The Corsair (The Bloodletters)

The Corsair was a renegade Archon of Time. They used various aliases, including Lily Evans (drawn from a fictional character) in female incarnations and Jon Gallant in male incarnations.

The Corsair did not grow up on the Homeworld but on the colony world of Cartago, with the Monk acting as their mentor. They later became a traveller in time and space, sailing their timeship the Silver Spray on the temporal shoals.

On Cartago
The Corsair was born on the colony planet of Cartago, which was run by their father, the Governor. Their original incarnation was a young boy. He had his bloodline's gift of night vision, (PROSE: The Bloodletters) as was common for members of House Arpexia. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

At the appropriate age, (PROSE: The Bloodletters) 8 years old, (TV: The Sound of Drums) tradition demanded that he go to the Homeworld proper, to undergo initiation (PROSE: The Bloodletters) by staring into the Untempered Schism. (TV: The Sound of Drums) Due to having pressing business to attend to on Cartago, the Governor was not able to accompany the frightened child on this trip, instead sending another Archon of Cartago, the Monk.

After facing the Tourbillon, the young Corsair briefly attended Cahlough Academy but quickly came to the conclusion that he did not "belong among those pampered, book-learned know-nothings". Against his father's wishes, he returned to Cartago, where the Monk reluctantly agreed to teach him "fencing, sailing and gunnery". Thus, he started taking fencing lessons with the Monk in the wild areas around the domed city of Cartago, using silverleaf palm tree as targets for practice.

On one occasion, having grown worried that the boy did not take his training seriously, the Monk decided to teach him "like the tiger", by inducing a moment of great panic at the same time as he showed a particular move so that the method would burn itself in the boy's mind. With little warning, the Monk thrust at the Corsair and actually stabbed him through the shoulder with his blade, being careful not to hit any bones or important arteries. Afterwards, the Monk took the boy to "a downclass bar full of hoydens and showboats" and took the opportunity to teach him how to clean a wound with alcohol, "pull it apart and ensure that the muscles were laying right", and finally to pack and bind it. They agreed to keep the incident a secret from the Governor.

On another day, they went fishing together in "an aquifer below the southern plate-steppes", which was technically illegal. The Corsair let himself be sold expensive multi-coloured bait by the Riverfolk, who claimed they'd be more visible in low-light condition; when he realised, the Monk laughed at his pupil's expense, given that the fish in the river were blind. As they fished, the Monk also told the Corsair about the war with the vampires, claiming that the Homeworld's star system had been artificially made a binary system during the War rather than naturally being one — which surprised the Corsair, who disbelieved it at first. (PROSE: The Bloodletters)

Career as a Renegade
Eventually, the Governor's child became a renegade, takin the name of "the Corsair".

On one occasion, in a male incarnation, the Corsair adopted the name of "Jon Gallant" and claimed to be "a simple farmer from far inland" with a habit of "coming into port once a year to sell [his] goods" and also to hear the tall tales of sailors, having a knack for knowing "the ring of truth". He was well-aware of the outrageousness of this persona, and was as surprised as anyone when it "got [him] hired as a ship’s captain with no experience and no references".

They'd become notorious as an adventurer by the time they met a young boy who would later become the President Kodachrome, who tugged at their sleeve and begged them for "adventure". The Corsair turned down the request, but retained a fondness for the boy.

In a female incarnation, the Corsair found herself in "a seedy spaceport near the end of the Humanian era". There, she was a costed by the Monk, whom she hadn't seen in fifty years. They were meeting out of order: the Monk had already met this incarnation of the Corsair, while this was her first time meeting him, and he'd last seen her two hundred years prior by his personal timeline. She asked him if he was still a renegade, and he tight-lippedly said that it was "all resolved" by his point in time, though the Corsair doubted it, noting he'd expressed similar hopes in his previous incarnation. In any case, the Monk informed her of the recent death of the President Kodachrome in the Ghost Wars. Although the death was later erased from time, with the President Kodachrome retaining no memory of it, the Corsair remembered her grief over the event.

In a muscular, male body with a beard, the Corsair practiced Ek Wan, though he also possessed an Ydaran trellwand to be used in augmented swordplay. (PROSE: The Bloodletters)

On Hoppiq Minor
Eventually, the Corsair regenerated from the bearded Corsair into a younger male incarnation with darkish skin and a nimble, svelte physique. He had black hair, which he usually did up in a bun. He took to wearing a purple "pirate coat" with fur trimmings, "a product of Stratton on Ealing" that never seemed to ruffle or get dirty, and softened the noises he produced by moving rather than accentuating them, proving an invaluable tool for stealthy work.

Still recently-regenerated, the Corsair's timeship, the Silver Spray, ended up wrecking itself in the temporal shoals that a time tide had connected to the planet Hoppiq Minor. Investigating, he quickly realised he was in the middle of the Ghost Wars of the Horsehead Nebula. Finding a pub run by vampires in a village, he initiated a fling with a local lad called Venn who'd been used as an unwilling blood donor for the pub. His discovery of the body of a dead Caxtarid vampire-hunter increased his suspicion that the pub operation was not as benign as it seemed, and with Venn's help, he ultimately discovered that Miss Garglespike, the S-Rank vampire keeping it running, did indeed have an ulterior motive. Confronting her over the secret stash of Q-Negative blood she'd been building up, the Corsair dueled the acumancer with Venn's help, and prevailed, pinning Garglespike against a tree long enough to escape safely back to the Silver Spray — although he had to sacrifice his trellwand in the process, and he knew she wouldn't stay dead. After spending one last night with Venn, the Corsair boarded the Spray again and left with the tide. (PROSE: The Bloodletters)

Behind the scenes
As pointed out on the copyright page of The Bloodletters, Ryan Fogarty's Corsair is a sci-fied-up fusion of two public domain comic characters, now construed as two incarnations of the same character — identified indirectly as a Time Lord by being of the same species as the Colonel, another preexisting Renegade Time Lord reference used under license from his creator.

Relationship to the Corsair Jon Gallant
"The Corsair", alias Jon Gallant, debuted in 1946 in A1 Comics #3 (1946) under the pen of Chas M. Quinlan. The story presented him earnestly as a naive farmer whose curiosity and keen mind got him hired as the captain of a ship called the Silver Spray, going on to see him adopting the moniker of "the Corsair" and become a legend of the seven seas. In The Bloodletters, the Corsair acknowledges these events but claims that the naive farmer Jon Gallant was a transparent alias he picked up on a lark when visiting the Earthly port city, little expecting that it would somehow get him "hired as a ship’s captain with no experience and no references". The name of Silver Spray is also used in Fogarty's novella for the Corsair's timeship, although it is hard to reconcile its being the same Silver Spray as in A1 Comics with its having been a timeship all along.

Relationship to the Corsair Queen Lila Evans
"The Corsair Queen", or sometimes just "the Corsair", real name Lila Evans, was created by Joe Millard's "Corsair Queen" in Buccaneers Comics #25 (1951). In the first Corsair Queen story, The Tigress of the Seas!, shortly after the Governor (whose name was given as Cedric Evans) returned to Cartago from an official visit to another unspecified colony, Cartago was ransacked and burnt down by a pirate crew. Escaping with the help of a seasoned sailor nicknamed "Monk", whom the Governor had assigned to protect his daughter but who ended up teaching her "roughneck ways" instead, Lila snuck aboard the pirates' nearly-abandoned vessel and took control of it, before sinking the pirates' rowboats with their own ship's cannons. Taking control of the ship, she named herself "the Corsair Queen" and swore revenge on all other pirates, with the Monk remaining by her side. Fogarty's depiction construes "the colony of Cartago", the setting of Millard's Buccaneer Comics #25, as a colony planet of the Homeworld instead of the 18th century British colony implied in the original. In the present-day sections of the novella, the Corsair suggests that in the past, in female incarnations, they used the name of "Lily Evans" as an alias, and Venn mishears it as "Lil-ah Eh-vanz", suggesting this is also the origin of the moniker "Lila Evans".

Relationship to Neil Gaiman's Corsair
Notably, The Doctor's Wife saw Neil Gaiman introduce a Renegade Time Lord known as the Corsair. Eleven Things You Probably Didn't Know About the Corsair, a short story fleshing out the Corsair's backstory, was printed in The Brilliant Book 2011 alongside the Welcome, traveller, to Sardicktown flyer which introduced Garglespike and Zadok, who were central to the plot of The Bloodletters. Although The Bloodletters does not constitute a legal use of Gaiman's creation, the intention seems to be that they may be one and the same.

The Doctor's Wife and Eleven Things You Didn't Know About the Corsair both noted that the Corsair's incarnations all had an Ouroboros tattoo, but on a different part of their body every time; in The Bloodletters, the Corsair is noted to have a tattoo on his inner thigh, although it is not described. Illustrations of Eleven Things You Didn't Know About the Corsair gave glimpses of multiple unnumbered incarnations. One was a female incarnation of the Corsair with pale skin and dark hair, wearing Time Lord robes. The outfit suggests a version of the Corsair who had not yet gone Renegade, potentially identifying her as the same incarnation as Millard/Fogarty's "Corsair Queen" (who notably always dressed in red in the original comics, whether standing on formality at Cartago or in her skimpier corsair outfit). Another one is a burly man with a black beard, potentially the version from whom the main Corsair seen in The Bloodletters is mean to have recently regenerated. Yet another, a man with his face obscured, wears a coat and a tricorn hat, making him resemble the Corsair Jon Gallant.

Fogarty's Corsair's earliest incarnation was a boy, implicitly followed by the young, female "Corsair Queen" of Millard's comics. Also lying in the bearded and dark-skinned Corsairs' past are another female incarnation previously unknown to the Monk (and who thus cannot be Millard's "Corsair Queen"/the Second Corsair), and the tricorn-wearing "John Gallant" incarnation. This sequence is impossible by the up-to-date list of the Gaiman Corsair's incarnations. However, The Bloodletters was released several months before One Virtue, and a Thousand Crimes established the Seventh Corsair as a dark-skinned woman. Striking her from the record, it becomes apparent that Fogarty intended for the bearded Corsair to be the Seventh Corsair, and for the dark-skinned young man to be the Eighth Corsair. By this logic, "John Gallant" would be the Third or Fourth Corsair, while the female incarnation encountered by the Monk at the space bar may be the Fifth or Sixth Corsair.