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)  | Reason: Not specified

Not completely sure I get the full gist of the question.

But, you find about every possible combination.

Most planes have a relatively flat ambient magic level. It may be high or low. Basically determing how powerfull and effect is, or how much work/effort it takes to produce the affect.

The lower level the plane, the more wizardry is required.

Some planes do have regions of magic concentractions, such as ley lines or other accumulator objects or races. Typically such concentrations or sparse regions seem to be caused by something (e.g. sentient actions in the past, or concentrations/formations of elemental presences etc)

I would think thats pretty boring. But even then, we dont know that they did not do that.
But if someone did that, my money would be on dragons doing that.

Is the first Dragon an shortening of Demon Dragon or are there two kind of dragons?
One demonic one not?

That is what the speculation is. Maou is dead on with that.

However, no one that I know, knows for sure. Apparently, later generations still don't like humanoid demons very much. So it's very painful to try and ask them.

Well, there really aren't too many "cities" so to speak.

At least not "public cities"

by which I mean, open/free cities that are large. The Courts is the largest city, since that's where the Cofactors, Triumverate and Supreme Septat hold court.

In fact the "Courts" are multiple courts

The Court of Co-Factors
The Court of the Triumvirate
The Combined Courts of the Quintenal Cabal (a joint session of the Co-Factors and the Triumvirate)
The Synod of the Supreme Septat

So it's big, huge.

There are a few other smaller towns/cities that are public/neutral ground. None are huge, maybe a few thousand demons in the largest. And a good number of these, while technically "public" are actually groups of loosely aligned demons who group together for protection. So while "public" they aren't necessarily friendly to outsiders.

What other "cities" there are, are really enclaves/villas/domains/etc of various Demon Lords and Princes. These are their "private" cities in which they and their followers/henchdemons etc live. I.e. this is where they bunk their demonic hordes, their armies, etc.

These can, however, be quite large. However, no one really officially "knows" how large any are, since this is considered sensitive information.

I don't.

I don't know anyone that does. Other than maybe a god. But I am not sure that even the gods do.

They can travel among the planes at will, but I'm not sure how many, if any, of them are splitting up and acting simultaneously on multiple planes. Not saying they can't or don't...

The closest I'm familiar with is when a very powerful Time Warrior (animage) splits him(her)self temporally to surround their opponent.

I've seen four or five splits; I've heard of six splits. It's pretty awesome, unless you are their opponent.

However, these are generally of short duration (objectively to observers) of a few minutes at most, typically less than a minute--it's very depleting.

When Ramses (for example) get's going with both blades and starts splitting, it generally doesn't take him long to finish his opponent, especially since some of the splits know what his opponent(s) are about to do, before they do it.

There are definitely some planes that run that way...Fae planes often do...

However, as far as I can tell (watches aren't that common in either Astlan or The Abyss) time seems roughly the same. Astlan has a 20 hour day, and The Abyss just has a never ending Day. So it's a bit tricky to know for sure. The fake days in the Courts are something like 20 hours, 8 hours of light, 8 hours of dark, 2 sets of 2 hour dusk/dawn periods. I say hours, but that's just proportionality of time.

Edited by user Thursday, October 23, 2014 1:45:03 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified