You explore alternate earths for a living. Nobody on the earth you live on knows it's what you do. But it's just how your life is. You go away for months at a time and they don't realize you traveled sideways in time.
People don't realize this but most earth's are empty. Humans had a low chance of evolving. So when you walk through an alternate earth chances are it's just an ecosystem and nothing else, some don't even have life. It's lonely on those empty worlds, knowing there's truly no one that will find you, that you can walk and walk and you'll be alone, it makes the fact that the stars shine so bright every night terrifying. You can place your human items, by mistake or on purpose, and know it'll mean nothing and be found by nobody. It's strange to be somewhere that truly doesn't matter.
A few of them empty earth's have small settlements specifically for people like you. Single villages or buildings of people who don't come from here and don't plan to stay. It can be comfortable there but in a way it's terrifying to know that where you stand is the only place with other people that there is, that you can sit in a normal looking building and know that the world beyond you is a void.
It is nice getting to actually go to places with humans, even if you don't get to be there for that long. Sometimes the earth's aren't that different, and you just have to adjust to small changes. Sometimes they're entirely alien. Most are in-between. As someone who travels through time sideways you have to keep in mind that every fact you know about reality can shift, that if something is true or isn't true isn't always going to be the same for you.
You had to spend six months on an earth where culture had shifted so that everyone wore masks, and showing any part of your face was as taboo as nudity on your world. It felt weird to be there at first, your mask was uncomfortable, and you couldn't figure out how to socialize without seeing people's faces. But a few months in it felt so very natrual, to the point where seeing someone with a mask that revealed a bit too much of their eyes felt scandalous, and the idea of seeing someone's mouth in public was disgusting. And adjusting back to your own world was nearly as hard as it was to adjust to theirs.
You lived in a world where all of humanity was forced underground due to an apocalyptic event. It was depressing at first, nobody there had seen the sun, and nature was limited to artifical biomes preserved by humanity. For a long time there you wondered how people could go on. But somehow they did, the world that was horrifying to you was mundane to the people who lived in it. Most people had their own concerns that had nothing to do with ever seeing the now empty surface, they had freinds, careers, art, love, that felt too real to despear about a sun that they'd never see. It was sad, harder on some then it was on others, but the lived, despite the world they still lived.
You spent a few days in a world where nazi Germany survived to the present day, mostly due to American and British isolationism. The Germany of that world looked horrifyingly normal. The violence and bloodshed and aggression all happened far away from where people lived and worked. There was a proxy war with Japan happening in India but few people gave it thought. The fact that the holocaust had happened and completed its mission was rarely spoken of, the disappearance of its victims being talked about in the same passive language as your world talks about the disappearance of the native Americans, or the Irish starvation that many still call a famine. Nobody talked about how women didn't work, and the police officers at every corner were said to be for saftey. And the fact that if you were open about being a communist, or non Christian, or queer, you'd be killed, seemed invisible when such things were too suppressed to cross people's minds.
You've been to a world where Christianity was wiped out before it could ever take hold in any country. Despite being a world of skyscrapers and computers the temples of the old gods were still open, and people still prayed and sacrificed to them. In that world there had been no crusade, no pogroms, no colonialism. Without Christianity homophobia and racism didn't even exist, to the point where when you tried to explain them to people from that world they were confused. Capitalism didn't even really exist without the specific conditions and ideologies that lead to it, and the climate was far better off. The world was far from perfect but it was far better. And none of it contradicted the technology of the modern world. You cried, for at that momment you knew that it was all possible, that there was nothing preventing your world from being such a way too. It was sad that you had to go so soon.
For a few hours you had to walk through a world that fell to nuclear war, with no survivors. You just stood there. Nobody could know who launched the bombs because nobody was left to tell you. There were only ruins and memories. And you just stood there. Wondering how easy it was to fall to the same, and knowing how easily you could have lost your world to the same fate, and knowing how wonderful it truly was to know that your world was still there waiting for you.
