[Kelly Pedersen]

Yeah, it definitely depends on which power gets worldline-travel first. Here's my speculation about how it goes for each of them:

The Japanese Empire: Probably the worst, as far as Homeline is concerned. The Shikaku-Mon Japanese are an expansionist, racist empire, who believe it's their right to exploit "lesser" cultures. They'll probably try to expand both militarily and economically on to other worlds post-haste.

The Swedish Empire: Not good, but probably less bad than the Japanese, from Homeline's perspective. They have an ideological commitment to spreading their political system, but they're not particularly efficient economically or politically, and they're dealing with a fair bit of unrest in the periphery of their empire. Parachronics might actually break them, as they put too much energy into trying to advance into other worlds, and their local population gets too much chance to see that there's other systems out there.

The Empire of Brazil: Only slightly less bad than Japan, for Homeline. There's not much central government left in Brazil, but that just means that there'll be a scramble on the parts of many, many megacorps to exploit the heck out of other timelines. And as the most "porous" society, they'll probably give the Secret to the other factions of Shikaku-Mon fastest, possibly even deliberately (a megacorp figures it can make more money selling the Secret than exploiting it themselves, for instance). Brazillian-contacted worlds will probably do better under them then any of the other powers, though, given Brazil's generally very egalitarian attitude.

The Kingdom of France: The weakest of the four powers, and the lowest resources, this is the nation least able to exploit parachronics immediately. If they do get it, I'd expect they'd exploit their control of spaceflight to keep it secret as long as possible - they'd probably build their parachronic projectors on the Moon, and launch space missions to the other timelines' Earths that they discovered.


Of course, since Shikaku-Mon has an active and thriving culture of "amateur surveillance", and generally better spy technology than Homeline in general, I would expect that whoever got the Secret first, would not retain it exclusively for long. In fact, if anyone but Brazil got it, it might very well be the spark that touches off the powder keg of Shikaku-Mon's international power structure (Brazil probably wouldn't do it because, as I mentioned above, it would end up leaking to the others pretty quickly). None of the great powers of the timeline have much interest in letting their rivals keep exclusive access to something as potent as parachronics, and they'd be willing to go to war to prevent it, I think.