Halle

Princess Halle is the Party's companion and the heir to the Homyn Kingdom. Her quest to find the Orphan Sphere is more personal than many in the Party, as the search for the Orphan Sphere is also a search for her father, the missing king Nasser Graham. The Party has brought Halle along to escort her to wed the koan knight, Sir Reglas, in a bid to keep the Koa in the alliance after Prince Lucas destroyed a Koan moon. While not particularly thrilled about her upcoming nuptials, she is determined to do what is necessary to continue her father's legacy, even if that means cutting her search for him short.
While not as adept a fighter as the Corsairs, Halle's adventerous spirit and training at the feet of both her father and Jin Bei have imparted some useful skills. Her talents with her bow, the Autumn Gale, bring a much needed ranged support in a mostly-melee focused Party. She's also a lightfoot in stealthy situations, owing to a childhood full of sneaking out of the royal palace.
Halle's upbringing around adoring subjects and servants often finds her overconfident in her abillities, and her efforts to boost morale on the ship by cooking and singing often backfire. Nevertheless, none can deny the princess's spirit and the Nomad's crew is happy to have her aboard as she completes her political mission.

Early Life

Halle grew up in the Homyn Royal palace in Lion City. The child of a Queen from a well-established royal family and the leader of a rebellion descending from a nomadic tribe, Halle took most after her father. While named after her mother, Queen Eleanor, Halle goes by her middle name to those who know her well. It is the one piece of her long list of names and titles that her father gave her, adopted from his friend and renowned scholar on the progenitors, Professor Halle.
Her older brother, Prince Lucas, commanded most of her mother's attention being the sickly heir to the throne, leaving Halle ample room to develop a mischevious and adventerous personality. Her father fostered these qualities by telling her of his adventuring days as well as teaching her how to shoot a bow and fletch arrows. She would often sneak out of the palace, accompanied by the royal family's pet Lion, Balabar, in search of adventures in Lion City.
In addition to her family, Halle grew up among a peer group of the Pride's other children. She often found herself a tag-along with her older brother and his entourage, Oliver and Thane Kestrel. She also grew close with her cousin, Mara, before she left to lands unknown with her mother. Halle also looked forward to visits from Jorund Brighthoof's son, Garund, who also became her first crush. She also looked up to Jin Bei as an uncle of sorts, who often visited the castle to regale her with his adventures as a corsair and teach her the art or swordplay.
The royal succession saw an unexpected shake up when Prince Lucas announced his intention to become a corsair. Since the Homyn do not allow corsairs to inherit titles, Halle found herself in the spotlight of Homyn politics as the likely heir to the throne. As she entered her teenage years, Queen Eleanor Arkades set about the difficult task of grooming her rebellious daughter for rule. For better or worse, the indulgences her father permitted in her childhood behavior had taken root too strongly to mold her temperament to suit a queen.
But where personality would not bend performance would suffice. Halle learned to adopt her mothers stoic poise when the need suited, and few guests of the palace would recognize that the demure "Princess Eleanor" had not been raised for court since birth. While knowing how to keep her composure among society's upper crust has proven a useful skill, Halle nevertheless finds donning that particular mask exhausting.

A Fractured Family

Halle's life changed forever on the day Prince Lucas joined the Corsairs. Their father, Nasser Graham, disappeared without warning, leaving behind an uncertain future for Halle's family and the alliance as a whole. Few took the loss harder than Halle, who felt confused and betrayed by the sudden absence of the person she loved the most.
Her losses compounded when Mong Bal left the Chimera Alliance, and Jin Bei took her brother--along with Oliver and Thane Kestrel--on a mission to that far-away planet to bring them back into the fold. Sudddenly, the royal palace became a much lonelier place.
When her brother finally returned, Halle found no cause for celebration. A rift had formed between Prince Lucas and Jin Bei, with the former setting out to create the White Lion Armada and displace the corsairs. Halle knew enough about her father's ideals to recognize that her brother's actions flew in th face of everything her father tried to accomplish. While she still loves Prince Lucas, she knew that she could not take his side in the conflict. So, she began training with Jin Bei in hopes of taking up the mantle to search for her father and stop her brother from destroying what her father had built. Halle knew she had made the right decision when word came to the palace that Prince Lucas destroyed the koan moon, Aspidie, in his conflict with the Corsairs over a map her father had secretly commissioned called the Progenitor Atlas. A conflict that placed Jin Bei fighting for his life in a comatose state.

An Unexpected Proposal

The destruction of Aspidie cast the royal family and Chimera Alliance as a whole in jeaopardy. The destruction of the Koan moon, Aspidie, at the hands of the White Lion Armada rocked the Koan Republic. Some thought that they would declare independence from the Alliance, or worse, war. Those rumors reached a fever pitch when her father's friend, the Koan Knight Sir Reglas came to Halle's nineteenth birthday with an important announcement.
Much to everyone's surprise, Sir Reglas asked for Halle's hand in marriage. While their vastly different physiologies and ages ruled out any romantic connection, none could deny the powerful symbol that a union between the heir to the Homyn throne and the most popular Koan knight would send. Moving Halle to Koan territory would also assuage the Koan people that further destruction of their spheres at the hands of her brother or the Homyn people would remain unlikely.
Faced with the weight of such momentous political consequences, Halle accepted Reglas's proposal. Or at least Princess Eleaonor did.

The Great Escape

Shortly after Halle's engagement, Halle learned that Sena, the phantasm of Io, had been captured by a daemon beneath Lion City during the corsair exam. She knew that Sena had provided treatment for Prince Lucas's ailments in The Dream World. She reasoned that if she saved them, Sena might be willing to disclose to her the Progenitor Atlas's location. With her father missing and Jin Bei comatose, she didn't see any option but take matters into her own hands.
So, Halle donned a reversible White Lion cloak to blend in with her brothers ranks, stole a prototype Jaunt Drive, grabbed her bow, and set off into the ruins deep below Lion City. Deep within the cavernous ruins, Halle encountered the Party. Little did she know, they already had the Progenitor Atlas in thier possession. But they kept mum on those details, uncertain as to whether they could trust the princess.
After a few encounters with the guilt daemon and saving Sena, the Party and Halle opened up to each other about what they knew. Halle led them to an ancient observatory located near the center of Source where a machine could be found that would decipher the atlas. It revealed the locations of three progenitor ruins scattered across the system; one on Io's moon Nimbus; one on Jotun; and one on Mong Bal. For the first time in ages, Halle had a clue to her father's whereabouts.

Adventures with the Corsairs

Halle returned to the surface to more good news that Jin Bei had recovered. He asked the Party--now, newly-minted Corsairs, to take her with them. He reasoned it would be a good idea to have somoene along whom Prince Lucas would hesitate to attack and that Halle's knowledge about her father could prove useful on the journey.
She was dismayed to learn that Jin Bei asked the corsairs to--eventually--escort her to her wedding. While Jin Bei didn't seem to pleased about the arrangements Reglas made during his absence, he nevertheless understood the importance of keeping the Alliance intact while they searched for its founder.
Halle got along well with her new crew, despite finding difficulty on the sea. She found herself romantically interested in Simon, owing perhaps to their shared upbringings among Homyn nobility and heroic ideals. Being a noble sort and no stranger to arranged marriages, Simon asked Halle if she really wanted to go marry Sir Reglas. She explained that while she didn't like the idea of the marriage, she felt it was her responsibility to keep the Alliance together in the wake of her father's disappearence and brother's betrayal. Although, she wouldn't mind at all if the Party took a circuitous route to getting her to the Koan homeworld.
As for the non-Homyn members of the crew, Halle's rapport found mixed results. She grew fascinated with the mysterious Jaime, who often displays little interest in her. Her interactions with Scalfi crew members, Helix and Anh, often betrayed the prejudices of a Homyn whose family hailed from a moon contested between the Scalfi and the Homyn. Although those prejudices usually manifest in skittish and over-polite behavior around those crew members rather than hateful treatment or invectives.
During the Corsairs' adventures on Nimbus, Halle reunited with her uncle Alyn Arkades and her cousin, Mara. When pirates captures Simon, Halle snuck aboard their ship and followed them to their camp, using her Jaunt Drive to free him.
On Mons Mirror when recruiting the musician, Ezra, Halle found herself trapped with the rest of the corsairs in an alternate reality where a bard used a powerful song to rewrite history. Halle's poor singing abilities actually came in handy, as she was able to use her perfomance to disrupt the musicians holding that reality in place.
On Jotun, Halle reunited with her childhood friend, Garund. The reunion was a little bit awkward because Garund had taken a (actually, more than one) wife and had a child. But she had grown up since her days as a latchkey kid in the royal palace, and she was happy that her friend had found happiness.
Halle helped the Party fight Geit draugr in the Habrok Crypts, knocking one of the undead generals off the crypt using her Autumn Gale. She also guarded the Nomad during the climactic encounter in the Battle of the North Sea, putting an end to her old friend, Thane Kestrel's, designs on taking over Jotun.

The Koan Engagement

After leaving Jotun, it seemed Halle's halcyon days of adventure would be coming to an end. Simon remained on the Geit homeworld to dispense the remainder of the White Lion Armada, while the rest of the Party decided it was time to finally visit the Koa.
She arrived to find that the political situation on the planet a bit more complicated than she thought. A growing movement had taken root in the Koan populace advocating separation from the alliance. Since the Koa adhere to a republican form of government, the rumblings of the masses had to be taken seriously.
Halle accompanied the Party to a party held by Reglas's electoral opponent, Flavian, to investigate his connections to the Koan Empire. Together, they uncovered a plot linking Flavian to an organization known as the Blue Frogs, a sect of imperial secret police that lingered in the shadows of Koan society, whose goals were to bring back the Koan Empire. It seemed the Blue Frogs were responsible for stoking anti-alliance sentiment among the Koan people.
The Party also recovered an ancient book called the Blue Frog Manifesto. Halle was horrified to discover a picture of a Koan knight marrying a Homyn princess! It seemed there was more to this marriage than previously believed, but with so much already riding on her nuptials, it was too late to back out now. While no stranger to being a pawn to greater political forces, Halle was growing increasingly worried about who was moving the pieces.