Parallax) and created a slightly changed timeline (Zero Hour, 1994). It was later revealed that this Central Timeline was like a river with branches. These branches were like different realities, the history of Earth was different in every branch and everything could be possible in them. They could affect the Central Timeline as they return to the mainstream and the heroes could encounter with different versions of themselves. However, they were somewhat ephemeral as the Central Timeline is the only one that could prevail (The Kingdom, 1999). After Crisis on Infinite Earths, there was no place for alternate realities, although they could exist in the form of ephemeral timelines (Hypertime), dimensions (such as the fifth dimension or the Fourth World) or universes inside the Universe (such as the Legion of Super-Heroes' pocket universe or the Amalgam Universe). There was contact with realities that existed outside the Universe such as those from Marvel, Milestone and Wildstorm. The collection of universes, multiverses and others that are unrelated, is most of the time called the Megaverse. Some also call it the Omniverse, but tend to include the Real World when using this denomination. The contact of these worlds usually brought cataclysms, the one being the most common, amalgamation. Traveling between these realities was extremely hard, only two characters were capable of doing so with natural abilities: Rift, who existed in both the DC and Milestone Universes, and Access, who had the task of keeping the DC and Marvel Universes separated to prevent amalgamation. Most of the time, these events were either forgotten (as shown in the Unlimited Access miniseries as Access has the power to annul or restore the memories of heroes) or believed to be "dreams" (as shown in DC/Milestone: Worlds Collide and DC/Wildstorm: Dreamwar), which in the end left few traces of the events in the respective continuities. The Wildstorm Universe was part of a larger multiverse but was separated after a multiversal cataclysm, forming a multiverse of its own (Shattered Image). Organizations known as Planetary and the Authority were capable of traveling across the Multiverse and were also able to map it. Its structure was described as a web of 196,833 universes arranged in a pattern resembling a snowflake, each universe separated from its neighbors by a medium called the Bleed. The Bleed prevented the Universes from colliding and was inhabited by "fauna" that despised all different Earths. 52 Alexander