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Less like a real organization, and more like a loose alliance of people with similar goals, the Time Lords claim to be the only ones who can be trusted to police the cosmoverse. The Time Lords are people who have been erased from their home time stream, and now have no "home" world, no one who knows them, no place to go back to. Most Time Lords stumble into it through chance, they travel back in time and make some change in the stream that "erases" them. Some few peculiar individuals do this on purpose precisely to become Time Lords.

A tremendous aberration in the cosmology of the timelines, and a great consternation to any aspiring cosmographers, the Grand Ex are a pair of time-space planes with one intersecting line. Each of these time-space planes has dozens if not hundreds of alternate timelines, which are difficult enough to map. And one of these alternate timelines, but only one, is an alternate for both worlds. This would be a convenient short cut for any travelers wanting to travel from one world to the other, but unfortunately travel between the two worlds is strictly watched and monitored.

The Grand Empress has said, on occasion, that she rules over a billion worlds. This humble scholar cannot believe that number is even remotely true, as it begins to violate the Rule of Universal Finity. If there were anywhere close to that number of worlds, then many of them would possess some level of traveler science, and we'd be overrun with travelers. As it is, dimensional travel is fairly rare, only common in certain corners of the cosmoverse. That being said, we have no way of really knowing how many worlds the Grand Empress does, in fact, reign over.

It's said that certain parts of the Void have taken on a life of their own. Or, some say, that there are creatures than live in the Void, and find any existence in spacetime to be anathema. Regardless of the cause, it's definitely the case that the Void has been taken to swallowing up entire timelines one by one.

Although not the most expansive world, and with very little traffic in or out, the Great Clockwork is perhaps the greatest culture of magic in the cosmoverse. Created at the dawn of its timeline by the Titans, it has since devolved into wars between various pantheons of gods, angels and demons. The clock operates with two great gears, on one which rests the Cosmic Mountain, and on the other which rests the World Tree. Between the motion of these two gears winds the Great Dragon, with a chain handing from it's tale like a pendulum.

I spoke a few days ago about how the Void occurs differently near to different timelines. Around the Great Clockwork in particular, the Void is a nasty business which disintegrates almost anything that tries to enter it -- including unwary travelers. It's mainly because of this that few travelers come from or travel to the Great Clockwork.

As I was talking about yesterday, the force of temporal inertia, or fate, keeps timelines from fracturing too much. Many timelines will have splits and convergences that make them look more like trees than straight lines, but these types of branches number in the single digits for many timelines, and in the hundreds for some complicated worlds. It's still fairly manageable for most travelers.

There is a very popular theory of time travel, called the "butterfly" theory, which says that any changes made in the timeline will necessary have dramatic consequences in the future -- changes which may seem totally out-of-scale. The example comes from the branch of mathematics called chaos theory. According to chaos theory, something as small as a butterfly flapping its wings in Southeast Asia can cause something as tremendous as a hurricane in the Caribbean, when you're dealing with a complicated "chaotic" system like Earth's atmosphere and the weather.

Many time travelers, especially novice travelers from cultures where time travel isn't frequent, hold themselves to the idea that the "past" is sacrosanct. The logic goes that if you change anything in the past, even something small, you may find your "present" radically altered. In the extreme, the argument goes, that people you know and love may no longer have been born, and that therefore making changes in the past is tantamount to murder.

In the regions of the multiverse where cosmic battle takes place and dimensions attack each other, usually the result is nothing except nothingness, the frayed remnants of no longer existent timelines floating in the Void. But in the Deep Core of the multiverse the great war between the Lords of Order and the Lords of Chaos were ended some meta-millenia ago with the Probability Accords. And so was found the Kingdom of Diamonds, and the Crystal Corps who enforced their law.