Three and a half million years ago, when monkeys ran on all fours...

The earth began to shake. Thinking it to be another earthquake, the troop of monkeys all ran from their grove towards the open savanna.

Nearby, the ground ripped itself open, spitting smoke and steam out into the air. Before any of the monkeys could figure out what was going on, red-hot lava, like a bleeding sun leaking life through the skin of their very own savanna, began to pour out of the fissure.

The dry grasses caught fire around the lava. Nearly all of them turned and fled, but a few brave monkeys approached it to try and see what was going on. They were quickly driven away by the roaring inferno now sweeping through the grassland.

The troop grabbed everything they owned and ran, knowing nothing other than that they must go.

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Fissures opened up all over the world: most out in the middle of the ocean, some in the middle of existing continents. Some fissures shut themselves quickly and were forgotten about with little effect. But out in the ocean, the crust ripped itself apart. Small tectonic plates were slowly pushed up at their ends by the force of the magma trying to escape, and each gush of cooled lava held the edges up further and further.

The would-be first humans, fleeing their original habitats and ending up scattered across Europe and Asia, had to retain their thick fur in order to survive the much-colder northern climates, and there was no reason for them to lose their tails now that they lived in forests rather than grasslands. While they evolved speech and the ability to walk on two legs, and their intelligence grew to match that of our modern-day humans, they never lost their resemblance to their ancestors. These nearly-human monkeys, a couple generations away from standing on two legs, were the only animals to migrate, their journey north out of fear more than necessity; whereas other species were mostly fine.

All around the world, islands and mountains grew upwards from fissures, some even forming tiny continents as the edges of microplates were gradually shoved past the water. Earthquakes shook the planet for tens of thousands of years as a result of this violent tectonic activity - over a hundred each day - though almost all were barely perceptible. For tens of thousands of years, in some places even hundreds, the world was thrown into an era of chaos.

The upturning of the world came to be known as the Th'vatvaite, meaning 'great calamity' in a now-extinct language, passed down for thousands of years. Th'vatvaite is pronounced as "th-VAT-vate".

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