The Scholarly Pursuit of Aethitek

Aethitek is at once the youngest and the most vital part of mortal life in the world of Gaelinar. This burgeoning field of academic study has, quite literally, changed the world and so has captured the imagination, attention and desire of the people of the two continents in a way that few scholastic pursuits ever have.

Utility

From ships to vehicles, lights to weapons, stoves to sky-lancing superlasers, Aethitek has been applied to a large amount of things. At its most rudimentary, Aetherium cut and fashioned to shape can form an obsidian-like cutting weapon. Through faceting and combined exposure to elements, Aetherium can be used to manufacture lighting systems like lanterns or even power grids for larger settlements, or create power sources after being exposed to natural lightnning that retains a long-lasting charge thans to Aethitek manufacture.
The most complex applications of Aethitek are the Cloudcutter airships that have recently been created and the Piercing Spire.
Cloudcutters require a vast crew - at least twice as many hands as a standard seafaring vessel. Positions aboard a Cloudcutter include people to manage Aethitek batteries and engines, or crew to handle navigation or steering, along with the large amount of servicepeople to handle both crew and passengers.
The Piercing Spire, meanwhile, is essentially the highest complexity construct that Aethitek has ever put together, demanding some of the finest minds in the field and the most stalwart guards to defend the site.

Access & Availability

Aethitek in modern Gaelinar times has permeated nearly every aspect of major civilized life. While smaller villages still tend to live from natural resources of the land they're located in like the old days, even they have some form of Aethitek constructs on hand, be they simple Aethitek weapons or basic light or heat sources.
Most of this ease of access is attributed to the fact that, by and large, most human and mortal life believes that they are under threat from the natural world and the gods above, having lived for years beneath the skies of war during the Celestial Conflict above. To the vast majority of people living in Gaelinar, Aethitek represents the return of control from prayer and servitude to the hands of the people and so there's bare few places it doesn't have a foothold in.
However, not every inch of civilized live houses Aethitek. The elves of the world - what bare few there are - have all but regressed to their original woods-delving state, finding more comfort in the natural light of the moon than the cold, blue glow of an Aethitek lantern. Worse yet, the subterranean race of the tieflings of Gaelinar believe that the harvest of Aetherium is a slight into their own vast kingdom, and rumors of their potential for invasion have seeped into the ears of some above ground.

Complexity

Aethitek manufacture is an involved process, requiring careful manipulation of the raw Aetherium materials as well as skilled creation of mechanical pieces such as cooling systems, pins, levers and housings. All of this fine craftsmanship, however, lends itself to most Aethitek creations being simple to use by most layperson standards: while the innards of an Aethitek rifle are certainly compound, using it is as simple as aiming, pressing the primer button, and then firing.

Discovery

The study of Aethitek is directly tied to the study of the related element, Aetherium. The mysteries of this strange, crystalline rock seemed to draw in the mortal populace like moths to a flame, starting first as a base material for creating crude items until it began to unfurl like a tapestry the more scholars and metallurgists from both Meritol and Mergel were drawn together to experiment, advance, and learn.
The advancement of Aethitek was astonishingly swift, seeing larger cities across Gaelinar found colleges, manufactories and smithies expressly devoted to exploring Aetherium and applying findings to the civilized world. While these advances have yielded some remarkable results, both the Gaelin Meritocracy and Mergel Confederation seem to have only chipped into the surface of Aetherium's uses, leading many people who live in both civilizations to believe that a golden age is yet to come.