Anh

Anh was a kind-hearted, but morose corsair who loomed as a giant both in stature and intellect. While he travelled with the party only for a short time, he made a big impression on those who knew him. Anh is responsible for creating many of the party's most iconic items, like The Lady's Rebuff, which serves as the Nomad's battering ram and figurehead, as well as Wukong's feathered captain's hat. While caring deeply for his friends, Anh always kept them at a distance. They never even saw his face, given that he always wore a mask depicting the creature who caused Tyrant's destruction.
When interacting with those outside the party, Anh often preferred to stay quiet and reserved. He often kept to himself during social situations, but on occasion he got along with fellow outsiders, like the defected imperial engineer, Cid Graysmog or Lily, the map maker's daughter on Alteri Island. Despite his occasional misanthropic moods, Anh is always willing to lend a hand to those in need, often putting others needs above his own.
Anh's combat style leveraged his massive frame to weather the blows of enemies. His signature weapon was a massive shield he kept wrapt in cloth. In addition to providing cover in battle, the shield acted as a sort of weighted training suit, making Anh stronger during the rare moments when he set it down. However, Anh's combat abilities quickly diminished when fighting those outside of close quarters. His obstructive mask led to terrible eye-sight, letting enemies get the drop on him easily. When fighting aggressively, Anh relied on his unarmed combat skills, picking up smaller enemies or allies and launching them at foes using his fastball special technique. Anh also contributed to the party's combat proficiency indirectly through his impressive feats of engineering. Although, given his long lifespan, some of his inventions from the past have come back to haunt the party in the hands of enemies like the White Lion Armada.

Early Life

Anh grew up on Tyrant and was one of the few people on the spheres who had first-hand memories of the planet. He served as his village's blacksmith where he enjoyed telling stories to the tribe's hatchlings. In the wake of Tyrant's destruction, Anh lived a nomadic life among other displaced Scalfi. These included his father, a well-connected crime lord, and a rambunctious young Scalfi named Boh, whom Anh mentored. As it did most Scalfi, the destruction of Tyrant left deep scars on Anh's psyche. To commemorate the occasion (or perhaps as a memento mori), Anh wears a mask depicting a cartoonish version of the creature who was responsible for Tyrant's demise. The massive stone shield he carreid as a shield also reflected a both literal and metaphorical weight Anh carried from the destruction of his homeland.

Fighting the Koan Empire

Like many Scalfi talented in engineering, Anh participated in the Dreadnaught project under the tutelage of the master Scalfi shipwright, Moska. The dreadnaughts were originally conceived as colony ships for displaced Scalfi. However, the Koan Empire coopted them as instruments of war when they realized the ships' capacity for destruction.
Some years later, Anh's ship was beset by the infamous pirate ship, The Dark Home. Their captian, Jim Kestrel, rounded up Anh and his first-mate, Sullivan, to negotiate their surrender. To Anh's surprise, Jim Kestrel was not after loot or money, but sought out Anh's engineering expertise, to carry out a plan to sink a koan Dreadnaught. While Anh held no love for the Koan Empire, he didn't much like being press-ganged into fighitng them. Nevertheless, as a prisoner without any other tribute to offer The Dark Home's crew, he didn't have much choice. Kestrel promised that he would provide shelter for Anh and his crew as well as any materials he needed. All he asked of Anh was to use his skills to build weapons that could take down the massive ships.
The Dark Home arrived at their destination, a city on Sera that had been destroyed by the very Dreadnaught the Dark Home pursued. Kestrel revealed that he would supply Anh with building materials from the fallen city. Anh liked the idea of recycling the remains of a destroyed city to get vengeance on the weapon that destroyed it, so he agreed to help Kestrel. Over the next few months, Anh befriended members of The Dark Home's crew. In addition to Jim Kestrel himself, there was Hemig, a surly Geit helmsman; Clara, a Homyn chef; Vandal, a boarding specialist hailing from the Koan Vandal tribes; Silence, an elderly Koan artificer who only spoke in sign language; and Wa, a Mong Bal lookout. The crew also travelled with two war orphans, Jin Bei and Klarisia. Jin Bei was a mischevious scamp who fought with an evasive fighting style and by riding on the back of Anh's shell. Klarisia was more reserved, but possessed a powerful connection to The Dream World. Anh's former crew member Sullivan also begrudgingly assisted the efforts, although he had significant reservations about standing against the Empire.
Over the course of their preparations, Anh created several inventions to exploit the Dreadnaught's weaknesses. First, he created a boarding craft called a Flying Owl, that could embed itself into the hull of a ship and by turning a giant screw, crack open its hull. Next, he invented a fast-inflating baloon called a Dandelion that could temporarily hold a ship aloft in the air--a device that would no doubt come in handy for dodging the Dreadnaught's torpedos. Anh aslo accompanied Vandal to rescue a steam engine from a ship wrecked by rhino toads. Shortly before the battle, Silence passed away and left a will to be executed by his son in Balphuran. Anh and Jim Kestrel left for the city to deliver the will. They learned that Silence's real name was Silas and he had fled the Koan Empire's employ when they asked him to develop a Dive Gear that would allow any ship to temporarily submerge like the Koan submarines. Silas defected the empire before the project was completed, fearing the invention would only solidify Koan naval supremacy. Silas's son gave Anh his father's project notes in hopes that the dive gears could assist their mission in destroying the Dreadnaught.
The night before the project was complete, Jim Kestrel and Anh shared a drink. Anh toasted the fallen of Tyrant while Jim toasted "his wife and the woman he loved", leaving it ambiguous if he was talking about one woman or two. During the celebrations, Sullivan betrayed the crew by alerting the Empire to the pending attack and kidnapping Klarisia. Not wanting to let a child with gifts in The Dream World fall into the empire's clutches, Jim Kestrel decided to move forward with the attack despite losing the element of surprise. Anh set his inventions against the Dreadnaught, evading their torpedoes and cannons while his flying owls cracked open its hull. Jim Kestrel announced that he was going to go aboard one of the flying owls to try to rescue Klarisia. Anh volunteered to come too, while Jin Bei snuck aboard to help as well. Together, they managed to defeat Sullivan and a Koan admiral while rescuing Klarisia, all before the Dreadnaught flooded.
The battle marked the first time in history that anyone had sunk a Koan Dreadnaught, and also marked Anh as an enemy of the Koan Empire.

Joining the Corsairs

After the fall of the Koan Empire, King Nasser Graham formed the Corsairs to dispense the remainder of the Koan Armada. Anh was an easy choice for one of the original members of the Corsair order, given his penchant for seeking Koan dreadnaughts. Anh continued to fight the remnants of the Koan Empire until the last dreadnaguht fell. After that, Anh went his own way, believing his time in the Corsairs and fighting the empire was just another chapter in his long life.
However, fate brought him back into the Corsairs' fold when news of the Battle of the North Sea reachd him. The battle itself was of little interest to him, but he immediately recognized the ship they sailed as a Koan Dreadnaught. Having spent much of his career on the wrong side of such ships, Anh was fearful to see them fall into the wrong hands. So, he set off to search for these newly-minted heroes to see if they really did have the system’s best interests at heart.
He rendezvoused with the group on Nimbus. Itthis and Wukong were clumsily trying to affix their latest acquisition, a large stone bust of a Homyn woman, to the front of their ship. Anh immediately realized that the system was in little danger of facing the return of the tyrannical dreadnaughts with these two novitiate shipwrights, but nevertheless found them to be a good sort and offered to lend his expertise as an engineer and shipwright. After taking Anh on an initiation mission to find some rare ores—during which time they briefly reunited with the Moku high-priest, Tempi—Itthis and Wukong invited Anh to join the crew.
The group contacted Jin Bei for suggestions as to where to go next. Jin Bei asked Anh to look over the Corsairs and try to help them in their quest to find the Orphan Sphere and defeat the White Lion Armada.

The Koan Engagement

Anh assisted the Corsairs in mending the rift betweeen the Koan and Homyn people by helping escort Princess Halle to her wedding with Sir Reglas. He helped Wukong catch a Blue Frog assassin and aided a poisoned librarian who was in possession of the "Blue Frog Manifesto", which outlined the Blue Frogs' history and plans--albeit written in a dead Vandal language. Anh took the book to his old friend, Vandal, who now ran a market in the capitol city. Vandal didn't know how to read the book, but recognized the language as belonging to the Tribe of the Crow.
While helping fellow Scalfi, Sir Arno, win his election, Anh and the rest of the crew subdued a hostile mallodile named Queen Joule on behalf of Sir Arno's sponsor, The Adis Power Company. Upon bringing the beast to the Adis fair, Anh grew suspicious of their claims to harness the power of tides to create energy. Of course, it later turned out that the Adis power company was using baby mallodiles as a source of power. Anh distracted the Adis company's mercenary security guards, the Surge Breakers, by making up stories about electically powered artifact weapons and telling them to their captain Dio. However, Anh's distractions proved too little, as Wukong and Itthis were attacked by Dio and other members of the Surge Breakers. As all seemed lost, Anh appeared on the battlefield, having hijacked one of the Surge Breakers' lightning bug mechs. After The Adis Power company was outed for using mallodiles, Anh lectured the guests of the Adis Fair about the dangers of junk science and encouraged them to vote for Arno. Arno managed to narrowly win an election, while Anh won the party Arno as a patron.
At Flavian's fundraiser, Anh joined the other guests at dinner while the others snuck around the restricted areas of the mansion. Anh leanred from one of Sir Reglas's opponents, Sir Cassia, that her squire Quirinus had recently gone missing. Anh set off in search of the squire and snuck into Flavians' back rooms with the help of a hungry guest by overflowing the serving staff with meal requests, leaving the path to the wine cellar and kitchen open. There, with Itthis's help to solve a puzzle, Anh found Flavian's secret baseemnt holding a Blue Frog base. After luring guards to his location and knocking them out, Anh rescued Quirinus and Flavian's mutated pet dog, Brutus, who had been mistreated and locked in a cage. Anh decided to take Brutus with him aboard the Nomad.
When recruitnig the crew's new lookout, Appoline, from the White Lion Armada, the party entered a protracted battle with a White Lion ship. To Anh's horror, the White Lion Armada was using his own Flying Owls to assist in their combat abilities. When they finally made it to the White Lion Headquarters, Anh sabotaged Captain Jastes' operations by causing his mechs to overheat and fabricating a map of the tunnels beneath the artificers' mansion to divide his troops into a wild goose chase. When the crew finally freed Appoline, she revealed that the Thunder Cannon that the town was working to revive was actually originally conceived of as an ultralight transportation system that could ferry people and goods across the spheres quickly. Anh was no stranger to good-intentioned inventions falling into evil hands, and decided the safer course of action was to destroy the Thunder Cannon's schema so it could not be used for nefarious purposes in the future. During their escape, Anh crafted a thermite arrow to burn a white lion ship pursuing the Nomad.
While infiltrating the Blue Frogs' underwater headquarters, Anh befriended a Koan artificer named Cid Graysmog who had been press-ganged into helping the Blue Frogs. Anh saw a kindred spirit in Cid, although the artificer intiially seemed a littel too comfortable helping the Empire. Anh used Cid's pet eel to build a matryoshka series of mechs that would help the party clear the Blue Frogs' headquarters. It was a great help until it met an impassible obstacle--stairs. Anh later saved Cid Graysmog from being poisoned after the Blue Frogs discovered his treachery, earning the party the defected engineer as a patron. When escaping the Blue Frogs' headquarters, Anh landed the final blow to destroy their submarine by ejecting the eel from the mech and detonating it--adding submarines to the list of Koan war machines he had sunk.

Death

Anh met his tragic end on Alteri Island in an attempt to secure the alliance of Sir Reglas's old friend, Sir Latro. Sir Latro lured the party onto the island under the guise of a bachelor party to unwittingly enlist their aid in helping fend off a coup from his squire. The party got blackout drunk during the party while Anh stood awkwardly in the corner. While saving Wukong from jumping off the balcony Anh fell on his back and got stuck there until a drunken Thurmacc found him and used him to play a game of spin the bottle. Anh awoke with the others with no memory of the party and a bad case of contracting the Alteri virus.
As the party tank, Anh saw some of the most dramatic mutations from his infection with the virus--at one point having his lungs replaced with gills, and at others becoming a powerful combatant with a saliva cannon and retractable claws. He also freed a group of mind controlled Brutes from control of the Eugenists, starting the Brute Liberation Front. However, Anh's mutations and army of brutes fell short in Latro's castle when the party encoutnered a mutated leviathan, the Morphing Prawn. In an effort to draw the prawn off the party Anh got seperated from the group. He managed to recruit a group of Latro's guards to help fight the Leviathan while he swam around back to make a suicide run to power the final generator they needed to reactivate the elevator.
Anh found the generator more guarded than he expected, and his wounds attracted three umbersharks to his location. He managed to clear a path for Jaime to sneak through and power the generator, but lost his own life to the umber sharks in the process. In Anh's final moments, he rememberd telling the story of Skoga the Patient to Boh. At first the story seemed to be about the virtue and dangers of inaction, but Anh revealed that Skoga was a mountain on Tyrant, and the moral of the story was that nothing persists forever.
After the group returned from Alteri Island, Mara performed a ceremony to send the spirit of Anh's Shield to the Deep so he could use it in the afterlife. Anh left each member of the crew with a gift that he had crafted before his passing. Itthis got an amulet that made a sound in The Dream World that could lead him back to his body, Jaime a ceremonial comb, Wukong a captain's hat with a long purple Auk feather sticking out of it, and Appoline an auto-knife. The Party returned to Balphuran to relay the bad news about Anh to Jin Bei. The leader of the Corsairs became very upset about the news, and it seemed to cause a rift between Jin Bei and Sir Reglas.
While Anh no longer stands among the living, the legacy of his long life lives on. Many people carry him in their memories, and as long as they do, Anh--like Skoga the Patient--will persist a little while longer.

Full Name: Anh Edonia
Race: Scalfi
Gender: Male
Background/Occupations: Shipwright, Engineer, Corsair
Current Status: Deceased
Number of Inventions Stolen: 2