The Far End of the Stick

The corp has been busy all night moving stuff in and out of our system.  There is a large network of connected systems, and we've seen scouts or probes in many of them.  So we are wary.  We have eyes on the entire wormhole chain from our wormhole to the highsec entry.  Our Orca makes one trip; we round out the goods with Iteron Vs.  Nothing bad happens.

Now we're done.  My corpies have bedtimes, so they disappear.  Me, I fly later into the night.  So I jump in Artemis to see what I might find.  Our system connects directly to three other wspace systems: a C3 via our static, a C2, and a C4 both via their statics.  These systems in turn connect to a few other systems each.  I look in each one for anything very interesting.  C4: nothing.  Then into the C2, with the highsec connection we've been using all night.  Nothing.  Two connected systems: nothing and nothing.  Such is the life of the wandering monster.

OK, back upstream and over to the C3.  Help me obi-wan C3, you're my only hope.  Nothing.  One connected system (highsec static don't count): nothing.  Crap.  Well, this is fate telling me it is getting late and I should go to bed.  I head home.  I'll do my PI and log off.

I jump across the C3->C4 wormhole, and oops.  Someone has found me: there are a Tengu and a Proteus sitting here uncloaked.  All my buds are logged off, so it is just a matter of evasion.  Fortunately my position is good, some 2500m from the wormhole.  On the other hand, one of them is just 3900m from me.  I wait a little.  He moves a bit further.  I order my move away from him, cloak and fire afterburners.  Or maybe the reverse.  Anyway, they don't even seem to try to uncloak me, so far as I can tell.  I warp off to a celestial.

I was planning to go to my POS to reship for PI.  But obviously not with people in my system.  I wonder if maybe they are scouting or something, so I go to the C4 wormhole hoping something interesting will come through.  But I see nothing.  The Proteus disappears.  Then after a while, so does the Tengu.  Well.  This is boring.

I fly to my POS and start in on PI.  Reupping all the extractors is fast as always.  But all of my planets need more inputs.  Hmm.  Should I carry or not?  Hard to say.  I decide to go for it.  I have some anti-ganking tricks I want to try out.  I jump in one of our smaller Iteron Vs, make my adjustments to the fitting, and set out with a load of Toxic Metal.

I don't fly direct.  I have read too much Penny for that.  Instead I do a tactic that I think might juke her.  We have a solo outer planet that, from our POS, is in a direction that nothing else is.  I fly to it at 100km.  There are several ideas here.  One is the most obvious, to deny cloaky eyes the ability to see which POCO I am heading to.  Another is to give cloaky eyes a very obvious place I am going, so that (hopefully) they uncloak while still on the way.  Then I get to see them on-grid, or at least on my dscan.  Then I would know for certain that I am being hunted.  One other idea is to get off their dscan for a while if they do not chase.  This should at least get them wondering if I have headed to a wormhole.

Anyway, I am off, and nothing happens.  I turn at the outer POCO and head to the one I was actually planning to go to.  I drop goods, grab goods, and move to another to do the same.  Then back to base.  And a second time: get a load, stunt Penny (as I lovingly think of my imagined monster), and go to another two POCOs for a pickup and dropfest.  Then back home for the last load.  One more stunt (though to the inner system this time, because I am pretty sure there's noone here but me), and I drop goods and start picking...

Uh oh.  Tengu.  Heartbeat rising.

Well.  I try to be calm because I think I have him beat.  He -- one GhostStarWolf -- is about 10000m off, but not coming fast.  I order the warp to my POS.  He is locking me.  I slowly turn, oh so slowly, and accelerate towards warp initiation.  His only chance now, I think, is to bump me (or have friends).  He's got his warp scrambler on me now.  Strangely, no missiles are hitting me.

I warp.  Sorry, fellow, but I had three warp core stabs.

I say Good Try in local.  GhostStarWolf breaks silence to tell me he had to try for it (which is true; what else do we play this game for?).  I tell him to stick around because there's more PI coming up.

I log out and log on to do PI with my PI characters.  Neither of them need to leave the POS, and so I don't.  Small victories.