Plot bunny: Temporal instability

Time travellers from the future change themselves every time they change the world. Time travellers from different distances of future would have different lengths of time to change, and change differently from each other. While this might get lost in the vagaries of human memory, some scales of change would show up in observable behaviour. Fading in and out of existence is the extreme end, but several versions of a person could have cause and means to have travelled to that point and been involved in that incident, meaning you could end up talking to several versions of a person in quick succession, as you change the timeline.

This obviously is inspired by how time travel works in DC TV.

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So you could write a time travel story where you've got a bunch of time travellers intervening at a particularly sensitive moment in time. And they're from different eras. And gradually they realise that they don't just need to get the big picture fragments in place, the ones that they set out to fix, the ones that avoid huge and notable paradoxes. They realise they are building the futures that they come from, and who they become there alters what they would do here, and how they'd do it. They can find several stable ish futures, ones that the web of time can carry the remaining paradox from - but the people they would become in those futures, that's a whole other argument.

So say they're intervening around the time of the first time traveller. They might not be on the first iteration. So you have stacked layers of time traveller that are currently stranded, until they rebuild the mcguffin, but can't bootstrap paradox their way into building it, they have to set up the world so it can happen. Only there's one guy who broke time travel in the first place, and while he is now working on the same goal as them because he doesn't want to be trapped here either, pretty much everyone else think he's the villain here. Only they all have a different idea of who he is? Because as it turns out, he's all of those, depending which future is dominant that day. He's from teh furthest forwards maybe, or the most effected... huh, maybe the furthest guy is just from a wasteland and there's a point past which the future gets very samey because apocalypse. Hmm, lots of possibilities. Like the apocalypse guy would want any future where he doesn't exist, right? Because there's a world to live in so he didn't have to travel? And his continued existence could be considered a problem by everyone else. But they all have their ideas of what a Better Tomorrow looks like. Edit wars. But there's one guy who is the most different depending whose ideas are dominant today, so we get a framework for flashforwards through that guys flashbacks, his memories are the future built here.

So doing things the way with secrets and secret prisons and murders and all, that might build out the tech they need, might seem like a stable future a handful of years from now (like five, because a show might get renewed often enough to catch up and turn one time traveller into a linear native). But people from further forwards get meaner or more desperate or something, or just have background assumptions that... make us in the here now not want to build that background.

You'd have to get good actors, put in some verbal habits, make some wardrobe choices. Color coding is cheap but effective. But you'd have distinct versions of a person every time the future changed out from under them.

And everyone around them would be trying to build a survivable future, but also one that made their favourite version of this person. Like if someone was only in love with one of the timelines, to start with, but then they'd see what was consistent or good in the other timelines, and it would get complicated. Or if someone was only in it for the money, and could pitch that as a selfless goal, look prosperity for all, but the hyper capitalist future wasn't one the rest of the travellers wanted.

But people would also be choosing their best selves? Like it would get... really complex, figure out how memory could even work, or how you could reconcile in yourself what the historical record said you have done with what the person you remember growing up to be even would do. It would be worse than mood swings. But maybe you have a few days where you're just better, by some personal definition of better, and working to be your best self seems like the best of all possible worlds.



Just, get a bunch of time travellers focused around a crucial moment, like Thawne trying to get Barry to be one of history's first travellers, and play out a bunch of arguments about what the future even could be, let alone should be. But in the present day, making changes that can only be observed through human behaviour, and could therefore be entirely a bluff or a mistake, but are all you have to work with.

You'd have a bunch of ethics choices to make and then know people who lived in the worlds they made, and people would want to both avert and build their own timelines, and it could be a mess. But the fun plot making way.



Or you could have just the one time traveller, but he disagrees with himself from day to day. That is a whole different mess indeed.



Don't know who I'd build though.

I mean, one set would be Time Masters, like everyone is a Time Master, like there's one group that built a monopoly on time travel and one set of actions makes everyone we know suddenly their Time Master selves but does nothing to the temporal natives.
They don't have to be the Legends version of Time Masters, just, monopoly enforced by time travel and raising people as part of the new group, that's one of the logical setups.
But also creepy, so all their friends in linear time would have Opinions and try and get their people back, but it would be difficult.


You'd have the Web of Time as people's lives connecting load bearing moments, but you'd get the idea that it can be different people doing things different ways. And that would matter, because the work might get done but the reasons and methods would change, and the knock on consequences rewrite everything whilst not actively paradoxing it.

It could get complicated.



I just like the idea of having the people-consequences walking around showing possible results of the decisions that might seem easy or obvious in a superhero or SF context.


And I kind of like how much you could complicate the relationships when you have competing or contrasting timelines bringing people together in different versions.

I mean the scheduling gets complex in a regular poly arrangement, if you have to have a set of if thens for whose personalities are doing what, that's going to get Difficult. And give people conflicting motivations for what is 'best' for the future.



Generates lots of possibilities, and is slightly different shape than time travel stories seen already.