"All war is based on deception"-Sun Tzu
Holy shit today was win. Only one kill, but I gotta say, it was pretty entertaining.
The Victim:
Like all of these things, it started with a wreck.
It had been a fairly boring day, with several promising situations (including one faction fit Golem that took a shot at me but docked up immediately afterwards), but no real bites for myself and the CARE patrol. I had told the girlfriend I was going to log off soon to watch TV, so I was about to quit for the night when I happened up a Worlds Collide mission in progress by our friend Sierra Alphatango here.
Upon warping through the first gate and landing in the first room, I find Sierra about to kill the final two NPC ships in the room in a Megathron. The real treasure in this room however, is an unlooted Gallente Battleship wreck! Hoping for a tech 2 bounty, I immediately zipped over to the wreck and looted it. Jackpot. There were 3 Meta 4 Large Railguns, 2 or 3 Tech II cap rechargers, some Tech 2 hardeners and a T2 large armor repper.
Unsuprisingly, Sierra here took exception to me profiting off of his earlier failure:
He was obviously stupid, because he immediately shot me, but I was hoping that by convoing him I could keep him busy typing long enough for me to get to the Orca, grab the Tengu, and get back. So I played innocent and kept him talking for a few minutes.
As soon as I entered the mission I dscanned in the direction of the warpgate and sure enough, his ship, simply dubbed "Megathron" was still on scan...
I overheated my AB to cross the 25km distance to the first warp gate. He sent the message about being about to leave right as I hit the Warp button at the gate. My heart was racing, I knew it was going to be close.
I landed in the room... just as the red name on my overview flickered off grid. I had missed him by less than 5 seconds. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement, but at this point it was still a huge win. I got about 15 mil worth of free shit from his wreck, and almost an entire mission to loot and salvage. So I decided to call in some of my buddies to come and salvage the mission. I hung out in the second room for a few minutes, but eventually decided to give up. I warped back to the Orca and went afk for a minute to grab a drink.
When I came back, I was just about to switch back to my probing ship when I noticed Sierra was still in system. I asked on comms if anyone was docked at the station, and Traigren was. I asked him to see if Sierra was docked, and he informed me that he was not. This meant the sucker was still in space! I figured he was probably landing at a gate to leave or was, well, anywhere other than the most obvious place to be (silly me to think so, right?), but I warped back to the first room of the mission and threw out one last dscan.
Holy shit, he was back in the mission! At this point I had about 5 minutes left on his agression timer, so I burned as fast as I could to the first gate. He wasn't in the second room, but the last NPC ship that was up when I was last there was dead, and he was still on dscan, so I warped into the third room, and there he was, 60km away. I had a moment of despair, as he almost immediately began to align to the station as soon as I landed on grid. Our Orca character doesn't have skirmish links yet so, at best, my point is good for 36km.
I had to at least try though, so I overheated and burned out to him anyway. A week ago I would have typed "I was expecting him to immediately warp out..." but of course he just sat there like a lump of stupid, waiting for me to come tackle and kill him.
Naturally, I was able to casually saunter over to him and point him, and when I lit him up his tank simply MELTED. I was taking advantage of his explosive resist hole, but even still, he didn't even seem to be repping or anything. I don't know if he suddenly had a narcoleptic attack or something, but it's no wonder he lost a Megathron earlier in this mission.
As he approached structure, I opened convo:
I figured a gentle reminder of his previous loss may yield some ransom results, so I went full speed ahead.
He hemmed and hawed for about 20 more seconds, and finally, my wallet blinked.
In all fairness, I DID say 10 seconds. Sorry, the kill request form had already been signed and filed at the head office while he kept me waiting. He had to die at that point, it's company policy you see. Killmail here.
I thought it was pretty cute that after all that he tried to get me to commit space sepukku by podding him. Sorry Sierra, you had the stupid well enough covered for the both of us, but nice try. As derp as all of this was, I do have to say that his response to my question about what he learned was fairly poignant and profound, if simplistic.
Not wanting to leave the poor crew of this mission heron hanging, I also went ahead and killed the last few ships in the last room and liberated the Ship's Crew.
The crew is doing well, only two of them were crushed by unsecured cargo on the trip back to the station. They are currently being offered controlled sanctuary in the SuperFun Concentration Daycamp area of our corp hangar, and will remain there indefinitely for their own protection.
Anyway, I think the total haul we walked away with was around 80 million, as the meta 3 and 4 guns we sold were worth many millions each, plus all of the tech 2 mods we got off of both of his wrecks and the 50 million donation he made to our righteous cause.
Good times.
-Vil
