Time-travel timeline chart (with negative lines)

[solidbronze]

I'm trying to produce a chart and I'm not sure it is possible in Excel. Can anyone please assist?

For a project, I'm trying to map a 'Back to the Future' style time-travel story as a scatter-chart. I want to have the Year along the X axis and the 'event' coded by a number on the Y axis - so a point on the chart might mean, say, 'Paris in 1980'. As characters travel forwards and backwards in time, the line should go forwards and backwards on the X axis while they reach different 'events' in various Y positions. I have several characters whose worldlines are different and need to be visible, in contrast to time and each other, so essentially I'm looking for:

1) a way of plotting 'events'
2) a way of joining them with lines in different ways for different characters.

I've attached a mock-up of what I mean, with two paths in different colours (sorry it looks so mince: arrows and order numbers are just for show; and the axis numbers don't quite line up). Is this possible to achieve with Excel? If not, is there alternative software that will do this from an Excel dataset?

Thanks for your help.
Graph.png

[MrShorty]

Not sure what you have tried, but it looks like a basic XY scatter chart. In a scatter chart, Excel will connect points in the order they are arranged in the spreadsheet. If you are unfamiliar with creating scatter charts in Excel: https://www.excel-easy.com/examples/scatter-plot.html