Day 8: A view to a kill

“Nightfall covers me, but you know the plans I'm making
Still overseas, could it be the whole Earth opening wide
A sacred why, a mystery gaping inside”
- A view to a kill (Duran Duran)

On day seven I found myself falling asleep as I waited by a wormhole, so I logged off. Tired is stupid, and I have already proven my ability to mess up when I am wide awake.

On day eight, however, everything went entirely to plan. As I arrived, a Heron came past and entered the wormhole. He was only a day old, so I let him be. Then I waited, probably no more that ten minutes, before I saw probes. Another Heron was incoming on my d-scan (at less than 3.2AU) so I dropped through the hole and waited some more. I was just about to give up when the sound alerted me to something coming through. It was the Heron I had just seen. I was already decloaked, so I approached the hole and activated all my modules. He took his full minute to decloak and then inexplicably burned away from the hole. He was marginally faster than I was, and out of range of both my web and scram, but my disruptor had him and he couldn't warp off. I launched my three hobgoblins on him and let them work away. I couldn't quite believe that he still didn't head back to the hole. Compared to the chaos of last time it went very smoothly.

After he popped I opened a chat with him. He was over a year old, so I didn't offer to reimburse. He asked me why I bothered? It's a reasonable question I suppose. I didn't give an explanation in chat, as I don't really want to get into arguments. I play for fun and for a challenge. I want to learn PvP. Right now my challenge is killmarks. My initial goal was one. Having acheived that, my second goal is to get to five in this fit, which leaves three more to go for Nagrindr. If I get them, I will probably move on to a different scenario.

Of course the question cuts both ways. Why do any of us bother? Why do people log on to spend an evening orbiting a bunch of pixels while their virtual ore hold fills up? Why do people scan down sites so they can run the same mini-game repeatedly in the hope that this particular site will have a more valuable drop than the last? Everyone has a different reason to play. I know everyone is the hero in their own story, but if you play a game about space pirates, you must expect to meet one from time to time.

After I dropped the meagre loot off I headed back to the same hole, only to see him emerge from it in another Heron. I decided to move on. The next hole I scanned down gave me a real scare. As I dropped through to bookmark it there was a Sacrilige inside. Fortunately it came out before I decloaked. Slighty spooked, I moved on again. As I approached the third wormhole a strategic cruiser came out and back in. zKillboard showed his security status as -0.97 and a history of killing things in wormholes. Too hot for my little Heron. I really wanted to make that third killmark this evening - but sometimes the universe is screaming at you to quit! I logged off and editted some screenshots instead.

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