Chronoclasm

Abridged Premise
Welcome to Chronoclasm. This is a roleplay about intrigue across time by factions that want to change history in order to secure their own survival.

Each poster gets to write as one world, one reality. Each of these worlds exists in a separate state of time, apart from those of the rest, each derived from a unique combination of circumstances and potential histories of what would otherwise be the same planet. For the moment, each reality is stable, but the clock is counting down (relative between each world of course) to the next Chronoquake - and when that happens, whichever one reality is most likely, becomes the only reality within our frame of reference. 

Each poster for the roleplay will be responsible for creating a history for their faction, including a list of imperative events that need to occur or else be preserved. During the roleplay proper, each poster will be writing from the perspectives of multiple agents sent into different models of time in order to cause or else safeguard these imperative events - all while dealing with their competitors.

Not big on science fiction or the complex ontological dilemmas born of multiple contradictory models of time? Relax. This is a soft science roleplay. Those who know me will tell you that I am typically strictly hard-science, but I also realize it is unreasonable to hold everyone to the same standard. The roleplay is also structured on the assumption that nobody knows how time in each model works - or if they do, they may still need practice in working in them. Everyone will get the opportunity to mess around with time-travel in a relatively consequence-free fashion in the beginning and to figure out the flow of things. Allow me to assure you: Time travel only sounds complicated*.

Decompressed Premise
As it turns out, everybody was wrong about time. No one particular theory of time in and of itself proved to be the undoing of conventional frameworks for understanding it, but all of them as a monolithic set of hypotheses had the same flaw: They assumed that, like other fields of physics, time was static and unchanging. That there was one 'perfect' model of time out there that nobody had discovered yet, but that once known, time would conform exactly to that model. The modern theory posits that time used to function as a nonlinear wavelike state and always had, always would have, up until we took the reins and forced it to make sense. How does one observe time though? Is not just living and being aware of reality sufficient observation? No. Because Human perception of time is strictly linear. We cannot perceive it as the ocean it is, nor how we can move through it as we might move through the rest of space. True observation requires that we reach out and seize time itself - touch it, hold it, sculpt it.

The modern theory of time ultimately came about by accident as a natural consequence of the development of room-temperature superconductors, resulting in the accidental creation of the first time machine. This is when the first Chronoquake occurred, and a seventeen year old spent the next three weeks in their garage looking up mathematical equations using Gogole in order to describe the phenomenon their science project was generating. This gave birth to the first false-positive definitive time model: That all of history was predetermined and set, completely intractable and unchangeable.

For a time, as it is now understood, that model was even accurate. Time genuinely worked that way. The world was briefly convinced that Humanity as a species was confined to an eternal, static, unbreakable if intangible prison. Thankfully, The same model also predicted that the indefinite waveform of time had broken down upon observation, with each separate 'model' of time, such as we understand them, operating in their own separate niche instances. Which means there were waves, strings, branches, segues - rooms of time where it did not behave in such a linear fashion. 

Humanity then freed itself. The inhabitants of one such room used its newfound ability to control its own fate in a freeform, nonlinear setting of time in order to break the Linear constraints of their temporal neighbors. This resulted in the second Chronoquake and the first partitioning of rooms.

Now, our worlds exist in a state of strained tension. Every actor within our partitioned spotlight stands poised to shove the others out from under it, and to become the sole star of the show due to the peculiarities of the most recent Chronoquake. Not all of us desire conflict of any sort, but it is a simple rule of physics that two objects - or in our case, two realities - cannot exist in the same place at the same time. The twelfth Chronoquake is projected to occur relatively soon - and when it happens, only one world will be left. There can therefore only be one logical outcome: In a conflict of to be or not to be, between us and them, we must always choose ourselves.

Important Information
There are currently three models of time, listed in order of least to most important to your very existence. The Nonlinear model, the Paradox model, and the Linear model. Once the twelfth Chronoquake arrives, each of these three models will merge, and their events will be translated in a final collapse event that will ultimately determine which world's reality is the one that actually happened. In order to manipulate these models of time, each world must send agents into each one in order to change history, all whilst thwarting the efforts of the other worlds and protecting events imperative to their own history.

In the Nonlinear model, all of time and space is a cohesive structure, making it the most complex and incidentally the least important model given your understanding of the Twelfth Chronoquake. While nobody can 'win' in the Nonlinear model per-se, an analogy can be made to grabbing the biggest slice of the pie possible - how much you win overall, relative to everyone else, translates to the eventual final collapse event.

When you travel through time in the Nonlinear model, the timeplace you leave keeps going, running in parallel with the new timeplace you arrive at. In the original timeplace, you vanish into thin air, and for all intents and purposes will likely never be seen again. The world goes on without you. In the new timeplace, everything will be as you would expect it to for the time you traveled to. There may even be another copy of yourself present, but in the Nonlinear model killing them or otherwise inconveniencing them means nothing, since the original timeplace you left and the new timeplace you have arrived in are both distinct parts of reality that keep on going, with the events that happen in one timeplace not affecting the events in the other and vice versa.

Thus, an agent sent into the Nonlinear model can travel anywhere at any time with virtually no consequence. If you make a mistake, that mistake will remain in the timeplace you leave, but as long as you go back before the mistake is made you can then change events so that the same mistake does not occur in the new timeplace. If successful, there would then be the original timeplace, where the mistake has still been made, and the new timeplace, where the mistake has not been made. You cannot actually fix any mistakes you make, but you get infinite lives and infinite retries across an infinite spectrum of time. 

To make things more complicated, each parallel track of time in the Nonlinear model preserves the original entry and actions of each agent sent into it, meaning that unless an agent can prevent their own arrival in time, the number of time clones in a given track will increase as agents travel between tracks.

This makes the Nonlinear Model the perfect testbed for practice in manipulating events across time and space, relatively risk-free of forever ruining your home reality's chance of surviving the Twelfth Chronoquake. When the Chronoquake occurs and when all three Models of time are translated during the Collapse event, the Nonlinear Model will barely factor in, since by that point every world will have created countless diverging universes with only a few adhering to the desired history of any given faction.

The only downside to the Nonlinear Model is that once you leave one of its effectively infinite universes, that one universe becomes wholly inaccessible - an indelible stain on the Nonlinear Model of time that everybody will be able to see and examine. Choose your actions carefully. Your competitors will be watching.
In the Paradox model there are certain key restrictions to time travel. No faction can send anything further back in time than either the occurrence of the first Chronoquake, and additionally cannot send anything further back in time than the last thing they sent through time. The Paradox model is named so since past events are afforded overriding precedence that destroy and rewrite the future as the past changes. Thus, the faction that can make the best use of the agents at the earliest times possible will have the advantage here. 

So if Faction A sends an agent to the year 100 to make a change, even if they succeed, if Faction B sends an agent to year 90 they can prevent Faction A's change from happening. Even worse for faction A, they will be unable to do anything to stop Faction B from doing so, since they can now only send agents as far back as year 100. As long as Faction B 'lags behind,' they have the advantage.

Unlike the Nonlinear model, there is no risk of time clones being present in the Paradox Model, since there is only one track of time.

This model of time is imperative; that which occurs here will lend valuable insight into the far-reaching consequences of acts taken in the Linear model of time, and the actual events in the Paradox model have a much stronger correlated rate of translation to the eventual final collapse event. When the Chronoquake occurs and when all three Models of time are translated during the final collapse event, the Paradox model will account for a significant portion of the translation. There is less room for error here, but even if a single world managed to completely secure the Paradox model that would not spell the end for the others.
In the Linear model, nobody can send anything further back in time than either the first Chronoquake, or any further back in time than the last thing any of the factions sent back in time. Once something happens, it becomes locked in place, immutable and unchangeable in the Linear reality. None of the factions can afford to make many if any mistakes in the Linear model. Not only are there no second chances to correct mistakes, but it has by far the greatest correlated rate of translation to the eventual final collapse event. A faction securing a definitive victory in the Linear model would not guarantee them victory overall, but would certainly put them far in the lead.

There is also the possibility that none of the factions can secure any kind of victory. Total failure across the board to secure a dominant history of events by the time of the twelfth Chronoquake would likely result in a Chronoclasm. A temporal reset button of sorts, blending all the histories of each distinct reality together to create an amalgam world, like and unlike all the realities drawn from in order to create it - with every composite reality drawn from being effectively erased from existence.

I would very much like to leave room for each poster to help sculpt how the world was before the first Chronoquake, but just to create a foundation to work off of, the world is called Earth, and is Earth-Like - but is not actually the Earth that all of us are familiar with. It has seven continents, which are arrayed in a different fashion and all in different shapes. It is rich with life, albeit life that is somewhat alien to us. A change in the disposition of landmasses implies drastically different selective pressures across time, so the flora and fauna of our Earth may be different as well. Or it could be the same. Use your discretion - keep it Earthlike and reasonable. This is science-fiction, not fantasy.

As alluded previously, there have been eleven Chronoquakes up until now, but you do not need to worry about most of them. The span of time any faction can appreciably send agents into and change is strictly limited between the time of the first and second Chronoquakes. To keep things neat, if perhaps somewhat contrived, it shall be assumed that a full hundred years passed between the first two Chronoquakes.

The First Chronoquake occurred the moment the first time machine came online - accidentally - when a seventeen-year old created a homemade room-temperature superconductor. After that, history is in your hands. Each separate world would have a different history within that hundred-year period.

Each faction in their respective presents are capable of sending agents back through time, into each separate model of time. Depending on how their specific time machines work, they may even be able to send the same agent into all three Models of time, or even into one Model of time more than once. Other hijinks are also possible. Factions cannot send agents into the present of other established realities. Perhaps it was possible a few Chronoquakes ago, but the nature of time has changed such that doing so is now impossible for reasons*. Each faction knows the others exist, but know nothing about each others' respective histories beyond what they have conveyed to each other - which leads to the topic of communications. The factions can communicate between the present of each of their realities, as well as with their agents in the past of each model of time. Each faction can also instantly identify any change made to any part of the three models of time.

The structure of the RP is such that nominally, everyone will 'start out' in the Nonlinear Model of time, in order to keep a hang for temporal mechanisms, shenanigans, and each other - but, technically speaking, there is nothing preventing anybody from sending agents to the other Models of time early. However, each faction can instantly detect any change made to any of the three models of time, and being in the present, they do not have to rush in order to deal with inadvisable rush-tactics. Or more practically: All three models of time are accessible from the start, but the Linear model remains frozen until multiple people decide to act in it. A single poster, for all intents and purposes, cannot post multiple times in the Linear model without giving the other realities a chance to intervene - because logically, they would have had all the time in the world to do so. So unless they have specific permission to do so, nobody will be posting frantically in regards to the Linear Model of time.

More to Come
Assuming this gets enough interest, there will eventually be a faction and character sheet templates, a Q&A, as well as a basic primer on conventional temporal mechanics as well as the specific intricacies of each Model of Time. If there are enough participants, I may even set up a chat group. Optimally, I would like for the RP to be able to begin on or about Friday.

If anybody has questions or would like to express interest, fire away.
Terminal Rancorous Narrative Proxy

Oraculum Perambulans in tenebris
