At 10:46 pm on an ordinary Tuesday, in a university physics laboratory staffed only by a handful of graduate students, almost all of whom have never previously done anything which came within seconds of ending the normal chronological progression of the world, a portal to another dimension - or, perhaps, some space between dimensions - is briefly opened.

This portal, like virtually all such human-created portals, is highly unstable. Within half a second, it has collapsed back in on itself, destroying half of the lab's machinery in the process. Amidst the smoking remains of the lab equipment, however, there is also single human person who wasn't there before.