My day began innocently enough, communiques were exchanged with my personnel ground side throughout Placid, I updated the few market orders that required my attention, and I finished reorganizing my hangar, something I'd neglected to do the night before after mining for several hours. Then I undocked for my regular patrol of the Intaki system, looking for any potential Serpentis pirate activity and my day really began. I was just finishing up my salvage work after "removing" another set of Serpentis craft when a Naga battle cruiser flown by Duluku Ukaladu (Dul) warped into the belt at more than 100km away and took a shot at me. I quizzically sent a greeting in local, and received a friendly one back in response, saying he'd just wanted to see if his fit worked. Mentally shrugging to myself, I finished my salvage work and warped to the next belt in my patrol route and got to work on destroying more Serpentis vessels. A few moments later Dul warped at zero on the belt in a Hawk, still suspect from the shot he had taken at me earlier. Once he closed range our epic battle commenced!
I was quickly scrambled and webbed and I reciprocated with my own limited e-war capabilities as our guns began to fire and my drones started their assault, the Serpentis ships in the distance momentarily forgotten. A cry of warning came from my drones as they began to take fire from my opponent, Dul's shields being rapidly regenerated from their withering blasts of plasma. One of the drones winked out in a fireball, and I momentarily overheated my guns to compensate as I swiftly brought one of my reserves to bear. Two more of my drones ended up being vaporized before I was able to get through to my opponents armor as his ancillary shield booster was being reloaded. My own armor was taking a beating and I was forced to overheat both my afterburner and my own repair systems as he tried to pull away until his shields began to regenerate again.
We closed range again, superheated plasma and rockets flying back and forth to slam against both Dul and my poor drones, who he had focused on again once he could bring his ASB back online. I lost the last of my reserve drones before his shields began to falter once more, and I burned after him with my engines exceeding their tolerances as I tried to keep him in range of my guns this time. My overheating repair systems struggled to keep my ship together as we both began to take shuddering hits to our internal structures. Heat warnings went off over most of the ship as my overtaxed systems began to melt from being pushed far past their operating limitations. I was starting to lose my control of structural integrity when I was finally rewarded with a backwash of heat and free neutrons as my opponent's vessel exploded in a glorious nimbus of hard radiation and shrapnel.
I quickly turned off all my modules to prevent further damage to my ship as his pod warped away from the scene of our battle. We exchanged a "good fight" in local before I got down to the dirty business of rendering the remains of his ship for usable modules and materials. The escape pod for Dul's minimal crew floated nearby, and I tagged them for pickup by station services. The escape pod for my own crew had been tagged as soon as I finished bringing my modules back from the brink of melting into useless scrap. I'm pretty sure Dul and I both told our crews to abandon ship once we both started taking structural damage. I finished gathering what usable material I could from the wreck of Dul's Hawk and limped my way back to Intaki 5-5. I'm pretty sure I saw Scotty down on the hangar floor shaking his head after I asked him for a repair quote before I began to decant from my pod. I still had a big grin on my face once I finished toweling off and heading to my couch for a nap, I refuse to sleep in the cubbyhole, or "bed" provided in my quarters. That had probably been one of the most stressful, yet enjoyable skirmishes in my career, and seemed like a great way to end my day.
The next day I would be heading deep into Amarr space to continue my work with the Aliastra corporation, who had sheltered me in the turbulent months after my escape from the drudgery and politics of Null space warfare more than a year ago. I felt good knowing that I was part of a recent push by many in the Intaki Liberation Front's recent efforts to foster better relations with the people known throughout the cluster as, "the Intaki megacorporation." Hopefully our work would shed more light on our cause among up and coming Intaki capsuleers, and perhaps give hope and purpose to those who found themselves without a cause or corp of their own...
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