Wo Shu, founder of the Trade Fleet, is perhaps the most famous ship’s captain in the history of the Lychin Kingdom.

She was captured by pirate raiders along with her brother and sister when she was eleven years old, and forced into peonage to work on the ship. But Hanako had an uncanny knack for navigation, which earned her a spot as the navigator’s assistant.

Officially, not much is known about the circumstances under which the original captain was deposed, but some form of mutiny was involved.

Wo Shu became captain after the Illuminated Cartographer was severely damaged in a storm, and many of the crew, including the captain and the navigator, were lost at sea. Wo Shu is believed to have single-handedly saved the remaining crew, as she plotted a safe route through the treacherous Glass Reef surrounding the then uninhabited island of Ithaco.

Unable to follow in his mother’s translator’s footsteps because he was severely dyslexic, Enturi MacDoumyn scoured the MacDoumyn plot at the foot of the volcano for traces of silver. Although the silver was of poor quality, and barely worth the effort of purifying, he did discover shards of ‘novelty’ potanium crystals.

With modest earnings from this first discovery, he quickly began buying up plots of rocky land close to the volcano. Since the silver was nearly worthless, most owners were glad to be rid of them.

Not long after, Enturi and his Ithaco Mining Company began to dig into the volcano in earnest and hit the mother lode, the world’s largest source of potanium. By providing an investment of high-grade potanium for research purposes to many interested parties and brilliant individuals, the Ithaco Mining Company is the largest driving force of the Potanium Revolution. As the sole provider of this now highly sought-after material, Ithaco Potanium Mining and its owner have reached unprecedented levels of riches and power.