Quantum Destinies A Ranma 1/2 Fanfic By Jurai Knight (sthesken@earthlink.net) This section is inspired by the information presented in TSR's excellent role-playing sourcebook "Tangents." Appendix: Underlying this story is the assumption that parallel universes are real, something that both quantum wave theory and also the theory of relativity predict the possibility of. Endless possibilities for alternate Earths exist, all contained within a structure known as Superspace. It is composed of every universe, coexisting side by side. Each of these individual realities will be referred to as a paraverse (contracted form for parallel universe) or a tangent. Each tangent is a timeline, an alternate version of history. Each separate tangent is like a thread, and the entire network of threads make up superspace. Timelines branch apart from each other at various points in their history, but threads also remain braided together in rough groupings of similar tangents, forming clusters across superspace. It's generally accepted that only truly significant events result in the creation of new timelines, and truly massive events or catastrophes (such as the Second Impact from Evangelion) serve as massive bifurcations of the threads and can produce entirely new clusters. There is also a theory (the one I am following in this story) that every action produces multiple tangents, but that almost all of those tangents merge back together into a single thread. Only a few of these tangents created cross over the minimum temporal energy threshold that will allow them to sustain themselves as separate from another tangent, but it is left to the reader to imagine how significant an event would have to be to do this. Time travel is an example of one of the ways that this might be done, but the change done in the past would still have to be large enough to split off a new tangent that would not simply fade back into one of the others. Tangents are "grouped" together into clusters, all of the paraverses within a cluster sharing many basic characteristics with each other, and they are all wound and braided around each other much like threads forming a rope. Each individual cluster may hold anywhere from dozens to thousands of tangents, maybe even more. Generally, the tangents within a cluster bifurcated from each other relatively recently (anywhere from a few moments to thousands of years ago), as they share many historical similarities, but it is also possible for a tangent within a given cluster to have originated within a completely different cluster and "migrated" to its new location. For the purposes of this story, it can be assumed that different tangents tend to be attracted to others of similar attributes. An example of this is what could be called the "Nuclear Armageddon cluster," which co