An Excerpt from a Lecture on the Nature of Planes - First Imperial College Circa year 285

Well we will simply have to start at the beginning; bear with me, for there is a lot of metaphysical ground for us to cover. Unfortunately to do this properly we are going to have to start very small, and build up from there. Imagine, if you will, a map of the country, laid out on a table. It is a nice new map, and very exact, down to the smallest line and dot, no stains, no tears, no rumples, no creases. In fact, it is a perfect map in every way except for one thing, the paper it is on is of exceeding thinness, very easily bent and seen through. Now imagine you were to take a second map, identical in every possible way, and lay it over top so that it lined up perfectly. If you desired to mark a course on both maps simultaneously you could then do so, and both papers being so thin, you would be able to do so by bearing down with only slightly more force than was usual. Let us say you desired to go from A to B. If you marked out this course on the top map and then separated the two, you would find that the course you plotted would have made it to B on both maps, provided you had lined them up perfectly. This is an example of two perfect mirror realms. If you were a traveler in one, and were to bore your way from one map to the other at any point along your course you would find yourself in the same place exactly. Let us take a slightly more complex case now. Let us say that when lining up the two maps you were not able to see through the top one to the bottom to make sure that they matched exactly, and say further that when lining up the map you made sure that one corner matched exactly at the edges, but expected the rest to fall into place on its own. If then you plotted a course between two points that were both close to that same corner, you could expect it to match up fairly well on both maps, correct? If however, you started in the aligned corner and then proceeded out away from it far enough it would not be shocking to find that one of the two pages had bent slightly, or become otherwise out of sync. Then when you bored your hole through the top map into the bottom you would find that your two destinations did not in fact match, but were instead slightly off from each other. In a more extreme case let us suppose that the bottom map had become, unbeknownst to you, slightly creased or folded. That would mean that not only would your course make a small (or rather large) skip upon crossing it, but also that a certain portion of the bottom map would be completely inaccessible from the top map. You would not be able to bore a hole down into it, no matter how hard you tried. Now, for some further cases, let us imagine that the maps you are using are not drawn to the same scale. Both still are of the same dimensions, but while one shows say, a country, another shows the entire continent that country is on. Then traveling (for if you have not yet figured out that plotting these courses is meant as a metaphor for physical travel you are rather duller than I thought) one distance on one plane would be either greater or less by the same factor that encompasses the difference in scale between the two maps. So even if they were lined up perfectly, and showed the same general locations, not only would it be nearly impossible to have your origin points line up, but it would most certainly be impossible to have your destinations be the same as well. Or, you could have the case of two maps oriented along differing axes, perhaps one so that North was the top of the table and East the right and another where West was the top and North the right. Then you could actually find yourself having traveled in a completely different direction than you intended the entire time. Unfortunately, all of these examples so far are several orders of magnitude simpler than is actually the case in the real world. For we have not two maps laid on top of each other but rather an unknown multitude that varies from place to place. In addition, the majority of these maps depict places with entirely separate geography from each other, so what might be a mountain range in one could be a forest in one another, a desert in another, and an ocean in a third. To complicate matters even further, while most of the “maps” here are of roughly the same size, and scale, no two are exact, and some are significantly larger or smaller, or scaled in a significantly different way than others. In addition, these have not been neatly lined up one on top of another, but rather instead crumpled together rather roughly, and thrown together. There are all number of folds and gaps scattered throughout, and even some places where one or more maps do not exist at all. There are however certain reference points, so to speak, like the corner we spoke of earlier. At these points a majority of the realms are somewhat aligned. This does not necessarily make it any easier or any different to travel between them (although sometimes it can make a great deal of difference one way or another) but it does mean that for a certain distance around these fixed points a majority of realms are available and generally aligned, without folds or tears. In most locations however, no more than two or three realms will align together, and so be accessible from one another. These rare points of convergence, where five, or even a dozen or more realms may exist all on top of each other are very important, and often very dangerous therefore.

Type

Study, Scientific

Medium

Paper