Elemental Planes an Academy of Super-Heroes Universe Information File copyright 2010 by Dave Van Domelen ============================================================================== [Editor's note: this is a partial transcript of a briefing given by Peregryn on September 29, 2026 to Solar Max, Scorch, Breaker, Centurion and Lightfoot. Since it's pretty much all lecturing, we've left out the main set of quotation marks and any minor gesturing he might have done during the mystic teleconference.] The first thing you need to understand is that what I'm about to tell you is simplified, but even the full complexity is not yet an accurate description of the truth. The study of other realities is complicated by the fact that most of that studying is done by people whose wills alter reality. But even leaving that aside, the mages of ages past agree that while there must be some underlying ultimate law of supernature, we haven't found it yet. And what we *have* found is too complex to explain without years of study. So this will be the "Rocks for Jocks" level of explanation, if you will. Where even an untrained person will be able to see where the assumptions fail to hold and the approximations break down...but it's a useful starting point. Of the many ways to classify realms is by the strength of their underlying "spirit field". It's a sort of mystical equivalent to the scalar field in physics, and it underlies everything. Matter and energy can interact with the spirit field, and some sages believe that the spirit field's strength doesn't actually vary from realm to realm, just the ease of interacting with it. Functionally speaking, for our purposes here, it doesn't matter who's right, since the effect is the same: different realms have different levels of spiritual resources. The Spirit Pillar of magical law could be seen as saying that everything interacts with the spirit field in its own way, and it's a violation of natural law to alter another thing's interactions or to significantly change your own. A world like our own, and in fact like all in which "life as we know it" exists, has a moderately strong spirit field. Certain things interact more strongly with it than others, and those interactions can be strong enough to affect the local spirit field even after the interactor has left. For instance, psychic impressions may be left on an area, and a person's mind could detach completely from their body and exist solely as an interaction within the spirit field. Most of the more dramatic effects violate the Pillar of Spirit, of course. In our specific world, all matter and energy interacts with the spirit field on some level, but the sorts of electromagnetic processes that go on in our brains have a special "hook" into the spirit field. The same sorts of things that make thought possible also create stronger links to the spirit field, be the thinker organic or artificial. Sages have postulated worlds where mass creates the links instead, leading to stars being the primary ensouled life in those realms. At the high end, you can have "spirit worlds" where everything is fully alive and aware, it doesn't take an electromagnetically active brain or an excess of mass to tap into the spirit field. Identity and personality can be constructed fully within the spirit field in such worlds, so even things that are too simple to ever think in a mechanistic sense are alive. Mind you, that's not the same as communicating with the spirits of objects in our world. You may recall me speaking to the spirits within stones or trees, but that requires artificially boosting their spiritual connections...they simply lack the complexity for normal thought in our world. In a spirit world, however, anyone can awaken the spirit in anything, assuming it's not already awake on its own. In spirit worlds, the spirit field is as important as gravity or electromagnetism, if not moreso. At the low end are realms where only gross matter and energy exist. There is little to no interaction with the spirit field, assuming they even have a spirit field. While I suppose it's possible to have life arise in one of these materialistic worlds, it would have no separation of mind and body, any intelligence would be purely a mechanistic process with no spark of the divine to it. A thinking being from a low-spirit realm would be fully self- contained, with no extension of their personality into the spirit field. Should such an entity enter a realm like ours, it would be as unpredictable and unsettling to them as a high-spirit realm would be to us, and they might gain abilities resembling uncontrolled spirit magic. However, I know of no such visitors having arrived here, so it's all speculation. Now to get a little more specific. Within the category of low-spirit realms lie the elemental planes. Not only do elemental planes lack a strong spirit field of their own, they tend to be homogenous in some way, representing a single sort of thing or concept. Generally they are parasitic sub-realities, each attached to a single reality or cluster of realities. The classical elements of fire, air, water and earth are each represented by such parasitic planes attached to our world, and they were not cut off from us by the Barrier. Other elemental planes, sometimes called para-elemental, quasi-elemental or pseudo-elemental because they don't map onto the Classical Elements of either the Western or Eastern traditions, also exist. Ice is the one you are all intimiately familiar with, of course, and I believe that hyperspace is a sort of elemental plane of plasma, related to but not the same as fire...but I could be wrong. Elemental planes generally lack native life, being too simple and pure to generate mechanistic life and lacking the spirit field connections needed to create life out of non-complex structures. The elemental spirits that I and other mages command are actually the result of making a connection between the elemental plane and our local spirit field. Fortunately, this process rarely happens spontaneously at interfaces with elemental planes, or Mrs. Grant-Taylor would have been shedding random ice elementals during her ordeal. But such interfaces do exist, and do generate elementals on rare occasions. The hearts of volcanoes often host portals to the plane of fire, and the depths of the ocean hide a number of weak spots between our world and the elemental plane of water, with elemental spirits emerging from these interfaces once in a great while. Without the binding of a mage, these spontaneous spirits tend to stay close to "home" and dissipate if they move away, though. Any sufficiently common thing or idea might spawn an elemental plane, but we know the most about the Classical elemental planes of fire, water, air and earth simply because they have been studied the most. Prior to the development of atomic theory a scant few centuries ago, most people who gave the matter any serious thought felt that those four elements...or the five classical elements of Chinese thought...in some mixture made up all things in the world. A mage specializing in elemental magic might simply be adept at manipulating the world around him, but some actually use specialized dimension-crossing spells to draw the elements out of their planes, summoning fire out of empty space, or bringing a stone wall into existence on a grassy plain. My own talents run more towards working with the materials at hand, while Claudette Viau's elemental magic includes a greater proportion of summoning spells...in that respect, her magecraft is more like her brother's than you might think at first glance. Each breaks the Spatial Pillar in different ways. The better-known quasi-elemental planes were once thought to have formed at the boundaries between the classical planes, such as the plane of mist forming where water met air. However, explorations in the 1980s confirmed fragmentary lore passed down through the ages and showed that the major elemental planes were functionally infinite, and a physical borderland was not the correct way to look at the "mixed element" planes. Every major elemental plane is effectively infinite in scope, with every point in our world matching a point in the elemental plane. Were you to enter the plane of air and travel one kilometer before leaving, you would come out in the real world a kilometer from where you started. Given my observations from the time when Comet was a living interface with the quasi-elemental plane of ice, I'd say that the ice plane is similarly infinite. On the other hand, lesser elemental planes also exist, even if they're not easily accessible due to the rarity or abstract nature of their element, and their physical scope may be much smaller. If you can think of something, then it may exist in the infinite multiverse, even if you can never find it, but the rarer it is the smaller its plane is likely to be. For instance, if there is an elemental plane of fudge, it is likely smaller than a lightyear across and very hard to access, much as my wife would appreciate its discovery. Entering it and forcing your way through even a small amount of fudge would let you emerge on the other side of the galaxy, possibly on a planet where they independently discovered chocolate. But that assumes you could ever find a way to access it. This, by the way, is why I think hyperspace may be an elemental plane, one that is several orders of magnitude smaller than our reality and hence useful for transport. But given that plasma of the sort found in hyperspace is actually more common than fire, air, earth or water, it's hard to explain why such a reality would actually be smaller than the classical planes. Sadly, there are few people currently qualified to have this debate, so it may be some time before I can put the matter to rest. Just as physical substances can exist as quasi-elemental planes, abstract concepts can also be embodied in some way, although the embodiment may be symbolic rather than actual. The lack of a spirit field connection makes it difficult to have an elemental plane of love or of sorrow, for instance, as emotions tend to be tightly bound to the spirit. As a result, it may be difficult to identify an abstract elemental plane once you do find it, and likewise it's possible to mis-identify a high-spirit realm as an abstract elemental plane. I have read of three spirit realms that were initially identified as "the elemental plane of chaos" by their discoverers, for instance, because of their ever-shifting natures. Many other abstract elemental planes have probably gone unidentified because their discoverers thought they were just empty pocket realities and never figured out what they were supposed to embody. The pocket in which the Svartalfen took refuge in South America, for instance, might have been an unidentified abstract elemental plane. The abstract elemental plane for which we have the most data is the Office, which embodies bureaucracy and order if it is indeed an elemental plane. Unfortunately, "the most data" is still very little, as the apparent lack of active threat put the Office very low on the priority list during an age when more obviously hostile realities were a concern. As far as I know, every nation that acquired a portal to the Office seemed content to keep an eye on it to make sure nothing wandered out, and left it at that. To the extent we do know about it, though, the Office would seem to be a smaller elemental plane which can only be accessed through the doors it generates in regions of locally high bureaucracy. The Pentagon's door emerged in the 1970s, the Kremlin is suspected to have acquired a door at about the same time, and there are ancient accounts suggesting a version of the Office opened out into the imperial capitals of several Chinese dynasties and at least one place in pre-Colonial India. The Office itself is reputedly fairly small in scope, and it's possible you could walk from Washington to Moscow via the Office in a fairly short time. No one is known to have done so, in part because all of the doors opened into "secure" locations and no one in control of a door seems to have done anything but guard it. If there has been an expedition past the first few rooms, I could find no record of it. Of course, it's also possible that the Office is a "real" realm that has been twisted by a being of immense power to meet certain needs. The gods often made or altered pocket realities to suit their desires, and a god with a particularly bureaucratic bent could have created the Office. That's one of the questions you will have to answer when you enter it. How will you answer the question? There's no way to be completely certain, but there are some things you can look for. For instance, while Mr. Dodson's stories in the 1990s implied a truly multiversal construct, few elemental planes connect to more than a single realm at once. So if you find clear bridges to other realities, that would suggest it is a purposeful construct rather than a naturally occuring abstract elemental plane. On the other hand, a construct would likely have some sort of "natives" or at least long-term residents, as it would have been constructed for a purpose rather than emerging from the aetherial foam on its own. Should the Office be devoid of such, that would suggest it is simply elemental bureaucracy taking on a form that matches how you see the concept...nothing physical would truly be there, it could all be mental constructs. A hybrid may also be possible. A god may have discovered the naturally occurring elemental planes of bureaucracy native to several realities and used his powers to connect them together via a sort of "Nexus of Org Charts." Or it could be an elemental plane of office furniture into which someone introduced elemental spirits of bureacracy in an attempt to breed a new sort of reality. You may start to see now the problem with answering the question of whether the Office is an elemental plane or not. There is no intrinsic hazard to being in a low-spirit realm, by the way. Such elemental planes do not hunger for your soul, or anything so dramatic. In fact, it's in the animistic high-spirit realms where you're most in danger of having your own connection to the spiritual assaulted, simply because it's just another avenue of predation for the native lifeforms. You may find yourself feeling somewhat...lessened, though. More like you're going through the motions. This will be especially pronounced in an elemental plane of bureaucracy. Your spirit isn't under assault, but neither can you bolster yourself by drawing on the spirit field as you might unconsciously do in the real world. What, you've never wondered why even normal people can sometimes exceed their limitations by digging deep? Even without a Magene, a human mind's connection to the spirit field is strong enough that sometimes the field can be tapped in times of duress to make an extraordinary effort. Such things cannot be done in a low-spirit realm, so you will not be able to count on "turning it up to eleven" while there. Grit and determination simply don't count for as much in an elemental plane. Except, I suppose, in an elemental plane of grit and determination.... ============================================================================== Author's Notes: This was originally going to be a scene in ASH #109, either done as a flashback to September 29th, or I'd have them forced to evac and regroup, getting a speech like this on October 1st while they prepared to go in and rescue Sal. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it'd be one big ol' chunk of explosition (exposition that explodes all over the story and shatters any sense of narrative coherence) and I decided to break it out as an info file, then have reference made back to it at a relevant place in #109. Of course, once I made that decision, it started expanding. :) My first draft was probably twice as long as anything I would have tried cramming into a story, and I added several paragraphs during revision, ending up with something about half as long as a regular issue. As a side note, while this piece was mostly inspireed by the need to work out some worldbuilding for ASH, the idea of interaction with a spirit field comes from some recent philosophical woolgathering I did while driving to Topeka. To wit, the idea that if there *is* such thing as a soul independent of the body, it must be constructed in such a way that it can interact with physical matter and/or electromagnetism or it wouldn't be able to actually DO anything. And this led to the idea that ghosts might just be strong recordings on the spirit field that remain stable in a process similar to magnetic hysteresis. :) It's likely that this idea has been developed many times under many different names, but it arrived in my brain at the right time to be useful for this file. ============================================================================ For all the back issues, plus additional background information, art, and more, go to http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/ASH ! To discuss this issue or any others, either just hit "followup" to this post, or check out our Yahoo discussion group, which can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ash_stories/ ! There's also a LiveJournal interest group for ASH, check it out at http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=academy+of+super-heroes (if you're on Facebook instead, there's an Academy of Super-Heroes group there too). ============================================================================