The Ballad of Tom Cutter

There was one thing that always bothered Tom about his own origin story, and that was the fact that it didn't quite fit. All of the best pirate stories started with a moonless night, as a storm raged out at sea, while the nobles and small towns folk huddled by their fires in their homes and drab inns when all at once the Devil's fleet breaches the shore and after pillaging the entire town to their black heart's content, a young lad stows away on their ship as they sail off, to lead his life of adventure. Pirates of the golden age were forged in war and hardship and violence and decadence. Yet Tom's story had had no such bold beginning. His aeronautical adventures had begun at ten years old, at Sunday luncheon.

At the time, his name was Angelus. Angelus Alexi Hohenzollern, son of Ariadne Potemkin and Joseph Hohenzollern was a child of wealth. His mother was descended from a very long line of Russian nobility and prestige, even going so far as to claim that her father had been born of Catherine the Great herself during one of her and Grigory Potemkin's passionate affairs. His father was the son of a nephew of Frederick the Great himself, a claim that was far more easily traced. Angelus had lived the early part of his life in absolute luxury. Having migrated to britain well before the currently explosive war between Britain and Prussia, as well has his upstanding lineage, his family had managed to integrate fairly well with British society. At the age of five, Angelus was running around his parents stately manner in the Yorkshire Moors with the other children, playing games and laughing all day.

His parents made sure that he never forgot his heritage. He was schooled in both Russian and Prussian as well as English, and was raised as an Eastern Orthodox Christian at his mother's request. His father made sure that he learned how to play the flute, and his mother insisted that he learn how to play the violin, though over the years it became obvious that his fingers favoured the strings over the metallic keys of the Prussian silver flute.

Angelus was a well educated child, having tutors brought in to teach him reading, writing and arithmetic, as well as history, philosophy, theology and latin. He was a diligent student, absorbing as much as his tutors could give him, his brain seemed endlessly thirsty for more and more information. Many of his teachers felt that they had before him in this five year old boy a prodigy. The next Socrates, the next Caeser, the next Nelson.

What Angelus loved more than anything else, however, was riding around in his family's airship. His father, being the enterprising Prussian that he was, had amassed a spectacular personal fortune through his command of the steel industry across europe, and had begun dabbling in commercial sale of airships to the great and good of european society. The Prussian military had been using airships for some time before Joseph began drafting up patents on personal vessels. At first they had been more like glorified hot air balloons, but over time, and with considerable investment, the Hohenzollern Airship Company had really begun to thrive. He sold smaller pleasure vessels, as well as more respectable airships, but the absolute pinnacle of his invention was the Air Yacht, of which he had one made for himself.

The craft was an absolute work of art. It was three times the size of the average airship, serving as a floating mansion essentially. It could hold a staff of over 50 people, as well as entertaining at least twice that number. It's upper deck was flat and well laid out so as to offer excellent seating and views from all sides, and the interior was established like an other stately home, with a primary entertaining dining room, a ballroom for more extravagant events, parlours, boudoirs and living spaces for smaller more intimate gatherings. It was called "The Tzaroviche's Jewel" and Angelus relished every second that he could spend on her decks, suspended hundreds of feet above the ground.

On his eighth birthday, his father took him up in the "Jewel" to celebrate. All of the worthwhile families were there, and Angelus had spent a good deal of time playing explorer with the children in the ropes and rigging of the yacht. Joseph called out to his son and Angelus went to him diligently. Joseph dropped to his knees to put himself at level with his son. He instructed the boy to close his eyes and hold out his hands. He did so, and soon felt a soft piece of fabric in his hands. His father had given him a hat, a military style one, a commander's cap from the Prussian aeronautics academy. When Angelus had questioned the gift, his father had simply told him that a captain should always wear the proper attire before boarding his vessel. Very confused, Angelus turned around to see on the deck behind him, with his mother beaming next to it, was a dinghy.