Name

Aziza Rahima bint Mazin

Known to most as Aziz ibn Mazin, and called Aziz by everyone.

Age

30

Gender

Female

Aziz is a woman, but being a woman pirate isn’t easy these days. Most women see fit to dress in trousers and talk in a manly voice, and Aziz is the same. She’s been masquerading as a man for many years. And she’s been on the same ship the whole time, so it’s only natural that people should figure it out. By now pretty much everyone knows she’s a woman, but they know better than to mention it if they don’t want to get unceremoniously tossed off the side of the ship.

Role

First Mate

Sexuality

Heterosexual

Not that Aziz is getting into a relationship while she’s pretending to be a man. That can only end in drama and lots of yelling.

Voice

Aziz has a rather feminine voice, and she makes up for this by talking a little lower than she normally would. It's plausible enough as a man's voice, though certainly higher pitched. She has an extremely thick Northern Egyptian accent.

Appearance

Aziz is a full-blooded Egyptian, and looks like it. She’s lucky enough to have fairly gender-neutral features, though by now it’s a moot point, since everyone on the ship knows she’s a woman. Her face is tall and lean, and she has a long nose with a strong bridge and rounded end. Her jawline is squared, giving her face a more masculine shape. Her eyes are almond-shaped and ever so slightly slanted. She has thick lashes, but short. Her eyes are mossy green with darker green around the irises, and rather large. She has arched eyebrows that she’s let grow scraggly, though they’re still thin. Her mouth is the most feminine-looking part of her. She has large lips with a more prominent upper lip, a shade darker than her skin. She has some small marks of the life of a pirate, and a large scar over her right eye. This goes from the far right side of her face to the upper left of her forehead, and passes over her eyelid. As a result, her eyelid is permanently closed. Her hair is dark chocolate brown, and has a natural poofiness to it. It’s somewhat bushy, and while that might have served to give it volume when it was long, it looks ridiculous now that it’s cut short. She has her hair cut to about the top of her neck, and it puffs up and sticks out at the sides, like it constantly has a crackle of static electricity holding it aloft.

She has nut-brown skin about the color of the outside of an almond. Her skin is rough and blistered from years out on the sea. She has a somewhat stocky build, but is overall slender. Her muscles aren’t very visible, despite her many efforts to build muscle mass. She has good strong arms and legs, though. She’s about 5’3”, and nothing annoys her more than being the short one among a crew of men who are all around six feet tall. She has rough palms and dirty fingernails. Her neck is slender and long, and her shoulders slope significantly, so she makes an effort to stand up straight and square to make herself look more manly. She doesn’t have a particularly large bust, and while slightly curvy, this is easily covered up with loose fabric. She has a reddish, somewhat ovular birthmark on her right shoulder.

Aziz typically wears a loose-fitting wool shirt, and avoids anything tight. She wears a slightly large vest, often colorful and embroidered. When it gets chilly, she has a red coat with a long tail and brass buttons. The collar is turned up and the sleeves are folded over. She has a thick leather belt for storing useful items, with her flintlock pistol tucked in on the right side. Her breeches are baggy at the top, but tight towards the knees where they end. Sometimes she wears longer trousers and rolls them all the way up to her knees. She has tall, worn leather boots with wide tops folded over. She loves to wear jewelry, and the bigger the better. Real gold is her particular preference, and she also likes gemstones, especially colorful ones. She loves wearing big earrings, necklaces, and rings, and occasionally a bracelet or two. The styles and origins vary wildly, all of it taken as loot. She loves her some good treasure. She has a scabbard with her cutlass on her right. Despite the nicer quality of her clothing, she doesn’t make a ton of effort to stay neat or keep her clothing clean.

Personality

Ask anyone to describe Aziz, and chances are they’ll start with the word “smug.” She has a phenomenal ego, and she can’t seem to stop herself from bragging. When confronted about this, she’ll always say she has good reason to brag. Yes, she did become First Mate rather young. Yes, she’s a remarkably good fighter. But these things become far less impressive when you hear her crowing over them for the hundredth time. She’s constantly comparing herself to others, and it would seem she always comes out on top. She enjoys competition, as long as it’s something she’s good at. She scoffs at the things she lacks talent in, and says she wouldn’t want to be good at them anyway. Though she’s capable of talking about things other than herself, she never thinks to ask other people about their experiences or opinions - not unless she’s trying to relate to them, but we’ll get to that later. She does have a certain charm to her. Perhaps that just comes from the confusing attraction some people have from her being a woman disguised as a man. But she has a special way of driving people crazy - with affection or irritation. Sometimes she turns that charm up all the way to get things to go her way. She enjoys being in charge and making important decisions. Recently, she’s taken to undermining the new captain in small ways. It may seem like she’s trying to take over, but truth be told, she thinks she’s being helpful. She really believes he’ll appreciate it. She’s always trying to impress her captain. The way she does this most often is to be unexpectedly and excessively hard on the crew when the captain is watching.

Despite her obvious flaws, Aziz has held her position so long for good reason. Besides her talents in running the ship, she’s incredibly loyal. Her loyalty is to the ship above all else, no matter who the captain or crew are. She’ll be there shouting orders as the whole thing sinks into the ocean. She’s honorable, and she doesn’t cheat or lie. She thinks that’s beneath her. When she makes a promise, she takes it very seriously - usually more seriously than the person she’s making it to. She’s generally honest with people, though perhaps less so about her feelings. This is partially out of honor, but mostly because she’s terrible at lying. That’s why nearly everyone knows she’s a woman. If she’s asked to keep a secret, she guards it like a precious treasure, and would rather die than give it away. However, she can be very judgemental when people do tell her their secrets. But she does try to be there for her crew, even if her attempts to relate can be awkward and cringey. If she thinks someone needs help, she becomes invasive and overly-friendly. Even when she’s trying to be nice, she sometimes sounds condescending. All the same, she truly is making a real effort, and if she understands that somebody needs support, she does her best to provide it.

She’s very active and restless, and constantly needs to be occupied. When she has no orders, she often bothers the captain to give her more to do. On particularly dull days, she might hang around the crew and help them with whatever it is they’re doing, giving unsolicited advice on things she knows less about than them. She loves being physically active, and especially fighting. She’s always ready for a good fight, and while she does try to use diplomacy first, she has a tendency to jump in just a little too fast. She practices long and hard, though she does a lot of this privately, since she doesn’t want the crew to see her having to practice. She has a terrible fear of failure, which is why she never takes any real risks in her life. She became a pirate, and that was enough risk. She’s lucky it paid off. But she hates to put herself in vulnerable positions, learn new skills, or be around people smarter than her. She’s very practical with what she has, because she doesn’t want to lose it. It’s better to play it safe.

Aziz loves beautiful things. She likes trinkets and knick knacks, and jewelry and dyed clothing, and seashells and pretty cakes. She has a sweet tooth and expensive tastes. Though she once feared it would set her apart, she found that very few crew members actually cared. She collects all of these things, but her favorite thing to collect is pressed flowers. She knows all the types of flowers, and will talk about them endlessly to people who never asked her in the first place. She’s childishly enthusiastic about them, and she seems most genuine when she’s showing off her flowers. She has extra pressed flowers tucked away in notebooks to be given as gifts, because she can’t imagine a better gift to give - or to get. Many of the crew members have a collection of flowers from her by now, and they can’t throw them out because every time she pops in trying to relate to them she wants to see how their flowers are doing.

Likes

The Color Red

Flowers

Cake

Glass Trinkets

Seashells

Weapons

Winning

Fighting

Bragging

Being Emotional Support

Expensive Items

Being Busy

Dislikes

Annoying People

Monsters

Dull Colors

Spending Money

Losing

New Situations

Risks

Liars and Cheats

Having Nothing to Do

Broken Promises

Being Laughed At

Her Frizzy Hair

Strengths

Aim

Honesty

Physical Fitness

Repairs

Sword Fighting

Keeping Secrets

Flower Identification

Wealthy Etiquette

Charm

Frugality

Weaknesses

Teamwork

Manners

Math

Creativity

Reading/Writing

Annoyingness

Ego

Her Disguise

Restlessness

Hard on the Crew

Background

Life in Egypt, under the Ottoman rule, was quite restrictive for women. Aziza was born to a wealthy family. Her mother died when she was young. Her father, Mazin, raised her and her siblings: her brother Munir and sister Midha. The family was involved in trade, and Mazin owned several magnificent trade ships. While Midha and Munir always loved being at the docks, Aziza was never quite as interested in ships and sailing. She was happy with her role in life, and looked forward to getting married. She hated her tutoring, though, so when she could she would slip away with Munir and Midha to go to the docks. Both of them wanted to be sailors. But Munir was set to take over his father’s position, and Midha was a woman. Aziza, meanwhile, drifted away from them as the day of her wedding approached. She was to be married at sixteen. When she was fifteen, though, news was sent that her arranged husband-to-be, Jabril, had run off with a band of pirates. She was quite bitter, and soon Jabil grew in infamy. Aziza felt she had been robbed of her right to share in his life - and his treasure. Before her father could find her a new husband, she told Munir and Midha that she wanted to go after Jabil. Munir, afraid of their father’s fury, decided not to accompany her. But Midha, always longing for a more wild and free life, didn’t have to think twice. Aziza’s goal was to track down Jabril and remind him of his obligation to marry her, pirate or no. She and Midha dressed up as men, taking the names Aziz and Midhat, and Midha trained Aziz as well as she could. They soon found work as deckhands, and their training intensified. Aziz, determined to impress Jabril once she found him, trained long and hard. When she heard word of the White Tide, she was determined that she would be one of them. It took a while, but she finally ran across them and showed her skill. She made the cut, but Midhat didn’t. Midhat told her to go ahead, and she would find another crew to join. So Aziz started working her way up to First Mate. She started wondering, though, why she was still looking for Jabril. Did she really need him? She was doing well enough for herself now. When she saw the flyers for bounties on both of them, his bounty seemed laughable compared to hers. She decided she no longer needed him. She had found a new life.

Other/Trivia

Aziz absolutely hates for her personal space to be invaded. She can’t stand being touched, and if you get too close to her she gets snappish and confrontational. She also hates to touch other people, and generally this is attributed to her ego.

She’s almost always smoking dokha, a mix of tobacco with herbs and spices. She has a midwakh, a little pipe of Arabic origin, and when she’s not puffing away on it she always has it clamped to her belt next to a pouch of dokha so she can get at it any time she wants.

Aziz has made up some half-baked story about her heart being broken as a reason for why she’s never in a relationship. Of course, the real reason is that she doesn’t want to date while she’s pretending to be a man, but she enjoys melodramatically describing her heartbreak. Nobody believes her.