Actually, as to pirates, I was thinking of borrowing something from a novel I'm writing (yes, I'm a geek, shutup

). Its a floating city called
Final Harbor. Essentially, pirates are the most widely reviled people in some of the coastal nations (piracy is right up there with homicide in some of there societies), so the pirates created
Final Harbor. Basically imagine a floating city of driftwood, complete with everything in any normal city. The difference: it floats on the water similar to a ship (with the additional help of magic). How it works is this: every Autumn all of the pirate ships, needing a place to dock for winter, bring
massive amounts of supplies (each ship has its entire hold full of supplies), and they all attach to the city using rope and other tools, making it much larger. They all spend the whole winter adrift (the city is normally anchored in place) on the open ocean, using various types of magic to keep the storms from overwhelming them. When spring arrives, the ships depart, figure out where they are, and map the cities new location. This means that it is almost impossible for them to be found by outsiders, since the location changes every year.
This also meant that, since such a large group of pirate ships merely clumped together would lead to anarchy and destruction in the city, the pirates chose one man to lead them: Governor-Admiral Cyrin Vlade, a ruthless (though he has his own honor code) pirate who had gained prominence among the pirates by destroying three royal naval vessels with only his own ship, the
Warhulk. This makes the pirates unified, and makes them that much more dangerous, as they are a nation in their own right...
I could ramble on and on about it (I got plenty of details), but thats what I got for now.