Welcome!
You’re likely very confused.
Perhaps you found something that appears to be a time machine and pushed buttons on it, and it turned out it was indeed a time machine.
Perhaps someone showed up claiming they needed to save your life from something.
Perhaps some people in uniform did something and you ended up being kidnapped to here, so it appears.
Perhaps you actually were kidnapped by someone and escaped and took their time machine.
Regardless of how you got to Haven Zero, welcome.
To make a long story short, time travel is real, and you have just interacted with it. You have ended up a safe haven for temporal refugees.
Don’t worry, you can go back if it’s possible. No one will keep you here. However, it might not be possible. See the rest of this pamphlet for more information. If you want to see if you can return, you need to do that within the day, as it gets more difficult as time passes, and will eventually become impossible.
Or you can stay here.
Either way, you need to speak to a Project Zero official as soon as possible, either to explore the possibility of returning or to register your name and get information and get housing, etc.
Welcome station
If you arrived at what is called an Arrival Point, and picked up this pamphlet from the welcome station at it, which is by far the most likely situation, there should also be a representative of Project Zero or the Haven provisional government there. If there is not, such as if you have arrived late at night, there is a button you can press to have a member of Project Zero security show up and at minimum escort you to temporary lodgings until morning.
There should also be also various packets provided by the Haven provisional government you can take to read at your leisure.
If you didn’t arrive at an arrival point, but somehow got this pamphlet, but you should be able to recognize security personal, they will be wearing dark blue uniforms with a Project Zero label and driving carts with that on the size. This will not be the same uniform as the uniformed people who sent you here, if they were wearing uniforms.
Can I go back?
Unfortunately, time travel does not work like people assume it does. Each timeline is a bundle of threads, all of which are mostly identical. And threads work their way towards conformity with other threads in the timeline, no matter what time travelers do in each thread. That’s an extremely simplified version of something very complicated, but it means the answer is ‘We cannot tell you’.
Depending why you ended up here, you may or may not be able to return. There are roughly three reasons you could be here.
You merely time traveled or someone kidnapped you
You discovered a time machine or time traveler, and either went with them, or stole it and left them behind. Maybe you were even kidnapped.
You can return just fine, as long as you are not away too long. Likely the only reason you were brought here instead of just being sent back to your origin thread is that they didn’t know where it was, or there was some sort of emergency, or if someone ‘saved your life’.
We can find out if your thread still exists, and try to return you to it. But see the caveat at the end.
Someone ‘saved your life’
You were going to die, in the future, and someone showed up to save you, for whatever reason. And a temporal enforcement agent shows up and rescued you from that ‘saving’. They did this because that isn’t how time travel works, and all the other threads still say you died. Eventually, your thread will conform, and you will been dead the entire time.
This is the same situation as before, we can return you, but you’ll likely not want to.
Something went wrong with your thread
You were somewhere nearby when things went very badly wrong with your thread due to some time traveler. Whoever it was altered it enough that it ‘frayed’, to use the colloquial term. It was going to cease to exist, it likely ceased to exist as soon as the temporal enforcement agent brought you here left it.
And you happened to be close enough that the temporal enforcement agent could grab you as they left.
You can’t go back, sorry. There is nowhere to go back to.
You are formally a temporal refugee as designated by Project Zero, and can apply for aid.
The caveat on returning
If you go back, you eventually won’t remember any of this. Not just ‘won’t remember’, but it eventually won’t have happened at all. No changes will stick. You can’t buy a lottery ticket immediately on arrival, or make a note to yourself, or anything. No matter you do, inexorable forces will reshape your thread, and you in it, into being the same as all the other threads.
Including if you originally died. A lot of people, having gone through the experience of having a time traveler show up and telling them they just saved them from some horrible fate, and then told it doesn’t matter anyway because history will still conform, have the immediate thought that they can accept their death, as long as they ‘make things right’ or set up something to provide for the loved ones.
That does not work either. Eventually, all of that will be erased, and you will have died in the original place and time having done exactly what you originally did. That can’t be changed.
You aren’t abandoning anyone
The threads end up conforming even if you aren’t there. The threads interact and shift through others, merge and split, and there won’t be a thread without you. You aren’t abandoning anyone, there will still be a you there, in history.
So don’t feel you must go back.
This pamphlet is produced by Project Zero to be distributed to new arrivals.