In ancient times, planet earth had no oceanic basins as we know them. Rather, as the earth was forming most of the liquid collected within a vast layer, a literal underground ocean, similar to a huge aquifer that spanned the entire planet.
As the planet began to cool and condense, the liquid continued to flow deeper into the planet through the many geothermal chasms and cracks, while the surface crust began to shift as these crevices eventually became filled or covered with the space debris and dust particles which continued to fall to the ground from the thick condensing gaseous cloud that eventually consolidated into the planet that we now know as the earth.
At one point, the expanding and overheated mantle of the planet began pushing outwards, as this huge supterranean ocean encased in vast caverns of basaltic rock was stressed to an incredible degree. As the pressure began to build to unimaginable proportions, a weak point was found in the crust, and the empressured waters at that point burst out through the crust in a geiser which shot miles into the sky.
As the rift increased and ripped around the globe like the broken seams of a baseball, other geisers formed, and the waters, propelled high into the atmosphere, began to prime the hydrodynamic cycle. A vast torrent of 'rain' began to fall, literally deluging the planet.
When many of these formerly aquatic caverns were emptied of their lost contents, their natural supports had disappeared and the sheer weight of the crust collapsed these caverns, creating the massive oceanic basins and the mid-oceanic rifts from which the waters had escaped.
The collapsing tectonic plates pushed other plates outwards and upwards, as continents and mountain ranges began to rise from their original levels.
Some of these aquifers or caverns, many of them quite massive, remained intact however, and literally formed a new world which would in the course of time be discovered by man and animals and foliage from the world above, yet the new conditions within this inner world -- isolated as it was from the world above -- would today seem strange and alien to most of us, since these isolated environments had taken an entirely different tangent from the outer world, as the physical forms within began to adapt to the strange and alien environments below.
This, brave seeker, is the world that you face as you continue to explore the lower levels of the dungeons. This is a world that I myself have seen with my own eyes, a world frought with dangers and delights, a world inhhabited by faerial vixens and infernal vermin alike. Do you dare to challenge this strange new world?
If so, then adventure awaits you within the portal beyond.
BRANTON'S THEORY OF HYPERTHERMAL SPELEOLOGY:
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Cautiously, you enter the portal and find a strange conveyance, which you enter, as you continue your journey into the unknown depths beyond...