The Quick and the Dead

Thug: I've had fun before, and this is not it.
Schlock: Sometimes you have fun, and sometimes the fun has you.
Sergeant Schlock - Schlock Mercenary

Ok, so I had a really bad start to my day. I like to think that, despite my inexperience, I have a brain in my head, I know when to engage and when not to engage. I lost a ship twice due to my own stupidity, or audacity, as some would call it. I decided to break a gate camp in Huola, just for the hell of it.

I died, gloriously to a smartbombing Hyperion. I was very lucky that it apparently took all his smartbombs to pop my rifter, because my pod would've been quite a trophy for them.

So I headed back and got a new rifter, which I then lost warping between gates to an interdictor. This was starting to look like a pattern, so I gave up for the night and docked up in Vitrauze.

Just a bit later Mynxee showed up in system and we got a lead on someone doing a job four jumps out. BravoFox, Mynxee, myself and Joc formed a gang and headed out to kill him and take his stuff. Turned out the lead was cold by the time we got there, and the ship was gone. Mynxee suggested we should head out to Tama, and I didn't have any better ideas. On our way BravoFox noted his fit was set up to handle the mission runner, missing his MicroWarp drive. He got caught on a gate literally a minute or two later and went down.

Tama was active, but no one was up to playing. Mynxee tried to coax a target or two out of the stations, but no such luck. I headed back to Vitrauze and went to bed for the night. I had fun, but it's been a week since my last kill. It was starting to bug me.

Today, I got a bit of a progress report on my application to join the Bastards, and decided to move myself back down to my base of operations in Gusandall. I stocked up a bit of my equipment in my rifter's meager holds and made the jumps. The area is alot more active than Vitrauze. I unloaded my equipment, loaded up a bit of ammo, and headed into Eifer. Eleven people were jacked into the local podnet, but no one seemed to be doing much besides traveling to gates. That was when I caught it.

An interceptor on scan. Raptor.

He was jumping from belt to belt, I saw the wrecks of Angel Cartel warships as he did so. I managed to warp in about thirty kilometers from him as he tried to loot another wreck and burned in his direction. He warped out as soon as he saw me and I picked up his loot. I called out on my personal comms for anyone who wanted to take down an Interceptor, but no one wanted to make the jumps. I decided to try for it myself. I warped my rifter out of the belt, and then back in. I sat right at the warp in point, started all of my modules, and brought up my scanner.

He was out there, maybe watching me watch him.

I kept rescanning until I saw him show up as four thousand kilometers out and closing fast. He warped in five clicks off and I started targeting him immediately. I keyed an orbit of a thousand meters into my navigation terminal and my afterburner which had been burning idle threw me a thousand meters a second in his direcion. The target resolved and my web, scram, and guns fired off. I watched happily as his shields dropped like a rock, while taking almost no damage myself, but then his own webifier kicked on. His armor took a bit more time, but I got him to structure before he had my armor down to half. I saw him start to align to a gate, so I kicked off my orbit and started following him, I started to take alot more damage as his guns finally found me an easy target to hit, but it was too late. He exploded as I fell to thirty eight percent structure.

The fellow offered a good fight after he warped his pod out, which I was too slow to grab. I regretted missing it, but for the first time, someone was smart enough to leave after I killed them. I told him it was a good fight as well, and carried his stuff back to the station for smelting and selling.

Good day.