Starting Blues II: EVE Strikes Back With Sleeper Drones

(Continued from here.)

And so I entered W-Space through my very first wormhole.

Lonely here. And spooky.

This cold, mysterious emptiness set my heart ablaze immediately and I was in love with EVE again.

Then the old scanning system immediately tried to kill that love again.

I set out to scan everything inside this strange system. Even though moving my probes around one by one every goddamn time was the weirdest and most openly hostile piece of UI I ever encountered in a space game. For some reason it reminded me of some of the stupid bullshit Master of Orion III tended to pull on me, but here with the added risk of multiplayer.

The first Sleeper-drone I ever saw with my own eyes.

For a time, I just warped around and tried to take a look at those strange, black drones scuryying around. Since I couldn't warp cloaked yet, this turned out to be an astonishingly dangerous adventure. My method was essentially this:

- Warp in at 100km
- Immediately cloak up after arrival
- Slowly creeping closer until I could move the camera to the drones for a closer look

My ship would have probably exploded the moment this thing started thinking aggressive thoughts.

Things like this nearly one-shotted me the one time I fucked up my warp-then-cloak routine.

With a flimsy Heron-frigate I of course was completely unable to do anything except look at things, so after a while I decided to leave. One of the wormholes I've scanned down lead back to another HighSec-system and I warped back. Luckily even as a complete newbie I was cautios enough to warp in at 100km instead of trying to warp directly to the wormhole, because someone was camping the HighSec-exit. This would have been a sad end to my little adventure.

A Phobos and an Oneiros were waiting for people like me dropping in for a visit. Together with a warp disruptor bubble, they would have pretty much prevented me from anything except dying horribly had I warped in too close. So thanks to my caution the Phobos had to go after me instead and I, after a short moment of confusion, ran away into the opposite direction.

Just after my cap went out I left locking range of that Phobos and dropped into cloak.

My plan after vanishing under cloak and moving erratically in random directions to avoid getting decloaked was simple: Wait until the weird pair was finished and packed up.

Of course at that time I was still unaware of how crazy people in video games could be, so after a while I stopped observing them and went to lunch, assuming they would be gone when I came back.

 

Motherfucker!

Yes, it turned out they were still there, blocking my way out. At that point I just went "Fuck it!" and used my by then really weird position to warp past their bubble.

If you look closely here you see my cloak is switched off. Prepare for warp!

I don't know if they thought I had slipped of somewhere or if they were still expecting me, but my gambit worked: Thanks to me warping past the bubble, I got to the wormhole and jumped out before they could stop me.

Back in civilization!

This little adventure impressed me immensely and my love for EVE's mysteries was back. Since this were the days before the Odyssey-Expansion made scanning less stupid, I soon had to stop my exploration-travels, though. It's kind of hard to control your probes if your hand hurts like mad.

But in the time I was forced to wait with computer-related things until the pain in my hand stopped, I read up on COSMOS-sites. As soon as my hand was healed up enough I avoided probes, scanning and everything else with too many clicks like the plague and tried to run as many COSMOS-missions as possible. (This was actually my second try at COSMOS-missions. In my first try, I ended up with my Myrmidon in a DED-pocket meant for battleships and died horribly.)

Sadly, doing the incredibly broken COSMOS-parts of the game was so frustrating I never thought about making any screenshots, so I have to skip that bit and time travel to a more interesting age. Join me next time when I finally wrap up the early era before we time jump from April 2013 to July 2013!