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Name: Renny (Renny Doyle, more formally Ranait Nic Gearoid)

Casting: Michelle Williams (actress not singer)

Element: Air

Logs:

Ranait (more usually called "Renny") is 5'8", 23 years old, with shoulder-length blonde hair and bright green eyes. She is exuberant, friendly, and outgoing, taking a swashbuckling attitude into all aspects of life. She is steadfastly loyal to her friends.

Renny sings, and writes songs, too. While she is quite capable of writing classic ballads, she has a knack for writing humorous ditties, and she's fearless deploying it to poke fun at the foibles of important people. Indeed, she's fought several duels with disgruntled targets of her satires.

She is an extrovert, but she is a great listener. She has an uncanny way of listening, listening, and listening, and picking out the important bits that the speaker doesn't realize even go together, or the little swing in the rhythm of a tune that makes it really sing.

She is also something of an improviser, good at figuring how to get by with the resources available to her. She is endlessly curious about the world. And she is fairly oblivious to political maneuverings.

These days her vessel is the dirigible John D. Lees. She is usually armed with sabre and flintlock pistol.

History:

Renny was born in 1797, in a small fishing outport on Talamh an Éisc's Irish Coast. When she was fifteen, her older brothers went away across the ocean to war, and she had to help her father out with the fishing. A quick study, she was soon working as a sailor, helping evacuate people from Ireland when it was clear Napoleon would conquer it (~1816). When the United New England Colonies started issuing letters of marque for French trade with the New World, Renny and her brothers gladly accepted one. They started with just a fishing punt, but through pluck and natural skill they repeatedly managed to capture larger ships.

After a couple years of this, Renny struck on the idea of using a balloon to help observe possible prey -- the ocean is wide, and while they stuck to the surface of it, their ability to shut down French traffic was limited. She had barely managed to get a balloon aloft when a French dirigible decided she needed to be captured. Apparently they didn't think one girl could take out their entire crew. That's how she ended up with her very own dirigible, one of only two flying out of Talamh an Éisc.

Since then things have just gotten bigger and crazier. Twice now the French have sent naval / aero task forces to Talamh an Éisc, trying to wipe out the privateers. And twice Renny led the privateers to utterly defeat those task forces, shining both with her tactics and ferocious hand-to-hand fighting. She has been so successful, in fact, that of late traffic has slowed up in the waters she usually patrols, and she has had to fly further afield to find French ships to prey on.

Renny Visual Notions

Renny's dialect of English (more or less)

Renny Songs

Pregame Questions

Arref asked, "Does Renny speak French?": Renny's native tongue is English, she is fairly fluent in Irish, and can get by in French.
Kris asked, "How do Renny's brothers feel about being eclipsed by the shadow of their sister the notorious privateer?": The quick answer is at least a couple of them are kind of disgruntled. On the flip side, she's captured enough ships to seriously distort the economy of Talamh an Éisc. All the family, all the crew are doing quite well for themselves from the prize money. (I don't see Renny particularly caring about money... as long as there's enough to keep the John D. Lees and the ships in good shape.)
Jason asked, "In many ways, corsairs are little more than sanctioned pirates - preying on merchants and unarmed ships. What quarter - if any - do you give to those you capture?": Once the fighting is over and Renny's crew is safe, she's a big softie, and would definitely not significantly mistreat prisoners. My thought is she probably tends to strand them along the Labrador coast of New France, where it's easy enough to find unoccupied land to drop them on.

Possibly the more interesting question is what does she do with French fishermen? It's almost a certainty that some of them fish the Gulf of Labrador or Grand Banks, and I'm guessing the Letters of Marque would support going after them. And I'm thinking Renny would NOT approve of that, fishing is a way of life to her people. She's organized the Talamh an Éisc privateers to agree to leave French fishermen alone, and if privateers from elsewhere try to hassle them she would politely but firmly stop them.
Keith followed that up with, "All right then; but if the French caught on to this and used the fishermen to move cargo?": I think it's safe to assume that the French absolutely do smuggle intelligence operatives and small cargo using the fishing boats. I don't imagine Renny much cares. She doesn't hate the French. She just doesn't want to see Napoleon conquering her home, and she's happy (excited, even) to make a tidy profit limiting his influence in the new world.

I suppose if they organized large fleets of "fishing" vessels that were obviously meeting with French ships and transporting a lot of people / goods, she might take umbrage. Even then, she'd be more likely to try to figure out how to shut down the overall operation rather than targeting the fishing boats.
Sol asked himself, "What bits of culture is Renny likely to be familiar with?": Stuff she knows for sure: King James Bible. Shakespeare. Many of the Child Ballads. (Not that she'd call them that, James Child has not yet been born.)

Stuff she might plausibly know: Homer (in English). Le Morte d'Arthur. Paradise Lost. Don Quixote (in English). Latest well-known books likely Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Though it doesn't feel right to me for her to have read all of those. I'd like her to know some Greek mythology, but I'm not sure what the transmission vector would have been.

(Renny art by Wendi Strang-Frost)