The Weirdest Coincidence

So there I was, just back at the beach house after spending most of the day canoeing down the river with my family. I had gone forth with the bright idea of not wear sunscreen, and my pasty white skin was starting up a slightly late protest.

As the burning sensation grew, with it came a slight nostalgia. The feeling of sunburn had reminded me of something I had missed ever since my gaming laptop (!) started to give out on me prematurely. Just a week prior to this vacation, I had built my own desktop, complete with a stupidly oversized monitor.

In a word: bak

Irvin the Dockworker

Irvin the dockworker grimaced as he lay down the final box of gear. After wiping the sweat off his brow, he slid down into a sitting position and leaned against the box and looked out towards the stars. It had been one hell of a day.

A bizarre order had come in to move a large portion of Gunpoint Diplomacy's shared hangar into the self-proclaimed Commodore Avan Sercedos's hangar. Just as they had finished moving all the equipment over, both by hand and by machine, the Commodore himself stormed into the room screaming about shitty interfaces and mindless workers. After nearly knifing a dockworker who talked back to him, the Commodore made his exit, complaining that they could have at least moved the exotic dancers as well.

Irvin wouldn't have minded that so much.

After a few minutes, a flood of smaller orders came in from the Commodore's quarters. They would slowly but surely return all the mistakenly purloined goods from his personal hangar back to Gunpoint Diplomacy's. A good while later and the hangars were mostly returned to their former states. Irvin had been happy that a long day's work was finally over.

Just moments later, another order came in. This time it didn't originate from the quarters of the Commodore. A mysterious order had come in from some mischievous fellow. This time, somebody else entirely had ordered that the entire contents of the same hangar that had just been emptied and restored be delivered back into the hangar of the Commodore. Irvin had sighed and picked the box he had just set down back up, growling. He had known that the first order was the correct one, the Commodore had probably just been high on Exile or something.

With the articles finally back in the Commodore's hangar, he returned. Sercedos seemed to have grown several days worth of facial hair in the short time between his appearances. He just looked around the hangar with a depressed look, and went over to one of his vessels, his fashionable Ares interceptor. As he came closer to it, his sad look changed to a look of glee as he gave orders to swap out some of the equipment attached to it. Finally satisfied, he sailed out into the unknown, to eventually return in his pod. As he strode forth from his pod, completely arse-naked, his grin had only grown.

Irvin worked for some strange people.

Murder in Outer Space?

So there I was, relaxing in my home system of Oddelulf, when a certain link from a certain Wensley caught my eyes. It was a link to a Scrapheap Challenge thread regarding the latest Gank Night. It seemed that the theme of this GN was CROWS, CROWS EVERYWHERE, and the roam would be taking place later the same day. What further encouraged my participation was that the lowsec meetup was exactly one jump away from my home! How convenient. Unfortunately, I don't have Caldari Frigate V, so I was rather disappointed until I read a post which stated that all interceptors were acceptable, preferably tackle inties such as the Malediction, Ares, and Stiletto. So I checked the market, and found the one that was cheapest.

                                   The Ares. I wondered for a moment why it only cost 10m ISK.

When I opened Eve Fitting Tool, I rediscovered for the third or fourth time why that was. Eventually I decided upon a fit that would A) only use missiles B) not die instantly and C) let me whore additional loot from every battle we faced.

[Ares, sure hope i dont get primaried]
Emergency Damage Control I
Micro Auxiliary Power Core I
Nanofiber Internal Structure II
Nanofiber Internal Structure II

Medium F-S9 Regolith Shield Induction
Catalyzed Cold-Gas I Arcjet Thrusters
Warp Disruptor II

'Malkuth' Standard Missile Launcher I, Sabretooth Light Missile
Salvager I
Salvager I

Small Core Defence Field Extender I
Small Core Defence Field Extender I

I knew from the start that this fit would lack any significant damage whatsoever, but what I didn't discover until the journey was underway was that my cowardice in fitting a shield extender over a sensor booster would cost me in ability to whore onto as many killmails as possible.

In the couple of hours before the roam would head out, I took a nap and at 21:15 EVE time, I logged back in and moved over to Bosena Bosnia, where our glorious FC Larkonis Trassler was leading what was supposed to be a conga line. In my opinion, it looked more like some sort of diseased blob but I kept my mouth shut and joined in. Fifteen minutes later, the fleet had mostly formed up. There were about 65 interceptors in fleet, accompanied by four or so interdictors and a boosting Loki and Tengu.

Now, I have to ask you to forgive me for any inaccuracies in the following tale. It was four hours of carnage that I'm going to super condense.

The roam began with a bit of lag on my end, but nothing unbearable. We were relaxing on our outgate in Astabih, just a few jumps from Bosena Bosnia, when a neutral Hurricane decloaked. While most people know that aggressing a neutral battlecruiser on a lowsec gate or station while flying a paper thin Crow is a pretty awful idea, some hero decided that they wanted to go through with it anyways. The sentry guns showed their displeasure and the fleet quickly took its first loss of the night. After a moment of said pilot being mocked on Teamspeak, there was a pause as the Hurricane decided to aggress one of our neutral pilots. Most people know that going GCC on a lowsec gate while you are in the company of 70 or so angry little ships is a really terrible idea, but not this heroic hurricane. Soon after its first loss, the fleet scored its first kill of the night.

Soon our scouts made it into 0.0 space, with the main fleet just behind. A small camp was reported on the first gate, consisting of a small number of battlecruisers and such. The wrath of our MURDER OF CROWS fell upon them, and much laughter was had. We proceeded onwards and encountered the largest amount of solo / duo blackbirds that I've ever seen. There is only one kill on the killboard, but I'm fairly sure we killed more than one of them. Next up was interrupting a duel between a pair of Drakes and defeating them both in honourable 70v1 combat. We carried on in this matter up to the system of UBX-CC, a system containing one of the various jump bridges in the NC's jump bridge network.

Our scout reported that a small number of ships were messing about outside of the jump bridge POS, and that he had tackled one. We jumped our entire fleet in and slew a diabolic Phobos heavy interdictor and yet another Hurricane, and then promptly lost a small number of interceptors to the POS guns, including our FC. Rather than leaving us here, we regrouped at a planet and some hero gave Larkonis a shiny Malediction. At some point during this, one of our pilots had figured out the password to the jump bridge POS. We warped our entire fleet inside and hung out with the NC pilots for a little while before having one of the most demented fights on a POS that I have ever borne witness to. After getting bored sharing the POS while shooting at them, we continued onwards.

On the out-gate in the system of L-HV5C we killed a bizarre procession of a Crane, Prowler, Ishkur, friendly Crow, and then a Harbinger. It was odd that none of them knew that we were there after we had been hanging around a jump bridge for twenty minutes or so. After a few more minor systems, we proceeded to completely get annihilated by the tactical smartbomb genius of Violent Entity... oh, wait, nevermind.

After mocking those who had managed to lose their ships to the smartbombs, we moved on to BWF-ZZ, where we fought Brick Squad. Most of the fight consisted of them warping in a small number of ships, their stealth bombers decloaking and dropping bombs around the ships to catch some of our guys, us tackling the ship or one of the stealth bombers, and then everything that got tackled dying horribly. At some point, Brick Squad got tired of dying horribly and decided that the most effective counter to our swarm was four Scimitars. Now, if their goal was to get rid of us, that's fine and good and they should have done it from the beginning. But supposedly, their goal was to get a real ~good fight~ out of us. I'm not sure who thought that adding so much remote repping power to their fleet that we had no real chance of breaking them would make us want to fight, but apparently somebody did. At this point, the Gank Night had been dragging on for four hours, so our FC had us jump into lowsec and "go the fuck home", and we were followed by at least one Brick Squad member and smacked for our cowardice. BR for all the fights in BWF is here.

Thanks Lark for FCing and "organizing." He also has a poast regarding this CROW adventure. Additional thanks go to Lady Spank, who kindly gave me a Gallente Federation Starbase Charter for use in my Ares, Wensley, without whom I would have never known about this roam, and Don Pellegrino for his Canadian moral support and mockery of my use of the peasant 'Malkuth' launcher instead of 'Arbalest' launchers.

Note: I'm aware that most of the battle 'reports' contain no information about our own losses, but that's because nobody gives a fuck about what we lost, only what we destroyed as a glorious Murder of Crows.

Durr durr Connection problems durr durr

As I said before, my adventures are generally uninteresting, but this odd issue I'm having with my connection basically prevents me from even having those adventures. You see, whenever I'm inside a station and chatting with people, trying to get an idea of what ships to bring about, there's basically a ticking time bomb which will go off whenever it damn well pleases, and at that point all my attempts at witty banter will be reduced to the blaring "YOU CANNOT DO THAT" sound, and then the client closes itself before opening another instance of the client as though to taunt me with what I cannot have.


So, I can't chill in stations for very long. That'd be okay normally, but I haven't had a chance to get my hangar even marginally filled out yet, so I don't have much to do besides chill out in stations while I think hard, as us gentlefolk like to do.



But then I logged in to see what my new corp was up to, and LO AND BEHOLD! They were committing atrocious acts of suicide ganking! After requisitioning a thrasher (with my connection problems, this was much more dramatic of a process than it sounds) I undocked, being led by glorious squad commander Ariartus. And I noticed something. For the 15 minutes or so I was undocked, there was not a single problem with my connection. And then, after I got the killmail for a hulk and proceeded to prove that I have no idea what suicide ganking means by warping out, our little group headed back to station to regroup. About thirty seconds after docking, I disconnected.

Greetings!

Hi there!

I am Avan Sercedos, ferocious Helios warrior in the MMO EVE Online. I'm not particularly good at this game or anything, and my adventures aren't particularly exciting either, but a certain fellow who will not be named made me make this. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, only time will tell.

Since I've just come back from a two month hiatus from EVE, and am currently changing home systems and acquiring a hangar of ships, I have no beautiful tales to recount to you. Instead I leave you with a beautiful picture.

Thank you for your time.