"Soooo... if you feel like it, you can't miss?"

"You are making it sound dumb."

"But you said it's like a feeling? Could you feel that way all the time?"

"No, not that kind of feeling."

Grath furrowed his brow. His unexpressive guest was hard to converse with. Grath was patching the Flounder's pectoral wing with his sewing kit as he spoke to the farmer. It turned out the man's name was Reetrarn, or Trarn for short. Grath had been trying to strike up various conversations with him for the last three days after the pirate attack. During the struggle, Trarn had crashed his flaming ship into a tree branch. His only other crew member, whom he refused to speak about, had died in the crash. From there, he worked his way through the branches and managed to board the Flounder during Grath's fight with the pirate crew.

It turned out his legendary shot at the pirate captain was thanks to elixir number 2, aka Cloud King bone broth. Consuming the bone broth of a Cloud King condor is such a rare occurrence that Grath had discounted elixir 2 as irrelevant. It wasn't that he thought it was not real; the elixir was the second one ever discovered and well documented, after all. But Cloud Kings are so rare and difficult to hunt that the broth may as well be a myth. On top of that, elixir 2 only lasts an hour... unless you are part of the Cloudkin family bloodline. Which Trarn was! Grath's questions had garnered him much info over the past few days. Cloudkin rarely got a chance to drink elixir 2, but if they did, its effects were permanent and sometimes even passed on to their children. Even more curious, the effect could skip a generation or several. Which is why Trarn was named Reetrarn. The "Ree" signified a recurrence of elixir 2's effect. Unfortunately, Trarn was not nobility, so him having the "Blessing of the Cloud King" was taboo. Grath hadn't learned much directly from the untalkative Cloudkin, but he estimated Trarn was out by the Prattian border, far from the Cloudkin territory because of this taboo. Why keep the prefix "Ree" in his name then? Grath wondered. It made little sense to him, but Prattians had their own weird customs. Maybe changing your given name would hurt Trarn's pride, he guessed. At any rate, he prodded a different line of questioning:

"I am drifting East till I reach the Eathean Prairies. Elixir 8 is my goal out there. Combined, we don't have enough food to loop back on the upper winds from here. You will have to drift with me until the prairies and get a different ship to take you home at one of the outposts. That work for you?" Trarn nodded without answering. Grath took that as his answer and decided to give Trarn a break. He felt bad for how hard he had pushed Trarn for a decision. Losing a crewmate was a terrible experience. Grath hated pirates all the more for their encounter. Luck had saved him, but dying while killing those scum would have been a decent end, in his opinion. They kept drifting East. The Flounder was beat up but functional. It was low on lift balloons and galena weight sacks. Getting wool from a cloud pine wouldn't be too hard. Wood logs would have to replace the lost galena sacks; the chances of finding stones for weight, let alone galena, above the cursed fog was near impossible in this region, so clunky logs it would be. On top of that, Grath was low on rope for the release systems, both for the weights and balloons. He sighed deeply; it was going to be rough piloting for a while. He hated balancing the weight of logs against new lift balloons. It was a laborious task.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Trarn grieved and Grath worked on the ship. The Flounder drifted lazily with only brief stops at rare unplucked cloud pines. Food had to be rationed, and hunger made the two men irritable. Finally, they reached the Eathean Prairies. Home of elusive elixir number 8 and common elixir number 7. Elixir 7, or float soup, is only considered common by comparison to other rare elixirs. It was still harder to get than klienah flower nectar, entirely because klienah flowers can be farm-raised at Proud Plateau. Elixir 7 is impossible to farm as of yet, though many attempts have been tried. The soup is made by rustback spoonbill storks exclusively at the boiling lakes of the Eathean Prairies. Early explorers and later Prattian scholars documented the storks' method of making the soup. First, the storks collected 8 to 9 types of herbs from around the shores of the boiling lakes (Fortunately, the boiling lakes' steaming water dilutes the cursed fog around them, making the shorelines not a death sentence for researchers). Next, the female storks craft crude bowls made from woven leaves and grass. Then, the herbs and a small amount of water are placed to float haphazardly about the lake. The male storks guard the bowls aggressively from rival males as a form of mock battle to impress the females. The surviving bowls are considered done cooking after around 20 minutes. Researchers replicated the herbs and bowls and used the boiling lakes to cook them, but to no avail. The reigning theory is that rustback spoonbill stork saliva may be the key. So far, all attempts to raise captive storks for farming the soup have been unsuccessful. Elixir number 7 must be harvested directly from the storks' bowls after they finish cooking it. A few outposts, both Prattian and foreign, are built amongst the lakes. The people manning these outposts, apart from the soldiers, specialize in extracting elixir 7. Many merchants from across the world journey to the boiling lakes every year, especially during peak season.

King Trosh would love to get his grubby hands on the entirety of the boiling lakes, Grath mused, if our military weren't stretched thin enough pretending to own half the world, we might have gotten the boiling lakes by now. As it was, the boiling lakes remained a tumultuous place; harvesting elixir 7 outside of the outposts was risky business. Elixir 8 was a whole 'nother task entirely.