It Took Me By Surprise

(You call out. Wherever you can, you call out.)

(TENIR has returned, older and severely wounded by his time elsewhere, wherever elsewhere was. He is not open for questions.)

(The Void shrinks.)

(Spacetime ripples.)

END of the arc “Something Entirely New”.

(You try to jump in. The Void expends actual energy to stop you. It’s a little painful. You are with pain.)

Time for a plane explanation! Let’s start with a quick overview of what planes are.

PLANES refer to the different ‘floors’, let’s say, of the house of existence.

POSITIVE PLANES are planes which reside in the less meta sector of fiction.

NEGATIVE PLANES are planes which reside in the highly meta sector of fiction, and you go far enough back and it’s all reality.

The majority of ask blogs reside on the +1 plane. In our house analogy, think of each blog as a room on the floor. Some leave their doors unlocked, others are more secretive. Either way, they allow in some influence from negative planes, so they’re the closest to those planes.

Other fiction, like books and movies, reside on the +2 plane. Again, think of rooms in a house. These can be tinkered with and brought down to lower levels, where ask blogs are created and such, but they are their own enigma and generally don’t consort with such folk.

The +3 plane is the realm of thought. An idea, unvoiced and unused, remains in the realm of thought. No outside influence can touch it. It’s on the roof, and there’s no stairwell.

The -1 plane houses some interesting folk you’ll learn about a little later, but such folk do quality control on the positive planes and the Void. They ensure continuity, do the work of retcons, and in the case of the Void, orchestrate that what has been promised to be done is carried out. They’re a little upset with the Void and its inhabitants right now, though they are normally very close, and are scrambling to fix plot holes and time loops that have tangled themselves in other +1 rooms. Try not to disturb them.

The -2 plane is a comfy cozy basement with all sorts of fun things to tinker with for us. You know, us. Muns. Askers. Not your real live selves, which are extraplanar (don’t conform to the planar system), but your internet identities. We consort all the time. You’re familiar with this, I don’t need to go into detail.

The -3 plane is something I talk about with great caution, to avoid unfixable breaches in reality. It is the blogspace. It is the Internet. We do not talk about Fight Club.

The Void is where Tenir and the Void and the rest of this ask blog rests on the planar continuum. I like to colliqually call it the Zero plane. It isn’t quite nestled in the rest of fiction because of its close interaction with -1. The Void, before it started accepting -2′s voices, was nothing but the hallways of this house. A highway for interblog travel, or heck, even intrablog travel. As it is now more sentient and has inhabitants, it’s now preoccupied and makes that kind of travel harder. Still… you might find it streamlines the process of allowing direct contact between -2 and +1, in some cases.

You feel a push. The camera is forced out of the back and into the middling place it has rested in for so long. You hear the sound of the color blue, and it doesn’t want you there any more.

(...You were never meant to see this.)

Your plane of existence is negative two.

You have this much correct.

You know your planes.

But something is wrong with that explanation.