I’ve been a bit out of touch recently with the blog, and have been harassed by some of my readers. Thank you, to those of you who bothered to harass me for my sporadic in game periods recently. With the end of summer, comes the end of another research project, and the endings of things tend to suck a lot of time out of my schedule. Things should now be able to resume as normal with biweekly updates at the beginningish and endingish of the week.
I sent another scan ping out to the Old Man Star Gate, which confirmed my previous result. A lone punisher on gate, two Caldari war targets somewhere in system and several of my Gallente allies swarming around. Strategic points had been captured, or would be in a few minutes, there wasn’t much left to do but hunt.
It had been a good day thus far. The militia had captured every site it could in Heydelies, repelling Caldari and Pirate alike. I’d nearly lost a punisher to a rupture earlier in the day, but had managed to escape. No losses, but no kills. I now sat in my trusty vengeance, 100M kilometers off to the side of the gate, watching the lone punisher on scan.
“He’s probably baiting,” I said to myself, “what the hell.” I urged my ship into action and dropped out of warp 20km from the target. Seconds later his propulsion systems were locked down and my guns were biting hard into his thick armor. Meanwhile the superior resistances on my tech II hull were mitigating most of his damage. The fight was over, it was only a matter of time.
“Two targets on grid,” Aura’s voice drew my attention to the local scan as a brutix and a hurricane dropped out of warp on top of me. I checked my own systems. The punisher had me scrambled, there was no escape for me, but his armor was nearly gone.
“Aura overheat everything that does damage,” I shouted as I manually manipulated the power hungry armor repair unit but I found my capacitor reserves dropping much faster than I had expected. Neuts. This was going to go poorly.
I sighed and sat back in my command chair, let the guns run, maybe it’d be enough.
It wasn’t, and in moments I found myself in my pod, looking down at the explosion that was once my ship. I sat in space, hesitating, and one by one the Caldari pilots locked and fired upon my pod. I needed this, I thought to myself, let it go.
A moment of chill ran down my spine.
I gasped for air and sat up in the clone vat, as if awaking from a nightmare.
“Where am I?,” I asked. No one was in the room. I strapped a new neocom onto my wrist.
“Aura, where are we?”
“Mies, Madame. Pend Insurance wishes to inform you that they regret the loss of your ship, and have transferred the agreed upon…”
“Thank you Aura, is the Arbitrator assembled and ready?” I was already in elevator from the medical sector heading to the flight deck.
“Yes Madame.”
“Good, have it prepped for flight. I want to be in space in 5 minutes, and authorize another clone.”
I stood in the elevator in my white clone robe and fuzzy slippers as it silently moved through the station. I brought my left hand up and steadied it. I was shivering with adrenaline, sent coursing through my veins by my confused new body.
The fear was gone. I felt warm.