I was confused by the article “Northern Fishing Opens” in the Dawning 1718 edition of the Kithiran Herald, and am wondering whether there was a printing error. The article reads that “With the increased presence of the Navy to the north, owing to the establishment of the Port Katherine colony, fisheries have followed the safety provided to expand their operations, seeking the abundant fish harvesting to be found surrounding many of the small islands in that area.”
My understanding of the world is that Aether surrounds islands and that Aether is an unhealthy, contaminating, understudied force that is not great to ingest.
Is there a fishing industry which catches fish in the Aether? And these fish are eaten by people? Does there exist a purported method of purifying Aether-caught fish in order to make them human-consumable? (I’m asking because if there is an aether-fishing industry that may or may not be safe, this sounds like a hook for some cool plot.)
Or is this perhaps an error in the printing of the Herald and should read something like, “…fisheries have followed the safety provided to expand their operations, seeking the abundant fish harvesting to be found IN THE INLAND WATERWAYS of the small islands in that area”?
There is a small amount of water along the coastlines of the islands of Kithira, between the land and the aether. Fish caught in this area are generally held to be safe for human consumption. There are also all kinds of creatures in the aether that are caught and used for other purposes (aether-tainted fish may be used as bait to catch larger aether creatures, fish and whale bones can be treated and used for all manner of things, etc)
So:
yes, there is a fishing industry that catches fish (both in the aether and in the areas immediately surrounding islands, which are covered in water)
the fish that are caught in water are believed to be safe to eat
there is no known method of purifying flesh from aether contamination, though the fishing industry has a number of ways it claims to remove contamination from materials not used for human consumption
There is a reason that the prevailing in-game theory as to the current cosmological configuration-state of the Pan Aetherium is post-apocalyptic in nature.
Imagine a Kithiran naturalist, contemplating the notion of an island, floating in a pool of water, suspended in a vast trackless expanse of corrupting aether: "Yup, something went severely wrong, here."
