The unacknowledged Infinite Worlds timeskip

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by SilvercatMoonpaw

I simply don't find the tension of keeping the Secret and any Homeline hand-wringing about it satisfying, barring Homeline being a misguided villain. I'd prefer a setting where there was a lot more equality in parachronics so the default playstyle didn't feel like haughty "You are not ready" aliens.

I've never really thought of it as a case of them treating other civilizations as "not ready." Rather, it's a combination of the fact that a) overt time travel is likely to screw up the timeline - not just "Oh, I interfered with the way things were meant to be" (which kinda comes back to those haughty aliens) but rather the fact that comparatively subtle manipulations can cause time quakes, quantum shifts, and all other assorted bits of badness, so who knows what would happen if you show up at Thermopylae with a squadron of attack helicopters. Oh, and b) they don't want any more competition (Centrum, Reich-5, and the others are already making a mess of things, from Homeline's perspective, they don't need even more groups screwing up the quanta).

As already alluded to in the thread, there's also the Doylist explanation - the whole point of the Infinite Worlds setting is having characters playing in different timelines, and the Secret keeps those timelines as they are expected to be, rather than how they would be with known time-travelers roaming about. There's also the fact that time travel stories almost always involve some element of needing to keep one's nature as a time traveler secret (to avoid disrupting the timeline, to avoid getting thrown into a mental institution or burned as a witch, etc), so IW includes a built-in explanation for why you've got to do that even when it's alternate timelines rather than your own.

All that said, a setting where there are a massive number of time-traveling factions (possibly with varying degrees of maintaining some form of the Secret, akin to ST's Prime Directive) could certainly be interesting.