Outsiders Inside

Excerpt from Scroll #4 By Melnibourne The term outsider is something of a misnomer, and strangely, is so in most languages around Enmilon. For example, the orc term for it roughly translates as "alien" (or more literally, "extremely different thing,") and the dwarf and gnome terms for it roughly translate as otherworlder. While these terms are almost always true for a mortal on the material plane, it doesn't very accurately describe the creatures, themselves, and it makes little sense to call them such when you're on their home plane, talking to them. (Though, I suppose when you're in one plane, the outsiders of other planes are still technically outsiders.) The term doesn't accurately describe them because it only references the relation to the speaker rather than describing the creature. So what is an outsider and what should they actually be called? The outsiders are energy beings, made up of the constituent substances of their native plane. Just like how the Plane of Water is almost entirely water in different forms and water elementals are made of water, and the Prime Material Plane is made of all 6 inner planes materials and prime material creatures are made of all 6 of the materials of the inner planes, Heaven is made of made of lawfulness and goodness, as are the angels, and the Abyss and demons are made of chaos and evil. Naturally, this is a difficult concept to understand at first. What do these things look like, feel like, sound like? The answer, to a material creature, is unsurprisingly, not very much. Our material organs, our eyes, ears, etc, just aren't designed to perceive such things accurately. In fact, if they didn't glow and emit a faint hum, outsiders would be difficult to detect at all by inner planes creatures; at least in their natural forms. To get around this, outsiders have a neat trick they can use to make themselves more, shall we say, relatable to us. After all, how should one react when approached by a flying, red, semitransparent, glowing snake that quickly changes shape into a ball, as if made of liquid? With trepidation? With terror? Probably not as one would greet a family member inviting them over for supper, that's certain! So, what is this trick? Surely you've heard a multitude of stories by this point in your life, of angels approaching mortals in the guise of a human and offering advice or granting blessings. Or of demons in the shapes of snakes or ravens, tempting mortals to commit base actions or join perverse causes. This is their trick. They can solidify their form to better interact with the inner planes, often taking quite mundane forms, so as not to appear too out of place, but also occasionally taking truly majestic or horrifying forms, for quite the opposite reason.