Airships Over Aranor 5

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The creature which supposedly "raised" Verra, or rather, the monster which tolerated her for some reason and got fed other people as a result, was long since slain by the merman pirate captain who at least somewhat more properly raised her afterward. It happened some time in her mid-teens or so. I should probably clarify that "monster" on Aranor means something very specific, not quite the same as the English word. Suffice to say there is a variety (or rather, several varieties) of creatures on Aranor that one might describe as bizarre, hideous mutants, which are not sentient but seem to have a collective hatred of anything which is sentient. Because of them, Aranor has always been a dangerous land to travel, and on Aranor weaponry technology has always been indespensible, even before the concept of a 'war' or 'murder' was even thought of. For any monster to not immediately kill a sentient being is extremely strange, and may have been the result of one of the Sins (I'll get into those later) playing some kind of prank or scheme.

In any case, and for whatever reason, the Daora razed a town and left one child alive. That child fed people who came to the ruined village, though eventually a few escaped and rumors of the 'Daora-Majou' got out. The captain I mentioned earlier had a son who he was raising to be just as much an excellent captain as him, and he decided that his son needed a rival for proper motivation. Verra was hand-picked by him for the purpose, and was willing to accept him as a guardian because the Daora had become her guardian by the same manner: killing the previous ones. Suffice to say that this unusual upbringing has given her both reputation and a rather unique outlook on the world and other people in general.

Turbulence is a big deal on Verra's ship, the Gran Daora, because of its unusual design. As its name suggests, it is in the shape of a gigantic spider, and its eight legs are huge, sturdy pipes that provide all the propulsion for the ship. Each 'leg' can be rotated 180 degrees where it connects with the ship, and has two joints along its length, making a total of eight knobs and sixteen levers one must manipulate in order to perform the simplest of navigation. The advantages of the ship are many: Its pipes are strong enough to support the ship's weight, so it can literally walk on land like a spider; the pipe-legs can be wrapped around an enemy ship to keep it captive and can even be used as passageways for boarders in the right circumstances; for someone skilled enough to fully control it, the Gran Daora can pull off the most amazing aerial acrobatic pirouettes that anyone has ever seen an airship do. Naturally the whole thing was drafted by Verra, proof positive that there is quite a remarkable intelligence somewhere in this insane murderous pirate.

For the moment, however, she pulls a few hand-carved eight-sided dice out of her pocket and and tosses them straight at the ground between her feet. The results are registered in her mind in under a second, the dice scooped up, and another toss made.
 
Verra invented the eight-sided die, right down to working out how to make them perfectly regular, and hence fair. Nobody on Aranor has ever really had a use for more than one kind of die--the standard, cubic one has been around for ages. She keeps a trunk full of them, carved of materials from simple wood, to gold; there's a few precious gems among them, and even a few she had enchanted by dwarves to do a little bit of magic. She claims that one is carved for every time her luck gets her out of a bad situation, or into a good one. Verra considers all of life a game and a gamble, and it certainly shows in her disposition. She may be a cruel pirate captain, vindictive, hateful, often insane, controlling, irrational, vain, disloyal, a liar, without a speck of remorse in her body for any of the horrible things she has done, but one thing she is not, is discouraged. Never has anyone seen her frustrated by even the worst of setbacks, and even her most poisonous and vitriolic of moods have a hint of playfulness behind them, though of course this only serves to make them yet more terrifying. Her philosophy is simple: When you win, celebrate; when you lose, make plans to win the next time. Beyond that she has an energizing, indefatigable optimism and absolute confidence in her own 'luck', which does seem strangely warranted given her past accomplishments.
 
And what of her helmsman? Very few people are able to pilot a ship as complicated as the Gran Daora, and certainly someone as intelligent as he could be doing something else. Why isn't he? Furthermore, the captain's temperament and whims often have her throwing crewmen overboard at random, or firing or killing them for little to no reason, and this environment often causes the less brave or less stupid to leave when they get a chance, and the others to mutiny periodically. Yet the helmsman, Callor Soptix, has remained a permanent fixture since not long after the ship was built. How?

The answer is simple: Verra loves a good game of chance, and her contract with the helmsman is exactly that. The agreement made with Callor was simple: The longer he sticks with her, the more money he gets when he retires. If he gets arrested with her, or killed on the ship, he obviously won't get anything. He isn't stupid enough to try and betray a mind-reading captain, and their agreement is ironclad, because in what Verra considers a 'pure' game of chance she will never cheat. Besides, Verra loves to take all of the glory, and Callor prefers to remain unknown so that if and when he finally does retire, he will be anonymous enough to spend his payment. In addition, he acts as a kind of first mate--the only kind Verra likes. He wants to get paid, and doesn't want to get killed, so he exercises no authority unless Verra specifically asks him to or clearly requires him to. And when he does have to order the crew around, he is calculating and efficient. If there is one complaint Verra has against him, it is that he takes everything too seriously and doesn't care much for 'style', as she calls it. All the same, her crooked, insane antics would surely be a little less interesting without a straight man to snark at them.
 
Since you already know of the Blue Tail I should probably explain the other half of Callor's lineage. The six kinds of Neshoba are sometimes considered to exist in opposing pairs, and the Red Claw are the opposite of Blue Tail. Where the values of the latter culture are centered on calmness, rationality and sometimes kindness, the former are just the opposite. This is not necessarily a fault: The best way to describe the attitude of the Red Claw is that they are passionate. They are extremely emotive, not merely in romance but in most other spheres of life as well. They tend to go with their instinct and feelings a little more, and while this can cause trouble it can just as easily be an advantage. After all, meditative thinking does not lend itself well to tense, swift situations, and some things are simply beyond the grasp of logical reasoning. Callor was raised in a predominately Red Claw society, other than his father. When he was young he was prone to exceptional, violent mood swings, vacillating from a calm, cheerful, reasonable disposition to a raging, antagonistic one. The balance he finally found, however, seems to contain worst traits from both sides: From the blue, a cold, calculating way of thinking of people, like unimportant objects to be manipulated and used with care; from the red, a cynical, caustic anger not unlike that of his childhood friend, but without any passion for justice to make it useful, and without any compassion for others to balance it out.

But how did they meet? That will have to wait. Verra is too busy looking up, out the eyes of the giant flying spider, at a ship quite a ways in front of them. Its shape is just now beginning to become visible as more than a speck. Callor starts, "Captain--
"Hmm? What's my name again?"
"...Mithh Krithet, do you think we thould thlow down tho that we are not recognithed? That lookth like a courier thhip." Small-time courier ships are riskier to fly by than ordinary passenger or shipping vessels because they tend to be proactive and attack pirates they recognize instead of just assuming the pirates aren't interested until they prove otherwise.

"This trip's boring enough without making it any longer. But saaaaaaaay, does that ship look familiar to you?"
"I do not know. Doeth it to you?" He has long since given up any answer that isn't an echo, because she only asks guessing-game questions to make her speeches sound like conversations. He could say it looks like a dragon, not a ship and she would still go on with whatever she was leading into.
"I'm almost certain. It's on the tip of my tongue....Oh, that's Conall's ship, eightn't it? The one that stole Regaris from us?"

"Thtole? I theem to recall him not even being aware thith wath a pirate vethhel."
"Yes, and it's their fault he found out. I think we should attack."
If he wasn't too busy working the console, Callor would turn around and give Verra a long, hard 'you cannot possibly be serious' stare. "...We are at half crew and they have already beaten uth onthe before."

"They didn't win, they just took a valuable asset and got away. We had to think up a new plan B."
"Right. Becauthe they have a counter to our plan A. What'th our current plan B again? Oh right, charge in and hope we get lucky."
"Yeah, but you're talking to the queen of luck here! I've got all of it, you know."
"It'th too bad you're thuch a charitable ruler, or we'd actually get to uthe it when we really need it."
"Aaaaaaaaw, c'mon. It's a gamble!"
"I jutht don't like thethe oddth."
Verra grins. "I see we're speeding up anyway."
"You're the captain, Mithh Krithet. But if I get killed or they wreck the thhip it'th all on you."

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Meanwhile, the captain of the Farran looks out the open back hatch. "Oh, this is absolutely the best news I have received all day. As if the statement 'a red dragon is chasing us, trying to set our wooden frame on fire was not wonderful enough."
"Should I not tell you next time?"
"No, but I must vent frustration somehow. Run and tell Whys there's a Daora behind us."
She gives him a look. "That...is what it looks like, but--"
"Just tell him--he'll understand. And Ann. Whatever you do, do not make eye contact with their captain."
"Okay." She leaves, and Conall shuts the doors. Then he picks up a few long pieces of sturdy wood and places them in some supports, locking it so it can't be opened from the outside without quite a show of force. Then he heads back toward the bridge.

I suppose the change of scene was a little premature. Verra still needs to decide what mode of attack to use once the inevitable negotiations inevitably break down. She could try to latch onto the Farran from the top, get beside it, or ram it (the mouth of the spider is designed for this purpose). Based on past experiences and her estimate of the enemy helmsman's skill, these are in descending order of maneuvering difficulty.

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From: http://www.mspaforums.com/showthread.php?42524-Airships-Over-Aranor-Prose