Pirate Homra au pls pls (p.s lots of mikoto stuff if possible). Hope you are well, love your blog!
As usual with Mikoto, I imagine being the captain of a ship would be something he came by completely by accident. Izumo worked on his uncle’s trade ship, called Homra, and inherited the captaincy when his uncle was injured and could no longer work, and Mikoto had been working alongside him. However, they soon discovered that the people on the ship just took a liking to Mikoto, and respected/obeyed him the most, so he ended up as captain (though Izumo was the brains of the operation as first mate).
I imagine Tatara’s role would be as a translator- he seems the kind of person who would be very good at learning languages, so having him around makes trading a lot easier. He works on the ship with the others, obviously, but he’s quite small and weak so he gets in the way a lot, so he’s mostly relegated to caring for the ship’s cats and things like cleaning.
The Homra members would be the ship hands- all wayward young men, often with either little family, little money, or both, who started working for Izumo as a way of earning a living- they were often considered roughians and struggled to find work elsewhere.
I think they’d get into piracy mostly by accident, through the means of seeing a slave trading ship. I think it would be Tatara’s idea to intervene- he wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of it, and he’d get quite upset, and Mikoto and Izumo would also be left with a sour taste in their mouth, so they’d come to the decision to hijack the ship and free the slaves on board. With a ship full of roughians and thugs who can hold their own very well in battle, they manage this quite successfully, and decide that they’re outside the law now, they might as well continue. (The only person who has an issue with this is Saruhiko, who, as much as he appreciates that the raid on the slave ship was well-intentioned, he doesn’t want to become a pirate full-time, so he quits to start working for the Royal Navy, under Reisi’s captainship, and quickly rises through the ranks on a vessel called the Sceptre 4).
As pirates, Homra mostly hijacks wealthy trade ships coming from the colonies with stolen wealth and slaves. This is how they found Anna- she was aboard a trade ship having been kidnapped to be sold into the sex trade for wealthy Europeans living in the colonies. They attempted to find her family back in her home country, but were unable to locate them, so Anna stayed with them on the ship, having taken a deep liking to the crew but especially Mikoto and Tatara, who had become like fathers to her. Besides, there was nowhere else for her to go- people seemed to think she was a witch and even the church didn’t want to take her in, so she became the ship’s good luck charm, and a sister or a daughter to everyone onboard. Mikoto is very protective of her.
As a captain, Mikoto is quite relaxed, and discipline isn’t strict because his crew all respect him and there’s no need for it, aside from the occasional telling off for drunken bar fights by Izumo. The only thing Mikoto is strict about is that the only ships they target are wealthy and can afford to lose the money, and they mostly use extra funds to fund hijacking operations on slave trade ships, and other human trafficking ships. They also don’t hurt traders on regular trade ships unless in self-defence, but slave traders are fair game.
Mikoto quickly tires of being a pirate though- as much as the work they’re doing is good, he’s the kind of person who would rather spend his time sleeping on a beach somewhere, so once Anna is in her early 20s, she takes over the captaincy of the ship, becoming the most famous and most feared of the few female pirate captains operating at the time, getting the nickname of the White Witch. She continues Mikoto’s work hijacking slave and human trade ships, and Mikoto and Tatara (mostly Tatara) open a bar in a port town, where the crew of Homra often stops between journeys.