Jim Kestrel

Jim Kestrel is an oft-forgotten member of the Pride who overthrew the Undying Empress. Before taking up with Nasser Graham and his motley crew of rebels, Jim made his reputation as a legendary smuggler. While his name has largely faded from the history books, he also briefly worked with Anh Edonia to sink the first Koan Dreadnaught.

A Smuggler's Rebellion

In many ways, Jim Kestrel was the first to take up the call of rebellion against the Koan Empire. While he never rallied nations to his side the way Nasser Graham did, he proved remarkably effective at sabotaging the Empire's operations and generally making himself a pain in the "imp frogs' backsides."
As a smuggler, Jim helped nobility who nominall swore fealty to the empire, loosen the Koans' grip. This included the venerable Arkades family, a prestigious family from Autumn trying to stay afloat in the wake of the rival Harto family's imminent rise to the throne with the Empire's blessing and full support. There, Jim developed a close relationship with Count Arkades as well as his two children, Eleanor and Alyn.
He made his early fortune and career as the captain of The Dark Home, a smuggling ship vaunted for being able to transport anyone or anything across imperial borders. He built a loyal following of fellow crew members from various races across the spheres, including Heming, a surly Geit helmsman; Clara, a Homyn chef; Alcier, a vandal boarding specialist; and Silence, elderly Koan artificer who defected from the empire; and Wa, a Mong Bal look out.
His merry band of outlaws also cared for two war orphans, a Mong Bal boy named Jin Bei and a homyn girl with a strong connection to the Dream World named Klarisia. While reluctant to throw children into his battles, the reality of operating a smuggling ship in imperial territory meant their lives were often put in danger. Jim comrpomised by making them his cabin boy and cabin girl, and the two often competed for his admiration and affection. Despite Jin Bei's earnest efforts, Klarisia's unique talents often placed her as the favorite.
Jim truly caught the empire's ire when he hatched a plan to destroy an imperial dreadnaught. The first step of his plan was to capture a Scalfi engineer who had worked on the dreadnaght program. That task proved simple enough when The Dark Home took Anh Edonia's ship and press-ganged him into work.
The second phase of his plan involved the city of Home, a settlement burned to the ground by imperial bombardment. Jim gave Anh free reign of the city's ruins as well as his crew to collect materials and build weapons that could exploit the dreadnaught's weaknesses. After a month of preparations and a few adventures, Jim and Anh gained a respect for one another despite their less-than-friendly introduction. On the eve before their attack, Jim toasted "his wife and the woman he loved" leaving it ambiguous whether he was talking about one or two people.
Their plans were set in motion sooner than Jim expected when a fellow crewmate of Anh's captured Klarisia and took her aboard the dreadnaught as a hostage. While the rest of the crew deployed Anh's inventions to sink the ship, Jim, Jin Bei, and Anh himself boarded the dreadnaught to rescue Klarisia. At the end of the day, the dreadnaught sank beneath the waves, while Anh Edonia and The Dark Home crew realized they had changed history forever.

Joining the Pride

While Jim harried the Empire on Sera and the Rim, another rebellion was gaining traction on Jotun thanks to a myserious newcomer to the stage named Nasser Graham. Said to be a Rim-born Homyn from a Xahir tribe, Nasser somehow managed the impossible feat of rallying the Geit clans toward common cause against the Empire.
Nasser sought Jim's assistance to solve the problem of getting the Geit navy off Jotun and through the empire's most well-defended seas. Sailors to this day still speculate how Jim managed the miracle of smuggling over fifty flagships and hundreds of supporting craft across the entire system beneath imperial notice, where they converged on the Rim to liberate Mong Bal. While many theories abound, Jim remained tight-lipped on the subject until the day he died.
When the rebellion at its full-force gathered agaisnt the Koan Armada, Jim also helped Nasser Graham and the rest of the Pride sneak into the Imperial City on Source for a showdown with the Empress. Her unexpected defeat before the dawn of what was shaping to be the largest battle the spheres had ever seen likely saved countless lives and dealt a premature deathblow to the empire. It also indirectly led to the formation of the Corsairs, as that order was born from the new alliance government's problem of what to do about the remnants of the Koan Armada.

Death and Legacy

While most other members of the Pride came from the nobility of their various spheres, Jim joined and left a commoner. Nasser offered him a position among the newly-formed Corsairs, but Jim declined, finding the gift of interplanetary immunity a little too establishment-leaning for his rebellious inclinations. By all accounts, he nevertheless supported his friend Anh's admission to the order though.
Jim returned to the Rim to carry on doing what he did before rising against the empire, smuggling. Like all outlaws who strike out on the Blue and Black, his luck eventually ran out. After being caught by the Io East Orbit Company, their old grudges against the smuggler overcame his illustrious and heroic deeds and they quartered him after a show trial. Since the Io East Orbit Company is a member of the alliance, many have noted that had Jim accepted Nasser's invitation into the Corsairs his life would have been spared. But Jim was a man of stubborn principles, and in the end he died for them.
Jim left several legacies after his death. The first is Klarisia, who inherited The Dark Home. Forming the pirate confederacy, the Scourge of Io, she would have made her captain proud by making herself a pain in the Homyn Kingdom's backsides.
And then there are Jim's biological children, Thane and Oliver Kestrel. While his galivanting lifestyl left him a distant father to them, they nevertheless capitalized on his death and the outrage it caused to strike a blow at the Io East Orbit company's monopoly on the shipping trade. They pitched to the Chimera Alliance that they should not entrust their goods and livelihood to a company that formed and prospered under the Koan empire. Many listened, and with their father's fame and his smuggler's "black book" of connections and blackmail, they formed the Kestrel Brother's shipping company. While they have certainly disrupted the spheres' economy, the kestrel brothers are a far cry from their father's pirate folk-hero roots, as the profits they've made from their business enterprises were funneled to fund the White Lion Armada.