I Will Destroy The Universe

I need two directives:  Seek and Destroy.

Seek is underway, I know the Corp he robbed, I know the ship he flies, I know where he has been, and I know where he will be, his PI headquarters in a wormhole space, I just don't know how to reach it (and then camp it).

Destroy?  I need to collapse him entirely, simply podding him to have him wake up elsewhere will not cut it this time.  I need to yank his supports and watch him tumble down, and in a perfect universe he would fall, and not be able to get back up.

I need to use his power against him.  He's isolated in an impregnable wormhole fortress that can only be found when it wants to be?  Good.  He's not in the universe of normalspace, he is in paradox; an extradimensional box that is not properly attached to the real.  I will destroy the box, not the man. 

I want to cause a collapse, not of the wormhole that links his box to the eve universe, but the wormhole system itself, all the planets, all the stars, all the stations and ships and clouds and particles, all the souls, I WANT THEM ALL TO BURN.

How?  Idunno.  But i'm starting to get a picture.  Some of the following has been gleaned from reputable sources.

A wormhole system is an "extradimensinoal space." (EDS)

Technically, EDS is an infinite amount of dimensions (while the real universes or interdimensional spaces, IDSs, have some fixed amount that's usually less than 15, but hard to tell) that may or may not interact with each other.

We notice wormhole systems with various strange gravitational effects, higher or lower mass attraction, negative energies, bizarre anomolies that seem to effect the space of the system in all directions.

I looked up an expert, Professor Sundrum:

"The extradimensional picture may actually contain an inflation mechanism which, under favorable circumstances, would produce observable gravitational waves, the details of which may give away some features of their extradimensional origin."
"In EDS, it might or might not have drastic effect. However, the destruction of an IDS is not a big thing in EDS, except possibly for the place (if it's a place at all) in EDS where the rift initially appeared, provided it did not relocate. "

A graphic illustrates the effect of passing from one plane of existence to a divergent pocket dimension.  Like Schroedinger's Cat, or the smallest units of quantum theory, it is thought that these pockets are affected by the observer.  The pockets appear to be replicated from elements of the universe proper.  Referred to some as the 5th dimension (separate from the 11 associated with string theory), it in itself is an infinitely expanding universe, like ours, essentially a parallel universe with none of the people.

(Click the above animated gif for an example of a 5th dimension entry) 

Duel Aftermath

I'd lost.  A few notes about the previous post's duel, obviously some things are more story elements than mechanics.  For instance, his chasing me through the asteroid field was real, I would fly between two of them then angle left, his auto-follow would cause his nose to bump a now-intervening asteroid, bounce him, saving me a few seconds and lowering his transversal such that I was able to get a good shot in.  This pattern was all that allowed me to warp off once I was free of the debris field by 2k.

Back in the station under the watch of local authorities, with a few of my corp mates at a rear table in case there was trouble, I met the pirate.  Over drinks we talked and eventually he opened up a bit about my Brother, I was taking it easy and ordering him stiff drinks, and so, the duel technically incomplete and with no ISK changing hands, I got some tidbits.

1.) He ONLY flies a Rifter
2.) He DID rob the wormhole corp.  They sent convos and mails after booting him but he never responded.  One of their members used a locator agent but he appeared to  be at the extreme edge of the known universe, and so they did not pursue.
3.) He's a right bastard
4.) Aside from theft, his wealth comes from T3 resources which he apparently produces himself and sells at alternating trade hubs, he has done this for months.

The last info was what got me excited.  As he went on I came to see that the most likely source of the resources he was offloading was some level of planetary interaction.  Somewhere out there were three or more planets with small industrial settlements on each.  I could only imagine the suffering of a workforce under my Brother's careless iron fist.

Weakness.  The first hint of it.  If he has planets working for him, he has something static.  To reach T3 he must've found a wormhole system with three specific planet types with specific resources in a certain proximity and it would've taken months to set it up properly and make it work.  To now, if he kept moving, it was possible I could never catch him, but to update his planets he'd need to return home every 96 hours to reset the industrial cycles and check on the crew.  My old wormhole cannot be his current base because the planets did not align there to create anything higher than T2.

I had a hard destination now and some hope.  Slim hope; a wormhole system, from a certain perspective, moves about the universe every day, relative to the links to highsec, lowsec or nullsec that pop up.  But there are ways.  I might not be lucky enough to catch him in Hisec and follow him home cloaked, but there are ways.

But what to do when I get there?  Next up, making crazy plans.

Duel with a Pirate

We met in the third belt, in a jagged strip of dense veldspar. As rocks drifted and bounced fine metallic mineral sprays would sparkle like glitter in the spaces between asteroids.

I arrived in a dependable Punisher with a dual light pulse laser setup, a web, scram and afterburner, and otherwise fitted for a fast armor tank. I piloted her through a warp tunnel and was spit out between two of the largest boulders in the belt. At first nothing appeared on scan but I assume it was my proximity to dense minerals disrupting sensors, because a Rifter menacingly drifted sideways out from behind a distant boulder. I saw her tail glow blue as a microwarpdrive propelled my enemy toward me at break-neck speed. We’d agreed not to destroy each other’s escape pods if it came to that, and suddenly I was worried that this would not be honored should I go down first.

This was a pirate used to losing ships, recklessness, treachery. He likely had me pegged as a highsec carebear who would be stumbling nervously into the engagement. I needed to shake things up. My own exhaust flared a lesser shade of blue as my afterburners launched me forward as well, angled for collision. I had to think like a pirate, that death is not to be feared, that pain is welcome, risk is reward. It was a game of chicken.

Our targets locked. I lanced multifrequency pulse lasers forward, creating rippling islands in the smooth shell of his shield. I overheated those turrets from the get-go. For his part, his autocannon barrels spun and sent antimatter slugs into my own shields. In only a few shots I was down to 15%; my strength would be my armor.

Passing blurred mineral debris out my viewport I came within 10km, 5km, 2km and closing. No one twitched untiol the last half-second when each of us angled our noses aside just a few degrees before the impact rocked us in our pods, emitting a shrieking photon grind of shield on shield as both vessels glanced off in a lazy spin. We recovered, my ship coming under control just in time to avoid smashing into the nearest veldspar chunk.

We came about once again, beginning to tightly circle as we chipped away at each other. I left my AB on as his MWD was off and my speed tank was helping me to gain an edge; I was 10% into my armor, whereas his shield were down to 10%. As his shields were the powerhouse equivalent of my stalwart armor, I was perhaps a hair ahead of him at this point. Choosing to hide it up to this point, I engaged the stasis webifier to slow him down enough to take some pulverizing pot shots. I took the time to make a wider loop in order to bring my Punisher to bear straight on for the web-assisted barrage I was about to let fly. As I arced away momentarily, firing from rear turrets, he overheated his speed mods and fired up his microwarp drive, barreling toward the outside edge of my web range. I fired one full barrage before he escaped my web range, making an extended S-curve to come about at 15k range beyond my molasses effect. Then he let fly, his turrets now overheated as his engines. Antimatter rounds came crashing in faster than my armor repairer could mend. Pieces of hull and fuselage were being scraped off into the oblivion, the debris of my ship spinning in all directions, some of it impacting sensors. I was being torn apart.

AB still active but capacitor running distressingly low, I broke off. His shields were down now but his paper-thin armor was holding, while mine was down to 33%. I propelled myself amidst the two asteroids I had originally warped in between and banked left, placing one of the between us just in time for the rock to catch incoming antimatter fire. It literally erupted in a rocky spray, confusing targeting computers and glancing off hulls.

I was forced to continue this pattern, swaying left and right between large and small veldspar deposits to allow them to intervene in the path of his autocannons to my hull. I let my turrets and mods cool down. Armor was back up to 55% but was looking worse for wear due to mineral impacts. I would need to make a move.

A well-placed shot threaded through the rocky debris, through where my shields once were, and deep into the armor of my port wing, slicing it off in a smooth action. The golden metal fin went mad-speed flipping end over end and stuck edge-first into another deposit like a shuriken. I brought her about, now continuing to overheat my turrets, now adding my afterburner to the list. From a lazy arc I jerked my nose at him and launched forward through a trio of concentrated veld chunks. Lasers pulsed ahead and bit deep into his armor. Flames erupted and trailed only my frigate as we blasted past each other and came about for another pass. I was in poor shape. Breaking from the 2nd pass formation I pulsed the AB and began to jet toward the edge of the asteroid field. I couldn’t afford 800 million ISK, that’d been a bluff; But maybe I could save face and my life if I could disengage. That way I could save face, and perhaps some alternative payment could be made. I’d bitten off more than I could chew; no one mod of tactic had countered me, just a superior pilot who had planned better. My weapons did not damage his ship as much as his ship’s weapons damaged mine, because of the types of tank mods we had used. Maybe he got lucky in this regard. I thought not.

Another autocannon round broke the last of my armor apart and passed through the center-left of my Punisher.


The round had passed through some vital systems. Instantly I felt gravity and inertial stabilizers drop off. The biofluid in my pod crèche began to drift upward in perfect bubbles. Fear, adrenaline, anxiety.

Another round clipped off the starboard wing, and the transfer of kinetic energy caused my ship, now resembling more of a pinched, golden cylinder, to enter an involuntary spin. With no gravity the centrifugal force made things inside a trial, and I mentally flailed to gain some sort of control in the anarchy. One of my engine ports erupted in fire and I was at half speed while the afterburner flickered between life and death. Behind me PirateXYD dodged furiously to close the distance while avoiding the asteroids in the belt, picking off pieces of my ship with his staggered incoming fire. At this time I right the ship just in time to see the mineral field fall away on both sides. Inertial dampeners came back online for a final few seconds and so I took the opportunity to funnel all other remaining power to the warp engines as I passed 2k from the nearest veldspar.

In the time it took to align I lost more of my ship, until I felt staggered that she was holding together at all. He released a final spray of ammo as his dented Rifter came roaring straight at me, and the welcome embrace of an azure warp tunnel gathered what remained of my vessel and transitioned it from the normally 3-dimensional universe. There were further internal explosions within the warp tunnel itself but fire control teams, no longer dealing with incoming fire, were able to cover them off. Trailing pieces of myself, the tunnel deposited me at our Corp headquarters at the bottom station. He emerged back into realspace hot on my heels but in such close proximity to the law and order of a public space station, he could only watch me enter docking queue and then disappear into the station.

I’d lost.

Aftermath next time.

Ebb Tide; A Challenge

The Red War had died down. The Russians were no longer losing ground but had dug in their heels, while the Northern Coalition’s forward press had eased off. Certainly, territory had been taken, but the big push was over and the local channels of once-hotly contested systems began to cool. Large convoys and fleets had already begun redeploying to safer staging areas, and I came to understand that what I had witnessed in this last week was merely the afterglow of a white-hot conflict. With the number of hulking, broken wrecks my invisible bomber had piloted through, I could only imagine the scale of the destruction I had narrowly missed.

And in the middle of it all, a clue. PiratXYD was a former Caldari Navy pilot who gained significant rank before an unspecified “situation” had him booted out of the war machine. Now he made his living in the shame corners of lowsec, killing for money to pay for killing. In talks I could sense the inbred sense of pride and honor and as well the filter of pirate ruthlessness through which it was forced in his new profession.

He knew my Brother. They were in the same Corporation, a wormhole corp, for months earlier in the year. It is my assumption that he learned the types of wormhole and POS mechanics that made his toppling of my empire possible. And, according to XYD, he robbed the corp of close to a billion ISK. Ships, modules, resources, minerals, personnel, all had vanished, along with that bastard, in a single night in August. The very resources that were put to use in his plan for my undoing. Could I find an ally in this corp he had wronged? I had to know more, but the pirate knew the score and he was asking for 400 million for information leading to my Brother’s capture. I once had that and much more, but no longer.

I saw his skills did not far exceed mine. I also sensed he had a strong sense of pride in himself, and in his pirate infamy, so I did the only thing I could; a duel for double or nothing. I challenged him in 1-on-1 in T1 frigates, if he won I would pay 800m for the information, if I won it would be 200m, something I could afford if I sold everything but my Purifier. He agreed.

At this time I had moved further back toward the interior and was 20 jumps off the Amarr homeworld in Pelisle. Pelisle is home to Moira., the corporation that I had served in defense against the Sansha preceding my time in the wormhole, and despite the broadcast of my official death in the takeover, I had cleared the paperwork and was an active member once more, though rarely in the area for Ops. It’s not that I would cheat and call in backup, but Pelisle is lowsec and he’s a pirate, and pride or no pride it may be a trap; I want friends ready for warp-in if that’s the case.
Give me an hour and I’ll let you know how it goes. If there are no further blog posts, you will know what happened, but this is a chance I have to take

Waralytics

After all my research, I find I need more research. It seems like all the non-hisec major players are involved in this campaign of invasion. The Russians field their stalwart Battleships and the Northern Coalition drives them back with Heavy Assault Cruisers and Drakes. A week ago a red swarm of 50 Drakes had poured into LXQ to turn the tide. Mammoth stations and installations are being shredded in space as the tide ebbs and flows.

Its very real. There are supply lines in the form of Jump Bridges, vast stable tunnels of warp energy that can hurtle ammunition and equipment from a safe home base into the fray. The universal nexus of trade, Jita, struggles to pump out enough T2 missiles to keep NC operational, some of their fleets dropping to T1 as things become scarce. There are trenches, blobs, gatecamps, desperate escapes, dramatic advances. A major NC supply tunnel which wormed through many systems to the nearest replenishment point was squeezed shut by a barreling surprise attack.

Wreckages drift, comm channels blare, people scream for help or scream to push on. I thread myself like a needle through all this, not part of a conquering or defending force, not swept into the carnage, but looking for one man, and for the key to his undoing. Between bursting Battleships and blinding blue cyno, I seek, unseen.

A standard warship has barriers around their computers; its not easy to break in and hack their databases. But just maybe one of these databases will have the name I seek, will make clear the path I must take to undo him. And so I broadcast still, and I drift, cloaked, near the most badly beaten vessels. There is a moment, before they combust but after their edefense collapses, when those databases are raw and unprotected. It take half a moment to copy it into my own shipboard computer. In this way I have discovered many secret things, sifted through a gargantuan amount of useless info and spreadsheets, and one day, I hope, to find my target this way. Someone knows him. Someone out here, with all this death and darkness, must know him very well.

Amidst the Warriors, A Mistake

I cruised into a contested area of Etherium Reach. Several jumps back, as I entered the thick of things, I had had to dock my Bestower and Vengeance in favor of the warp-while-cloaked stealth bomber. I did my broadcast as a pair of minor engagements were erupting near the two main gates. Flipping between safespots, I received my first response:

TelarUS > I can help you with that, gimme one sec.

Me > /Nod

A full minute passes and instead of a convo I receive a fleet invite. I accept. He immediately drops out of fleet and I receive the convo I was expecting.

TalrUS > Oops wrong invite. Ya I do know him, we’ve flown a few times. Are you sincere about the 10m?

At this point something happened. With a metal flash he erupted from a warp tunnel and came to a stop less than 2k off my bow.

It disrupted my imaging sensors and in an instant and my ship wavered out of cloak. I’d made a mistake. I was about exactly between two temperate planets in empty space, pre-aligned to my next safespot. I heard the chime of a lock in progress as the blue steel Drake brought it’s enormous missile launchers to bear on my little frigate. Looking down the barrels I could see the missiles loading and prepping to fire. During all this I mentally commanded my bomber to blast forward to safety.

It was one of those thrilling, down-to-the-millisecond moments. My reactionary autolock aborted as the warp drive engaged, as the Drake managed a lock, as the missiles let fly, as a scrambler began its cycle. Was it the end? I set my view to external, and all but squeeled in triumph as I saw my hull jerk ahead of the incoming projectiles by no more than a few meters. The stars and blackness distorted into the familiar warp tunnel. The leading missile seemed to glance off my receding shields, and in the next second it detonated, causing the others to explode it a fiery corona that engulfed the space my ship held a moment earlier. I was free. Lesson learned.

The Universe in a Nutshell

I need to get the word out that I am looking for that scum-sucker. One system would be to mass mail Eve players, rapidly evemailing every player in Jita. However thats not realistic to the way i'm trying to make this all happen. Instead, as I mentioned yesterday, I broadcast. In time I will find the major players in terms of intelligence gathering, minicorps I know exist but can't yet find that deal in the darkness, will get things done for a price. Until I can find the right people, I broadcast.

But where? I need to reach the maximum number of people. In Jita, the comm traffic is enormous and my message would be lost. I need places where people's eyes are glued to Local even though it is not overly active: warzones.

I could park near the largest hisec-lowsec or hisec-nullsec bottlenecks. But half the people passing through are newer pilots and won't have possible encountered a top-tier pirate like my Brother. Instead I will follow the greatest wars in the universe. Right now that means Dronelands.

NC has invaded the Russians' home space beyond the edges of Empire. (OOC really? You attack the Russians as Winter is coming? You NEVER fight Russians in their homeland in the Winter!)

I've done a tremendous amount of research the last few couriers, which I am mixing with combat missions in the Vengeance now. All this reading and watching has allowed me to distill a highly fractured universe into something salient:

Eve universe sovreignty rotates clockwise.

By this I mean that the major alliances will move a step clockwise, take over or get pushed back. If they win they move another hour forward clockwise. They will reign there and become bored and not want to move back the way they have come, so the only way is forward, more clockwise behaviour. In this way one can predict basic fluctuations in the sociopolitical currents of the universe. This does little to help me short-term, the rotation is slow enough that you are never hard-pressed to catch up with the front. Obviously the sovreignty regions aren't perfectly organized in this rotation, some stay put, some go backwards, but you can draw a generalized path that to the layman approaches prescience.

Right now, the most intense hour on that dial is 2pm, the Northeast, where the Russians have dug in to guard their home. My next task, after increasing my wealth through missions at least 4-fold, will be to find and contract the right tranportation corp to load my HAC, SB and Hauler with all my equipment and crews into their carrier and sweep them past the more dangerous regions between Amarr space and the Dronelands conflict.

Once there, I will need to be careful. I'll find a way into the heart of things, perhaps directly after downtime in a warzone I can reach dockable station, deposit my ships, undock with the Purifier, get invisible and safespotted and insert my message between the shots across the bow. Ten million ISK for information on my Brother. The most massive conflicts of the void will always attract mercenaries, pirates, scum-suckers looking for scum to suck or looking for cheap thrills by involving themselves in the conflict. Who knows? Maybe i'll find him myself out there.

That is my dream. I picture him cowardly, in a large fleet of pirates or mercs, picking off Russians only when safe. He and his friends engage an isolated and broken down battleship as it arcs away from the conflict for repairs. As it explodes, their Rifters rock and are blinded, and when the light subsides I am there, uncloaked and behind him, launching bombs and torpedoes and smiling.

but that won't be enough. My revenge will need to be complete, a taking back of my things and a theft once and for all of his. I need to find out how he killed all my clones that day. I need to do that to him before I drop the hammer. I am considering a radical possibility: what if I were cloned into a completely different body? Such procedures have often ended in disaster, with the new host body falling apart in short order, but if it could be stabilized, it might be the only way I can gain his trust and infiltrate his kingdom. I wonder, too, what he is doing with my wealth; the universe is his oyster, and I am the shell. Soon, I will snap shut.

Immortal once again! A few more couriers and I have enough ISK to install an updated clone at Amarr Emperor Family Academy. A certain intangible weight has been liofted from my shoulders. I suppose as a pod pilot I took it for granted over the years that I could not die in any conventional sense. My week-and-a-half of vulnerability was a strong reminder that not everyone can make decisions without factoring in mortal danger.

I felt powerful, It was the familiar feeling of being stowed away in complete safety far away, and astrally projecting myself into a ship out in space. This projection now had enough to purchase a brand new Purifier. I interfaced immediately and steered her in a generous S-curve along the length of the station, before a microwarp-driven boost about the circumference of the nearby planet.

Now that things were coming together in terms of materiel (not a typo), I had to get moving on intelligence. Google and other conventional methods turned up nothing. I needed to cast a net. I needed PI (playertary interaction.). Everywhere I went I would broadcast the same message.

> Any information I receive on the whereabouts and/or activities of ‘_____’ is worth 10 million to me

I was also searching for the identities of the pirates he had hired to help destroy me. I had little to go on.

(OOC I did see the names of the pilots alongside him, but my character doesn’t know so I won’t use that to help me find him. I’m trying to stay meta here. Why stay true to RP when I could use locator agents and the names of the pirates to track him down? Well, alone I might pod him. With a blog fanbase behind me, I could do much more. My theory is that if I stay 100% true to how I’m allowing my character to play this out, it will appeal more to the casual blog reader, it will maintain more integrity by amusing people with the way I incorporate game mechanics. I could be wrong, but I’m sticking to my guns)

I don’t have ten million to spare after buying the stealth bomber, but if I get a good enough tip I’ll sell the Purifier to cover it, I can get another later and now that my sweetheart ship is dead and gone I’m not overly attached to any one ship.

Next post: ways to cast the intel net.

Gatecamp!

On my third run to lowsec I encountered a gatecamp.

I came in at 100k and they came down hard, I thought I was done for but managed to warp[ out and pass through safely later.