Half-heartedly harassed
1st November 2012 – 5.34 pmAll alone, tonight may be another quiet night, if it weren't for the persistent notifications about a tower I don't care about in a system I don't know running out of fuel. I hope the force field goes down soon, so my in-box stops blinking at me, making me think I'm popular like that. I ignore it as best I can for now, launching probes and scanning the home system. My, what a mess. Eight signatures now clutter our system, with two more signatures than there were yesterday. Then again, only one of them is a new site, a clumping of rocks, as the other is a K162 from class 4 w-space. Let's see what's there.
What's in C4a is a well-stocked tower, and no—hold on, there is a ship, a Loki strategic cruiser decloaking as it approaches the wormhole. I don't break the session change cloak my own Loki lingers under, wondering if the pilot saw my entrance in to the system, and I can be fairly sure he did. The Loki doesn't jump through the connection, warp away, or cloak, but enters a lazy orbit of the wormhole. I may as well break the cloak voluntarily, so that I know when it happens, and move from the wormhole and activate my cloaking device to hide again. The other pilot will certainly know that I'm here, and what I'm flying.
There's little point jumping straight back home, as I'll end up polarised, so rather than loitering ineffectively by the the wormhole I'll explore the system. The tower I see on my directional scanner is in the same position as from two years ago, but warping around reveals two new towers in the inner system, along with an Onyx heavy interdictor waiting warmed up at one of them. Is that for me? How sweet. I also notice the off-line towers on every single moon in the system, to make any invasion inconvenient, and the farthest planet holds one more tower with a piloted Tengu strategic cruiser inside its force field.
Having been made already, I will achieve little in this system but die horribly. I'll head homewards to look for opportunity in the other direction. The wormhole looks clear when I land on it, but having seen active ships and waiting pilots I have no idea what's on the other side. I jump to find out, and appear in the home system on what looks like a clear K162. Moving away from the wormhole and cloaking has a ship follow me from C4a, if a bit slowly, and I am safe before the Tengu reveals himself. And, as far as I can tell, no one follows me across to our static connection, and I get no surprises jumping to the class 3 w-space system beyond.
I suppose it's not really disappointing that I'm not being hunted, and I'll still need to be wary of what I do in case I'm being shadowed, but I suspect those C4ers will not pose a particular threat this evening. I turn my attention instead to the strategic cruiser on d-scan, but as there is a tower also visible and a lack of wrecks I'm not surprised to see the Legion unpiloted at the tower. I'm back to scanning, and I sift through the seventeen anomalies and twelve signatures to discard the usual suspects from the sole wormhole in the system, which is its static exit to low-sec empire space. Where it goes, nobody knows. Except me. It goes to Domain.
There are other pilots populating the low-sec system, which keeps me from ratting but not from scanning. I launch probes just as I am spotted in the local communication channel. Maybe low-sec isn't so bad after all, even if he's wise to my general antics. Scanning reveals three additional signatures, but I am wondering how long they are going to last. I resolve a magnetometric site, some rocks, and, well, it looks like my fellow w-spacer wasn't kidding that he was collapsing a wormhole, as the third signature has disappeared. Maybe I should be less conspicuous, or fake my levels of competence even more than I already do, so that pilots welcome me in to their systems.
It looks like I'm going home. I leave low-sec behind me and return to w-space, with C3a remaining unchanged from only a few minutes ago. Jumping home has no one obviously waiting for me on the wormhole, and neither is the K162 from C4a buzzing with ships or being collapsed. It's all rather anticlimactic. Never mind, I can try to get an early night. I don't suppose there's much else I can do at this point.
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