Radix: the Nebula

Nebulas always fascinated me.  The idea that entire bodies of gas manage to coalesce without condensing into a single point or expanding into the vacuum around it is just amazing; the fact that they have their own light-play within them, creating an effect that only our own planet's Northern Lights can come close to emulating at times, is mind-blowing.

Whenever someone tries to explain the Astral plane, Aethyr (or ether, for that matter, which is a little embarrassing for me), or inter-planar travel, images of nebulas inevitably dance in my mind.  I'm not sure if it's wishful thinking, or just an inevitable imagery to which I always return, but it happens, regardless.  Even in chemistry, when everyone got to burn the crazy stuff that made all the different color fumes, my head immediately went to space and imagined all of it happening on a grander scale.

So when I decided Radix would not have oceans and instead "float" out on its own, I immediately decided it would be sitting in a vast "nebula," albeit one of a more fantasy-oriented origin.  The idea itself wasn't entirely original, I suppose; the nebula is supposed to lock things floating within from the passage of time, causing them to be caught in a sort of "stasis" until they pass to somewhere with normal conditions.  Landmasses and planes create a "bubble" around them, a space where the nebula is pushed away allowing for gas and matter to settle.  Because of this, many of the edges the planes and landmasses are cluttered with the debris of "floaters", and sometimes will even see people suddenly landing on them, completely unaware of how they got there.

Although supposedly one could simply propel themselves into the nebula and hope that inertia would take them to their destinations, most travel throughout the world of Radix (and beyond) is done through two magical means.  "Gates" are made by pulling a part of nebula into two different landmasses and connecting them through magic.  Due to the difficulty of pulling the nebula into the plane (since the very stuff one stands on tries to reject it), most Gates are permanent, as Mages would need to work together in order to create them, and since they wouldn't want to have to do so more often than needed, they put the extra effort into making sure the gate withstood the natural tendency to decay immediately. 

Where Gates use the aspect of the Nebula to travel between Planes, "Tandems" would use aspects of Planes to travel through the Nebula.  Much easier to create than Gates, Tandems are vessels of all shapes and sizes, with one simple commonality: Each has a piece of the plane on which they were made in it, whether a jar of mud or a room coated in sod, which has been magically infused to echo the plane itself on a smaller scale and create its own "bubble" around the vessel itself once it's drifting in the nebula.  Propelling the vessel is a different matter, and is handled differently by each manufacturer (weird using that word in a fantasy setting, but it's still applicable), but each uses the same idea to make them work.

(Photo Credit: NASA, Jeff Hester, and Paul Scowen (Arizona State University))