April 5th 23:00 Eve time
After an incredibly long day of doing prep work in my restaurant alongside a rather anal French chef that I train with, I finally get off work and catch the 554 out of Seattle to my home over in Issaquah. I jump off the bus, grab my laptop and a change of clothes and then hit the 24-hour fitness for a quick swim and a shower. Afterwards, I walk over to my favorite Starbucks, order a Venti flat white latte and turn on my laptop to log into Eve Online. Immediately, a ping goes out: Bastion has set up a gate camp in on the IPAY-2 gate in EIDI-N and are commencing the usual Sov Fuckery brought about as a result of CCP Fozzies wonderful brainchild.
The fun begins, as the ping was from a newly-minted recruit to the Test alliance FC training program for a Caracal fleet to go and break up a gate camp being run by Bastion. Bastion is flying the usual meta, 5-6 insta-locking Svipuls a few Maledictions, two Sabres as well as a Maelstrom that was there for a little while. The new FC (I forget who he is) explains to everyone that this is his very first fleet and we form 60 or so Caracals, some tackle, and a few various newbro things. I jump into a Crucifier Navy Issue that I’ve been toying around with in EFT and away we go.
The fleet goes about as well as expected for a new FC and a bunch of newbro pilots. Slightly chaotic comms, people asking if they can bring their drake. New bros, not knowing what align means and various other forms of bullshit. We eventually get things more or less ironed out and as Bastion have eyes in the system, when we jump into EID-N they have all made themselves scarce. Test does its usual local spam, we warp around to a few gates, people not paying attention got separated and a Bastion Omen pilot decides to take advantage of this and bravely hits the IPAY gate and starts to engage. The fleet converges on the IPAY gate and right as people are landing with the Omen still sitting there the entire fleet for whatever reason decides to jump the gate rather than tackle and kill the Omen pilot. It was a fuckup, and I admit I laughed hysterically when it took place, but a few of the more experienced pilots managed to burn out and grab tackle as the fleet turned around and got back into the system in order to whore on the Omen pilot.
Bastion, being the clever bastards that they are, POS’d up in the system and there really wasn’t much of anything that we could do to get them out of a “reinforced” Pos except all gather outside the shield and digitally shake our fist while yelling “argh” in local, as the POS proceeds to blap a few of our newbros in frigates that forgot to keep moving. Anyways, we killed an Omen that was ballsy enough to engage us while spread out (kudos) and we temporarily broke up the gate camp while only sustaining a few losses. The fleet unilaterally thumped their chests and declared op success, and we all flew home back to Obe. Well… Not really. As we are two jumps out of EIDI, about to jump back into Obe, we hear a “help help” on comms, one of our new bros in a Caracal was tackled in EIDI by the fleet we just chased off and we all attempted to burn back and save him. It didnt work, and in all honesty the only objective we really achieved was to respond to hostiles, show up and offer a presence and then shake our fists at an enemy that possessed the fortified high ground where we really couldn’t actually touch them or do anything really worthwhile. Still, the operation was valuable experience to the new FC, who learned quite a bit about how to manage a fleet. It was also a good experience for the newbros just learning how to fly and engage in combat. Bastion also played quite well and capitalized on the opportunity we gave them.
Anyways, for the next hour or so I spent most of my time ship spinning in Obe and creating various forms of reddit propaganda and dreddit is recruiting ads in photoshop for my own personal amusement. I notice in intel every 5-10 mins or so someone posts that the same Bastion camp is still up and they link their deaths to the group in our intel channel. I kinda toy with the idea of starting up a fleet to go chase them off but its getting kind of late and I really didnt much feel like going back out again as I was having too much fun feeling “Space Important” from my multiple reddit posts that day. Getting bored, I pop down to talk to a good friend, long time space brother and fellow FC Ikech in order to try and pull him aside to ask his perspective on a fleet we were on earlier.
We get on really well, Ikech is a badass guy and we flew together or against each other for years, having both gotten our start in a previous alliance: “Why So Serious”. I had been pestering him for a few days to do an interview with me on leading one of our Anti CFC Fuckery fleets as I glance over to our intel and Bastion has headshotted another one of our guys, this time in a Hurricane. Noticing that their camp had downsized considerably to only 6-7 people, Ikech made the off-hand comment “I could probably take them in my solo Proteus”, which I happened to think was a capital idea and figured “fuck it, lets go and see if we can’t get a fight with just us.” So I hop in a Sabre and end up having to scout his ship through a few jumps of lowsec, and as I’m sitting cloaked up some PL guy brings in a fucking Avatar. This guy is just whistling merrily to himself while going gate to gate in a Titan without a care in the world, just daring hte CFC to drop on him. I laugh hysterically and tell Ikech to hold on the gate, he thinks it’s a hostile and I just tell him to wait and see what comes through, moments later I hear him in hysterics as he sees exactly what I saw. We take it as a good omen and proceed on our way to go get ourselves into some trouble.
Finally, we make it into EIDI with just the two of us, myself in a Sabre and Ikech in his Proteus. Ikech jumps in and, much to our surprise, the system is completely empty. The Bastion camp is gone, leaving us kinda heartbroken. Our little makeshift fleet decides to chill out for a few minutes to see if they come back, and when nothing happens we call it a night and start to head back home. Suddenly, one of the Bastion guys comes burning through in a Svipul he is hot on the tail of a blue Scythe Fleet Issue. I burn back to gate, jump through, and start laying down bubbles as the SFI and Bastion’s Svipul jump through. Ikech gets tackle with his Proteus, I burn in and get the bubble off, and the hostile tries to take my Sabre down with him, knowing he’s a goner. I’m 10mn AB fit though, and as soon as I get my transversal up his DPS doesn’t touch me. Ikech gets in close and then melts the Svipul down with his blasters. The pod is caught and then subsequently sent back home to wherever Bastion space is nowadays. I linked the Bastion Svipul kill into our intel channel and a few of the victims that had fallen to the camp gave a brief cheer as a small bit of revenge was had on our enemies. Realistically though, the day belonged to Bastion as their little camp claimed quite a few pilots and was a well-executed maneuver.
Our little fleet was just a small drop in the bucket of the events going on in “World War Bee” and though we did not do anything catastrophic or inflict any great loss, we showed up and we fought and in the end managed to inflict some small retribution on our opponents, walking away feeling absurdly space proud that the two of us had some small success in the great scheme of this conflict.
-Sanai Nobuseri
p.s. Props to Bastion and to Ikech
