Monstrous Matters: Detecting intrusions on our material plane

You may be wondering: How do Monstrous Matters operatives locate beings that have entered our realm from parallel physical planes? And how do they know that these creatures aren’t just regular inhabitants of our world, somehow hidden for much of humanity’s existence?

The answer, of course, is that “it depends.” Sometimes, the MM team is tipped off by the investigations of other organizations that study paranormal events. Sometimes, Monstrous Matters is directly contacted by residents of our world seeking help in understanding mysterious happenings. (MM is a public-facing organization.) However, there are two main operations that Monstrous Matters strategists carry out regularly in order to monitor the appearance and disappearance of planar breaches.

The first is that worldwide news reporting is scoured as completely as possible for any leads. In the early days of Monstrous Matters, this was a rather tall task that required a lot of time from interns and hourly employees reading newspapers from around the world. This task has been made much easier with the expansion of news on the internet and the development of artificial intelligence platforms capable of executing this screening very quickly and fairly accurately.

Since the 1980s, however, detection of interplanar visitors has often been achieved thanks to the convenient fact that breaches from other material realms usually have a detectable radiation signature, often called “fissure glow.” With the proper analysis tools, this radiation can even be detected by satellite imagery. The Monstrous Matters IT team actually spends a lot of time hacking into government servers to access informative satellite data. The discovery of a potential rift is usually followed up with direct investigation near the source of the radiation.

Unfortunately, fissure glow is easily blocked by fairly common sedimentary and metamorphic rocks, including those found in many of Earth’s mountain ranges. This has led to a number of cases in which entire dungeon-like complexes are established on our world and remain undetected for many years (and potentially centuries or more).

Many interested scientists believe there is a connection between fissure glow and another phenomenon associated with interplanar travel: the regular appearance of a specific mineral, known as etherealite, near planar breaches. This material, along with the implications of fissure glow for interplanar visitors, will be covered in upcoming pseudoscientific blog posts.