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Of course! This might take a few words, but I’ll try to keep things as brief as I can. Beware of spoilers below!

Even though it’s early days, I think we can make a good guess what caused the player’s appearance on the station: Professor Senno’s experiment! We know very little about it, but a few small details have popped up in conversation so far. One really useful one comes from a small slip made by Marrowyn: we know the experiment has something to do with quantum physics!

I think this is important. Quantum physics is an area where all sorts of strange, magical-sounding things can happen. I’ve worked in the area, so you have it from the horse’s mouth! In quantum physics, it’s possible to do amazing things like teleportation, manipulating objects at a distance, and messing around with time (to some degree). Depending on your interpretation – we still don’t really understand the mechanics behind the quantum world – we may also be able to shunt objects around between different dimensions. Quantum effects may also be intricately linked to consciousness, and thought. Again, that depends on your interpretation. If all this sounds complicated, bear with me!

We know that Senno’s experiment didn’t work as planned. His data doesn’t make sense to him, and it sounds like his team is unsure what, if anything, happened while the experiment took place.

Here’s my thinking. Senno’s experiment either did something completely unexpected, or else worked far, *far* better than he had hoped. The quantum-mechanical forces unleashed reached out and grabbed hold of the player, dragging them back to the carain station. Remember how the first place we see in the station is a lab full of scientists? I’m guessing that lab is pretty close to the room housing the experiment! (Why wouldn’t the player materialise right inside the experiment? Well, with quantum mechanics, there tends to be a bit of fuzziness with things like position. You can never be completely sure where objects will end up, only roughly where they’ll be. Thanks, Dr. Heisenberg!)

So why was it the player that got transported, rather than anyone or anything else? It could be an accident, but the game’s already hinted at something more. Remember, at the beginning of the game, that the player was clutching the campus map, trying to find out where to go? That map features the college mascot, a humanoid bulldog. The mascot features again, in the little alcove the player was hiding in when the transportation happened. If you play the opening of the game again, you’ll see the mascot appears on a little poster on the wall, right in the player’s line of sight. I think it’s fair to say that the player could have been thinking about the mascot at the instant of transportation.

Here’s a suggestion. The energy of Senno’s experiment reached out a long, long way. It groped around to try and find the closest thing related to its origin point that it could: the mind of a carain. There are no carain on Earth, but the experiment found the image of the mascot in the player’s mind. The experiment grasped onto that, and dragged it back to the station, pulling the player along with it. This might sound weird but, if you buy the consciousness interpretations of quantum mechanics, it could just be possible! We’re going outside the realm of human physics here! The player-character might be coming to this theory on their own, too, at least subconsciously. Remember that dream about the mascot?

Anyway, that’s what I think happened: the player was dragged to the station by the energies of Senno's experiment. I could stop there, but I did mention *theories*, and I’ve only discussed one here. That’s because I’ve skipped over one little detail. Where actually *is* the player? Where is the Arias system?

I’ve already said a bunch of things, so I’ll just summarise this. Although if anyone really wants to hear more, let me know – I’ll whip up a Marrowyn lecture, haha. I have three ideas.

1. The Arias system is somewhere else in the Universe. This could work, but the problem here is with the carain themselves. They are incredibly close to earthly species of dog, and the chances of a species evolving independently like that is astronomical. In galactic terms, that means that you’d need to travel a long, *long* way before you’d expect to find a species like the carain. By long, I mean many, many times the size of the portion of the Universe we can currently see. Say something like a trillion light years. Physics gets pretty weird over long distances like that, and that might mess up Senno’s experiment. I’m not sure I buy this one.

2. The Arias system is in another dimension. This is neater, and solves a lot of problems. You don’t need to worry about probabilities, here, because pretty much *anything* can happen in another dimension, if you go looking for it. That being said, it’s still a little strange that the carain evolved independently, in a separate dimension. Humans bred dogs for very specific purposes, producing the different breeds. I don’t think those breeds would be produced by a self-aware species evolving naturally; the selection processes would be really different. So how did the breeds appear? Were there humans in this other dimension, that bred dogs and then died out, letting the dogs evolve dully into carain? This solution could work well, but it still has a lot of unanswered questions.

3. The Arias system *is* the Solar System, but far in the future. I don’t think this is the right answer, because I have to make a *lot* of concessions to make this work. It’s a cludge, and fails Occam’s Razor terribly! But it’s fun to think about. This also solves the problem of the origin of the carain. They *are* dogs, and evolved to become carain after the human race died out, or left for somewhere else, or transcended into beings of pure energy, etc.. There are a few interesting similarities between Arias and Sol, too. Comparing the systems is a bit messy, but I can make something work. Here’s a suggestion:

Arias = Sol: Humans mined the star for gas, which is why Arias is a little smaller than Sol (i.e. it’s an orange dwarf, rather than a yellow dwarf).

Tiruum = Mercury: This comparison is pretty much one-to-one.

Iyeo = Venus: Humans terraformed the planet, and shifted Luna there (check Marrowyn’s picture!). That might have been to help with colonisation.

Urium = Earth: It’s arid and inhospitable because of thousands of years of extreme climate-change and/or the aftermath of a global, catastrophic war.

Dyss = Mars: It’s arid, and also more inhospitable than the ruins of ‘Earth’, which makes sense.

Morrendi = Jupiter: Humans mined this completely of its gas, so all we’re seeing is the core. That would explain why it’s small and uninteresting, as Marrowyn describes it. The moon Ryke is actually Jupiter’s moon Europa, which is also covered with water-ice, and which would be a good candidate for somewhere to live.

Novail = Saturn: This was mined, but less extensively than Jupiter. It’s much smaller now.

Reklain = Neptune: This isn’t that well known, but Neptune *does* have rings! I’m saying Neptune rather than Uranus, because Marrowyn’s picture shows roughly the right number of moons.

What happened to Uranus? Either humans mined it so much that they depleted it completely, or else its core became another moon of Neptune. Uranus’s core is pretty tiny! (Bonus, bonkers theory: humans used it as an interstellar ship / mass for building a temporary wormhole!)

What about Pluto? It’s still there, but the carain don’t consider it to be a planet. And the asteroid belt? Either Marrowyn just skipped over it, since he was just talking about planets, or else humans mined it heavily, so it’s much less of a feature now.

As I say, this displacement-in-time theory is unlikely to be the right approach, but I had fun thinking about it! I suspect the alternate-dimension theory is the one that makes the most sense.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. Sorry to be so wordy, but there are some tricky details in these theories! Uh, and if anyone hasn’t been put off by this little essay and wants more details, or would like to ask some questions, do say!