Chapter 22: Tourism sent me to time-hell

I come downstairs, groggy as hell, to find the group already chumming it up over the breakfast table.

Demarcus was a little more reserved but perks up when he sees me. I trudge over and receive a “Morning, Sunshine.” From him.

Mato and Isabella look up from their breakfast and quiet conversations, Mato looks suspicious while Isabella has that permanently angsty and defiant look she always wears.

“And where'd you sneak off to?” She asks.

“Axe-errands.” I mutter as Demarcus slides me one of his side dishes. Toast with jam.

“What was that?” She pesters, slightly peeved by my muttering.

“Here.” I say, taking a potion the color of Mountain Dew Voltage and sliding it across the table to her.

“Mana potion. Picked some up last night. I'm not sure if [Bards] use mana or not but, some are yours if you want ‘em.”

Izzy doesn't know what to do with that for a moment, before defaulting to the standard response of scorn.

“I'm a [Bard]. I sing and play guitar. Not a lot of magic to it. Won't see me slinging any spells. But, thanks.”

“That's all you did? Went shopping? I thought we weren't meant to spend money, or is that rule just for us plebians. Doesn't apply to all-important time travelers?” She says, and I think I detect some of her scorn directed at herself there. I'm not sure how she can say she doesn’t have much magic after the way we found her, holding an entire forest at bay with just her voice.

Does she really have insight into the way The Great Work thinks, but refuses to believe there's anything the universe would acknowledge about her? The self-image pitfalls of the teenage years I suppose.

I take back the mana potion and answer her questions.

“Didn't spend money, bartered. And no, not just shopping; I also did some [Jury-rigged Alchemy] and dropped some time sand off to get made into glass. I'll pick it up from the [Blacksmith] in a few months in The Wider World.”

The group blinks at that silently, Demarcus just shaking his head with a smile, until Mato grabs the attention of the [Innkeeper] after she takes my order of eggs and sausages.

“Excuse me ma'am, but you wouldn't happen to know if anythin’ caught fire or exploded last night? Maybe some theft?” He asks her.

“Hey!” I shout, offended.

The [Innkeeper] shakes her head.

“Not that I know of. But I can ask around. Why? Should I be worried?”

“No need. And no, just makin’ sure everythin’ is in order. Thank you.” Mato assures, and the [Innkeeper] walks off with a forced smile before whispering to one of her other patrons at the bar.

Mato gives me a reluctantly acquiescent look, unsatisfied that I've done no wrong but has no evidence for it.

“Ya know, I don't appreciate your presumptions about me, Mato. We barely know each other! I am perfectly capable of running simple errands without starting fires or committing a crime.” I lie.

A thought occurs to me.

“Ya know I haven't even seen a [Guard], [Sheriff], or any real form of governance. This place is sorta running solely off a common desire to level and survive, as well as infrastructure and knowledge passed down from those about to hit tier 2. Kind of an anarchist's paradise.”

Izzy, of all people, is the one who seems interested in this.

“Yeah it's kinda fascinating.” She says. “I'm excited to take a look around, see all the various classes people have and how they're trying to build them. I want to know who that church is for. This place has magic, I wanna see how that changes how people live.”

I'm a bit struck by that, the genuine wonder in her. I feel the same, always have, but it's been tempered by the responsibility of just surviving. Can't go to the museum when ya gotta buy food and your clothes haven’t been washed. Unless you sneak in with a school group and pretend to be a 5th grader, but that usually doesn’t work cuz of the scars and eyepatch though.

Even now, a corner of my heart flinches as it's smacked away by necessity.

“I'm not sure we'll have too much time to sightsee before we have to head out for these ruins.” I break it to her.

She scoffs. “And who says I'm coming with you? That binder of yours, Half-baked?”

I bite back a hostile reply to meet her tone. Something like “no, the fact that you're desperate for approval and wouldn't survive on your own does.” And I swallow it. I don't want to be alienating her even further.

Though, if she does fuck off to do her own thing and die to some big-ass rats, is that the end of the world? Will my journal just adjust to compensate, be incorrect, or is this what the oh so spooky “branching” is?

I'm told not to read ahead, but it seems pretty damn relevant now. So, I start to think about “branching” and leaf through the journal as I reply.

“Yes. It does.”

“And, what, your three ring binder is omniscient? Knows everything that'll ever happen with absolute certainty?” She asks.

My fingers find any number of passages when I think about “branching”, but when I focus on what branching is, that number dwindles. I start with the first one.

Branching is, at its core, a straightforward concept:

Branched selves or branched timelines are the timelines in which the time traveler— you — makes a different choice than the primary timeline.

But when ya get down to the nitty gritty of it, it gets… messy.

Does every decision create a branch? Can these branched selves go back into the primary timeline and prevent the branching? If there is an infinite number of possible decisions, are there infinite branches?

Some of it isn’t even branched from a choice, but probability. If, in the primary timeline, you succeed at something you had a 99% chance to fail at, 99 branch timelines where you failed are likely created. Or at least 1.

As far as I can tell, not every decision makes a branched timeline. I’m not sure if it’s a product of the [Self-correcting Timeline] skill or just the nature of reality, but it looks like the large majority of decisions get “Pruned” as redundant or irrelevant and don’t create viable branches. Izzy theorizes that which timeline is the primary timeline is determined by “Narrative Weight,” and that that’s what all of time subsists on. So, the primary timeline is the timeline where the decisions of the time traveler creates the most… timey-wimey stuff for The Great Work to work with.

I have no idea what this means.

But it would also mean that any branched timelines allowed to exist also have some amount of narrative weight. Those that get pruned don’t provide enough to justify the cost, as reality does have some ineffable cost to exist. So, only decisions that diverge the timeline significantly enough soon enough become branched timelines.

Branched selves can be useful. I’ve seen future versions of myself summon branched selves to help, and some have useful skills and abilities that we don’t. But branched selves are sorta locked to their own branched timeline, so they can only come to the primary if we bring them here. No going back and preventing the divergence.

Though, with the phenomenon of Simultaneous Causality; where, not only do events in the past cause or affect events in the future, but events in the future cause or affect events in the past—

Then I read the second entry [Traveler’s Journal] selected, and it starts a lot more aggressively:

FOLLOW THE DAMN RULES, CY.

It's nearly impossible to ride that line between giving our past selves every advantage possible while outlining what they need to do to maintain the primary timeline, and keeping things vague and in flux enough to not predetermine a bad future, but we have to try.

I met one today. A branched self. I've met dozens, but this time I actually sat down and talked to the poor bastard. His point of divergence was a choice I made less than five minutes ago for me, but nearly 2 years ago from his perspective. Time travel.

He described what it felt like.

When the timeline branches, you blink. One of us closes his eye, but two of us open theirs.

One of you will go on his merry way with things as they should be.

One of you will not.

He won't know he's branched immediately, but when he sleeps, when he looks around and things feel wrong, when he goes to the future and finds only one or two of him running around and they give him a look of such absolute sorrow, he'll know.

He says you can feel yourself stop being you. Feel yourself become just a perfect imitation.

He says the world isn't quite real. Only real in the places he's looking, but when he turns his back he knows it stops existing. That when he looks away, there's nothing there. Every building is empty until he peeks in the windows, every bird that flies past took its first breath when it reached his peripherals. People are hollow shells, oh– they do what they would normally, they say the right things, make the right faces… bleed the same… But it's as if they're just following a script. As if the Great Work is sparing just enough energy to simulate the “what if?” of his timeline, seeing how the narrative plays out, until it gets bored.

Demarcus died in his timeline. Not heroically, or tragically, or painlessly. He died brutally. Screaming. He knew that wasn't the real Demarcus, but the screams were real enough.

But the worst of it is, that it finally clicked for me. There's a sense of otherness to the branched selves, like they aren't quite real, or they aren't me because I'm me. But they are. They're you. Every single one of them is you. Every mistake we make, we will deal with the consequences of. It will never be you, but it will always be one of us.

I'm not sure what's worse, risking the future of the primary timeline, potentially predetermining a horrible future where everyone we love dies, and locking that in as the one true future.

Or, doing it all right, flipping that coin carelessly every day, damning some version of us to a hell of our own making, just waiting for the day that we open our eye and realize we lost the coin toss.

If this is what branched timelines are like, I shudder to think what Doomed timelines⸺

“Well?” Isabella asks, breaking my horrifying focus on the journal.

I blink, then look up at her across the table. “Well what? What was the question?”

She scoffs and rolls her eyes. “Does your binder know everything?”

I open my mouth to respond, but think about what I just read. That thin line between sure and unsure. Either risking that my future will become an unavoidable hell through predetermination, or guaranteeing the primary timeline’s safety by damning countless others to a different hell. It’s… an unpleasant thought. One that nestles into some dark corner of my mind. I choke on my words, then mutter.

“I— I don’t know.”

All I can do is my best, so, I’ll try not to think about it. No use worrying about it unless I can fix it.

I think my voice is audibly shaken, because even Izzy eases off.

“Well, if you’re gonna be telling me what I can and can’t do just because you read it in that book, I’m not gonna stick around. Thank you for helping me out, but no.” She pushes back her chair slightly then moves to stand and I hold out a hand reflexively.

“Wait!” I flip back to the pages outlining our next actions.

“...it doesn’t say that we don’t take a look around. Just that we head North by Northwest in the morning so… as long as we leave before noon, we should be fine?”

Isabella shrugs. “We’ll see.” And gives me a demonic smile before standing fully and heading towards the door.

I heave a sigh of relief and begin to scramble to catch up as Mato and Demarcus share a look of concern.

I have to keep up with her and convince her to stick around. It would suck if tourism sent me to time-hell.