Invasion, maybe?

Wormhole space can do strange things to the systems on your ship. It can also do strange things to the people who live there. Maybe it's the solitude of living in deep space, not knowing where your next exit to more accessible and mapped regions will be. Maybe it's the more-than-slightly hypnotic qualities of a pulsating wormhole when you're assigned to running intel duties. Whatever reason, strange things can happen.

Very recently something strange happened to one of our pilots which he has subsequently attributed to Quafe cider. It was late and I was scouting our newest member into our home system. The entry from K-space was  two jumps through W-space and there was also a link to a class six system from that wormhole. As we were coming in, I had just warped off to the next connection when the new pilot announced a Badger was on d-scan. Being tired I decided it was not a big deal and I couldn't be bothered hunting for it - the lure of a comfy bunk was too enticing. I hit the sack and killed comms.

Next morning I checked my mailbox to find a rather startling sequence of events had occurred whilst I was isolated.

Invasion!
From: ######
To: ###### 

Well sort of., Some 9 day old idiot in a badger has put up a tower in shirley. (Either he's an idiot, or the best bait in the world.)
Come on comms, get information and if you log in to game, do not log into an obvious pvp ship, Be in a cloaky ship.
Thanks.

Oh my, what has happened? It turned out the Badger I had flippantly ignored had arrived in our home system less than an hour after I switched off the lights and anchored a tower. Said 'idiot' was swiftly dispatched back to hisec using the fast lane. Thus followed requests for guns to dispatch the anchored tower, including one pilot waking his wife to help, and finally a report that there were two hours of Strontium in its bay.

Re: Invasion!
From: ######
To: ###### 

Enemy tower comes out of reinforcement at 0610 EVE time.
If you are available then, we would really appreciate the help.

If I'd been paying attention I could have been awake for that. Sadly I wasn't and on checking my mail the following message was already waiting:

Re: Invasion!
From: ######
To: ###### 

Kill: Amarr Control Tower Small 
today - Santa is dead!

The biggest question was: "What the hell was that all about?". Were we really dealing with a nine day old noob or was there a more experience hand guiding this new pilot? The actions and activities of this new pilot suggested something deeper was afoot. His ship was disguised using our naming convention, his tower was named similar to an existing tower of ours. Suspicions were raised that this was a fishing operation to see what our response would be. Did we have more coming? What the hell? A wardec by him? Now we were totally confused. If he was part of an invasion force why would he waste ISK on a wardec?

:(
From: ######
To: ######  

you pay for that. we just wanted to share. no need!!!!!!!!!!!

and

Re: :(
From: ######
To: ######
TOLD YOU YOU WOULD PAY. NOW WAR.

By now I was now fully awake, if somewhat confused. My morning was spent turning 'dickstar mode' to eleven on our POSs just in case. Non-essential structures were put offline and all resists and EWAR were onlined. After that we could only wait and see what was going to happen. And wait, and wait and wait.

That day we had no less that four connections into our normally solitary section of space. I decided it would be fun to drop a stop bubble between the route from our static C4 and our visiting C2. This was mainly because the C4 had a C6 static and I was hoping to relieve the excitement from the past few hours with an easy hauler kill... Oh, a Loki landed in my bubble. He's from a wormhole mercenary corp. Aw, crap...

---To Be Continued---