Union pieced themselves back together, they each adopted a new calendar based on this paradigm shift: The current After Unification (AU) calendar, for which the year is A.U. 35 (RL year 2025). An unsteady peace driven by uncertain logistics persisted from BZE 374 / AU 0 to AU 15, at which point it is generally agreed that the two organizations engaged in a Cold War that flared hot at specific moments. These specific moments nearly always involved elaborate schemes to interface advantageously with the various disparate physics sets that make up the constituent components of the Multiverse, which ultimately backfired in AU 26.
The Reunification Event of AU 26 was the last straw in the failures of the first-generation pan-Multiversal governments, seeing them dissolve back into their individual states and to seek more measured ways to pursue their interests. The organizations that would come out of this thinking would be called the Concord, Paladins, and Watch, each with a distinct and more ground-level approach.
Since then, Unifications in Sector Zero haven't slowed even a little. An endless swirl of change also represents an endless swirl of new opportunities-- and problems.
Updated November of 2025.