All-Elements Fundamental

Fundamentals are the weakest true elemental beings, as distinct from the many other natives of the Elemental Planes, and their real nature, purpose and place in the order of the Inner Planes remain unknown. A stubborn myth paints them as headless, bodiless bat wings made of their element, flying forever. In truth each is a slim, nearly flat strip of elemental matter or energy that ripples and flaps like a bat or a bird. They do not truly fly; they simply move through their own element without hindrance from gravity or anything else. The bat-wing legend probably began when someone mistook fire bats, which really do have bat wings, for fire fundamentals.

Now and then a fundamental hops briefly out of its element into another, so an earth or water fundamental jumping into nearby air may look like it is flying low. One that strays into its opposing element, such as a fire fundamental landing in a pocket of water, survives only 1d4 rounds before it sputters out, dissolves or otherwise disperses.

Every fundamental fights the same way, slamming its body into a foe for 1d6 damage. This is a weak attack, but since they are not really flying, it costs them no movement, and it never hurts them. Armor Class and movement rate vary with how solid or energetic, how heavy and how fast a given fundamental is.

In their own element they are very hard to spot: when still, which they sometimes are despite rumors to the contrary, they are 90% invisible, and their coloring imposes a -2 surprise penalty on anyone they attack there. For this reason wizards on the Prime and other material worlds often summon air fundamentals against their enemies, but rarely ooze fundamentals, which would be obvious at once. Fundamentals are completely immune to their own element and unaffected by sleep and charm spells, and only weapons of +1 or better can strike them.

Fundamentals do not really fit into the politics of the Inner Planes. They are too dim to serve or oppose any faction and too weak for anyone to care; even the good and evil archomentals do not bother courting the fundamentals of their elements. They simply exist.

Fundamentals eat very little, make almost nothing and seem not to reproduce. They may not even be alive in the usual sense, but rather an animate, mindless extension of their element. Some planar sages propose that they fill the role on the Elemental, Paraelemental and Quasielemental Planes that plants fill on material worlds, an idea odd enough to be right but hard to prove. Others follow one planar explorer's view that they are exactly what their name suggests, the most basic expression of their element: weaker than true elementals, yet more essential to the element and its plane. The notion that they are young or larval elementals has been rejected, since few if any Inner Planes elementals reproduce that way.