So there I was, minding my own business blowing up bantams in aurohunen, when the time came to lie low and wait out that blasted GCC before heading home. Absentmindedly I selected one of the many safespots I have in that system and quickly scampered off for a well-deserved bio break.
When I came back only seconds later I found myself in a very very STRANGE place.
I was inside the sun. And the sun had a hole in it. Bizarre.
Unfortunately being able to tank A STAR does not equate to being able to fight two Navy Comets and a Hurricane at once, and the poor vengeance in these pictures is no more. For what it’s worth the miscreants that blew it up explained that they thought I was going to have reinforcements or they would have liked to have the comets fight me 2 on 1 as I had hoped, and apologized. Fair enough, no harm done and they were polite at least.
Fortunately I have 4 more vengeances in the hangar. These rocket fixes on SiSi cannot come soon enough!
Today was the day before my birthday, so after concluding the day’s activities I decided to do what every reasonable capsuleer would do;- I logged on and went looking for things to blow up, steal or otherwise inflict terrible terrible damage upon. Unfortunately it all started off rather poorly. Take a seat, and I will tell you of a day in Python
Stage 1: Fail
It all started off with fellow pythons, IEATCRAYONS (he does) and Mr. Chucknorris (he’s not) egging me on to go fly with them, this suited my plans naturally, so the discussion of what to fly quickly began. For reasons I am not entirely able to explain to you, we ended up going out in the most ridiculous ships we had…
…This being crayon’s preposterous large shieldbooster celestis, chuck’s BATTLEBOMBER (don’t even ask) and I elected to use the most dismal Assault Frigate known to man, the retribution. We set off to mara and almost immediately discovered a Drake in the top belt. No doubt you can guess where this leads, bait drake was bait, a second drake and a curse showed up and we all died in flames.
In python we like to call this “A promising start”.
Stage 2: Almost win
Undaunted we took toilet breaks and got more coffee, crayons had to leave but Chuck wanted to learn the mystical space martial art of Arty-thrasher-fu from me. Ok. We can do that.
I loaned Chuck one of my thrashers and explained the deep and complex secrets of flying a ship that quite literally has no defenses at all (In python we fly MAN-thrashers, which don’t even have a Damage Control. Arty-thrasher-fu has no room for the WEAK). We made our way through several systems, almost catching several frigate sized vessels, which sadly seemed to be aware of the unrivalled frigate popping power of the mighty Thrasher.
The most striking was a crow pilot named “mister lucky” who happened to be just that as we landed just a km out of pointing range of his unsuspecting interceptor and was able to make good his escape. Well damn…to TAMA then.
Tama proved to be a disappointment, we attempted to lure tacklers away from blobs, we baited, we chased rifters, nothing worked. This was starting to get boring.
So we set a course for Old Man Star. SURELY somewhere along the way something would fight us.
And something did.
We spotted an Exequror in an icebelt, screaming our terrifying phallic battlecry we engaged our warp drives to try and catch this puny mining cruiser!
It was at this point that Chuck failed to comply with thrasher-fu’s first and most important rule: “Thou shalt not warp at zero”.
Chuck however had done just that, and landed right on top of a mighty battle-exequror fitted with two webs, a scram and a long point. The results were both immediate and obvious. I had tried to close in on the fight and was destroying the drones tearing chuck’s ship apart, but to no avail… His ship was destroyed. By a mining cruiser.
Meanwhile though our artillery had been doing a good job on the cruiser in question, the ship was falling to pieces, dipping into structure… but then again so was mine. The fun ended abruptly as a much more dangerous Thorax landed very near me and I had to bail; shells and drones belting my poor ship to a pulp.
As the picture below shows, I quite easily escaped to make my way home.
Along the way however I was able to indulge in my most favorite activity, I spotted a cyno field on a station with about 5 carriers around it, jumping in an out. Excellent! This is what thrasher-fu is for!
I quickly docked at the station, whipped the local repair boys to COMPLETELY REPLACE ALL MY BROKEN ARMOR.
Then I undocked, aligned, and destroyed the cyno frigate, taking several volleys and an earful of abuse from the station directors. Gf Gf.
This insignificant kill was rather enhanced by the fact that the nearest cyno field generator module for sale was 11 jumps away. HAHA SUCKERS. After gloating a bit, I tried to explain to the crew that fire extinguishers were needed or the plasma reactor would explode. Since we were on fire. Again.
Stage 3: Epic win!
While I was being a jerk to our carrier-toting overlords, Andrea Skye, pilot extraordinaire had logged on and was making trouble in nearby Mara, Chuck had swapped into a Vagabond and Jawmare had done the same. I decided I should join this merry speed-freak gang and docked up to look at my ship collection.
I was greeted by the sight of a whole lot of extremely slow amarr vessels. Fiddlesticks.
But all was not lost, gathering dust in a forgotten corner of my hangar was the tusked shape of an old friend… The Dramiel. I grinned, looked for more barrage and headed out to join the fleet.
The first kill in mara was, in a rather bizarre example of poetic justice, an exequror which Chuck promptly annihilated as payback for his lost thrasher. When we inspected the wreck we found SIX AND A HALFÂ THOUSAND units of tobacco, enough to give a small country terminal cancer. Very very strange.
Fortunately the fun did not stop with this oddity. After several hit and run engagements in which nothing died a small gang consisting of a Cyclone, a Drake and a stabbed kestrel dropped into our belt. Unfortunately for them they did so one by one and that is also The Way In Which They Died. Do not trifle with python!
But then things got really fun. SFCrazy, pilot of the Carebear Stare pirate corporation (one of three corporations now that claims to have taught us all we know. heh.) and long-time rival was sitting in the top belt in a Ferox. Obvious bait is obvious of course, but we TOO had a trick up our sleeve.
I warped into the belt, quickly got a tackle on the ferox and laughed rather hard at it’s attempts to hit me and at the drones trying feebly to match my 8km/s of pure awesome. The HACs went to work laying down the DPS and our scanners indicated that Crazy’s trap was being sprung… HTrag his co-conspirator was en route in a fearsome Vigilant, closely followed by an Oneiros.
Sadly for them, they too arrived piecemeal, and in a stroke of inspired python douchebaggery, we had since warped in MIGHTY MACHARIELS OF DOOM.
(Hturt made a little youtube video of this fight, you can watch it! If you see a pink box fly across the screen at RIDICULOUS speed, that would be moi.)
As we sat gloating in a safespot going through our precious loots, we failed to notice that skye’s voicecoms had died. So it was only later that we noticed the screaming capslock text in fleet chat “GET TO PIEKURA GATE NOW”
With the typical speed of pythons we talked about some irrelevant things first and then warped.
We found skye fighting no less than TWO ravens and a drake. Alone. In his Gila. for GOD knows how long. woops!
We swiftly corrected the mistake and annihilated the ravens, though sadly the drake managed to escape. We chased the drake around for a while, but in the end he managed to give us the slip. NO MATTER! Because in the mean time ANOTHER drake had set up shop in the top belt (Drakes are more common than bread I think).
This Drake had a Manticore with him. For all the good it did them.
The last part of our mara adventure was a huge blob of Dominixes, Typhoons and Armageddons trying to fight us, but in the end their massive spider tank was too much for us to chew through; and we were much too fast for them to catch (Though Hturt’s machariel nearly kicked the bucket when a megathron landed precisely on his face, it lacked a scrambler fortunately).
The final kill of the night was… you guessed it… a Drake, in our own home system. This was a slightly harrowing experience as he was parked right next to some asteroids when I tackled him, resulting in my being bounced left and right between giant rocks as missiles and drones swarmed all over me. Fortunately I managed to get unstuck before any serious damage was done, and got to watch yet another pretty explosion.
With all that said and done, I set off to jita to pawn off our ill-gotten gains, and by the time I was done distributing the proceeds… I had turned 30!
