As technologies for faster travel were explored, the option of subspace or hyperspace travel was exhaustively pursued. While the vast wealth that was ploughed into this avenue would produce no method of travelling faster than light, it would produce fruit of another kind, and so the subspace tweeter, with all its considerable benefits, was born. And it was after creating one of the minuscule wormholes necessary to make the subspace tweeter work that one team of Nomad scientists was able to stretch some of the properties of that subspace strata outward like a bubble in the hopes of creating a doorway into this realm of instantaneous travel.

But the experiment had some strange results. As the subspace sphere enveloped the very engine that was expanding it, its contents temporarily ceased to be governed by the rules that hold sway in our universe.

Scientists were baffled, at first, by the results of the experiment, as the apparatus had appeared to simply vanish. But, after the building they were experimenting in started shaking and then collapsed, the survivors had discovered the remnants of the apparently partially successful experiment merged into its very foundations.

As the sphere had formed, it had, indeed, removed the constraints of the universe on its contents, as had been hoped. It had not disappeared, but had become invisible and intangible, light and matter now passing through it like it was not there. Unfortunately, it was still subject to forces in subspace, and the gravitational well of a planet is so great it affects even the non-space below the skein of reality. And so, without the solidity of matter to stop it, the sphere and its contents had started to fall into the very gravity well it was being designed to escape, rematerializing a moment later, merging with the building’s foundations, displacing and undermining them; quite literally bringing the house down.

The next time the premise was tested, the scientists were ready, and the world looked on in amazement as the sphere, dropped from a great height, passed clean through the planet to materialize in open space on the other side, not only unharmed by the passage, but sling-shotted outward by it.

It did not take long to realize the vast implications of this discovery. Seeking to harness the power of the stars, scientists tried to tap into the phenomenal gravitational pull of their sun. The next evolution of the new invention was accelerating toward the sun when they initiated the sphere, blinking back into existence a month later on the other side like a ball shot from a stellar cannon.

It was a steady evolution from there on. Changing the angle of entry into the sun changed the direction of exit, and speed could be progressively increased more and more by stringing together progressive ‘jumps’ through other stars, planets, and moons en route.