It's been a while since I went hunting with my fellow Hellcats. There are severe down-sides to operating at the times of day I prefer, one of them being that the majority of my corp-mates are active later and we often miss each other by a matter of minutes. The last week or so has been filled mostly with catching up on the small pile of work that's built up, punctuated by bouts of roaming solo without being able to catch anything.
It's made me a bit sad to see members leaving my first corp, Under the Wings of Fury. The guys there taught me to fly, to fight, and to have fun doing it, but even a sound, solid corporation need to take a break. Many of the members have joined corps within Sc0rched Earth alliance; only a few remain in Atrocitas alliance, and they've moved into the same general area I've been doing my roaming in. I've not had the chance yet to fleet up with my old teachers, but Samma t'huk, my replacement as Sumatox's protege, joined me for a little roam the other day, during which we failed to find anything we could take on in our frigates. We still had fun, so it wasn't really a waste of time.
A couple days later, I was in the process of overseeing my crews fitting out a few ships that had just been brought in when someone greeted me on the local comms channel. A quick check showed Kyle Langdon, Nursultan, and Jyren's Rage and eMokiLLaH from Mayhem Bros. in Local. We chatted for a bit and then I realised I was sick of logistics for the day. Opening a private channel, I asked, 'You got any room in that gang for another?'
Which was how I ended up buzzing around first Auga, then Siseide and Egghelende in a cheap Incursus for several hours. We had several near-misses on a few missioners before moving on into Egghelende, which turned out to be a veritable goldmine, if we were only willing to be patient.
Patience, for a pirate, is the ultimate virtue.
It seemed it was a good day... for Thoraxes. One, two, three in a row, and their little pods, too. I'm really digging Number Two's fit; check that thing out, I'm amazed he could even kill his mission targets. He ran when we warped in on him, then came back almost immediately and just froze at the controls as we pounced. I felt a bit sorry for him. At some point in there, we lost Nur, and Helicity joined us when a missioning battleship showed up on scan, but we missed that by like half a second. The kills were interspersed with stretches of that Zen-like state one reaches when cycling the D-scanner to locate potential targets.
Eventually I started to feel tiredness creeping up on me and headed back to my new base for the night. Once docked, I checked to see what CONCORD had taken out of my standings for my actions that night, and was stunned to see that the capsules of the pilots I'd helped kill had lopped a whopping 18.5% each from my security status. Normally, a podkill only takes 12.5%, so this is rather a drastic change. I'm suspecting someone legislated in the change in order to make attacking innocent pilots less attractive... but when you're focussed on working your way to a perfect -10.0, this is actually a boon. Thanks, CONCORD!
