Miss Fortune - The Bounty Hunter

Beauty and danger: There are few who can match Miss Fortune in either. One of Bilgewater's most infamous bounty hunters, she built her legend upon a swathe of bullet-riddled corpses and captured ne'er-do-wells. The booming echoes of her twin pistols in the port city's reeking wharfs and scavenger shanties are sure signs of another warrant from the Bounty Board being settled.

Like most who rise to notoriety in the twisting, salt-encrusted labyrinth of Bilgewater, Miss Fortune has no shortage of blood on her hands. Yet, it was not always this way, for she was once known as Sarah, the beloved daughter of a renowned gun-dame who lived peacefully at her isolated island workshop. Young Sarah helped her mother in the forge, filing wheel locks, calibrating trigger pulls, or casting custom pistol shot. Her mother's skill in crafting firearms was legendary, and her bespoke handguns were to be found in the collections of many a wealthy noble. But ofttimes, they were desired by those with more meager means and darker hearts.

One who desired such a weapon was an up-and-coming reaver of Bilgewater called Gangplank. Cocksure and certain of his power, he demanded Sarah's mother fashion a pair of pistols the likes of which no other man possessed. A reluctant deal was struck, and a year later to the day, Gangplank returned for his weapons. He had donned a red scarf face-mask and had no intention of paying for the guns – he was there to take them by force.

The pistols Sarah's mother had crafted were masterpieces, twin hand cannons of pinpoint lethality and exquisite beauty. Too fine for the likes of him, declared Sarah's mother, seeing the brutish pirate that Gangplank had become. Enraged, Gangplank seized the pistols and gunned her down with her own creations before turning them on her husband and Sarah herself. Then, for spite's sake, he set the workshop ablaze and smashed both pistols on the ground, declaring that if they were too good for the likes of him, then no one would ever bear a weapon with her mark upon them. By killing her and destroying her weapons, her legacy would be wiped from living memory.

Sarah awoke to agony, straw-colored hair stained red with her mother's blood and bullets lodged on either side of her heart. She crawled from the burning ruins of her home with the broken remains of the two pistols clutched to her bleeding chest. Her body healed, but a part of her mind remained trapped in her mother's burning workshop, and no amount of soap could wash the vivid red from Sarah's hair – or at least, so the story is told.

Waking nightmares and night terrors would forever torment her, but Sarah endured them with an all-consuming obsession with vengeance. She rebuilt her mother's pistols and learned all she could of the red-masked reaver during his rise to power, preparing for the day when she would be ready to slay him.

Taking ship to Bilgewater, Sarah killed her first man within minutes of setting foot on the crooked timbers of the quayside, a drunken pirate with a gallon of Myron's Dark in his gut and a bounty on his head. Sarah shot him in his stupor and dragged his corpse to the Bounty Board, before tearing off a dozen more warrants.

Within a week, every one of them was settled, and those criminals who'd had the misfortune to be hunted by Sarah were either dead or in chains. She quickly earned a fearsome reputation in the taverns and gambling dens of Bilgewater, becoming Miss Fortune to inspire fear in those she hunted and to mask her true intent with flamboyant exploits. Gangplank would never see her coming; she would be just another bounty hunter among many in the crowded streets of Bilgewater.

In the years that followed, tales of Miss Fortune spread far and wide, each more fanciful than the last. She captured the Syren from a captain who learned the hard way what it meant to slip a hand where it wasn't wanted, drowned the master of the Silk-Knife Corsairs in a barrel of her own rum, and dragged the insane Doxy-Ripper from his lair in the belly of a half-dismembered leviathan in the slaughter docks.

Gangplank was still too powerful to confront openly, so Miss Fortune spent the years wisely, surrounding herself with a small but loyal cadre of allies and lovers she would eventually use to lay her demons to rest. But just killing Gangplank would never be enough for Miss Fortune. Only his abject humiliation and the burning to ash of all he cared for would satisfy the bloody-haired bounty hunter.

And that day has come at last.

Miss Fortune has risked everything to make her opening move against Gangplank. Plots within plots have seen the Dead Pool blown to flaming wreckage at the quayside and the self-professed King of Bilgewater overthrown. Best of all, everyone in Bilgewater saw him fall.

Now, with Gangplank deposed, every reaver captain and ganglord in the port city is vying to take his position.

The battle for Bilgewater has begun.

"The bigger the risk, the bigger the bounty."