Rafting

As a generic term: the attempt to remove a threatened creature, community of creatures, or sometimes an entire ecosystem, from the location where it is threatened, with the intention of re-establishing the population under threat in some new, safe place where it can continue to thrive.

Rafting is an extremely wizardry-intensive business, as it involves not only obtaining the consent of the creatures to be rafted, but prepping the new location so that it matches the original environment as closely as possible, without doing violence to any already-extant creatures native to the world, planet or plane in question. The matter of transport itself normally uses the largest tranche of the energy budgeted for such a project, and rafting projects are usually carried out in close cooperation with the wizards who handle the local worldgating resource.

Among wizards practicing at the interstellar level, a loosely associated "de facto" rafting group called the Interconnect Project has sprung up, its main job being to identify and assess species in need of rafting, and to assist in organizing and overseeing the transfer. (Often this process is assisted when other wizards independently refer cases to the Project's wizards.) The Interconnect Project itself is the remnant of an ancient rafting project associated with the imminent collapse of the star Alterf. This project relocated many vital worldgating technologies from the doomed system to a multiplicity of new homes across three galaxies, including the planet Rirhath B, where Alterf's gating technologies were migrated to / mated to the newly evolving technologies already based at the Crossings.

Probably the most famous of Earth-based rafting projects has been the aphthonic intervention, in which a working group of the wizards of Atlantis attempted to save their most unusual species of flora and fauna from the destruction of their continent. (AWOM)