DAVE: ................
ROSE: To understand what happened, it really helps to understand exactly what a scratch is.
ROSE: When John severely damaged the Beat Mesa on your planet, and sent it off to Skaia to release its temporal energy there, you could view it as a kind of "request."
ROSE: We were asking Skaia to change everything at a fundamental level, and we gave it the energy to do so.
ROSE: But Skaia is a very passive entity. It only "knows" and "sees," but it never quite "acts."
ROSE: When it is asked to change everything, there is only so much it has control over.
ROSE: In fact, it has control over exactly one thing. The defense portals.
ROSE: It can decide to send important meteors to different points in time than originally planned, thus creating alternate realities.
ROSE: Offshoots of promise, rather than futility.
ROSE: And it turns out the most important meteors of all tend to be the ones delivering the young players to their planet.
ROSE: So all it has to do to change everything is tweak their destination times a bit.
ROSE: All internally-prompted changes in the post-scratch universe are decided entirely by this modest adjustment to the parameters.
ROSE: It's a very simple concept, actually.
ROSE: Yet the consequences are dramatic. It results in not only a hard reset for the session, but a partial reset for the universe too, due to the many causal entanglements between a session and its originating universe.
DAVE: what do you mean tweak the destination times
DAVE: where did they get sent to
ROSE: A variety of different time periods.
ROSE: The simplest way to way to look at it is to picture the original destinations of our two groups of four ecto-babies...
ROSE: And switch them.
DAVE: what
ROSE: Though this is just a slight oversimplification.
ROSE: While it's roughly true, Skaia had some peculiar whims this time.