One clear, crisp night about 120 years ago, a ship carrying mining engineers from England to Australia was tumbling, uncontrolled, through time and space. It wasn’t supposed to be. It just was.

 

Eventually it came to a stop when it hit a volcano. Everybody survived, which wasn’t all that normal when colliding with a volcano. The ship did not survive.

 

The first thing they realized was that the stars did not match any configuration to which they were used. The natives of this land were slightly taller and thinner, and spoke a strange approximation of English, which was clearly not their primary language. Also there were dragons nearby. They were clearly on another world.

 

Eventually, six days later, a delegation of leaders and diplomats arrived from the twin city of Borkulon. They sat with the Earthers and explained a few things. The Earthers learned that they had crashed into Mount Thunderbastard, the only known volcano in the land.

 

The natives also suggested that making a large camp literally ON Mount Thunderbastard was not at all wise, and they were all very worried.

 

The natives were especially concerned that the Earthers were digging into the side of the volcano. They tried to say that their new friends might be hurt quite badly by the lava. But the Earthers were miners and they loved to dig. They said they had gloves and goggles so it was fine.

 

The delegation tried to explain that this was not Earth, and maybe in order to survive, they may want to perhaps not literally drill into the side of an angry and clearly active volcano.

 

The Earthers said that they knew what they were doing, and they were aware that this was not Earth. They had named this world Verne, after a visionary of their time.

 

The delegation patiently explained that this world already had a name. A name they quite liked. Cayamar. In the language of the Longdark, it meant “Sea of the Fallen”.

 

The Earthers shrugged, for they were British, and had a penchant for naming things that already had names. Over time, the Engineers of Earth built a large city, using metals mined from the ground, and forged in the fires of Mount Thunderbastard.

 

They built large devices, powered by science and not at all by magic (despite the most learned of the natives explaining that their devices would absolutely not work if magic wasn’t actually real in this world).

 

They named the city Widget Ridge.

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