Arlena

"My name is Arlena, and I'm the cook of the Black Pike! Now, don't you make the mistake of thinking that cooks can't fight! I've fought for my life more times than I can count, and I won every single fight -- can you say as much?"

Arlena is the ship's cook of the Black Pike and also provides extra muscle when needed; she's not only a supreme cook but while ostensibly a normal human she has the strength of a tiger and the ferocity of... of another, angrier tiger.

She was originally the cook of a trade ship plundered by Captain Nera and her crew, but she so impressed them with her strength and bravery (plus, her ability to actually cook good food; an ability they all sadly lacked) that they instead of turning her into a mermaid like the other crew, offered her a job. Since she hadn't much liked the old crew, she accepted, and since then has done very well for herself on the ship and earned the respect of all the crewmembers... and this grew into something more with the ship's physician, Doctor Coppa.

Today, Arlena and Coppa are married in all but name -- though perhaps they weren't as careful about certain things that they should be, since Arlena after a few years discovered she was pregnant. Captain Nera was this close to firing her and put both her and Coppa ashore, but it turned out that pregnancy didn't slow Arlena down one bit -- and when the baby was born; a girl they named Lydia, it turned out that Arlena was more than up for being a working mother, and neither her cooking nor her ferocity in battle got poorer in any way.

So in the end, both mother, father and child got to stay on, and Arlena is currently training her daughter to become a real pirate and a proper member of the crew.