Zephry Kreel needs to get the hell out of Broken Keel, preferably yesterday. Partly because he's sick of the grimy shanty, partly because he always been possessed of a wanderlust, but mostly because he just stole back his musket from the local pawnbroker - thanks to his trusty skeleton key - and blew the local gang leader Old Ratface Harling's head off. Zephry is not planning to return to Broken Keel in the forseeable future...
Admittedly planning has never been Zephry's strong suit, but he has noted the location of Harling's vessel and has already extended casual invitations to a few likely looking souls. Something about finding the Lost City of El Antiguo, and getting out of this reeking tumour of a town.
How did young Zephry end up atop the Sea B*!%@ Inn, running for his life while Harling's furious associates race towards him from the square below? Well the sharpshooter has daddy issues, specifically dead daddy issues. Ratfaced Harling was part of Zacharius Kreel's crew upon the Red Reign, one of the most feared pirate ships ever to set sail.
Now nobody would claim Zacharius Kreel was the world's best father, but he did provide for his bastard son, born to a tavern keepers daughter in Downshore. Zephry met him three times, and worshipped the muscular pirate with his tales of adventure and daring do. He dreamed of joining his father on the Red Reign, but grew in his mother's image, slender and nimble, and could not see how he could stand side to side with the giants of his father's crew.
Then he saw a weedy little man calmly raise a stick, point and blow a hole in an archery target from a hundred feet away. He did more damage than the strongest man straining at a bow, and he looked no stronger than Zephry! Needless to say the mysterious stranger found he had acquired a twelve year old shadow who would not take no for an answer, and eventually simply gave up and taught the lad the art of the Musket.
Master Kardon, the gun totting mercenary, served Downshore's Council for five years, teaching Zephry to shoot and maintain his battered old spare musket. Eventually, to Zephry's disgust, he caught his mother and Master Kardon together. It was only the boys fury that made his mother blurt out the news of his father's death two years earlier at the hands of his own crew.
Zephry left that night, taking the gold his father had left him on his last visit and setting out to avenge him. In his months of travelling since he has learned that the Red Reign's deeds have gone from piracy to slaughter. Her new Captain, the Wereshark Margan Drank, is carving out a name for himself as a terror of the seas and literally turning his crew into monsters.
But Zephry Kreel has a pair of silver bullets with Margan's name on them and he's already started getting his revenge! While loosing his shirt gambling, and being forced to pawn his beloved musket, Bethany, to pay his debts he learned that the local gang leader was a former crewman upon the Red Reign, and that he had already beaten two boys to death for refusing to join him. In the gunslinger's eyes that made him a dead man walking, and after a quick nocturnal visit to the pawnbrokers, Bethany made him a dead man sprawling with a hole where his face used to be.
