Lurking for Fun and Profit

You know... I'm not really certain how last night happened.

The corp has had a lot of recruits in the last couple weeks, bringing the Hellcats membership up to eighteen. We've come a long way in the eight months since I joined, but it means extra work for the Hellcats command staff -- Mynx and I had a chat the other day and we decided that Venom Orchid had earned the trust and responsibility of being a corp director. Not bad for a girl who joined after hearing I'd shot and downed her sister in a baiting attempt!

I was working away in my office making up for the time I'd lost on Saturday and listening in on voice comms when I heard 'sniping Abaddon in Las', 'mostly tackle, here' and 'need more dps'.

Without hesitation, I turned my transmission on. 'You guys want me out there in the Myrm?'

What followed was a bit confusing, but the sniping battleship seemed to disappear, there was a gang in Todifreauan we thought we could handle which suddenly decided to go somewhere else, and then there was a Dominix in a mission who had a scout sitting on his entrance-gate. We did pick up a load of free t2 heavy drones there, but it was a somewhat disappointing evening. Especially sitting in a battlecruiser: it means that all those targets you have to let pass you on the gates are suddenly viable because your tank can take the damage from the sentry guns.

Piracy is a very hit-or-miss profession: either you get it and go home with fat pockets or you go hungry another day.

I ended up on the Lasleinur gate waiting for the go to jump in and in the end a Caracal got tackled by Bastards recruits Jmarr and Happy San and the call was made to leave it to the smaller ships -- something I agreed with, because it feels just plain wrong to send against a target any amount of ships that total more than the target's hull-mass, a sentiment I picked up from Tical31 in Doom Armada. The Caracal ceased to exist, and then the pod was caught.

And then someone had the brilliant idea of seeing how long they could just hold the pod in space. I'm not certain what the point was; maybe just milking the smack cow, or maybe it was a personal challenge. In the end, someone got an itchy trigger and the pod popped after eleven minutes while we waited to see how many of his mates would come to the rescue. None arrived, however, and we returned to Evati.

I swapped to my Taranis. I've been loving flying interceptors lately; the size and agility make things fun, and at the end of the day, I've always been more of a small-ships pilot.

Flash decided it was time to range further afield in our search for a fight; he sent me out towards Otosela. I had a close encounter of the Blinky Thrasher kind on the Akkio gate in Todifrauan; not fancying my chances -- Thrashers, when properly set up, are fearsome frigate-killing platforms -- I jumped in and picked a safespot to warp to.

My spot just happened to be in line with the Tama gate, and it was clear the destroyer pilot did very much fancy his chances taking me out, because he warped to Tama, hung about at the gate for a bit, jumped in, then came back. By that point we had RoninData in Akkio too, with me playing bait on a planet for his Rapier, but the destroyer pilot I think knew trouble when he saw it and left.

Otosela, when I checked, didn't look like a very pirate-friendly environment: twenty in local, mostly members of Rote Kapelle alliance, several of whom were waiting out GCCs somewhere in the system. I may still be on speaking terms with members of Stimulus, but I know better than to test my luck.

Just about then, someone spotted a mission-running Rokh in Evati. The pilot had been drifting around for a few days, but this was the first time we had seen her actually doing anything -- and in such a juicy ride, too. The pilot entered and left the system a few times, with everyone desperately checking the nearby systems to find out where she was going, until one of our newer members who hasn't yet lost all her security status checked Anher and caught the Rokh returning.

The tankers huddled around Anher gate, awaiting the telltale flare of the returning battleship. When it finally appeared -- 35km from the camp! -- the pilot beat a blazing trail away... towards the top asteroid belt. The gatecamp split as pilots went to either the belt or the planet, just in case, and the rest of us waiting in Todifrauan jumped in and aligned.

Jmarr hit the belt first, and there was the Rokh, sitting at 0 to the beacon, fresh out of warp and too slow to get away. Tackle was called, and we quickly surrounded the battleship, pinning it in place while the confused pilot was offered ransom terms. In the end, she had only 147 of the 150 million demanded, but this was considered an acceptable compromise.

Guess it was a fat-pockets day, after all!