Captain Morgan 4 (Patreon)

The Adventures of Captain Morgan 4

Morgan Olsen

I struck with the force of a meteor, or at least one of those cartoon gags of a piano falling on someone’s head. My ax bit deep into the void monster’s carapace, arresting my momentum.

I pulled back with my second ax and hammered the spine deeper, cracking the shell. A pulse of azure light erupted from the blade lodged inside the monster, cleaving it in two. I kicked off the giant, crab-like creature before tumbling gracelessly onto the sidewalk.

“I think I’m getting pretty good at this,” I muttered to myself. Lately, I hadn’t even needed my finishing move to kill these things.

“This is only the beginning,” Tipsy warned. He tapped his foot impatiently against the hood of someone’s car. “Get up, how long are you going to lie there?”

“Until the sky stops spinning.” I took a swig from my trusty gourd and waved at the sun. His shades looked stellar today. Heh, stellar.

“My Star Guardian is a dumbass…”

“Pirate.”

“Whatever.”

“It’s important, Tipsy. I mean, what are we even guarding anyway?”

“Life. The universe. The fabric of existence,” he deadpanned.

“See? Nothing of substance.”

I laid there, atop the cool cement. It’d been three years since my anointing as a Star Guardian and I felt… empty.

I no longer feared the Void, or at least these mindless creatures, but nor did I enjoy the battle. It was just a chore, one more thing to tick off my weekly to-do list. I helped Uncle Gragas test the ABV of his casks, picked up milk from the store, and diced up some void-crabs before they could give the world STIs or something.

Even the whole pirate schtick, I kept that up to annoy Tipsy more than anything. I drank, practiced my stellar magic, and occasionally fell asleep on top of random people’s cars.

Sure, the Valoran City News said I was a reprobate and the “most irresponsible Star Guardian in history,” but who gave a fuck? What were they going to do? Fight the Void without me? Conventional magic fizzled out against even the weakest voidling.

I was… I was bored. I’d quickly mastered my unique brand of stellar magic, to the point that I wasn’t being challenged anymore. Three years was a long time to do milk runs, after all.

“Do you truly believe that?” I heard. Up above, a beautiful woman descended, carried on gentle winds and violet starlight. She looked at me with eyes full of quiet concern. “Do you see nothing of worth in your duties?”

I stared. Loyal to the fluffy I might be, but Janna was without a doubt a gorgeous woman. She had an ethereal beauty about her that was at once entrancing and commanded respect, like an ancient, wise elf who’d protected her forest for a millennium.

In a way, I supposed that was what she was, a veteran of countless battles who’d defended the universe since long before I was born. In the main Runeterra canon, she was a spirit god, a divine existence. She was no such thing here, but I couldn’t help but feel a slight sense of awe as I gazed up at the literally breathtaking woman.

I couldn’t let that stand. That was altogether too much reverence towards someone without any fluffy. “Seagull print is a bit odd on purple, but it’s cute.”

Janna stared at me expressionlessly, but I had a feeling her opinion of me was plummeting by the second. She silently floated to the side. “You truly are a reprobate.”

“You’re the one dropping out of the sky in a miniskirt.”

“We do not choose our uniforms.”

“No, we don’t. How’s it going, Janna?”

That got a reaction out of her, even if it was but a single blink of surprise. “You know my name?”

“I do. I know you’ve been a Guardian longer than I’ve been alive. I know that you’ve got an unreasonably high affinity for air magic. What I don’t know is what happened to your old team or why you’re here.”

“That is… private.” She settled on the ground, her heels clicking softly against the sidewalk. “You… are not what I expected.”

“No, I guess I’m not. Fine, I won’t pry,” I snorted. I held up my gourd to her. “You look like you could use a stiff drink, though.”

“I drink to celebrate on occasion, but I will not drink to forget. I cannot afford to.”

“Deep. Heavy, too.”

“Such is the burden of our mission.”

I smiled bitterly. No matter how much I pretended otherwise, she wasn’t wrong. There was something about her, a sincere and profound grief that made pretending feel disrespectful.

So instead, I took a long sip of my rum and stood. “Then we’ll have to get you in a celebratory mood one day.”

‘I’d like that.”

X

That was how I met Janna, the Storm’s Fury. She became my on-again, off-again partner. As we fought together, we quickly found that we weren’t very compatible; our personalities were simply too different.

Janna was a solemn, contemplative woman whose idea of a good time was reading in a quiet nook. She fought in a similar manner, always dedicated and with a solemnness that sucked the joy right out of my hijinks. It wasn’t that we hated each other; we were just so different that we had trouble coordinating together.

Perhaps, if we had other Star Guardians to balance out our personalities, we would have been able to strike a happy medium, but with just us two, we often found ourselves acting alone. Maybe that was why a team was so important. We needed Lux’s hope. We needed Lulu’s whimsy and Poppy’s earnestness and Jinx’s… whatever the fuck she brought to the table.

Fortunately, Janna didn’t bug me about my drinking. The bewildered look on her face when she found out that my anointing wish was for a “stiff drink” was one I’d savor for centuries to come.

Over time, I learned a little more about her, our grand mission, and the way it all worked.

The Void was similar to an acid that slowly ate away at the foundation of reality. Eventually, cracks would form, widening to the point that lesser void creatures could emerge. Those were the voidlings and house-sized monsters I’d been fighting.

Powerful void creatures, the ones I remembered from my past life as Champions, would only emerge when these cracks widened enough. These entities were intelligent enough to hide and would work to widen the crack further from our end. It was up to Star Guardians to find and kill them, so that the cracks could be closed without interference. 

In the worst cases, a Void Rift would form, along with a monster with enough power to swallow the local cluster of worlds. I could only assume that this was how Lux’s crew ended up fighting Baron Nashor in her music video.

Janna herself had seen several such Rifts, and had never been strong enough to close them on her own. She evacuated those she could, moving them to different clusters, before moving on with her self-imposed crusade.

I was captivated by her stories. Yes, they typically had tragic endings and I could see the soul-crushing depression behind her violet eyes, but they were also new, something different from the Runeterra I’d read about. Each of the nations and factions I knew were worlds unto themselves.

There was the Valoran Cluster, which contained Valoran City, but also the Demacia Cluster, Ionia Cluster, and so on. I knew they existed of course, trade across clusters was a consistent thing, but interstellar trade was also dangerous and costly. It was a big part of why Uncle Gragas was so damn rich; exporting luxury spirits was very profitable.

It was also why Star Guardians were so revered. We were free, truly free, to come and go as we pleased. The magic of the First Star was a boundless ticket to the greater cosmos, if only that we might fulfill a bloody destiny.

Hearing about some of her travels from a veteran Star Guardian was something else. I wanted to travel. I wanted to see all that reality had to offer. If I was to be a universal janitor, I figured I may as well be compensated in unlimited travel vouchers.

“Come on, one drink?” I asked Janna, poking her in the ribs. We were currently seated on a random rooftop, gazing out over the sunset as several, large corpses dissolved into nonexistence below us.

She yelped shrilly, something between a squeak and a laugh. Finding out that my new partner was ticklish may have been the highlight of my year.

“Stop doing that!” she glared, a stormy look that promised heavenly retribution.

I smiled guilelessly and nudged my gourd in her direction. “Then drink. We won; it’s a good reason to celebrate, right?”

“I don’t like how bitter alcohol is.”

“I promise this isn’t bitter.”

“Fine, if it’ll get you to behave,” she huffed. She took my gourd and brought it to her lips. Her eyes widened subtly as the sweet, floral aroma hit her nose. She took an appreciative sip and handed it back. “It’s… not alcohol?”

“It is, kinda. Turns out, the First Star wasn’t actually sure what I meant by a ‘stiff drink,’” I said with a shrug. “I tried making moonshine once and found out that I could replicate any alcoholic drink I want with my magic.”

“What’s in your gourd now?”

“A sangria, with less alcohol than normal, not that those tend to be strong anyway. Like it?”

“I do… maybe too much.”

I slid the gourd back. “It’s not bad to unwind once in a while, you know.”

“If I join you, I’m afraid I’d never stop. Can you imagine what the news will say about us? They’ll say you’ve finally corrupted me with your degeneracy.”

“Yup, that’s my evil plan. I want a team of Star Guardians who are all drunkards like me. We’ll call ourselves the Alcoholics Anonymous.”

She laughed aloud. It was a tinkling, musical sound that seemed to echo on the wind, all the more enjoyable because of how rare it was. “Don’t you dare. If we ever form a team, you are not allowed to be the leader.”

“Of course not, granny. Age before youth, and all that.” A current of wind snatched my hat from my head. “Oi!”

“I am not old.”

“Gimme my hat, woman!”

“Say it.”

“You’re fucking ancient! Cope!”

She floated higher, leaving the rooftop behind. “Well, I suppose this is a nice hat…”

“Alright, fine! You’re not old, happy?” I shouted. The hat settled back on my head.

“Quite,” she sniffed imperiously.

“Shouldn’t you be past the point where you’re sensitive about your age by now?”

“Shouldn’t you stop drinking in front of children? The news said the rate of underage drinking skyrocketed since you started here. The youth look up to us, Morgan.”

“That sounds like someone else’s problem.”

“Like it or not, you are a role model for the current and next generation. Please be more conscientious.”

“Ugh, you nag worse than Tipsy.”

“His name is Calico Jack.”

“Thank you!” said rabbit exclaimed. “Is that so hard?”

“Hush, Tipsy,” I said, tossing him towards Janna’s cat-fox thing. Zephyr, that was its name. I still didn’t know its gender because it never talked, unlike my chatterbox rabbit. “Are you really going to attend high school though?”

“Of course,” she said. “You did say that there would be more Star Guardians from your class, right?”

“Yeah… Lux, Jinx, Poppy, and Lulu. Lulu’s a year behind us but the rest of us are in the same year. I have a feeling we’ll also get lumped into the same class. You know, destiny and all that.”

“Then I will attend as well. Lux will need guidance if she is to become the leader you envision.”

“Hey now, I’ll be there to help her out.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. The last thing Valoran City needs is your Alcoholics Anonymous nonsense taking root,” she said primly. “Besides, maybe a scholastic environment is precisely what I need to unwind.”

“Neerrrdddd!!!!!”

“Hush, you. Some of us have productive hobbies.”

“Yes, like brewing. The other is an adult sneaking into a high school to groom little gi–Hey!” I yelped, windmilling my arms so I didn’t fall off the roof.

“You make it sound so wrong.”

“The truth hurts, doesn’t it?”

“Hmph, you’re insufferable,” she huffed. I savored it. I’d perfected getting a rise out of her into an art form. “Will you ever tell me how you know these things?”

“Drunken revelations,” I replied glibly. “Really, I don’t know much more than what I’ve already told you.”

“So be it. This world is changing. I hope we’ll be ready.”

“So do I, Janna. So do I.”

Author’s Note

I don’t really have a proper outline. We’ll see how this goes…