The storm of Green Sun energy mistaken by the trolls as a symptom of a scratch in time.
The rift is a misnomer given by Karkat Vantas and the trolls to an anticipated event that was in fact the combination of two separate factors; the scratch of the kids' B1 session, and the arrival of Jack Noir in the trolls' A2 session.
Background[]
Because the activation of a scratch construct causes an immense release of “temporal energy”, the trolls' Trollian screens seemed to show the kids' timelines ending in a storm of temporal distortion.[citation needed][image?] Meanwhile, at the end of the trolls' own timeline, a similarly powerful surge of the Green Sun's cosmic space-time energies heralded the Becquerel-fueled Jack Noir's entry into their own session. The trolls interpreted this as a singular “rift in parad0x space” allowing the demon to travel from the kids' session to their own; though Aradia Megido was in fact aware that the rift was a phenomenon known by the Incipisphere's locals as “a scratch”.
There was some truth to the relation between these two events; Jack Noir's travel via Frog Temple time capsule allowed him to escape the temporal annihilation of his home session,[citation needed] and Andrew Hussie even refers to the results of a scratch as “a spacetime rift”; Doc Scratch, however, something of an authority on the subject, later contradicts this, outright stating “[t]he Scratch does not open a rift in spacetime.”
Truth[]
The machine responsible for Jack's half of the rift, as seen in Cascade.
It was not, however, a direct result of the scratch that allowed Jack to move from one session to another instantaneously. In truth, an unnamed and heretofore unknown device located in the Wayward Vagabond's station seems to have had the express purpose of transporting things from the ruins of a planet to the victory platform of the session that created it. While superficially similar to a transportalizer, this device's scope is far wider, and the glyph on its surface - a spirograph a la the symbol of Sburb - is different.
It is not clear what purpose this kind of teleporter might serve to the exiles or to the wider goal of universal reproduction: if the transport is two-way, it may have something to do with the Heroes of a session claiming the world they created. The dial on the left of the device's face also indicates that it can transport the user "forward" through universes as well as backward; possibly this would have taken Jack to the victory platform created at the end of the combined B1 and B2 sessions, leading to Earth C.