January 31, 2012
We’ve already learned how planes come to be and how they interact with one another, including how mages and especially-talented scientists can bridge the gap between them and cross through them, but without warping the Incarnum shell that keeps a plane from blowing out into the empty void, how do you communicate across planes? Indeed, wouldn’t it be best to see if there was something nasty that could be waiting for you on the other side before bridging that gap?
Naturally, the most common postal workers for the planes are spellcasters, since their use of magic allows them to fiddle with physics on a level that takes more mundane posties a lot more effort and research.
This is typically done with a very small planar gate effect, effectively minimising the volume of planar shell that needs to be bridged. Through this microscopic gate a more traditional air-based message is sent, with a “carrier pigeon” magic circuit attached to ensure it reaches its intended recipient and determine what it does when it gets there (magic circuits have appeared before, they’re what makes teleportation magic and almost all of necromancy possible).
This could be compared to slipping a message through the letterbox of a house. Here the opposing sides of the door represent the two planar shells of sender and recipient, with the letterbox representing the tiny gate that joins them temporarily, and the neighbour’s irate dog representing, well, an irate dog.
The first and simplest method for duplicating this sort of communication is decidedly less subtle for non-magical planar postal workers. This method is what is known as a planar pulse, and if you happen to have a soul my advice is to never be near one.
By reducing matter to energy and stimulating its condensation you can artificially produce Incarnum without any connection to the plane of Incarnum. Then, if you control it very carefully you can create a miniature plane with a specific frequency. By producing a plane with a frequency that already exists somewhere else, the miniature plane gets whisked out of your present plane and into the original plane’s Incarnum shell.
This produces what is perhaps best described as a shockwave through all Incarnum in both planes. The smaller you can make the duplicate plane the less widespread the effect, but this method is by no means subtle even at subatomic levels. The shockwave ripples through every bit of Incarnum in the afflicted region, and if you have a soul that means something that is very intrinsically associated with your brain is rattling like it’s been hit by an earthquake, typically manifesting to the mundane sense as a very distinct and very loud crack of thunder.
In theory larger planes could be generated for the sole purpose of incapacitating an enemy warforce, provided you weren’t subject to the same debilitating quality of having a soul. In many ways then this vulnerability to planar pulses can be considered one of the few downsides to having a soul, and indeed very few magical societies ever develop pulse-based communication between planes, due in large part to the almost all tests resulting in gigantic headaches for everyone involved (that also being why they don’t often see use as weaponry in magical civilisations either).
Certainly energy-wise, planar pulses are much less efficient, as synthesising artificial Incarnum is a tremendously energy-intensive process, predominantly due to the need to disintegrate a chunk of matter, but if Incarnum could by some means be contained and then used to generate a plane it would certainly greatly reduce the energy demands.
Ah, I suppose you’re wondering how a shockwave through planes can allow for communication? Well it’s not unlike radio waves as we use them in actuality, we send out radio waves at specific frequencies to generate different levels of electrical energy through radio antenna, resulting in comprehensible information and thereby producing communication. Planar pulses are much lower on the level of data transmission, in that you pretty much need to hard-code the details of the information in binary form within the split-second before the plane is engulfed by its predecessor.
Unlike the gate-based communication used by spellcasters, planar pulses also have the benefit of non-interaction with the recipient plane: the miniature plane collides with the recipient planar shell and the matter and energy within it are disintegrated and re-integrated within the recipient plane, the shockwave within the sender plane is the result of planar cavitation (and this also means the shockwave within the sender plane carries no information).
Of course, many other methods of communicating with planes exist, limited only by the imagination of those attempting the effort, but they generally boil down to these two in terms of implementation and stability.