Writing the title to this post I immediately started thinking of a song from Aladdin: Arabian Nights. I can't stand that movie, but I really like that song. Anyway...
I've managed to work out a less-than-ideal solution to my recent lack of play-time on the home front (ie with the wife). Due to my work schedule I can't really stay up late and night during the week, which really forces me to get in all my gaming on the weekends. Since that is the case I've gotten the clear to stay up all night on Friday's and I won't be bothered Saturday. I can sleep in until mid-afternoon.
Now, while I can play all night and into the morning on Friday night/Saturday morning, that's not really how I like to do things. I'd much rather have a few hours on several days throughout the week, so let this be a lesson to you younger gentlemen who probably have never seen a women naked without paying for it: just don't get married! If you don't want to take my word for it then at least take the advice of the great and powerful Sam, possibly one of the wisest cocaine sages of the 1980's.
Last night was interesting in a fail kind of way. I logged into to find that we had a possible fight with Existential Anxiety (EA), a group that has become something of a pet project for Transmission Lost over the last few months. I'm not sure what lead up to this possible fight, but they knew we were there and we knew they were there and everything looked pretty good, so I hopped into my Proteus and headed down the chain.
I had to travel through two systems in k-space, which should be renamed suck-space, but when there are fights to be had suck-space is of no consequence. After those two systems I dived back into the beloved unknown and we gathered the fleet in EA's home system.
For a while there we thought they were actually going to fight us. I had about an hour before I needed to log which was plenty of time to blow some people up and get back to Loveshack. In the end they simply wasted about an hour of our lives. First their excuse was that we had too many people.
Are you serious?! You and two thirds of wormhole space, outnumbering us 6-to-1, invade our home and burn it to the ground and now you don't want to fight outnumbered yourselves?
Then they said they would fight a 10v10. While we mulled this over they took ten ships and moved them to the hi-sec wormhole. EA, why would you do this? Do you think we would come and fight you on the hi-sec wormhole? I think this got me pissed off more than anything else.
But it's okay. It's all fine. You don't like to fight unless victory is assured. When victory isn't assured you'll fight on a hi-sec wormhole so you can just jump to safety. Good. Insidious Design played these stupid Mickey Mouse games. They ran their mouths and made a lot of talk and hid inside POS's, wouldn't fight outnumbered and all that.
I would like to introduce EVE to the new punks of wormhole space: Existential Design! I hope everyone gets a good look because they won't be around much longer.
During the first week of April we, Transmission Lost, identified scouts from Polarized, a mercenary wormhole alliance, in our system. Polarized, for those of you not familiar with w-space, are a spin-off of Exhale. They know what they're doing and are not taken lightly.
A lone covert ops frigate in the system is not typically a problem - we simply wait for it at the wormhole and kill it when it attempts to leave. The fact that this was a group in covert-capable ships and presumably lead by that alliance's fleet commander indicated that this was no ordinary scouting party.
An invasion was probably in the works and we had just put eyes on their reconnassiance team. That our alliance had just been war-decced by high-sec mercenaries only lent more credibility to that line of thinking.
Over the course of the next two days we stayed well ahead of this recon group, quickly scanning down the statics as well as incoming connections and setting up camps to catch and kill them or force them out. In this way we thinned their numbers, but their ultimate goal, J215338 or Loveshack, was still within reach.
We got intel that Polarized was rage-rolling and on the first of April they got their chance when a wormhole connected their system to ours. A swarm of ships from multiple alliances (Polarized, Existential Anxiety, Surely You're Joking, Ixtab, Ash, Buffer Zone, The Last Chancers, R.E.P.O., Exiled Ones, etc.) began pouring into our system and there was very little we could do about it.
Transmission Lost was not without friends, however. Our frequent and skilled opponents Sleeper Social Club and Kill It With Fire were, themselves, rage-rolling for our system. They didn't arrive in time to prevent our towers from being seiged into reinforced mode, but they did come. Unfortunately, their arrival was ill-timed. Transmission Lost forces were few at that point in the day. Thinking that if they moved quickly enough they could wrest control of the static wormhole and thus gain system control SSC and KILL attacked the enemy fleet camping the wormhole.
Transmission Lost pilots joined in on the counter-attack, but the Polarized coalition was reacted quickly with overwhelming force that was far beyond our expectations. We took severe losses and the reinforcements were forced to retreat back to their home system, collapsing the wormhole behind them.
Our fate was sealed and written in red on our killboards.
What was the impetus behind this invasion? It's uncertain, but it was clear that the Loveshack would burn and every capsuleer flying the colors of Transmission Lost would feel the cold bite of open space before it was all over.
Even as I write this the forces arrayed against us are destroying our POSes; obliterating a fortress system that has existed for longer than I know and has seen countless battles.
But their coalition is fleeting and as nebulous as wormhole space itself. Those who have instigated this will not always so grotesquely outnumber Transmission Lost. Their die is cast and sooner or later we will come to collect the debt that is owed to us.
