The Ragazza Ridente

The Ragazza Ridente is a character in The BATTLE of the CENTURY.

Description
An old and obviously finely crafted sailing ship, now fallen on hard times. Wine red from bow to stern, the Ragazza features a pair of eyes painted prominently on either side of the bow, still strikingly visible despite the peeling paint on the rest of the vessel. Roughly 20 meters from end to end. A huge, ragged gap is visible on the port bow, exposing the ship’s ribs and the remnants of a luxuriously furnished cabin. . Knotted ropes hang aimlessly from the splinters that mark where the three masts once stood, now little more than nubs worn down by years of lobster mating seasons. The deck is warped and twisted from years under the water and is infested with all manner of irritatingly undying sealife. The only part of the ship that remains whole is the figurehead: a beautiful young girl cast in gilded iron, smiling and holding a bouquet of wildflowers. Her eyes are two massive rubies set into the metal. Painted next to her is the inscription Raga; all else is illegible.

Items/Abilities:
Although largely intended as a pleasure vessel, the ship was designed with the possibility of more interesting situations and holds eight incendiary cannons hidden in its belly as well as a small but thorough armory (variously rusted), several weeks’ worth of basic supplies (largely unusable), and a very distinguished wine cabinet (immaculate). Most of these are tucked behind false walls, though with the ship’s deterioration the disguise is rather pointless.

The Ragazza Ridente was supposed to have been sunk a significant amount of years ago, but no one bothered to tell it that. Its keel floats about the ground at a steady two to three meters, though it has been observed sailing much higher under certain circumstances. Its means of levitation are unclear, as is the reason for the brilliant amber glow beaming through its portholes, though they are presumably related and almost certainly highly relevant to its status as a zombie boat. Its time underwater has not diminished the ship’s speed or maneuvering capabilities; it moves as nimbly as any vessel ever made, with the added advantage that it doesn’t need to bother with pesky things like water.

Biography:
As with any ghost story, there are multiple iterations of how the Ragazza Ridente came to be and no real proof to prop up one or the other. Most accounts seem to agree that a witch was involved with its making, or possibly several witches, or maybe a very drunk gypsy, and cursed the newly-christened ship with general well-wishings and a particularly ominous clause against all theoretical disasters, which even the most amateur of storytellers can see was a very bad idea. Thus damned, the ship was delivered to its recipient, who is almost always the daughter of a famous pirate lord or some other lady of nobly ill-bred stock. It was a wedding present: this is unanimous. What happened at the wedding is not.

A freak storm, an accidental kraken, an attack by the Royal Armada of some despicable monarch, an ambush by a rival pirate or simply a very elaborate and confusing suicide by the bride are all contenders for the cause of the Ragazza’s sinking, and in the end it matters very little which of them is true. It may be the case that none of them are, which would still leave the ship at this point in the story very much sunk and porthole-deep in the muck of a certain cape, from that point onward known rather uncreatively as the Ruddy Bay, or Bloody Bay, or really anything the storyteller in question feels like throwing in at this point to avoid sounding like they don’t know anything at all about Mediterranean geography. After that a number of years passed, generally either five or ten or fifty or one hundred, and one day the ship rose again from the dark depths to take its revenge.

Whether it succeeded is, once again, pointless, because it was around that time that the Ragazza Ridente gained the distinction of being the most common and infamous ghost ship sighting for nearly a thousand miles in any direction, favorably rated by four out of five mediums and gleefully proclaimed as the cause of more or less any weather pattern more extreme than a light summer rain. In truth its sightings were rather formulaic: a gradual darkening of the sky and water, a feeling of brooding dread amongst the crew up the three days before the event, and finally an apparition of a crimson shipwreck cruising towards the unlucky vessel at top speed and vanishing at the last moment just before the onset of dawn. Very occasionally the Ragazza’s appearance would be tied to the disappearance of a sailor or two from a particularly well-crewed ship, but taking into consideration the source these reports may less than completely reliable.

I wouldn’t bet on it if I were you, though.