“ As they are travelling along the road, the characters come upon a carriage under Goblin attack. They rush to the rescue and defeat the attackers, but the owners of the carriage, a man and a woman, are already dead. As they rummage through the corpses looking for gold and valuables they hear a noise coming from inside the carriage. Investigating, they find a young child hiding underneath one of the benches. What will they do with this orphan?”
“ Some parallel worlds have different time-flows, like the fabled dwelling-places of the elves: those who visit them under the hill for a night return to find that years have passed in this world. Perhaps it is the gate leading between the worlds which causes the alteration. If a gate were 'misaligned', the shift from '| |' to '| \' or '| /' as it were would lead to that difference, much as a light-beam split and bent by a prism ends up taking a longer path. There might even be a mathematical function linking degree of misalignment to alteration of time-rate.”