"I am the Nexis Prime's legitimate daughter. And... I'm not sure how to deal with it. I thought maybe you could help me..."
The young, mischievous girl known only as Rash travels the multiverse with her captain, a mysterious being called The Soldier...
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"So, tell me..." A curious Rash inquired, leaning in closer towards the armored alien. "How does time work, again?"
It took her interlocutor a couple of seconds to react. Chortling, he turned away from his ship's console to look at the girl, a highly amused smirk on his face.
"Oh? Now you're suddenly interested in these sorts of things?"
"No." She replied, leaning back, looking annoyed. "I just wanna know exactly what kind of maze I got myself into."
"But do you really care?" The alien, known simply as the Soldier, asked, raising an eyebrow. "That sounds like a question you should have asked the moment you signed up to be on this crew, dear. You're way overdue on it."
"Better late than never." Rash snapped, looking away.
The Soldier eyed his companion for a moment. "You sure it's not because of all the stuff that just went down? You know, the whole blowing up your home planet business-?"
"Nexia is not my homeworld." The redhead growled, turning back to her Captain to look at him square in the eye with fiery rage. "It never was."
Taken aback, the alien fell silent, but didn't budge from where he was. After a few seconds, in which the only things that could be heard were the odd sounds of the ship's forbidden technology and the occasional clangs from the wandering mechanic on the lower levels, the Soldier leaned back, giving his first mate an infuriating, all-knowing smile.
"Oh, sweet Rash. I'll tell you what I know, but... don't expect to find the answer to your inner demons in this story." He giggled.
"Quit it, Captain. Just tell me already."
Mortals perceive time as a straight forward line, and take it for granted. However, a single temporal structure like that would never work for the entirety of the multiverse; it's just too vast for such a frail construct. Some say time doesn't even apply to the rest of existence; that it's a made-up concept, and that is true... only when it relates to the way mortals sense and measure it.
To be able to conceive what time looks like, a few things must be considered. First of all, it is more correct to imagine the temporal structure of the multiverse as an intertwined series of several of these aforementioned straight lines, forming a massive, stretching compound of strings that go in all directions, behaving differently in shape to one another. Secondly, none of these lines should be imagined as "solid" objects, since they are instead comprised of many events and instances, which would give a timeline the estimated appearance of a beaded collar. Thirdly, even though all timelines are their own entities, the entire dimension of time must be understood as something that exists all at once and in the same "place". With these three things in mind, it's possible to add that two or more timelines can begin and end in the same event, but crossing them at any other points would most likely cause a paradox, destroying a piece or the entirety of the line, sending event debris flying towards nearby lines and damaging or destroying them as well. Lastly, it must be emphasized that everything explained so far is just a conceptual map of time, and it is impossible for any mortal to actually see the temporal structure of the multiverse. The only beings that can accomplish such a feat are immortals such as the highest-level gods, the Basts... and Tai.
