Just a Little Patience

I get home from work on Friday evening to a message on the alliance jabber server from one of my guys. Seems the people living in our static are moving out and, being the good neighbours we are, we decide to help them. Our current scout needs to take a break so I log in with Orea and park myself on the perch we made near their POS. I realise they still have a decent number of modules to offline and unanchor. This could be a long wait.

During the course of the evening I watch a rather disorganised POS pulldown. One of my corpmates comments that we should jetcan a prop-mod for their Iteron V just to speed things up. Eventually our targets realise warping off and back to the next thing they want to unanchor and scoop is faster than slowboating around. By now I'm required elsewhere to watch a film with my wife. Others are watching the POS efforts unfold and I'm floating back and forward between the film and fleet chat to see what's happening. Just as my film ends the locals offline their POS and almost immediately start onlining it again. WTF?! Oh, they left a PHA anchored and need the POS online to unanchor that before they can unanchor the POS properly. Also, we now have a Proteus guarding their hisec connection. Guess what guys, we're already in here plotting to kill you!

Cue even more waiting, watching, and discussing how terrible they are at pulling down their POS. We watch one guy log off followed by a new contact appearing on d-scan in a noobship. Okay, that'll be his alt leaving the hole. Noobship jumps out, new contact logs off, old contact logs back on. Guess we were correct. Now they have one guy leave in a pod and return in a pod 10 minutes later. What was he doing? Why did he leave and return in a pod? Why is he sitting next to that Tayra? Oh, I know, he needs the skill to fly it and in 22 minutes he'll jump into it. Turns out we were spot on with that prediction and he warps out with the now unanchored PHA.

Our initial plan was to hang around until they unanchored the POS then blow up what we could before stealing the POS when it unanchored. Due to the Laurel and Hardy show they exposed us to we modify that slightly. New plan is to warp down as soon as they down the bubble. Hopefully they start unanchoring the POS before they see us, if not tough. We've waited too long and can't be sure they won't online the POS again or do any manner of unpredictable crazy.

By now we've been watching these guys for six hours. We just want to shoot something - anything. A corpmate who has a habit of wandering through traps logs on and receives that as a warning. I have eyes on the tower. Another corpmate is watching the hisec. A third is ready to go from our home system in a Phobos. After the longest time they offline the POS and I shout "go go go". I warp down and land on what is now only a Mammoth and a Buzzard. I kill the Mammoth and the pod flees. Someone calls that the Proteus jumped into hisec. Is he running away? Damnit! I get the Buzzard into structure then stop firing so someone else can get on the killmail. That explodes and I get the pod.

Sadly, the POS isn't unanchoring. Like everything else these guys did tonight they even took too long to click the appropriate buttons. We're considering what to do when our Phobos pilot mentions he has the Proteus in a bubble but is taking damage. Wait, didn't the Proteus jump out? Turned out he jumped out and back in to crit the mass on the hisec hole. Presumably this was part of their unanchoring strategy? Whatever reason he did it for he was now polarised and we warped off in his direction to end another ship. Expecting a fight I also had my industry character jump into a Brutix for some extra dps. As expected, the Proteus' shields melted as I had my indy character warping to our static hole. The armour started to vanish surprisingly fast as I entered warp to join the fight with the second character. I noted the Proteus set his drones on Orea's Loki but this didn't worry me much as his armour was almost gone now. Really? So fast? Just as my second character landed the Proteus exploded. I started shooting the pod but he got to the hole and jumped out with structure damage.

We looted, salvaged and shot the wrecks plus took the corpse back to our 'meat locker' container. During this we noticed they had a character we didn't know about re-online the POS. This meant taking the fuel which dropped in the Mammoth was really important for us just to annoy them. By now it was really late and two of us had to leave. My parting shot to our Phobos pilot was to have more fun with these guys when they went for more POS fuel. It seems he took that to heart and got five more kills. Including two in hisec which required sacrificing a smart-bombing Naga to the powers of Concord.