Captain Jenny Harker

A merchant captain and owner of the Second Best, Captain Harker has been sailing the seas for the better part of twenty years. Coming to life at sea after her family on land proved disappointing, Harker first made her bones as a deckhand along the coast of Motageem, when she braved a tempest to make repairs to the exterior of the ship she served on. For a few years she performed duties on half a dozen merchant vessels up and down the coast, before one of Motageem's frequent skirmishes with Carlabie resulted in her impressment. Once in the navy, the structured life it provided suited her well and she rose swiftly through the ranks, eventually coming to serve as a captain of two-deck ship-of-the-line. Although the orderly nature of the military suited her, she disliked the professional distance she was required to keep with her men and hated to lose them in pointless skirmishes that occurred mainly to create pressure in trade negotiations.

After ten years of service, she retired from the Navy with a small pension and, along with her carefully husbanded prize money, fronted it to buy a captain's share in the merchant vessel The Second Best. Her proudest day was the first time she set sail with a crew all her own, second only to God on her ship. For the last four years she had been steadily buying larger shares of the ship to enable her to choose her voyages more carefully, until disaster struck. The Second Best was beset by pirates off the coast of Bridlane, and while she kept the ship and most of her crew, the vessel was badly damaged and her First Mate, Red Barton, was taken prison along with six of her crew. Desperate for aid and rebuffed by indifferent authorities, Squad 13 was hired in a last-ditch attempt to rescue her crew. The team performed well, saving Red Barton and slaying the pirates, but the rest of the crew were sadly slain in a terrible offering to She Who Dreams Beneath. Currently she has set up an office in the dry docks and is hard at work repairing The Second Best.