WHEW. I’ve been crazy crazy busy over here, but I finally snuck away some time to drink some tea, listen to some podcasts, and doodle a little Captain Pandemic in my free time.
haha just looked through those old drawings and dang, I made those a loooong while ago
Captain Pandemic is a weekly narrato-pictoral thing I write and draw for kicks on Thursdays, and you can check out the past bits of it here!
“You know, I’m actually astonished. This might be, well, a decent idea. Which is saying a whole lot.” The Vice Admiral paced back and forth through Captain Pandemic’s cabin, waiting for dinner to begin.
Barker was busy getting into his dress uniform. “Could this be a ploy of some kind, sir? Corner us or split us up while she sneaks onto our ship?”
The Vice Admiral looked on him admonishingly. “Barker, the Captain’s idea of a ‘ploy’ is to send a 10 person crack-team onto our ship over the course of several days to steal the bags which our food was held in, so that ‘We’ll harrve to eat all the food right arrway, and get fat and complarrrrcent!’“
Barker laughed. “I suppose you’re right. Lets go.”
They stepped into a dining room, far nicer than any other place on the ship. Captain Pandemic was sitting with Buccaneer Gray and down a little ramp the crews of both ships were slowly warming up to each other. “How will ye have yer steak, Vice Admiral?”
“Rare. I mean, no, I won’t have steak, because that doesn’t make ANY sense because we’ve been out to sea for days. I’ll have fish or sea turtle or something.”
“As ye wish! Here, while yer’ waitin, look over our maps an’ our projected course, we think we arr about a week behind the red-sailed ship. If we joined up, I’d lay me life on the idea we could take ‘er by sarrrrprise.”
“Okay, just one more thing. But have you even LOOKED at these maps? How do you know the coastline of Florida that well? And we didn’t successfully get the river systems of South America down ‘til like a CENTURY later. And our position? What, do you think we have Google freakin’ EARTH? We’re in the middle of the ocean! People make maps by walking along the ground with a bloody stick of graphite in their hand! They didn’t even put erasers on the ends of them until eight-teen-sixty-bloody-two!”
Captain Pandemic is a weekly narrato-pictoral thing I write and draw for kicks on Thursdays, and you can check out the past bits of it here!
“Captain! A ship off the mizzenbow!” Captain Pandemic pulled her spyglass up and spied it on the horizon.
“Arr, what good luck! If we make good time, we should be able to reach it before the others! And what a prize that MacGruffin said he would give us if we were the first to retrieve the chest aboard that ship!”
“Sails to full! We’re top speed, laddesses! Throw yar anchors and whip the whale, we’re catchin’ em!”
The Vice Admiral looked back to the faint black sails growing larger. “Oh, son of a-“
Within moments they had pulled up beside each other and thrown the white flag. “Arr, hand over yer chest, ye lily-livered lilies! The Vice Admiral! I shoulda known you’d be keepin the chest for yerself. MacGruffin will hear o’ yarr defeat!”
“Erm, Captain,” Buccaneer Gray mentioned, “I believe this isn’t the ship we be looking for.”
The Vice Admiral stepped out of his cabin. “Wait, did you say MacGruffin? The man who sent us out here to hunt after that red-sailed ship?”
“No, you liver-lillied liver, you’re dumber than a plank on which you’ll be walkin’! He sent US to hunt after the red-sailed ship, not YOU! Well, us along with all the other ships in the haarrrbor.”
She looked at him accusingly and drew her sword toward his neck, and the crews of both ships waited for a solid two minutes until the dawning realization hit her face.
“-wait.”
Captain Pandemic is a weekly narrato-pictoral thing I write and draw for kicks on Thursdays - or, well, early on Fridays - and you can check out the past bits of it here!
“A note for yarr, captain!” Buccaneer Gray swung across the ship with a message in his outstretched hand and gave it to Captain Pandemic. “From the Great Pirate himself!”
“The Great Pirrrate? Gasp,” she said. “We must leave immediately. Arr.”
“Captain, it says for you to come alone. Up to the mansion at the hill, the meeting is in 15 minutes.
“Fifteen minutes? Gasp,” she said. “Let us be away! Arr.”
She bashed in the door. “Who be you and why be you usin the name o’ the Great Pirate to summon me ‘ere?”
“I be Barko MacGruffin the First, Captain of the Shameless Bologna, and right hand to the Great Pirate ‘imself.”
“Well I be Captain Pandemic o’ the Daring Kazoo, Waverider 1st class, certified Alpha-Pirate by the Guild o’ Pirates, AND reigning champion o’ the Shantytown dirtbike race for three years runnin’.”
“Arr, I see. O’ course, I be a Waverider 0th class, plus-rank captain by the Board of Certifiers an’ Such, 3-year top customer at Greasy Ale’s Ale n’ Grease, AN’ winner o’ the Olympic gold in wrestlin’ whales.”
“I unnerstand, but you ‘ave to see, I am an MVP (Most Valuable Pirate) at seven o’ the ten-“
“Arr, and I be the leader o’ the Pirate Acafellas and am the fastest rower on slave ships out o’-“
“Yarr, though I be the Dragon o’ the Sea, and I own a pair of glasses that’ll-“
“Thar I recognize, but I be-“
Later that evening, the Vice Admiral received word from a nobleman named Barko Macgruffin the First, who had apparently been talking to every ship in the harbor about a special mission, direct from the queen herself.
He walked through the door frame, which a few servants were busy re-attatching a door to. “Hellloo! I be Barko Macgruffin the First. You’re the Vice Admiral, I presume?”
“The First? How many children do you have? You know, I have a daught-
Barko looked at him stupidly. “None. What kind of a dumb question is that?”
The Admiral sighed. “Nevermind. Go on.“
“Barker, take note. We need eight weeks salt and tack, replacements on our line, shot…. Barker! Take note!”
“Vice Admiral, sir, this is the twelfth time we’ve been over this. We have already bought all that! Where did you think the line I’m rigging came from?” The Vice Admiral responded with a look that vaguely resembled the way a goldfish looks at Jupiter.
“Maybe you should go for a walk? We have some spare coin, why don’t you go pick up some, uh…” he fished for help as he looked through the crew, “some… We could use some more… nails?”
So the Vice Admiral found himself, nails in hand, stumbling through the market accidentally into the ridiculous tones of the pirate queen, Captain Pandemic.
“Ma’am, I don’t CARE what you’ve heard, we do NOT have any fire-resistant talismans, warlock-staves, or rings of power.”
“Arr, ye be playin me hardball, I see it now. Well, yer glasses o’ mesmerisination there, how much for?” Captain Pandemic, as he saw her now, turned her cap to the side.
“It’s not a – whatever,” the vendor sighed. The Vice Admiral began slowly creeping behind a stall.
He watched her pick it up and put them on, slowly leaning over. “Mermisation, huh? Well then, ‘Glasses’, show me… my worst enemy!”
The Vice Admiral froze when he heard the street vendor say, “Uh, you’re Captain Pandemic, right? The crazy chick that stalks that admiral guy? He’s over there,” the vendor pointed.
“Gasp! I’ll take your magic glasses, woman!”
“Whatever, those were broken anyway.”
The Vice Admiral walked over annoyed muttering, “Wait, glasses? Are those even invented yet? Shouldn’t they be worth a ridiculous amount of money or something?”
“Actually,” the shopkeeper replied, “glasses have been in wide circulation since the mid-1700s.”
“Fine, but… magic glasses?”
The vendor shrugged and said, “Well, I have to give that one to you.”
“ARR, bring us dockside, ladess!” Captain Pandemic boomed from the crow’s nest. “We be needin’ reparations and repartee, if my drift ye be catchin’.” The Daring Kazoo screeched against the side of the dock, bruised, battered, and burnt, smashing to a halt. Captain Pandemic jumped to the dock with the few doubloons they had left.
“AHOY thar, Charles Valoo and Buccaneer Gray!” She addressed two of the four remaining pirates and tossed them most of the coin. “Hire some brigands to patch ‘er up. I…” she paused as her gaze passed over the little port of Shantytown – a more wretched hive of scum and villainy you will never find – and declared, “I arr be findin’ me a parrot.”
The Vice Admiral, exhausted, steered his battleship along the coastline. A sharp rap rang through the door. “Come in?” “I don’ mean to intrude, sir, if you’re busy…” Oh blast, he thought, he hadn’t changed out of his clothes since the battle two days ago. They, charred and bloodied, must’ve been what gave him little disturbance til now. “No, its fine, come in.” Barker, his first mate, cautiously stepped forward. “Sir, we need to make birth soon. The ship is falling to pieces.”
The Vice Admiral checked his map, dirty and bloody as well, he now saw. “It seems we have no choice. We’ll have to pull in… to Shantytown.”
Captain Pandemic is a Weekly Series about Captain Pandemic, Pirate Queen of the Daring Kazoo. Part 1 is over here!
“Third, what in the WORLD is a missensail? Or the port bow? And how in the world would you hoist one, once obtained? Christ, girl, you should try reading a book sometime.” He ducked to the right away from a sword, and signaled his sailors with a hand. “Fourth, you should know better than to engage with us while we’re sailing towards shoals like those. With my men back on board, we are now leaving.” He waited until Captain Pandemic struck forward, and used the weight of his sword to springboard her back across the waves onto her ship.
“Fifth,” he yelled, across the rocky sea and ever widening gulf between the ships, “I don’t have your stupid chalice! For the last freaking time! Go bother someone else for a change!” The Vice Admiral sighed and looked to his first mate, who was coiling a length of rope. “Maybe we should just shoot her from here, that would probably make our lives much easier. Better yet, just shoot me.”
On the other ship, shelooked off to the horizon, silhouetted against the blazing sun. “You win today, Vice Admiral… But we will be back, and you will learn to fear the name of…
Captain Pandemic of the Daring Kazoo!”
Captain Pandemic of the Daring Kazoo raised her golden-hilted scimitar up to the heavens as cannonballs blazed overhead. “Raise the missensail! Hoist the port bow! Double the starboard longs!” She swung down to the main deck from an extraneous rope and looked straight into the face of the Vice Admiral. “Arr, you’re walkin the plank now, matey!”
The Vice Admiral sighed and leaned against the wall as his sailors began flinging grappling hooks across the way. “First off, “Walking the plank is a misrepresentation of traditional piracy, which was actually an extremely rare phenomenon that has been unnecessarily dulled by modern representations of piracy.” He ducked as a musket ball whizzed overhead, and pulled out his sword to parry Captain Pandemic’s blows. “Second, scimitars are from Southeast Asia, and I highly doubt you are an Ottoman. The sword you should be carrying is a cutlass.”
Captain Pandemic scoffed in a manner most affronting as she danced across a rope and engaged the Vice Admiral. “Arr, your fancible words show your downfall! Now hand over the chalice and we’ll spare you a trip to a watery grave!” She thrust to the left, then right, and the Vice Admiral parried.
