Introduction

Mist World, as its name suggests, is a world covered by mist. The only land visible on Mist is the mountains and plateaus that rise out of the never ending grey sea. On mist world only the land above fifteen hundred feet of elevation is clear of the mist. These are the places where humans make their homes. From some you can see distant other lands rising from the mist. While others are nothing but lone islands with not for company. So why did humans build on these islands you ask? The answer is simple, for safety. The mist held great dangers to the humans. Never being able to see where that danger may come from drove humans to the heights for protection. There are stories and legends of daring souls venturing between the lands through the mist, but most of those stories end in tragedy not victory. No one knows who first discovered lift gas. I tend to believe it was a young lad on one of those far distant islands, who longed for the company of others.

We do know it was the discovery of lift gas that allowed the first airship to be created. Of all the countries on this world, almost all of them lay claim to the first airship. Whoever and wherever it was created it opened the world to those lonely places. The airships gave man the ability to travel between the lands in relative safety. Those early days of flight were filled with peril. The early airships relied on the wind for travel. They would fill the envelopes with lift gas and cast themselves to wind adding gas as needed and venting it to the sky so they could come down to earth once again. As a child, my school took us to a museum. There I saw the oldest painting of an airship. The painting depicted not the triumphant landing, but a disastrous failure. It showed the ship as the wind pushed it off the plateau as it descended.

After years and years of plying the winds airships received a great boon in the form of electricity. First airships used the wind to make electricity to power their movement. Then a new lift gas was created. This lift gas became excited when electricity was introduced to the envelope. Excited lift gas has magnitudes more lift. This meant airships no longer had to carry endless supplies of lift gas. The final piece of the puzzle came about by accident. The first solar sail happened for good or ill to King Hasting the Fried. He is called the Fried because his sky eel cloak turned poor King Hastings to a crispy critter the first time he wore it in the sun. The news of the Crispy King Hasting traveled around the world with every airship.

What was most important to the airships was that Sky Eel leather made electricity in sunlight. Within a year airships grew sails at least the airships that could afford them. Sky Eels are hard to catch. An adult eel is between four and six feet long and two feet across with a wing span that can reach greater than eight feet. They can contract the bodies down much smaller than expected, or expand them greatly. Their leathery wings should not be able to keep them in the air. In truth, they don’t. Sky Eels are the original airship. The eels have segregated sacks that fill with a gas the eel creates. As it flies in the sun the gas becomes excited by the electricity the eels control this internal lift perfectly, and use their large wings to propel them through the air. Poor King Hasting’s Sky Eel skin cloak was a gift of great wealth. For few sky eels, had been hunted successfully.

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