Yes, that is exactly true.
However, there are some gotcha's. I think I mentioned this somewhere else, but finding it on the forum is painful.
The infinite worlds of maybe theory does apply, however, most alternate choices that people make turn out to be insignificant, and so while there might be a temporary alternate universe created, it quickly fades/collapses back into the dominant timestream.
For example: If on one day you decide to eat grapefruit for breakfast instead of your normal oatmeal, you might end up with two short timestreams where in one universe you had grapefruit but in the other you had your normal oatmeal.
In the long run, what you ate one time some time ago doesn't really effect your destiny (unless it's poisoned) so the alternate universes that were created merge. And even for more significant things events, most of smaller things get smoothed out, merged back into the main time stream.
(this is why, I mentioned somewhere else, memories are hazy and two different people can have two different memories of the same event sometimes it's bad memory, sometimes it's merged timestreams where one person's preference was for the other timestream).
And these minor alternate timelines aren't really accessible to people of other time streams, e.g. someone coming from Astlan. They can't focus tight enough to "pick a time stream" they just get the largest/most major/primary stream).
Thus only major events that change a world's destiny create true, long lasting branches in reality.
It's only after two tightly related time streams have diverged sufficiently can an outsider truly see them as different planes.
So anyway, you note that early on, Boggy says "Oh, so you come from one of the Earth's" by this he means one of several different variations of a world like ours. So in short, there are not an infinite number of alternate universes that are similar, but there are quite a few.
There are also lots of planes where the world we see isn't an Earth. It's an Astlan, or a Westeros, or Midgard or some Galaxy Far Far Away...
And in fact one confusing thing is that sometimes a traveler can think there are two different planes, but they are really just different planets in the same universe.
Inter dimensional travel is very tricky and hard to understand and figure out. And while the Astlanian's are good at it, they have real limits, hence their myopic view of people from the Earths.
A large number of the demons in the Abyss are from an Earth. This is because it's the Astlan like planes that tend to summon most of the demons, and these worlds are all just out of sync enough that they see people from Earths as demons.
All that being said...time does seem to be somewhat linear.
Almost all Earths are right about the same point in time. The more advanced Earths are generally the result of prior branches where technology leaped forward rapidly for some reason. E.g. the Alexander the Great's dynasty lasted, or the Roman Empire continued or something similar.
So for example, a demon who came to Astlan from, I don't know, say Ancient Egypt, has been here (The Abyss/Astlan) for about 3000+ years...depending on when in ancient Egypt they left.
Edited by user Monday, August 4, 2014 2:58:11 AM(UTC)
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