Whereon It Pays To Be Courteous

So we're down to one wormhole now, our Class 2 with Moros Dreadnought, or Zombieland, as I have termed it. We got sick of calling them C2-1 and C2-2, and mixing them up between us. So I called the one we live in now Zombieland, and Nick called the other C2, Pretoria. I think Johanesburg and a couple other South African cities were on the list. But anyhow, we are short one Pretoria.

Day had been going as any other, we ran down the combat sites, I opened our Class 1 static and found an unoccupied system. I jumped in my Zealot and Devoter and ran four of them, planned on coming back later. Did some PI, some fueling. Typical day.

Til later in the evening, I get a text from Nick says that there are structures in "Pretoria" that aren't ours. I jumped on vent and found out someone had put up a large POS in our system. Nick noted that this corp had tried to join our contact channel, but he was afk, so never responded.

So, we both get scanning, and the POS shield is up, and guns are being anchored. That's not so good. Nick runs down the corp with his awesome internet stalking skills and we find out the corp is made of 12 members, and Nick adds them all to his contact list, and finds only a few online.

Earlier in the day, I had actually thought about dropping this hole, in fact. It didn't spawn fast enough to even replenish what the wormhole vacationers took down, and I hadn't actually been looking forward to moving in once this hole ran dry. So we were presented with a couple choices.

Either we fight for the hole, or we pack it up and move out. We chose somewhere in between, and launched every character we had access to in whichever the most bad ass ships they could fly. Scanned down the exit, found only a drake watching it, and warped in my Zealot, the Devoter, an Onyx, a Dominix, an Armageddon fit for max DPS, and an Ishtar.

Somewhere in all this, they woke up to the fact that people were in system, and started talking with two characters. One didn't know very much about wormholes, or anything, really, and seemed to be in charge. She was to the point, and wanted to "be diplomatic". The second character was your atypical Eve pirate. Lots of "wure gunna buld 6 dreuds in thar and blows up ur PoS!"

After taking a look at all the characters, we noticed they were almost all, to the day, made back in May of this year. Hard to fly a dread and fight it well in that kind of time if they were doing any sort of other skills....so no, that threat wasn't going to work.

Somewhere in the posturing and "being diplomatic", our fleet arrived inside the wormhole and set up shop with a bubble. This really got their attention, and the bulldog dropped off the radar, no doubt soiling the radar as he fled. The "diplomat" then asked what we would like to do. I told her that since they had been "undiplomatic" by moving into an occupied wormhole, and assuming we were an industrial only corp, that we'd sit there til we managed to kill a few of their ships and pods as restitution. And then, if we wanted to, we'd sit inside and wait for their dreads to be built, all the while sniping and trapping them. Oh, and I was going to clear the hole of sigs, but I didn't mention that. These people didn't know much about wormholes, and I saved some backstabbing for later.

So she kept kindly asking us to move off the wormhole, to which we replied that that wasn't happening. I discussed it with Nick, and we said, okay, you give us the gun, and we'll give you the cornbread.

Wait, no, that's not it.

We demanded 100 mil to move away from the wormhole and to take our POS down. That didn't get mulled over very long before she countered with 50 mil. So these guys are broke from putting up this POS. Alright. So we agree. She then tries to get us to move away before she pays, for us to move out our POS before she pays, etc etc. She also says quite a few things that makes us realize she has no idea how long a POS takes to take apart.

Chock another one up for a noob corp. There's nothing bad about noob corps, sure, or noobs. We were all a noob at some point. But when you let a bulldog bark, you might want to make sure he can bite. And you probably shouldn't assume things in Eve, like what looks like a mining corp with mostly 3 year+ members can't fly nasty nasty ships. That puts you in a precarious position, one in which I think was that their scanner pilot was not inside the wormhole we were blockading, and she was starting to panic a bit.

But, that's what you get when you posture and bluster before you try the carrot.

So, eventually, she gets that we aren't going to move. "No wallet flashy", in fact. She ends up having to have some friend log in and send us the money. We were really shaking our heads at that. You shouldn't move into a wormhole unless you have plenty of capital to cover all your losses.

The money is sent, we head to our POS and start taking down modules. I sent Nyslia and Firt to get the Impels, and start hauling out the few ships we actually had in there, all while Nick kept watch on the hole from the outside.

At some point, a couple of spider tanking Dominixes show up, bluster outside the hole, and head inside. A Hyperion shows up....and fights one of his corpmates, showing Nick exactly how much DPS the BS is putting out. Sure, he could be trying to lull him into a flase sense of....skill superiority, but I highly doubt it. They start a discussion about ship fits, and all is peachy.

Then the wormhole goes to half mass, the "this wormhole has had it's mass disrupted". The couple of people we had been talking to either log or go afk, and we end up with an actual competent character. Sort of. He knows nothing about wormholes, and tell us that he needed to bring in his BSes before the wormhole collapses. We both kind of give a virtual grimace on vent, and inform him that there's half a bil of mass left, plenty of room for the BSes since our transports use up very little. Go ahead and pull em through, we tell him.

So we're done with modules, all the guns are in, and I pull the final fuel out of the POS and offline it. Nick waits at the POS for it to offline while I hop in the remaining Anathema. We then watch as the final corp member scans down our POS and comes in and uncloaks to bookmark it. And he waits.

Oh? Want a free POS huh?

So I drop my scanning probes.

And scan down and warp to every signature in system. Every Ladar, Gravimetric, Radar, and Combat. In a few days, every single site will despawn, and they will be left with a festering wasteland of nothing to do but a couple combat sites a day. I'm glad we got our money out of the system.

As a parting shot, I said "Enjoy the wormhole, it'll be great in about 3-5 days!" That got a response from the remaining corp member, who convoed me asking what that meant. Nick suggested I tell him something interesting, so I said you'll get a Class 6 wormhole every 3-5 days. The guy then asked if anyone lived in the C6. That threw me for a second, and then I had to tell myself he had no clue what he was talking about. I said no, no one lives in it, and if you make those six dreads you were talking about, you'll make tons of money. He said that they were planning on it, although, mind you, none were dread pilots. This guy was titled "Titan Pilot", however, and claimed to fly an Erebus. Yeah, right. So I ended the convo with "It's gonna be great in 3-5 days!"

So, in the end we were very happy with the outcome. Sure, I would have liked to catch a couple of their ships and blood them a bit, but we got what we wanted, and we promised them we'd get out of the system.

Everything else was just extra for being so courteous in dealing with us. Hopefully the next time someone tries that with us, it'll be in the system with the Moros in it.

Enjoy the wormhole Blood Legion, or whatever your WoW reference name was.