A Series of Fortunate Events

“You just missed a fight, Susan.”

I hate logging on to hear that. I want to log on to hear “Quick, get into fleet! We’re about to kill all the things!”

But today, my story starts at the end of a fight, and at the beginning of a rather strange day playing EVE. In order to fully understand it’s strangeness, you’re going to have to understand some of the strange politics that go along with it:

As of Saturday, we had several primary groups living in the Huola-Kourmonen-Kamela area. This area, including the Auga, Amamake pipe, tends to be the ‘hottest’ part of the Amarr/Minmatar warzone, usually with both militia and pirates lurking about.

Death by Design, led by x-Amarrian Predator Elite moved back into Kamela within the last couple of months. They were followed by Tempest Legion, who ended up joining the Minmatar militia and wardeccing Late Night Alliance.

We also have several Amarr groups in the general area, as well as newcomers Mafia Redux who moved into the area after leaving their alliance, Black Legion.

I don’t know the whole story, but there’s some sort of bad blood between Predator Elite’s group and Tempest Legion. Hearing snippets of this and that, apparently, Predator’s group and TL were friends with each other, with Predator ‘batphoning’ them to drop capitals on various people. The way I’ve heard the story, he teamed up with some Late Night folks at one point, and turned on Tempest Legion, killing several of their capitals.

This would explain why shortly after returning to the warzone, TL started attacking Predator’s Corporation’s assets –POCOs, etc. in Kamela, and wardecced LNA.

I’m not sure what had transpired before I logged on this weekend, but when I did, people were posting killmails, and there was a random Tempest Legion in local smacking people.

Quite a lot of Late Night were active, which is somewhat unusual these days. Included in the mix was our alliance CEO, Bahamut420, and one of our FCs and best pvpers, TeaEarlyGreyHOT.

Well, you should never smack LNA with Tea in local unless you are willing to put your money where your mouth is. He immediately challenged the TL guy to a 1v1, to which the TL guy agreed. After discussing the ‘fairness’ of it all, Tea ended up inviting the guy to our fleet, and I grabbed a bag of popcorn and prepared to enjoy the show.

Timing is everything in EVE. And as it was, just after inviting the Tempest Legion guy to fleet, an Amarr gang shows up.

Killing the Amarr always takes priority over killing inter-militia wartargets, so we were instantly distracted from the 1v1. Hearing what was going on, the Tempest Legion guy offered to join us in killing the Amarr, and asked what he should bring to the party. He was Minmatar, too, afterall.
One thing led to another, and before long he was also on our coms, and was joined by another Tempest Legion who also joined our fleet.

Now, if you’ve ever flown with LNA, you will know it’s not for everyone. We don’t have FCs in the traditional sense, and this often makes people nervous. We’ve all flown together for so long, that usually we just decide what we want to do and do it –and everyone knows more or less what is expected of them. The term ‘FC’ is more a fancy label for the target caller, which is usually whomever lands first on the field of battle. It can sometimes be chaotic, but it works –most of the time.

You could sense the TL guy’s blood pressure rising, as he was not told exactly what to do and where to meet up with everyone. “Does this fleet have an FC?!” he kept asking. “Is anyone leading this operation?!”

Finally, he snaps, and starts barking orders. Kudos to him for that. Most people snap, and leave—never to return. I’m not sure we’ve ever had someone jump into a LNA fleet and take over before.
Especially not someone who is currently at war with us. (lol!)

We chatted about him a while in our super secret alliance intel channels. Some people were very grumpy and demanded he be removed from our Team Speak channel, and fleet immediately. While others shrugged. “Let’s follow him and see what happens. Maybe he’ll get us kills –it’s not like we’re picking out curtains with him or anything.”

I’m not sure what happened to the Amarr group, but we ended up roaming out to Metro. Jokes were told, stories were shared, and Amarr were killed. We trolled him a bit, which he didn’t really pickup on. Needless to say he amused us, even though he talked more than anyone should have breath for.
“Does he need to tell us 10 times to hold on the gate?” someone asked in a private intel channel.

We even started discussing the possibility of helping Tempest Legion take down some Death by Design assets that were coming out of reinforced mode soon. (In another channel I was talking to Predator Elite about the fight with TL they were about to have over the POCO. Whom we would have ended up supporting is anyone’s guess –we never got there.)

And, while we didn’t know it at the time, in yet other channels, Tempest Legion was organizing with Mafia Redux to possibly attack us in the near future.

And then, Shadow Cartel shows up.

Now, the thing with Shadow Cartel is they are bloody hard to kill. They fly around the warzone with this tinker tank setup with Tengus and the like, and even a decent gang of neuting battleships usually can’t break them. (We know, we’ve tried!)

“Susan, you want to go kill Shadow Cartel?” Predator Elite asks.

After some diplomatic bantering on coms about what we wanted to do, we decided to go for it. We end up using our fleet, but getting on Death by Design’s coms.

And we aren’t the only ones Pred invites to the party. The gang is a mixture of LNA, Death by Design, Tempest Legion, at least one Amarr group, and even a Goon who lives in the area.
We are rather large at that point, and I kind of thought SC would run from our rather staggering amount of DPS. But, kudos to them, they took the fight.

Our much-talking Tempest Legion guy dropped a triage carrier into the mix, in spite of being at war with most of the people in his fleet.

We rolled SC pretty soundly, killing their Tengus and Domis. I couldn’t tell if they were fighting, or trying to de-agress and run away, we killed some of them so fast. Especially after we broke the first 1-2.

Amusingly, a group of PL ishtars showed up to the party.

“Should we go after those ishtars?” someone asked when SC was dead.

“Nope. They were helping us kill Shadow Cartel.”

Now THAT I have not heard before. Though, we were expecting SC to light a cyno when things hit the fan. And Pred has been known to batphone PL before.

After drooling over shiny killmails for a half hour or so, everyone ended up parting ways. However, for LNA and Death by Design, it didn’t end up being the last, nor the biggest fight of the evening.

Much later that night, a strange neutral gang was spotted romping through the warzone. I say strange, because we had some difficulty in identifying who they were.

“Every name I show-info on is in a different corp/alliance!” someone complained. “What on earth?!”
There was only one explanation: Bombers Bar!

(We found out lately that it was originally an incursion fleet, that decided to go on a PVP roam and invited all the people out of the bomber’s bar channel.)

We ended up engaging them on the Ossogur gate in Amamake. And from their affiliations, to what they were flying, they were about as kitchen sink as you can be. We killed tons of battlecruisers, an Ishtar, a Loki, a Damnation, among other smaller things. Even in spite of them having 6 logistics on field. After killing one of their logi, the rest seemed to act like deer in the headlights, allowing us to quickly pound through their fleet members.

We lost some battleships of our own, but soundly held the field. Judging from coms, and the gfs and other comments in local, everyone obviously had a good time blowing things up, on both sides.

Their FC private convoed me later to thank us for giving them a really good fight.
I must admit. Extracting tears is fun. But the most satisfying fights tend to be where everyone leaves with killmails and a smile on their face.

Sadly, I don’t think Tea ever got his 1v1. And, we never found out who would turn on who among our strange Saturday night crowd of devious frienemies.

But I guess that saves some stories for another day.