"When thou runnest the holy Sleeper sites of Bob, the Lord thine God, thou shalt never do so without first rolling thine statics. If there existeth any K162s, those thou shalt also roll. If thou shalt not roll thine statics and K162s then thou shalt post a scout on the holes. If thou shalt not roll thine statics and K162s or post a scout then thou shalt burn."
- A reading from the Holy Scriptures of Bob
As a devout follower of Bob I feel it is my duty to bring his Holy Word to all the peoples and tribes of w-space. This past Monday I had an opportunity to do just that (just like the Spanish Conquistadors that purified the souls of the Aztech savages).
Having resolved our home system, Dirty Mermaid, I was scanning out our static chain. There were a couple of wormholes to C5 space and some lower class systems as well. I began poking my head into each of the systems. I started with the low-end stuff first, hoping to find a solo site runner, but had no luck, so moved onto the C5's.
The first of the two wormholes contained nothing of interest, so I immediately moved onto the second, a system we would unimaginatively name 5.2
The wormhole to 5.2 was this system's static and I noticed when I first scanned it down that it had just at that moment spawned the K162 on the other end. By the time I jumped through it had existed for a good 5-10 minutes.
Dscan was empty save for a citadel and a POS and there were only three or four signatures in system, along with two sites. The outer planet was outside dscan range, so I warped over to check it out.
Someone was running escalations! Accompanying the wrecks were 2 Rattlesnakes, a Moros and a Phoenix. I quickly put eyes on our targets, relayed this information to my fleet and after much serious deliberation it was decided that the two of us (me in my Helios and Menacher in his Machariel) would fall just short of being able to break their tank, so he batphoned some friends of his: POSParty and Fly Sideways.
At this point the situation became somewhat unstable. While Menacher tried to collect some extra DPS, our targets which were part of an alliance called Moist (nice name, btw) spotted the extra wormhole connection and began rolling. For anyone not familiar with w-space, this presented a particular issue because if they rolled then our well-trod and convenient back door into their system would be lost and if there were no other convenient routes we would lose an opportunity to gank capitals. At this point, though, there was nothing we could do.
I remained in the system, hoping they would return to cap escalations at which point I could scan down the static and hope it wasn't crit. While they were busy rolling I went ahead to the outer planet and dropped probes, then moved them out of dscan range of the system and returned to my perch on the wormhole.
Meanwhile, Menacher was dealing with POSParty and Fly Sideways. Their alliance was under a wardec by some hi-sec scrubs. POSParty's rectal cavity had already been ravaged earlier in the day and they decided to have a big, gay ship-spinning party for themselves rather than redeem their abject failure in the eyes of Bob. Fly Sideways, however, did not disappoint. They came for the gud fites and flew across a dozen or so hi-sec systems, dicks out and waving like glorious banners of defiance in the face of hi-sec wardec and CONCORD alike.
As soon as the hole collapsed Moist reshipped and returned to finish the site and I made use of their distractedness to resolve their system under their noses. Their static, miraculously left stable, lead to a C3 system. The C3 was full of sigs, but I quickly found a hi-sec connection that was just a few short jumps from a hi-sec connection in Dirty Mermaid's static chain.
With our route to Moist's sweet, sweet capitals re-established I headed back to the C5 and put eyes back on our target, but they had changed up their fleet comp to produce more Sleepers. They were now flying 3 Moros dreadnoughts and 2 Phoenix carriers. Our fleet, though reinforced by Fly Sideways, wasn't setup to handle a this, but we soon lucked out.
Moist finished the site and began prepping to run the remaining Sleeper site while one of them salvaged wrecks and loot. Menacher and Fly Sideways were now in the hi-sec system, waiting to move up the chain to the C5. We were waiting for Moist capitals to take the field again, but several minutes ticked by and nothing happened. While we probably could have waited for the salvaging Noctis to clear the field and reship so they could run the second site we got tired of waiting and decided to use the Noctis as a pretext to bait Moist into a larger fight.
Fly Sideways joined my Helios in the C5 with a Loki and Proteus (both cloaky). The rest of the fleet moved up into the C3, standing by to jump into the C5.
While I kept eyes on Moist's citadel, the Loki engaged the Noctis, slowly burning it down. Moist escalated with a Stratios, which also died, this time to both the Loki and the Proteus. While the Stratios burned Moist pulled out a shiny Bhaalgorn. As it warped ever so slowly to the outer planet where the Loki and Proteus were our fleet jumped into the C5 and warped to what was an inevitable slaughter.
We wouldn't get any cap kills, but the Bhaalgorn pilot's death cries in local would entertain us well enough. Loot was scooped, lulz were had and a valuable lesson was taught.
Special thanks to the professional multi-boxers from Fly Sideways!
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