On the Outer Planes

Excerpt from Melniborne's Notes On Planar Cosmology
The elements of fire, water, earth, and air we take as being irrefutibly for-granted here in the Material plane are quite noticibly absent on the outer planes. They exist in small pockets, though mostly as rarities and novelties for prestigious individuals. There is little in terms of walkable land, breathable atmosphere, or much of anything we Material folk perceive as being contingencies for and inseparable from existence itself. Indeed I can say that the stories of angel kings sitting on thrones of gold, or hellish cities made entirely of basalt and bone are little more than literary allegories. My best guess is that these mentions are to compare that which is actually there to more Material familiarities in such a way as to make them comprehensible to the Material mind. Equally absent are the unearthly beautiful humanoid beings, though I have seen many outsiders in such forms during my forays into the inner planes. (Many have told me they take these forms for the benefit of our comprehension.) To I and those others who have actually visited these planes, even the heavens, which are said to be the ultimate paradise, the truth is far stranger than fiction. If I were to take you to an outer plane now, you'd quickly find yourself suffocating in a strangely lustrous blackness, with no land to stand on, little in the way of heat to keep you from freezing to death, and little moisture other than that boiling from your own skin.
Yet despite this lack of heat, the various intense planar energies still prepare the body in a way that can only be explained magically. I've heard accounts (and I'd like to pause here to issue a warning to the weak of stomach that you may desire to skip the remainder of the current paragraph) that it feels as if your body is being inflated from the inside, and the pressure pushes blood from your eyes and nose, and makes your head and chest feel as if it wants to explode. This is simultaneously accompanied by a sharp tingling in the limbs that quickly turns to a strange pain that feels hot, yet wet, like when you place your arm over the steam coming off a pot of boiling water. And this is all while feeling an intense cold, unlike any encounterable on an inner plane, less intense, but somehow deeper than freezing in the Plane of Ice. No one I've found to speak with has survived past this point, nor have I met any souls who died this way, strangely (more on that later,) but I imagine the resulting death would be as quick as it would be painful.
However, to those who have sufficient magical protection from these dangers, as well as magic to aid in the perception of the surroundings, the outer planes are truly magnificent to behold. And in a way that is is truly indescribable, though I will certainly try over the next page or two. The first thing that such a prepared traveler would notice upon arrival would be a swirling multitude of semitransparent energies, like clouds of bright fog, which never blend with each other, but always remain distinct, yet ever shifting between each other. Some of these energy clouds are massive, and what a Material native might think of as land, ocean, or sky, though there little pattern to their placement. Others are much smaller, and move in ways that would suggest intelligence. Indeed these energies are intelligent, for they are the outsiders, as fluid and immaterial as their surroundings. How they remain separate is something of a mystery to me, as their responses to my inquiries made less sense to me than I had hoped they would. The gist of it seemed to be that it was the result of willpower. They wish to remain distinct beings, so they "simply" do so.
And in the mention of our communication, these energy beings are fully capable of changing shape to appear more familiar to whomever they're speaking, but they're also fully capable of communicating to Material folk without doing so. Most of the communication is telepathic in nature, since sound, for reasons unbeknownst to me, travels poorly, if at all, in the absence of air or water, (almost as if it uses them as a medium, but such ideas have little other evidence backing them up and should be discarded until further research can be done.) There is, however, a strangely present, constant, pervasive noise in every outer plane I've visited. It is like the sound an ocean makes, but constant in pitch, unlike the ocean waves which ebb and flow in pitch and volume as they do in size. This sound is very quiet in some places, and nearly deafening in others. I've asked several outsiders about this noise, and they seem oblivious to it. Indeed, explaining the concepts of hearing and sound to them proved fruitless in and of itself.
I mentioned earlier how harsh the environments of the outer planes are to physical bodies, but the nature of these environments proves to be much deeper than one might glean while suffocating and boiling. And the deeper notion is this: They are perfectly nurturing to the souls of those who die and choose to depart to one of them. I have met many deceased in the outer planes and found that the newer arrivals still keep mostly the appearance they had in life, while those who have been there longer have developed over time the same fluidity to their appearance as the natives. (These older souls area bit rare, though, as most elect to be reincarnated before reaching this point.) In my discussions with various outsiders, I came to realize why this was so: Outsiders are beings composed entirely of soul energy. They don't even differentiate between physical and soul bodies; it's all the same to them. To help illustrate this, I would like to provide the following story I experienced just under a decade ago.
I bore witness to an outsider on the Material plane who flew near the body of one of her allies who had just been slain in battle, and begin staring off in a direction which to me seemed irrelevant. When I asked what she was doing, she said she was conversing with the person who had just been killed as if it was completely obvious (remember here the telepathic nature of their communication.) I said "But she's been killed. She's on the floor there." She gave me a look that I think was supposed to be quizzical (she had a hard time with human facial expressions) and then said "He's not down there," while pointing at a spot near the corpse, the way a blind person might point near the direction of a sound, "He's right there," and pointed at a spot in space where she had been facing just before. I was too dumbfounded, and simultaneously intellectually excited, at the time to do so, but I wish I'd had the presence of mind to ask more questions in that moment. Because this raises many questions about how outsiders perceive the world around them that I have had little time to investigate since, but may mention in more detail in a later volume, should I learn more about it in the near future.