EVE Corporation - Page 987

The other day I was sitting on station with my main bored of missioning and wanted to try something new.
After the initial tutorial my massive probing skills (Astrometrics 2 ftw!) have never really been put to any use. So I decided to blow the dust off a Heron in the garage and fitted a Sisters launcher I had bought somewhere along the road. My thought process was: throw an Analyzer and a Codebreaker at the thing and start some basic exploration to get a grip on probing/hacking. It must have been a coincidence but the first sig that really got me interested happened to be a wormhole. Without further ado I warped to the wormhole and jumped. But as fast as I entered the wormhole I had to leave it again. Some cruiser hit me followed by a Nado uncloacking. GTFO time. 10% armor.

After repping my poor vessel I found myself a quiet little system to do my scanning thing again. Soon another wormhole was found. I learned from my last mistake - blindly jumping into a wormhole - that is what I thought at least. "Dey not be takin my Sistas Launcha!" I told myself and stripped it from my ship. So I jumped into the second wormhole of the the day, awaiting a massive enemy fleet. To my surprise nothing decloaked on me - *phew* - so I quickly warped to the first celestial, dropping a safe on the road. While warping back to said safe it dawned on me: how am I going back to that wormhole entrance?

A quick F10 revealed a wormhole spot on the map. But no way to warp there. I was trapped. Noob life. So I sat in my safe sorting my thoughts. The entrance read something like "will not last another day". "When the entrance collapses no one will ever gonna find this wormhole again" I said to myself. "But at least nothing on Dscan. No ships. No structures. This wormhole seems to be emtpy." Good.

Sitting in a safe spot trapped in a wormhole leaves you with enough time to read your wormhole 101. So while occasionally hitting Dscan I started reading stuff about wormholes. A table with the numbering schemes of wormhole entrances/exits brought some relief. I remembered "K162". This and a "will not last another day" bit. "I should have at least 4 hours left until the entrance collapses" I concluded. Freedom was possible! By that time I already had resigned to the fact that self destruction might be the only way out of the hole.

So with a much better understanding of wormhole mechanics I started to fit an alt with a probing ship. The alt just finished some basic stealth bomber plan and already had some ok probing skills trained. A quick ship check revealed: this alt was ready for covops.

The rest of the story is quickly told. I rushed through space - destination highsec system with the wormhole entrance. After arrival the K162 wormhole entrance was probed down easily. I jumped into the hole hoping to - again - stay alive on the other side. Only this time with my alt. I did. Fleet-warped my main to my alt. Day - and Sisters launcher ^^ - saved!

Today I had first contact with the corp that has a lonely deathstar in "my" wormhole.
Right from the start when I moved into the wormhole they didn't seem to be very active. Sitting on a safe near their station I watched them refuel their POS from time to time. Occasionally they ran a site with two ships. Nothing fancy. After some weeks I developed the bad habit of blindly warping to 0 on newly probed down wormhole exits. After all I am in a cloaky, right? Some days ago - while dualboxing - this led to a small moment of shock when I realized that I had just landed in a bubble. Slowboating outside bubble range I checked Dscan only to see it empty. I uncloaked in range of the exit to force some enemy action. But nothing happened. I must have found the remnants of a skirmish.

So today, while follwing the inevitable daily "probe-the-exit-down" procedure, I was alarmed. Using combat scanner probes I found tracks of enemy activity: other probes. So I first warped to the exit at range to make sure that I didn't get trapped. While re-warping to the exit at 0 I was surprised to find an Onyx on Dscan. Again I was dualboxing so it took me a second to realize that I had my grid still minimized from probing. Just a moment later I found the Onyx landing on my uncloaked ass. I quickly jumped to the secure highsec side of the exit but took my time to lookup the Onyx pilot first. So what do we have here? A member of the native inhabitants.

After the Onyx sighting I decide to let some time pass before getting back into the wormhole. While waiting cloaked in highsec I notice a Drake jumping into the wormhole half an hour later. So I follow him but find Dscan empty. Being cloaked again I drop a safe outside obvious warpin vectors and warp to the local deathstar. There they all are. We have company.
The next minutes I watch them setup a bubbled camp on the wormhole exit to highsec. Originally I just wanted to fly out some PI stuff. But these guys start to camp my door. What are they thinking?

Instead of waiting for them to get bored of camping I decide to reveal myself in local. So I start to make comments about their actions. How I like their bubble, asking why their friend just warped off to POS and so on. It takes them 15 minutes to react in local and another 15 minutes to collapse the wormhole exit.

A funny little chat starts. They - being russians - talk to me with the help of some translation website. I quickly figure that my Russian skills (mainly toasts) are superior to their English. Also I want all of them to understand the convo. So I myself start talking to them with the help of online translation, plausible checking the translations with the tiny rest of Russian still in the back of my head.

Without much at stake for me I openly tell them that I only do PI and we quickly agree that no violence is necessary. Nevertheless they start to ask for my position. It takes them another 20 minutes of scanning the system with combat scanner probes to realize that I may sit in a cloaky. My talks with the guy that seemed to be the one in charge of the translator earlier leads to them "guaranteeing 100%" multiple times that they are peaceful and only want my best. They want to help me to get out of the system so they invite me to their fleet to fleet-warp me to the recently spawned new wormhole exit. What a helpful group of russians!

Multiple times I politely turn down their fleet invites on my cloaky. Instead I log in my PI char in the worthless T1 indy and ask them to fleet-warp her to the exit. To my surprise they really do without shooting her down and I start to think that we could be a happy wormhole family from now on. So I start to ship out my PI stuff, trip after trip. Unfortunately they don't like the fact that I decline fleet invites on my cloaky. Suddenly the tone of our conversation gets a little rougher. They link killboard statistics from the system that show indy and tower kills, telling me how they had to defend their "SOV" 3 times within the last days and that they were are getting tired of it. I must have missed the action. Poor guys. After turning down their fleet invite another time the mood tuns around completely. The boss kicks in and tells me to get out of their system.
Could it be that they don't want me to do PI there? What about the "it all starts with a scanner" nonsense?
Read more about my struggle to strengthen international relations in the next episode.