Casey Corrigan



Mrs. Cassandra Q. C. van Tromp, MBE, Esq., (popularly known as "Casey Corrigan") is a British-American salvager, adventurer, and writer based out of the St. Louis City of Light.

Early Life
Cassandra Quiolian Corrigan was born in Denver City of Light in PA 55. She is the eldest of five children born by Jackson Corrigan II and Xiaodan Corrigan (nee Zheng). Like all Corrigan children, Cassandra got her start in life being indoctrinated to the family business, the Corrigan Trading Company, and privately educated to eventually take a role in the company.

Cassandra was sent to St. Louis at sixteen to attend St. Louis University, where her parents hoped she would mature, gain a relevant education, and potentially find a husband to bring back to Denver and rejoin the family business.

(None of these things happened.)

St. Louis University and the Salvager's Guild
Cassandra excelled and moved quickly in her studies, but often found it hard to focus on any one area of interest for long. Eventually, she began her graduate work in Humanities/Archaeology with a focus on pre-Rise fine arts and artifacts (also a focus of her family's trading business).

During time of her graduate studies, her brother Jacob (now in his mid-teens) began to cause friction in the family and it was decided that he should apprentice with the Salvager's Guild to strengthen the bond between the Guild and Corrigan Trading Company. The Corrigan parents sent him to St. Louis where he lived with Cassandra who took primary guardianship of him.

Jacob stayed with Cassandra after reaching age of majority, and was becoming a successful young beller with a good reputation. Around this time, Cassandra began to feel dissatisfied with St. Louis University and discontinued her studies there a year before completing her doctorate. (There are rumors of a scandal being involved, but neither Cassandra or the university will discuss it.) She briefly considered a transfer and continuation of her doctoral studies elsewhere, but at her brother's suggestion, decided to see what the Salvager's Guild had to offer her instead.

Career as Casey Corrigan
Over the next few years, Cassandra and Jacob headed a Collector team, usually co-financed by Corrigan Trading Company and the Salvager's Guild, searching out surviving fine arts, textiles, books and other lost treasures in British America (and occasionally beyond) from the pre-Rise era. As a way to pass time between traveling and their "off-season," Cassandra began to write short novels starring a fictional version of herself on sensationalized tellings of her salvage expeditions using the alias "Casey Corrigan," a nickname she'd picked up from Jacob and her fellow Salvagers. The stories were written by Cassandra with assistance from her brother Jackson who would take her rough drafts and then edit and handle publication for her out of Denver. The novelizations also helped gain a reputation for Casey, Jacob, and their rotating expedition group.

This arrangement continued for the next few years until a belling accident led to Jacob's death in early PA82.

Return to St. Louis and the HRF Outbreak
After Jacob's death, Casey took a short sabbatical to Denver to be with her family, but eventually returned to St. Louis to resume Salvager's work in May, PA82 where she was sent on an expedition to investigate a missing expedition and an Aestership wreckage. It was on this expedition that she met the people who would eventually introduce her to Selkirk's Pub, and what she would later dub the Selkirk's Sewing Circle.

While Casey appreciated the sudden (and distracting) calls for seemingly random adventure and chaos she found with the Selkirk's gang, she largely kept them at a distance for the first several months and focused on rebuilding her Salvager's career without her brother.

With scores left dead and the Salvager's Guild taking heavy losses, Casey found herself involved in more utilitarian forms of salvaging during the HRF outbreak and the aftermath.