Friday, October 5, 2012

Ending the day with a satisfying kill

My day starts off with a scouting report of an Orca closing a wormhole 3 systems out. I verify that I am sitting in my cloaky Proteus and head down the chain at best possible speed. A little demon on my shoulder is screaming in my ear that I really should change ships to a HIC but I ignore him.

I get in position just inside 5 km of the wormhole and wait. Our scout reports the Orca is in route. He jumps into the system, I decloak and we both jump back. The Orca and I are 13 km apart when we pop out of the wormhole but the Orca is a slow ship and I have plenty of time to burn into range and put a scram on him.

Target lock is acquired, scram is applied and I am burning toward him to ram him. 2000m, 1000m, 500m and he warps off! I should have listened and brought the HIC. I wave in local to the pilot, and he waves back from the safety of his tower before I head back home. It is doubtful he will be willing to give me another chance.

The next step is rolling the static wormhole looking for something to do since the current static is barren of life. Rolling, rolling, rolling! We roll the wormhole 5-6 times finding nothing interesting in any of the systems. We finally come across a wormhole that has a few sleepers and eager to fire on something, we run the 5 sites before rolling the wormhole yet again. This time we have 4 Tengus and some wrecks on d-scan.

Our CEO goes looking for the tower while I go check out the outer planets and find more wrecks. One of the Tengu pilots has gone offline, another has switched to an Anathema, a Noctis has turned up at the tower and there is an unpiloted Scorpion floating. A check of the corporation shows a small corp that is only 30 hours old.

In a few minutes, the Noctis pilot warps back to the outer planet and finishes salvaging there before moving on to the next site.  I swap places with our CEO and he gets out of d-scan range to deploy probes. We narrow down the location of the Noctis with d-scan and he initiates a scan. The first scan comes up with an 86.9% result. Lousy CEO scanner! He throws the probes off grid and resets for a second attempt.

The second scan is successful in getting a lock and the fleet is instructed to jump and hold cloak. The CEO locks the Noctis and calls for the fleet to warp in hot. The Noctis explodes and we send Lee Ang to a cloning vat. I have no idea why the Noctis didn't drop the loot from previous sites while he was at the tower earlier, but we appreciate his generosity. A 770M ISK Noctus kill is a sweet find.

The Noctis pilot logs off immediately upon hitting the cloning vat. The Anathema pilot wakes up and warps off. We deploy probes and start looking for wormholes. While we are scanning, the Noctis pilot comes back online and the Anathema is observed jumping into a K162 to a C5 system. Our scout jumps in behind him and we move a couple of interceptors and an interdictor up to the inbound C5 connection.

Our scout reports it is a blue system and there are active pilots. We notify them about our activity and wait for the Anathema pilot to jump back. He jumps and I lock him down quickly only to have him jump back. I follow but he manages to get cloaked before I can lock him and even though I know where he was last seen, I am unable to decloak him.

Now he starts trash talking in local. We are not adverse to a little smack talk ourselves and the insults fly freely. While this is going on, we ask our friends to collapse the wormhole for us. They are more than happy to oblige, possibly just to get rid of the annoying chatter in local.


A couple of minutes later, our friends land 2 orcas and jump the wormhole quickly bringing it to the verge of collapse. Less than a minute later, the Anathema pilot jumps back in. This time he is not willing to jump back through the dying wormhole and my fast locking Stilletto proves more than capable of locking him before he can cloak and escape.

He screams noooooo in local and attempts burning out of range, but his resistance is futile. Our CEO yells "nailed yo ass!" as the cocky pilot's Anathema explodes. Even better, my boosted lock time enables me to catch the pod and send Almaa2001ro back to a cloning vat. We scoop more sleeper loot from the wreck and head home smiling.

Without the trash talk, it is doubtful we would have bothered with the Anathema after he eluded us the first time. It wouldn't have been worth the trouble. Combining the totals from him and his alt, we destroyed over 900M ISK and took home over 400M from their efforts. Welcome to wormholes, jackass! Your nullsec experience is no good here.

As a reminder of the experience, I anchor a can in a safe close to their tower with the message, "Almaa2001ro is pro, he died here". Please enjoy the reminder of our encounter for the next 30 days.

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