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.

But, when you get closer to the timeline, you start to see the compounded effect of trillions upon trillions of micro-branches in the timeline that operate on the very short term. Does Joe eat chocolate or rocky road ice cream? Is there a traffic jam at 3pm or 3:03pm? Does the hyena die of thirst in the morning or in the early afternoon. These types of minor splits in the time stream aren't noticeable on most graphs. But, when you look very closely at the line, they may become apparent as a kind of hairy cocoon around the core of the line itself. Certain types of travel may experience this "hair" as turbulence. Care needs to be taken, then, when "taking off" from a time line or "landing" in one, to account for the violence caused by the these microlines to your traveling apparatus.