The Raraan Ge
In the South West, the line between aristocrat and pirate have always been thin. Power lies in naval dominance and control of trade routes, and in such dangerous waters the ships of rich men travel armed. The Raraan Ge are a shining example of this, blending post-Shogunate hints of honour codes with the fashion sense of a bird of paradise and a kleptocratic approach to the possessions of anyone who cannot defend themselves against their sharp-bowed cutters and junks.
Rather than one unified group, the Raraan Ge are instead a culture who can trace their roots back one of the lesser Dragonblooded empires who were destroyed by the Blue Monkey Shogunate. When their masters fell, the lesser lords and sworn warriors kept to their own lands and paid dues to the Blue Monkey Shogunate. As the Realm encircled that rival, the Raraan Ge drifted away from their control, never formally declaring independence but no longer paying their taxes or providing men to the bloody wars against the Third Scarlet.
Though the families are fierce rivals, they recognise their shared kinship and venerate the honour codes that set them apart from other men. Raraan Ge in itself is a bastardised version of 'Children of the Dragon' in a far Southwestern Firetongue dialect, and Terrestrial blood runs in many of the lesser lords of the South West. No small number of pirate-lord families will have a Terrestrial child every few generations, though with the degradation of the breeding lines and the hemorrhage of the young to the Realm this rate has fallen over the past few centuries.
Before House Sinasana seized Saata, the Raraan Ge ruled the crime-ridden island - and many of the surrounding coastlines, too. The last Despot of Saata was one of these extravagant pirate-lords. It was his ill-advised raids that drew the attention of the Imperial Navy and led the Fourth Scarlet to offer a band of disparate outcastes Cadet House status and permission to conquer the island in the name of the Throne.
If the pirate-lords had been unified, they could have defeated the newly formed House Sinasana, but it is the eternal curse of Raraan Ge that they are always at each other's throats. Instead, the other lords were glad to see the death of the despot. Like gulls they picked over the Despot's holdings and flocked around the new regime, seeking to ingratiate themselves to the upstarts.
Culture
In appearance, the families wear their Southwestern blood proudly. They commonly are flat-faced, with dark skin and tightly coiled curly hair. Their Terrestrial heritage means that elementally-aligned hair and eye colours are not-uncommon, and gives them a certain angularity of their features. When a child is born with aspect markings, it is a great blessing and a lord will often throw grand parties for a week.
Each family has its own range of elaborate dragon tattoos, and the thaumaturges and wonder-makers of the pirate-lords will often invest these markers with a measure of power. The most powerful of these tattoos are made from powdered jade dust and the essence of captured elementals. These grant magical powers that the pirate-lords who wear them claim comes from their Terrestrial heritage - and perhaps there is some basis in these tales, for they will not work for men who do not have the blood of dragons in their veins.
Many of the Raraan Ge follow a bastardised version of the Immaculate Faith. They venerate the Immaculate Dragons as the first of the Dragonblooded, and the children of the Dragons themselves. The Immaculate Dragons are treated as intercessory ancestor-spirits, who can plead one's case with the greatest of the gods and through whose authority one may bargain with lesser spirits. In the eyes of visitors from the Realm, they are clearly lapsed and border on heresy for their tendency towards ancestor worship and willingness to barter with the Dead, but at the edge of the world the Order's reach exceeds its grasp and attempts to reform the locals have had little success.
Notable Families
Each lord of the Raraan Ge is nominally independent, though many are bound together by complex webs of alliances and marriages - and split apart by vendettas and old grudges.
Baltoo of Saata
A prosperous family based out of Saata, the Baltoo family are heavily invested in the opiate trade to the far South West, taking precious gemstones and feathers in exchange. They have two merchant fleets and have lost some respect among their fellows for their lack of martial prowess. However, the true shame of the family lies in the second daughter of the current family head. Ba-le was blessed by the Dragons and would have been the next head of the Baltoo, but she fell for Sinasana Colira, the third eldest grandson of the head of House Sinasana. The two of them eloped, and she has been adopted by the Sinasana. Her father and mother cannot forgive this insult or their daughter's treachery, and now secretly plot against the lords of Saata.
Hinya of Zenmetsu
Zenmetsu is a province on the northern edge of Shuu Mua, just east of the cursed Met Saana marshes, and a tributary of House Sinasana. As a result, most of the land is set aside to growing rice and samphire to feed Saata. The Hinya family dislike such activity as unworthy of them or their kin, and so the work is mostly done by slaves taken from dinosaur-hunting tribes from the Deep South. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this means that Zenmetsu has a chronic problem with slave revolts and sizable numbers have fled into the marshes or up into the highlands. This has made the Hinya very unpopular with their neighbours, and some of them are considering whether they could conquer them - and fund the rebels to make that more likely.
Masaati of Saata
The remnants of the kin of the last Despot of Saata, the Masaati have mostly gotten over any grudge they might have got. Unfortunately for their prosperous elders, the Lintha have gotten the ears of some of the young of the family and fill their minds with tales of the power that should be theirs. The Lintha family is only doing this so they have a backdoor to the prosperous markets of Saata, but the young Masaati are about to ruin everything. They're planning a bloody coup in their family - and this has no chance of success. When the Lintha discover this, they're liable to panic because the young hotheads are about to wreck years of effort.
Zamar of Zamar
Zamar is a tiny, sargasso-choked volcanic island around a hundred kilometres from Saata. Its mineral resources are negligible, the population is tiny, and its fleets are comprised of a grand total of two elderly cutters that are mostly used for fishing. The Zamar family have historically been a non-entity. That's about to change. At Calibration twelve years ago, there was an eruption of the volcano. Fifteen months later, the countess gave birth to triplets with bright orange eyes and embers in their hair. The first of the children has just exalted as a Fire Aspect. If there are really three young Fire Aspects in Zamar - with abnormally strong breeding to boot - then the island has just become a regional superpower.
Clearly, Keris was meant to be a pirate in this life, and was prevented from growing up as a cabin girl only by a minor Lethe error that led to her being born approximately two thousand miles away from the nearest ocean.
