Editing Traveler/Introduction (section)

=== A Game Of Temporal Displacement ===

Time travel is risky business. And when you time travel- when you Jump for the first time- you are fighting the Stream that is time itself. Most people burn up, pushing against the flow or moving too fast. Some manage to survive, but lose their temporal anchorage; they fall through time like the Rabbit Hole, move from era to era without comprehension or meaning and lose their senses of time and self. But some manage to hold on. Just a few little pieces- the pocket watch, the chalked runes in the dirt at the core of the device, the Tau Drive. They keep the core of their Time Machines, anchoring them to a single time and place- filling their heads with a perfect comprehension of the era of arrival, pressing them down like a lead weight on the rubber sheet of Time and distorting everything around them to fit the past. These are the Travelers.

What they learn first is almost invariably that there is no place for them back home. Second, there is no place for them whatsoever. A Traveler can never go back home- not to the home in their memories- but can't leave it behind, because it's snapping at their heels, turning an alarm clock into a pocket watch, a lightbulb into a torch, a new friend into a familiar-seeming stranger. A Traveler can move through time, but everything they do makes things worse, and in their travels Time bends and curves around them, forces them out and rips away their ability to remain. Worse, there is the Stream- Time itself, made a place of constant movement and momentum, an endless wave of temporal force constantly pointed Forward, a sea of inertia. Things live in the Stream. Things that want Time ordered and unbroken. Things that hate humanity for its capacity to ruin cause and effect, for wasting time and saving time and most of all for traveling through time.

All of time is open, and none of it wants you. What's next?