Austusel

Austusel is a fictional mineral used in worldbuilding and speculative geoscience to illustrate the properties of rare aluminosilicates. It is described as a rare blue-green aluminosilicate with a glassy to vitreous luster. In most fictional treatments, austusel is considered to be transparent to translucent and to form recognizable monoclinic crystals. The hypothetical mineral is commonly assigned a Mohs hardness of 6 to 6.5, a specific gravity around 3.0–3.4, and a pale gray to light blue streak.

Crystal system: monoclinic; typical habit: prismatic to tabular; cleavage: imperfect along {010}; fracture: conchoidal.

Formation and occurrence: In fictional contexts, austusel forms in hydrothermal veins and pegmatites where silica-rich, volatile-rich fluids interact with aluminum and silicon-rich rocks. It is said to crystallize under temperatures ranging from 400 to 700 degrees Celsius and moderate pressures, often with quartz, spodumene, and topaz as associates. Geographically, it is imagined in Alpine and central European plutonic belts.

Name and etymology: The name combines an allusion to Austria (a common setting in worldbuilding) with a suffix used in mineral terminology; there is no real-world basis for its existence.

Uses in fiction and teaching: Austusel is sometimes used in teaching to discuss mineral classification, phase diagrams, and crystallography, or in narratives to denote a prized ore with unusual properties, such as heat resistance or radiation shielding in speculative technology.

Note: As a fictional mineral, austusel does not appear in official mineral databases.