There was only so much the golden torc around my neck could do to deal with the radical
time shift I was moving through and so my stay with the Deep Imaskari descendents was
brief, though I packed a lot of learning into that short visit, sadly I can't remember any
of it, memory loss is built into the planar gateway that connects their deep ethereal
realms from the rest of the multiverse, a foolproof protective measure, so, instead,
thankfully I have the chronicals I kept of my journey into deep imaskar, the most amazing
location, aside from the chamber in which they were building artificial worlds, was
the trade ports of the Molf.
I have illustrations I sketched of molf all through my journals, so I am guessing there
were long periods of time I had a stable and comfortable environment in which to take out
my marvelous pigments set and get some artwork done.
I can also tell that a lot of these sketches are my copies of something I was reading,
for example, I am not in the habit of taking creatures apart and cataloging all their bits,
but I love the studies of those who do that sort of thing, the molf meet a lot of them,
the illythid being one species commonly known for that sort of thing.
The molf were not shocked I had heard of the mind flayers, though they call them lots of
different names depending on which dimension they come from, the molf would call this their
iteration.
They talk about a creature with more categories then humanoids are used to, so you are not
just a human, you are from a specific time and place, a specific dimension which is related
to a set of others, so, they will know how to get to a moment in your grandfathers life
just like you would know how to deliver a courier package to someone in your day to
day life.
Molf also don't consider a demiplane located inside another demiplane to be much different
from travelling from one room to another, however, the planar nexus is a whole other
level of planar technology I was simply not prepared for the fact the molf come from infinite
worlds, creating infinite numbers of infinitely expanded planes and within those, they controlled
everything, more or less, in the grand overview of the multiverse, the molf are more commonly
known and encountered by other species than any humanoids, they are, basically, the standard
race encountered in artificial realities within the multiverse..
it turns out this news bothered me, but I couldn't say why..
it felt a bit petty of me, but hey, it is what it is, nobody likes being knocked down
another rung on the ladder of cosmic importance.
As we reached the planar nexus, I was patiently and painstakingly instructed to keep looking
up at this infinitely long central beam of sunlight that we arrived at side on, entering
what I was told was a massive, planet sized tube from what appeared to be a portal in
the ground from the perspective of those inside the nexus, I did't feel any different pull
of gravity, looking up the other side of the tube was too far away for the eye to see by
far, so looking up it felt like a star was stretched out infinitely in two directions
but it did help distract me from the warped perspective of the planar tunnel.
As we orbited around the central sunbeam like a corkscrew, the land below shifted and changed.
I chewed on some fresh ginger root to settle my stomach because this made me feel a weird
kind of sea sick, then my brain kept trying to make sense of what we were passing through,
I can't really tell you how I knew the ground was orbiting in a spiral around that central
star beam, but I could, and, to better explain how it works, I have a couple of crude illustrations,
first is the motion of a planet around it's star through space, now imagine peeling that
world so only the surface facing the star is shown, now fill in the gaps... this is
the motion of the surface and the direction time travels, if you go this way, you go forward
into time, if you reverse direction, you travel backward in time.
Each layer we traveled into was not just a new demiplane, it was also a different era,
thousands of years in the future, with the passage of time accellerated up another step.
I paused here, as we had stopped to get something to eat at a crystaline cathedral of some kind,
which served up all sorts of freshly prepared fish, crab, shrimp, rice, greens and delicios
pickles, cleverly prepared to be eaten on the go, we perched on gently curved crystal
outcrops over staggering waterfalls criss crossed with rainbows from the strange starlight
strip overhead, but as peaceful and eternal as this all seemed, I did want to make it
home again and I was very concerned with the passage of time back at Candlekeep.
I was probably much more torn on the issue at the time, I mean, to explore into an eternal
future, try transporting advanced magic back along the nexus to a past version of myself?
I wondered if these things were possible, but never had the time to find out.
Talking about such things with my imaskari friends was difficult as we still had a lot
of language translation issues, see the descendents of the deep imaskari people speak an array
of dialects all derived from the original roushoum language of Toril, these days you
can hear the similarities with the languages spoken in Kara-tur, the brightstar lake regions,
ancient Mulhorand and Unther, oh and some of the pirate dialects of the southern waters
of the sea of fallen stars.
I asked a few questions, trying not to sound too stupid, they told me a molf would answer
my questions and gestured towards a carnival of graceful tent tops, well, at first glance
that's what it appears, then it looks like a really huge jellifish body, all stretched
out and decorated with very glittery things, then it resolves itself finally and you are
looking at a flattened out gateway, the strands are edges to corridoors inside the web within
which floats a gossamer, gleaming jellifish-like creature wafting about in near perfect zero
gravity.
The Molf are interdimensional creatures that long ago left the material universe behind
to dwell within the deep demiplanes of the ethereal realm.
They seem like they must be related to the flumph at first glance, but the moment you
see their body light up with shifting, strobing glows and then just shift from one position
to another, or skip forward a few moments in time, you quickly lose that misconception,
the Molf actually come in a variety of different forms, but the overall description of "floating
alien jellifish creature" is pretty universal.
Individual Molf may have different brain caps, different tentacle growths, different symbiotic
relationships with engineered organisms and different organic inhancements.
It gets far more complicated when you find out the molf are not one species, but a common
form of transdimensional life with origins very different from our own which almost invariably
means they develop planar magic before most other species, so, lets take a little journey
to where a typical molf type species comes from.
Deep in the atmosphere of a gas giant, here the density of the environment can reach extreme
levels, the translucent substance of a molf is not gelatinous, its as hard as diamond,
the energy contained in their cells is explosively strong, they are very, very cold to the touch
and feel as dangerous as instable vibrating glass, they are very well protected by tight
fields of force which are as much a part of their body as the material you can see, molf
home environments consisting of highly engineered and stable kelp forests which also serve as
mass communication network, atmosphere and energy system, the molf swim is vast drifts
of super dense liquid gas illuminated by massive crystals glowing under the pressure if harvested
from the upper layers of the atmosphere, or glowing from released heat if mined from deeper
toward the metallic planet core.
Molf learn how to move through environments as different from each other as rock, sky
and ocean long before they become aware of anything existing outside their planet and
the vast void of space beyond is not something they are comfortable with.
Molf naturally gravitate toward magic that creates demiplanes and much like the aboleth,
their primitive city structures looked like they were designed by sea monkey time lords,
bubble domes with spiral towers and clusters of connected organic chambers filled with
their trinkets and collections for study.
Molf have a strange view of humanoids, they don't have much to do with them, back in the
prime material planes they just don't cross paths since they live in such very different
environments.
Left to their own devices, the bodies of the Molf, like the Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish
of Earth, the so-called immortal jellyfish, constantly and slowly cycle back and forth
between their polyp and adult stages , still reproducing as per usual whenever they are
in Adult stage, but they have the amazing ability to revert back to the polyp stage
anywhere in their medusa stages of development.
The process, called cellular transdifferentiation, allows one type of cell to transform into
another type of cell.
When the immortal jellyfish reaches the hydroid, immature, maturing, or mature medusa stages,
it can revert all the way back to the polyp stage at any point and start all over again.
This happens either because of trauma or because it's aging and needs to renew itself again,
they have integrated this process intimately with their culture of course, so every now
and then a molf will simply withdraw from society and go into a polyp form for some
time, this is viewed among the molf as a retreat, taking it easy for a while, a retirement,
except in their case, they return from it completely refreshed, their body now young
again, their mental vitality is also restored so, they are known to be quite influencial
in their society around this stage and also more prone to reproducing.
Some molf spend quite a long time in their polyp stage, they are not less intelligent
or active while polyps, they just enjoy different pursuits, more design, management and research,
they tend to be less egotisitical, oh another interesting fact, the molf which developed
in very warm conditions tended to have less total number of tentacles than those who come
from much colder places, and they don't all evolve in water, they come from gas giants,
sometimes they simply live comfortably in mixed, boyant gas layers for millions of years,
developing internal chemistry of fantastic efficiency and existing only as mental projections
into any demiplanes they create simply for their very eclectic games and fantasies, they
mostly discover the universe outside their own gas giant via telepathy and clairvoyance.
This mental contact with other species leaves them much better prepared for their first
encounters with hot, fragile, creepy rocky planet creatures like humanoids, with their
constant chattering sounds and body movements that mean nothing to the molf.. a molf find
smiles from humans as mildly unsettling displays of their vestigial fangs, they don't find
it charming at all.
Others think it is hilarious and love to watch humanoids do it, so they will crack jokes
with humanoids just to see them going into their odd little gasping lung spasms and fang
displays, striking things with their flat hand claws with the spidery finger digits.
Molf can see right through humanoids, like they see everything in x-ray vision, they
find bones a bit creepy, even though their body is as dense as diamond, it still moves
like a floating jellyfish, in a dizzying array of stripes, colours, sizes and arrangements
of their delicate tendrils.
Molf tendrils don't have stingers, they have no need to eat or drink really, I think they
just do so for fun.
The immortal jellyfishes of our earth are tiny; about the size of a pinkie fingernail,
the molf range from gnome size for the infants, all the way up to drifting behemoths that
could rival a whale shark or a small passenger van.
Giving them physical stats for dungeons & dragons is mostly pointless, they are not even slightly
inconvenienced by any sort of physical damage thats from evolving in the most extreme environments
and having mastery over containment and deflection force fields.
There is not much reason to attack a molf anyway, they certainly don't attack humanoids,
they know it riles them all up, which is terrible for business.
Attacking or attempting to rob to molf is a catastrophically bad idea, but hey, you
do you.
If you are enjoying the sage's trip into deep Imaskar, please remember this is just a work
of fiction, this is not my usual researched lore topic video and I appreciate your feedback,
I'm enjoying making this sort of stuff and I enjoy posting those future video topic image
polls in the channels community tab, so look out for more of those, in the meantime, as
always, thanks for listening and I will be back with more for you, very soon.