Mazhsuigt: A New Way to Float

“How are we supposed to do that?” Kaçidor asked, their voice dripping with disgust.
Eyne Dorsteldyn raised his nose and looked down the length of it at the grumpy technologist officer. “Materials abound in this place.”
Kaçidor flung their arm out, though if they still had wings, they would have menaced him in pique. “This place has nothing!” they screamed. “Nothing! No ajarçen, no katwen, no suigt. How am I supposed to make a ship fly without suigt?” They turned, stumbled as their boot heel caught in the plush carpet, and did their best to storm out of the tent flap without losing more of their pride.
Dorsteldyn regarded Nwesen with a lopsided, resigned smile. “And your team?”
“We’ll look around,” they said. “We should have replacements for ajarçen, katwen, and the like. Fuel, however, will take time. We have no distilleries or crystal crackers, and suigt doesn’t seem to exist on this planet. Plane of existence. Whatever you call it.”
“The evening lands,” Dorsteldyn said with huffy laughter.

In this Document:

Mazhsuigt: New Suigt

all images by Shade Melodique
unless otherwise stated
Featured image background by Mihai Vlasceanu, Pexels

The Need

When Eyne Dorsteldyn founded Badeçasyon, he wanted a place where all Gabridarço spirits could live without fearing reprisals from the Talin ghosts that inhabited the Evenacht. True, Badeçasyon was on the outskirts of polite society, but that made it more attractive, not less, for the interstellar invaders.
Turning to ages-old building techniques from Gabridarç, he sought to create a community that resembled the ones they left. However, he quickly learned that minerals, metals, plants and animals common on his home planet were nowhere to be found in the evening lands. A few things were similar in nature and behaved in almost the same way, but he and his fellow crewmembers needed to use ingenuity to collect and use them. And one element eluded them; suigt.
Suigt was a crystal ground into small grains and dumped into a vat of chemicals to produce a lighter-than-air gas. This gas lifted even the heaviest equipment and ships off the ground. Each object had a sphere with the suigt and chemical mixture attached to the corners of the ship, and tall, lidded pipes rose from it to contain the gas. A valve would allow more or less gas into the pipes, making the ship rise or fall accordingly.
Dorsteldyn wanted similar transportation, but the technologists had yet to discover a substitute for suigt.

Eyne Dorsteldyn

The Search

Nwesen was a more resourceful Gabridarço than Kaçidor. They, a product of a desolate rural mining town, had experience finding ways to build things that used cheap, local materials. They set about investigating the local environment and aquainting themselves with their neighbors.
Most of these neighborly beings were glejeth, who were considered the most monstrous of all umbrareign. They also lived outside polite society, because their forms frightened and instigated attacks. The rest were rufang, who had two torsos; one on the top with two arms, one on the bottom with four legs. Each community was outcast in some way, and they saw the Gabridarço not as scary interstellar invaders, but yet another group of outcasts. So when Nwesen had questions, they answered them.
Scientists among the glejeth found the idea of suigt interesting. The Evenacht, as far as they knew, did not have a similar element. When it came to hovering, one knew magic, was a ghost, or was one of the floating creatures found throughout the Evenacht.

Nwesen

Nwesen was a ghost, but they had no idea how to transfer Ether form abilities into lighter-than-air fuel. Since no Gabridarço seemed able to use Mental Touch, a magic solution was unlikely. But these floating creatures? Perhaps they had an answer to the problem.
Dorsteldyn, from the funds Death gave him to start his settlement, paid for an expedition to the nearest swamps south of their city, in Csdarling. Among the many strange creatures were drippy, bluish-green animals that vaguely resembled the jellies that swam in the ocean waters near Badeçasyon. They, however, floated mid-air instead of in the water.
To accomplish this, the floaters had a special sack filled with gas. To create the gas, they ate a white-petaled, spiny flower called the wickering with a special beak on the tip of a tentacle. The beak sent the pulp through a tube to the sack, where it interacted with a caustic goo oozing from the lining, producing the floating gas. The sack, however, fell apart if touched, so while the goo and gas interested them, they needed to find another way to study it that didn’t crumble so easily.

Breakthrough

A breakthrough came with the floaters in the Snake’s Head Peninsula. These floaters used their bells as floating devices, and during rock storms, formed nigh-impenetrable shells around themselves while feeding on nutrients brought to them by the winds.
The chemical that hardened the shells was the same one Csdarling floaters used to interact with the wickering so they could hover. While an intriguing link, the group had difficulty examining the shells. They were hard, the floaters only used them during dangerous rock storms (with literal rocks flying through the air) and fell off in chunks when the storms ended. The broken bits were notoriously impervious to most tools, so creating small pieces to study proved annoying.
During one storm, when the group huddled with others in a rock-cliff shelter, they met a curious elfine pirate named Rally who was seeped in all things floaty, whether in the sea or the air. She told them about the brightrock floaters of the Sun Plains; they behaved like the ones in the Snake’s Den when the winds grew strong, but their shells became jelly-like when shed. They, too, might have this chemical. After thoughtfully inviting herself along, she helped them conscript a boat to reach the northern shores of Fading Light.

Glass Float in Rockstorm

Brightrocks jelly residue

With Rally as a guide, they reached a colony of brightrocks attached to a rock outcropping not far from the port. As she had said, when the winds grew fierce, their shells hardened, but once the gusts died, those shells became jelly-like and slid off the brightrocks, to land in clumps on the ground below. Locals used the stuff in art supplies to make the works glow, but no one had any idea about floating properties.
The jelly-like substance proved easier to work with than the sacks or the shells. Through trial and error, the group discovered a way to melt the jelly so that it interacted with wickering to create the floating effect.
Excited, they brought their discovery to Dorsteldyn. With the help of Rally and the glejeth, he purchased land in the Sun Plains to raise the jellies, and the techs built a miniature swamp in a greenhouse complex where they grew wickering. This upset many of the upper command, who felt their abodes should be constructed before this greenhouse nonsense. It was owed them, after all.
Dorsteldyn ignored them.
Through Nwesen’s efforts, Badeçasyon had a substance that would let them hover. They called it mazhsuigt—new suigt. And now, they just needed a craft to put it in.

Further Reading
Badeçasyon
The Flayn Invaders
The First Love