The Immaterial Plane

Whether there is one material plane or infinite, the **void** spanning around and beyond this one has depths like an ocean, and further within, thoughts and feelings become more real than bodies and objects. The shallows between substance and abyss provide a viable environment for the imaginary to scavenge for new homes and bodies, with the help of whatever or whoever finds its way down from the surface. Their echoes can take form in this in-between as **limbos**.

## **Canvas and limbos**

Parallel to the corporeal plane is a metaphysical plane along which limbos exist. In the **umbracosm**, also called *the abyss,* the *astral plane,* the *dream plane,* the *imaginary plane,* the *immaterial plane* or *the void,* these limbos may be *wished* into being by the fantasies of creative minds, as with **fantasias**, or *believed* into being like **loredoms**, but such realms can also be created by ambient cognitive noise, as is thought to be the case for **liminalities**– imperfect reflections of **the surface**. As a whole, these are realms where cherished objects, imaginary friends and spiritual beliefs may come alive, where stranded spirits may find new identities to adopt, and where shadowy entities may prowl like hungry deep-sea lifeforms.

Fantasias, especially personal fantasias, are strongly affected by the environments and mental states of their creators in the material plane, and several entities across the umbracosm prey on anguish due to their origins. Phobias and trauma can manifest as predatory **dark masses** which prey on the feelings that conceived them. Periods of widespread suffering can also accelerate their proliferation, which in turn draws more attention to **liminalisms** where shades can cross over for feeding frenzies; however, they may have difficulty returning to their own territory if the rift is impermanent, and they risk degeneration if sustenance is scarce, so some prolong their stay by haunting prey long-term as parasites.

On the other hand, back in the umbracosm, entities like these can eat through attachments, whether body-spirit bonds or homeworld residency. This means that astral projectors and physical victims alike may be reduced to **silhouettes**– bodiless and nameless, not exactly dead, but effectively ghosts with no choice but to take permanent residence in a limbo. Some **imaginaries** are what became of dreamers’ silhouetted spirits after surviving a spectral attack, succumbing to a mental spiral, getting stranded on the way back, not having their own extant dreamscapes to seek refuge in or all of the above. The more fortunate of these silhouettes may retain enough sense of identity to form a mask, typically plain and white, as a sort of place marker until they either find a new vessel to occupy or recover enough for their spectral forms to adopt more definition. Due to having been majorly emptied of their former personalities, the basis for their new senses of identity will often borrow heavily from what they perceive around them, such as the environment or its inhabitants. The less fortunate, meanwhile, may fully deteriorate into dark masses themselves and similarly chase after reminders of the last sentiments they remember having until they finally pass on. Limbos rarely section out reserved habitats for beings like dark masses, so it is more common for them to roam across multiple limbos or the empty **Canvas** all around.

## **Dreams and their dreamers**

*To be creative is to be imaginative.*

*To imagine is to make up.*

*To make up is to create.*

At their cores, fantasias manifest as outlets for a desire, a *wish,* that can be summarized in a *key term*. The dreamer may not recognize the correlation, but if they make contact with their fantasia, they are often given the opportunity to find out first-hand whether their wish would truly meet their expectations.

In this context, a *dreamer* is someone who imagines a fantastical place wherein they’re granted something that they believe will complete their life; and because dreamlands manifest the dreamer’s imagination, they are rarely shaped by only the wish itself. Memories, musings and personal conflicts often embellish the dreamland’s formation through inhabitants or the environment itself, and these can include personas of the dreamers themselves or replications of what they remember other people by. The familiar is reflected in the unfamiliar, as with any other limbo, and the dreamer effectively builds themself a demo of the desire that establishes this landscape. There are cases of dreamers physically visiting, but most only tour theirs from the safety of their sleep.

A common belief is that most dreamers like these are youths because children are especially likely to believe in fantasy, but this is an oversimplification. Those who have more to lose are less likely to take risks, and fantasias are often formed by dreamers fantasizing escape routes from their personal lives. It would be more accurate to say that more adults than children are likely to evaluate the possibility of abandoning their homes, obligations and relationships, without a guaranteed way back, before they willingly leave the surface for a limbo. By this reasoning, of course, age alone is not the only factor to raise a person’s proneness to voluntarily leave the surface for a fantasia. Artistic inclination, home life and neurotype can play just as much of a role, if not more, and ages have broader variance when accounting for dreamers who crossed over involuntarily.

Another common limitation for conceiving or accessing fantasias will be whether a potential dreamer already has the anchorage they need, and a common risk with visitation is that dreamlands with no ingrained protocol for reversal may alter their dreamers in such a way that subjects them to the same restrictions as imaginary residents. However, this scope is still narrowed by misconception. Coverage of liminalisms varies widely, and with older dreamers, publicizing their tales as innocent anecdotes of whimsy becomes a more common challenge.

Beginning with one dreamer who felt oppressed by rigid order in her early childhood, she wished for a world of *nonsense* to lend her freedom. While she never met her alter ego, she was mistaken for a residing housemaid while there, and even the limbo had alternates of itself and its inhabitants. In the end, she was just as overwhelmed by boundless disorder, but either way, she would find herself waking to resume life as normal.

Another dreamer similarly desired freedom at supposedly an even younger age. However, he attributed this to maturity and wished for a world where *childhood* could last forever. When he physically left for his own fantasia, the rumors implied that he kept himself in a cycle of recruiting other children as his cult followers, forsaking them when they grew older, and forgetting anything that could allow him the chance for personal growth.

Meanwhile, a limbo occupied by multiple older dreamers, many unbeknownst to themselves initially, had personifications of their *internal conflicts* to shoulder emotional pain on their behalves. Although it is unclear whether this limbo was personally conceived by the earliest known dreamer, it served as an arena where she would switch places with her own counterpart, and those of her friends from school would be dispatched against each other. The friends were able to resolve their conflicts and return home, but only after some of them nearly disappeared completely.

Fantasias are conceived by desire and imagination, but while intended as sanctuaries, the greater difficulty is that because of the link between fantasias and escapism, and the circumstances or mental states that can motivate escapist desires, several fantasias create their own unique dangers. The umbracosm is a place where you must be careful what you wish for, because the umbracosm may just grant it.

## **Phenomena**

### **Alternate selves**

When fantasias reflect aspects of their dreamer’s personal lives to shape themselves, this can include personas of the dreamers themselves, isolated facets of their identity or personality (including but not exclusive to alters and headmates), impressions of people they know, even themselves, or personifications of the roles other people have had in the dreamer’s life. Alternate selves that take directly after the dreamer are more directly a part of them, whereas their versions of other people they know are at best echoes of who they take after based on how they are remembered.

### **Blanching**

“Blanched” fantasias have predominantly white or black-and-white environments, and appear as if put through a high-contrast filter wherever color, even grey, does occur– hues are either heavily muted or brightly saturated, and shades of grey are often either very dark or very pale. This phenomenon is not yet fully understood, but there is an observable correlation between blanching and bleak outlooks.

## **Planar residency and visitation**

The imagination of those in the “real world,” even in the sense of belief– expectations, assumptions– they can manipulate the “imaginary world” without the dreamer ever knowing it’s come true somewhere. But the act of perceiving it and interacting with it *can* and often *will* make it *real in the eye of the beholder*. And just as belief alone cannot change fact, imagination has no power over reality. There is still a risk to spectating or visiting the umbracosm, but it is safer than staying as a permanent resident. To belong in an imaginary world is to be imaginary yourself, and to *believe* as a *real* person is to *actualize* in the *unreal* world.

Although possible, most imaginaries cannot easily stray far from the immaterial plane as they are. Several can only exist as intangible specters and risk disappearing if the existential discrepancies between the surface and the abyss cannot be reconciled. However, just as the material can become immaterial in the imaginary plane, some imaginaries are capable of *becoming* corporeal in the material plane under certain circumstances.

It is, of course, far more difficult to reconcile discrepancies between the rigid laws governing physicality and the comparatively arbitrary laws beyond. The immaterial may find a material anchor to haunt until they are returned, otherwise they may be reduced to only the realm-compliant aspects of their form. For example, an object-head may be reduced to their inanimate head, and a live doll may become mostly inanimate, whereas a monster may be fully phantasmal. For this reason, it is easiest for “doubles” like a dreamer’s imaginary alter ego to cross over by trading places or possessing them.

For assimilation into the umbracosm, meanwhile, it varies between limbos whether physical visitors will become imaginary and at what rate, or whether they’ll reset to their original state upon return to their homeworld. If a material visitor has undergone changes that make them more fantastical, their chances of returning will heavily depend on the reversibility of the alterations or compatibility with their home realm’s existential limitations.

Several limbos do not open themselves to interplanar visitation at just any time for just anyone, even among those with a reliable crosspoint. It is common for limbos to personally choose their visitors in one way or another, the visitors often being the dreamers themselves who created the dreamland they visit. There are fantasias, loredoms and quiltationss which fall outside this generalization, however, the odds are higher among less selective limbos that visitors are targeted as prey of some kind.

Despite these limitations, history is full of attempts to seek crosspoints and make entry for corporeal visitors and exit for imaginary residents more feasible, with marginal success. The conception of loredoms assures that there is always a realm in which belief and superstition reflect the truth, and similarly, there is always an abundance of motives to exploit and traverse umbracosmic space at a greater scale than personal use.

## **Rumored crosspoints**

### **Hall of mirrors**

Wherever liminalisms occur, a mirror may fail to reflect people where they can walk through and take any nearest door on the other side to a hall of framed mirrors. It remains unknown whether there is only one such hall or if the same one reshapes itself between occurrences– one’s mirrors were set in window frames the shape and size of doors, hidden behind curtains. In another, they were framed like an art gallery with metal plaques. In instances like these that should have words displayed, the spectral may see nothing, but corporeal readers may see that they all say self-reflection– flipped like a mirror.

It is similarly ambiguous whether every corporeal trespasser will see the same things in these mirrors’ reflections. In some claims, not all the mirrors would show their reflection, and for others, they did show up in the mirrors, but warped, or only as transparent shadows until touched, at which point their reflection suddenly took the shadow’s place. A common pattern, however, is that the mirrors also break when contact is broken, and the frame then opens to a one-way exit to the realm the visitor came from. No reported visits have seen a mirror already shattered, so one inference is that they may restore themselves between breakages.

Supposedly, these mirrors entrap wandering spirits that try to pass through them, keeping them in hibernation until they either contract a host or dissipate. Physical contact with a corporeal being causes occupied mirrors to transfer custody, giving the captive spirit a new identity mirroring that of the host they will share a body with from then on. It is still unclear whether they are assigned upon contact or if each host is compelled toward one more than another, but there is a possibility that reflections’ personalities take after how their hosts view themselves.

For those who already have alternate selves, these mirrors may instead show them in the reflections, and if the contracted alternate had a physical location in the umbracosm, the host may instead be taken there. They will not, however, be stranded if they never found their personal dreamland’s way back to the material plane before.  Those who share bodies with their reflection are often able to distinguish the corporeal from the imaginary, perceive passages between planes and possibly even cross freely between.

### **Hotel**

A meeting place between dreamers. From the outside, its building spontaneously relocates itself across the plane, but from inside, the halls are like a maze, and every dreamer has a room.

It is unknown how anyone is checked in, but room keys will open any door to the dreamer’s corresponding fantasia, save for their own room. If the dreamer is present only in spirit, their hotel room will show them to their body in the material plane, but if the dreamer is physically and wakefully in the umbracosm, even the hotel room door will open to their limbo. Supposedly, if any guests have no body and nowhere to return, their key will open to a normal hotel room until they check out.

### **Shell Hill**

A mound in a wooded area, shaped like a turtle shell, which allegedly comes alive with a head like a snail, claws like a crayfish and legs like a beetle. The rumors go that this false hill is both the entrance and the gatekeeper to another realm.

### **Train of Thought**

A train that travels on and off tracks between regions of the same limbo or between different limbos entirely, and may sometimes fly like an eastern dragon or swim like an eel. The view outside the windows depends on the viewer, so a passenger with brain fog may only see fog outside.

Like the hotel, the train has a tangible presence with a tangible location, but its doors open to a multitude of locations regardless of the train’s proximity to them. Wherever a passenger boards, they can also step off at their destination whenever. They simply have to keep in mind where it is they are going for the door to open. If passengers have no destination in mind, the exit doors will simply open to its literal location like a normal train door.

Wherever quiltations assemble, this train may be provided proper railways through each annexed region, affirming their placements in relation to each other.