Aether-tappers are the aether-producing goblin variant, and they are named for the one thing only they can do. Aether is no native power: it rained down on Alaria after an eruption on the neighbouring stack of Lanthornia, an exotic meta-fluid stranded in a world whose own laws never made it. The tappers are the answer the world grew to it. Their sensitivity to the substance developed in the generations after the eruption seeded it across the sky, so they are not a remnant of any lost age but a new thing, a people shaped by a foreign accident.
Drawing the fuel
Raw Aether hangs in the air, inert and invisible. Pulling it out is not chemistry and cannot be taught from a manual. It is an exotic working that sits somewhere between breathing and weaving, and an aether-tapper performs it by instinct refined into craft, drawing the substance from the air and fixing it with a measure of water into a liquid fuel. Every attempt to reproduce the process without goblin hands has failed. That single failure is why the fuel of an entire sky-trade rests in the keeping of the clans that guard the technique, and why a people most of the continent would otherwise dismiss as vermin sit at the root of how anything flies.
The clans and the cage
The work makes the aether-tappers valuable, and value is a dangerous thing to be. Their clans cluster wherever the sky-trade reaches, thickest around the great docking hubs, and they guard their methods as jealously as any guild guards a secret, because the secret is the only wall between them and the people who would rather own them than pay them. Across much of Ve a tapper is treated as livestock, kept and bled for its secretions. The grounded exception is Yuki, the Suki Hills city-state where the goblins fled during the Consumption and were given something rarer than coin: a seat on the council, property, and the name of citizen. Their Aether powers Yuki's alarms, signals, and trap-arrays, and their freedom there has made the city a magnet for goblin refugees, which is both its strength and the reason it will never be left wholly alone.
The aether-tappers should not be confused with the Etherweavers, the goblin line born to the non-basic Kethic elements. The two are different peoples whose names happen to rhyme. An Etherweaver weaves a power native to Alaria; an aether-tapper fixes a fuel that fell from another world.