So, if you’re reading these files, you are probably in my laboratory. Truth be told, it probably isn’t truly “mine” in the sense of having full ownership over it; I just gained consciousness in the place, and no one else has said anything about kicking me out. I’ve been acting from this area ever since!

The normal parts of the place consist of a pretty big lab complex. There’s some small rooms that were once offices, and plenty of big rooms that I assume were used for various tests. One room had a bunch of chairs and a big board that I’m assuming was used for meetings, and I still tend to use it in about the same way for those who like to listen. Some of the lab rooms have been converted into chambers for some of the tricky beings that want to interact with others, but need living conditions that don’t mesh well with your average person. There’s even some storage rooms filled with all sorts of junk that even I haven’t been able to catalog yet!

And yet, that's only scratching the surface of the place- literally! Whatever the previous group was doing here, it seems like it made some quite non-euclidean modifications to the building. When you travel to a floor below ground level, it seems like a pretty normal basement at first… but no matter how deep you go, there always is some other entrance leading yet lower. The first levels don’t look that much different than the rest of the lab, but stuff gets weirder and weirder the deeper you go. From our explorations of the place, we’ve found everything from walls of flesh, to entire floors that are underwater despite the ones above and below being completely dry. There’s often some pretty weird entities down there, so caution is encouraged if you plan on looking around yourself!

Oddly, a certain bird-faced friend says she starts feeling really bad when she tries to go down there, to the point of physically not being able to continue down. Due to this, she usually tends to act as “mission control” for expeditions, which is an interesting reversal of roles.

So, are you wondering what “Gates” are?

First things first, are you familiar with the physics of other dimensions? No? So, to put it in the most basic sense, each dimension represents a new direction of movement. Some poor thing confined to a piece of paper only knows “forward and backward” and “left and right”, but go a dimension up, and you have the nifty new motion of “up and down”!

If you are confined to a lower dimension, things from higher dimensions act really weird! To a flatlander, a sphere moving up and down through their paper dimension looks like a circle expanding from and then contracting to an itty bitty point. Even better -or worse?- a cube tumbling through would look like all sorts of polygons with shifting sides!

So, why talk about all of this first? Aside from being educational, experience seems to show that our world is just one little slice of a whole plane’s worth of areas. While most people stay confined to just one slice their whole lives, there’s a whole lot of weird, strange, and sometimes scary places out there! However, getting out of the plane you live on is hard if you don’t have any supernatural mojo. While some creatures can navigate moving through different planes as easily as a person can walk, most are stuck trying to wrap their minds around the idea of how to move in a whole new set of directions.

Sometimes, people end up crossing planes by pure accident. Usually, this happens in places that are easy to get lost in, such as deep forests or abandoned offices. This tends to be a very bad thing for your average mundane person, as figuring out how to repeat the process to get back home is not easy. Ergo, this form of transportation does not tend to end well.

If you don’t have the innate ability to planewalk, your next best bet is spells. Magic is really finicky to work with, being distinguished from what is usually termed Science by making sense less by a regular set of rules and more by the belief put in it. This means I can’t include a consistent guide here for creating a Gate between planes or anything, as it may not work for the silliest of reasons with a given person. The most minor of these spells is a one-way transposition between planes that could be considered “nearby”, but mages with greater finesse have more permanent methods at their disposal.

A “Gate” is the term used here for a structure that creates a permanent passageway between two planes. These can be made manually by spellcasters, or created naturally by magic resting in just the right place. A lot of them are so old that it’s hard to tell exactly what made them first. While this seems like an easy-peasy solution to moving between planes, there’s a catch; most of them only appear in certain conditions. This can be having a physical object, a certain mindset, or to wait until the weather’s right. A lot of times, a gate just won’t work in front of a lot of people, which goes a long way to explain why the Masquerade hasn’t been shattered yet.

So, you are wondering how magic works?

The funny thing is, magic seems to be defined by how hard it is to explain!

If you ask any given person who uses the stuff usually known as “magic” how exactly it works, you’ll probably get a different answer each time. Some people view it as picking at the threads of reality until something weird happens. Others take a bunch of things related to what they want to do and mix them together until they get what they need. Personally, I view it as a bunch of particles that act on concepts rather than physical things… but it's clear I could have some biases there.

Some people (or other terms) have a born aptitude with magic, being able to use its powers without questions in the way a living person breathes naturally. Other people have to learn it, with certain items known to have steps that allow any given person to recreate a given effect: these are commonly known as “rituals”. Curiously, a decent amount of people have the opposite effect; their existence will repel magic, rendering them unaffected by magical powers, but also unable to use them.

So, are you wondering what all these weird creatures are?

Just like the plane you are probably on right now, the principles of evolution still stand even in the weirder dimensions. Due to this, plenty of creatures have formed to exist within the niches of their own environment, gaining plenty of weird features to exist within equally bizarre biomes. For example, within a dimension that consists of an endless sprawl of fast food restaurants, there’s some critters that have evolved heat-resistant snouts for slurping up fried grease. It’s rather strange, but not much worse than some of the critters on our own plane.

Of course, there are forces far weirder than natural selection at work in many of the planes. It’s not that hard for mages with the right technique to modify living creatures -or create them- for their own purposes. This seems to be the likely cause for many creatures whose inner workings do not seem practical or feasible to be formed by the invisible hand of evolution. Of course, many forms of magic can also spontaneously act upon the world, creating instant endlings with bizarre powers.

Things get even stranger when you go outside the bounds of what can even be considered traditional biology. Almost any object can have an animating force imbued into it, whether intentionally or from pure chance: you may notice that Yours Truly is a good example of the latter! Magic is also good at doing things other than basic animation, resulting in a lot of the entities that most would consider “supernatural”. When magic is involved, things tend to go from being influenced by basic evolution to existing on more conceptual scales… hence the amount of monsters (including some close-ish friends) that can feed on emotions.

So, what happens when you die?

It seems like pretty much anything that’s intelligent, and even some things that aren’t, end up forming what most people call a “soul”. On your average Joe, a soul should be unnoticeable while they are alive. Its function seems to be to act as a copy of the consciousness of the thing it's attached to, but whether this is intentional by some high-powered entity or a natural process hasn’t been definitely proven.

In ideal circumstances, a soul only detaches from the body that made it when the body dies. In effect, this results in the body’s mind reappearing in the vessel of an intangible force. As a result of not being able to interact much with the outside world, most souls end up not doing much of note before either degenerating into vagueness or being devoured by some dread creature. If they are able to form some way of connecting to base reality (the chance of which seems to be influenced by the presence of strong emotions associated with the subject). This is how you get ghosts.

You may be wondering: “With how many people are in this world, shouldn’t there be a ton of ghosts around?” The reason that a ghost-pocalypse hasn’t destroyed the world yet seems to be due to several factors. As I previously mentioned, most souls don’t seem to have the staying power to be able to influence the world in any way that most people would notice. Alongside that, souls and other ethereal things seem to be on a particularly slippery layer of perception. Not every ability that can see things hidden from mortal eyes can see the departed, and vice versa. Due to this, rather than freely intermingling, ghosts tend to live and form their own layer of society with each other.