Uhhh, Guys?

Last night I logged into shenanigans. Apparently, someone had found a couple offline poses a few jumps away from home, and thought it would be a good idea to go take them.

With a titan.

In the past, my corpmates have proven themselves to be somewhat untrustworthy with shiny ships. However, a ‘shiny’ ship back then was anything costing over a billion ISK. I still haven’t decided how I feel about having titans and supers in corp now. I keep waiting for the mail where a corpy sheepishly explains they were doing something stupid with their Nyx on a gate and got it blown up.

However, on the other hand, the general attitude of my alliance (BBC) in general is that ships are for shooting things. Not for sitting offline in a pos, scared. And I guess I’d rather have it this way –a little too close to discomfort on the leroy scale –then to be in a corp or alliance where nothing ever happens because people are too afraid to log on their crap.

Things seemed quiet. The crazy from earlier –where we accidentally leroyed a ton of expensive arty Machs to zero of a large fleet and promptly got them blown up in chaos as our FC DCed for 20 minutes –had been over for hours. Things seemed calm, and granted –the offline poses were in jump range of Shadow Cartel’s home system –but we’d be careful.

(okay, okay. There’s nothing careful about romping around with a titan and a super within jump range of Shadow Cartel, during prime time USTZ. But, that’s what we told ourselves. After all it was just a few innocent offline small towers.)

We arrived at our destination, a titan and a Nyx (who decided to join the party also) in tow. I will never really get over how strange it looks to move through gates with a titan. There were a few solo militia running around, and I sometimes wonder what they think when they land on gate in a Hookbill and see a titan decloak.

Don’t mind us as we roam around with a ship the size of a small station. Nothing to see here.

As we began to light up the first tower, I took a glance at the owner’s corpname. A very tiny voice buried deep inside my subconscious told me that the corp was very familiar…

But the voice was VERY tiny, and very quiet, and the thought only lasted for a split second.

 “Are my drones out?” The Nyx pilot asked.

“What do you mean?!”

“Well, my internet is really crappy right now and things aren’t really loading right. I can’t see if they launched or not…”

I’m pretty sure our 20-something year old FC sprouted a few gray hairs right then and there.

“I see bombers out…so I think you’re good.” Someone piped up.

“If you’re going to be flying a super around you should probably get reliable internet.”

We shot the tower a while, and I carefully alt tabbed out to check market orders on an alt. I have decided to train cyno theory on all of my trade alts. This way, I can appear to be somewhat useful in providing emergency and ‘out’ cynos when I have these trade alts logged on. (*cough*)

“Shadow Cartel in local.”

The tower was entering deep armor, but coms suddenly became a little tense.

“Align the supers out.”

“I have an out cyno ready. They can probably keep shooting the tower –we should be good.” Someone offered.

“Astero on scan –that must be him.”

I pulled up ZKill, and looked up the pilot, half expecting –and dreading—that I would find the killboard record of a kamikaze cyno pilot with a long history of hot dropping. Instead, the killboard was somewhat benign. In fact, it looked like the poor dude was trying very hard to be a solo pilot, and wasn’t really doing so well at it.

“He lost his astero a couple days ago to a slicer…” I noted. “He’s probably just looking for a fight in the plexes….”

My theory was disproved a few moments later. Our new tower was onlining, and our supers had just left grid when the hostile astero landed at the pos site.

Also, our eyes on Shadow Cartel’s home system reported some new HIC activity going on as well.

“They’re hunting us.” Our FC grumbled tersely.  “Get those damn supers cloaked.” (A titan isn’t technically classed as a super but everyone knows what everyone else is talking about.)

Our support fleet landed on the second pos and began shooting it.

“I believe I’m cloaked…” our internet-disabled Nyx pilot mused a few moments later.

“I can’t see you on scan so you’re probably good…”

I couldn’t help grinning at my computer monitor at that point. My corp is certifiably nuts.

“This would go a lot faster if we were all in Tech 3 Battlecruisers.” Someone mentioned. The decision was made to go back home, reship, and come back since we wouldn’t be using the titan and the Nyx to take the second tower. We did so in pretty short order. Returning with a fleet better equipped to taking down a tower.

“Since we aren’t gonna use these big boys, can we just jump them home?” The Nyx pilot asked hopefully.

“Nope.” Our FC responded. “Shadow cartel has alts in our home system now, probably waiting for us to jump them in. “

“Where did the astero go?”

“I have him close to planet six…”

“But…….I’m at planet six!!!!!” The Nyx pilot sounded a little panicked.

“Wait a second, “ our FC sounded deathly calm –a sign I have come to recognize that he is anything but calm –“you cloaked your Nyx on a planet?”

“Don’t worry, I warped to a hundred off….I think.”

You could have heard a pin drop on coms, it was that quiet for a few minutes.

“Please tell me you’re moving…” our FC finally said, sounding a wee bit tired.

“No…I was scared I’d DC or decloak accidentally…”

“You should never, EVER cloak your super on a planet like that…”

“Well, I’m cloaked in an asteroid belt…” the titan pilot piped up.

This resulted in an instant round of chortling on coms. We really are terrible at this game.

“A LEGION!!”

Now, the legion had nothing to do with Shadow Cartel. But after the stress of being openly hunted, a legion landing on our fleet made everyone practically jump out of their skin.

“It’s okay, just align to the station….”

What followed was one of our more drunken alliance mates getting caught and losing an oracle to a large armor fleet the legion had behind him. This other fleet was just out roaming for kills and fights, knowing nothing about the bigger story they had traipsed across.

That is one of the things I love about EVE –the interconnection of stories and people. This new fleet arriving on the scene probably had a completely different tale to tell, with landing on a small group of idiots shooting a pos being but a small incident in it.

They went on their way with their single killmail, and we went back to shooting the pos –our paths crossing briefly and moving away like two motorists passing each other at an intersection.

Meanwhile, our replacement pos at the first location onlined.

“I’m going to try to fit my titan into it…”

Fitting a titan into a small pos is not easy. Something always tends to stick out a little too much, if you don’t bump yourself far of the tower at the onset of landing. 

As both our titan and Nyx got safely wedged inside the small friendly pos, the second tower exploded and we began onlining the second pos of the night. And, it was obvious that Show Cartel nearly immediately stood down. So long as our supers were safe inside the POS, they didn’t have much chance at that point.

The astero left local.

A few minutes later,

“Uhhh, guys?” It was Rom, our head POS technician who was industrially setting up the new POSes for us.

“What’s up.”

“I just looked at the corp of the towers you just killed….you do realize you were just shooting two Shadow Cartel POSes, right?”

“WHAT?!”

“Yeah, that corp is one of their fairly obvious alt corps….”

By now, it was quickly approaching midnight and I was giggling like a little fiend at my monitor.

“You mean to say that we just dropped a titan and a super onto a Shadow Cartel pos, within range of their staging system, with little to no support, during prime USTZ on a Saturday night.”

“Yessir.”

“Well that explains a lot…”

Still giggling, things went quiet as I left Teamspeak and shut down my computer for the night.

Just another night in USTZ BBC.