Yannit isn't going to go mad
Other indrel would be scared and confused when entering human society but Yannit sought it out. Also this page
suggests that Yannit considers the others part of her pack and the buildings a hive, which is probably very important in a indrel society. As she has both a pack/hive and a strong interest in other cultures this puts her a low risk of madness, plus lets face it, she's probably not a normal Indrel.- Seems confirmed for now. Indrel Go Mad from the Isolation because to their expanded hive-senses, non-Indrel don't seem to truly exist and appear like ghosts. Yannit has found a coping mechanism: touching people, which reminds her that they're real. This of course means that working at Salia HQ makes you a target for surprise Indrel hugs now...
Viracroix wants Zhat Zhing for his own use.
He's smart enough to recognize the sheer potential power of the Yinglet's directed evolution, if it was managed properly. To that end, he has Ran study Kass to see how the transformation into a Yinglet affects the target's mind, and if it turns out that the species-wide Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny! problem can be overcome, he plans to become a Yinglet himself.He also mentions to the Baxxid representative that he has his eyes on a potential bride, and the only female we have seen him interact with so far was Vizlet... The Elders want Zhat Zhing to create more females.
Most likely for reproducing purposes, as it's never a good thing when one gender greatly outnumbers the other. Although they may also be gunning for any species that are smarter than them as the yinglets overall are not the sharpest knives in the drawer.- If the Of Ends And Beginnings side-story is taken as canon, they might be supposed to be used when a local enclave is in danger of having no females left.
- Relatedly, another possible view on this, and a WMG on how the plot came to be, is that they invented the Zhings and already use them for enclave emergencies as stated above. However, they lost a large number of them somehow, and are trying to retrieve them. as a consequence, Narklet decided to contribute to the search, by recruiting Brakka to find one of the lost samples that he surmised might be around Val Salia, possibly promising him that his banishment would be lifted if he did so.
This is a sci-fi story, not a fantasy one.
Humans arrived on this clearly alien world by crash-landing a spaceship (through the glowy thing in the sky, most likely). The artifacts everybody is hunting for are debris from the wreckage. Possibly the shiny vials like Zat Zhing contain some kind of nanotech...- Several hundred years ago, a human terraforming mission arrived and began modifying this world. Yinglets were developed as "first wave" colonists; their strong reaction to shellfish was a tool to encourage them to eat the "correct" food — the rich oyster beds of the planet's coasts — and their size, short life cycle, and wild genetic variability are due to the "lesser yinglet" species still being under development in a laboratory environment. Then, a nearby star went supernova. This event created the nebula now known as the Heavenly Veil, but the radiation surge forced the terraforming crew to abandon all orbital facilities and left their vessels and stations to fall out of orbit over the following centuries, becoming highly advanced Artifacts. The yinglets were simply released to live as animals, but within only a few hundred years their genetic instability completed the process of granting them full sapience. Meanwhile, the human society that developed lost all record of their origins in the struggle to survive.
