Your Application for a {Time-Travel} {Passport}

Those who are planning a trip through time or expecting to live elsewhen should consult this guide while completing their time-travel passport application. The Department of Time hopes that these instructions make the application process easier, as traveling through time is already confusing enough. After all, it’s not rocket science (a vastly simpler and easier to comprehend method of transportation used by primitive societies for spatial navigation).

Application Types

You must apply in-person if:

• You are applying for your first time-travel passport in this timeline
• Under the age of 16 (whether or not you this is your first time being 16)
• Your last time-travel passport was issued more than 15 years ago or 15 years from now
• If your last time-travel passport was lost, stolen, or damaged. (Note: If your passport was stolen by a future, past, or otherwise alternate version of yourself, you must still apply in person.)

For all other cases, or if you are unable to appear in person: please apply by mail.

If the era you are currently trapped in does not have a postal system, please store your time-travel passport application in a secure location (such as a security deposit box, empty grave, or famous historical monument) and leave clues as to its location in your personal journals, letters, and works of art.

Expect delivery of your time-travel passport anytime between 2 to negative 4 weeks. Expedited shipping is available if you currently work for the government of any time period, are planning a trip in the near future or recent past, or have found yourself stranded moments away from the heat death of the universe.

If you have already applied for a time-travel passport, but changes to the timeline wiped that application from existence, you will have to reapply. We apologize for the inconvenience.

In-Person Applications

Identification

Please be ready to provide proof of a citizenship. This may be a valid spatial passport issued by any nation (past or future), a certificate verifying your birth (past or future), or a certificate verifying your death (past or future).

Please be ready to present one form of photo identification. This may be a valid in-state driver’s license, in-state valid non-driver ID, or a copy of your future-self’s time-travel passport. If you are contacted by your past-self for a copy of your time-travel passport, and you do not currently have a time-travel passport, please note that your timeline is likely about to be erased from history as your past-self takes actions that you did not. At this time, we will not reject applications to save your reality. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Please be aware: you must present an additional form of identification when presenting an out-of-state ID. This applies whether the state still currently exists or has been wiped from the timeline due to interference with historical events.

Provide a Photo

You must include one color photograph of yourself. Please make it 2 inches by 2 inches, with a neutral expression. If your photograph begins to fade away, as though you never existed and the events which lead to your birth never occurred, your application may be rejected. Black and white photographs, oil portraits, and cave paintings will only be accepted from certain centuries. Please: no holograms. They will be rejected.

Payment

Payment for your time-travel passport may be provided in paper money, credit card, tally sticks, debit card, galactic credits, personal check, cryptocurrency, precious metals (including gold and silver, but not bronze), money orders, and tachyon crystals. Please adjust for inflation or deflation, depending on your current era. Barter will no longer be accepted, and previous barter-based payments will now have never happened. Applicants from post-scarcity societies where money no longer exists must still find an acceptable form of payment. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Additional Information

Please include a list of known relations to any past world leaders, especially failed ones, and the periods they ruled in. Travel to these periods will be barred.

Please include a list of embarrassingly personal events and the dates they occurred. Travel to these periods will be barred.

Please include a list of relatives and friends who died in tragic yet preventable accidents. Travel to these periods will be barred, unless you suspect a future version of yourself may have caused it by attempting to prevent it. In this case, travel will be mandatory.

Note that after traveling, you may be barred from donating blood. This is especially true of trips to Europe in the 1300s (the Black Plague), any tropical areas past or future (malaria and super-malaria), and 2452 (the Blood Wars).

Special Circumstances

You may have additional requirements for your time-travel passport application if you are under 16, are over 16 but have never been born, are in the process of a gender transition, are in the process of a species transition, owe child support to children in any timeline, speak a language that now has never existed, killed your own grandfather, are your own grandfather, exist within a closed time loop, or owe child support to your own grandfather.