Part 3
All I could think about during the day was returning to Eve. Calculus equations, physics problems, the musings of long-dead authors, all these things meant nothing to me now, for I was well on my way to becoming a virtual pimp. I drove home like a maniac that day, darting in and out of traffic and speeding through crowded city intersections. I sprinted to my computer and started Eve, my heart warming at the gentle glow of the galaxy sun. I netted about 1.5 million more credits by 7 PM, when HardHead logged on. He wasted no time in messaging me.
HH: "Hey dood, how's it going? How's the financial situation?"
Me: "Pretty fucking awesome, I've made 5 million credits so far."
HH: "Are you kidding me? Jesus Christ that's a lot, can I have my money
back?"
Me: "Sure. I'll give you a million extra too, just as promised."
HardHead logged in, and I wired him 4 million credits. His trust in me was now firmly established, and I got back to work, doing what I did best, running trade routes. During this time, Trazir bitched and moaned, asking me to wire him money so that he too could start doing trade routes. He even called me up a few times, asking for virtual money. I eventually gave in and sent him a million just to shut him up. By the time I went to sleep that night, having made an additional 500k by whoring large amounts of cheap items through safe areas, I knew that my virtual life had changed forever.
Over the next two weeks, I traded harder than a Chinaman in a flea market. Trazir even joined in, but since he was too lazy to wake up early in the morning, he would be lucky on his best days to make half what I made on my worst days. During this time, HardHead told me about how he had moved on to actually writing scripts for the game so that he could find and mine the very rarest of asteroids with ease. I also became a master of blasting off with my MWDs the second any hostiles showed up near a warp gate, and while there were a few close calls, nothing ever rivalled my experience with Dethbringer. By the end of this period, I was worth close to 85 million credits, and Trazir was near 30 million. I felt like a fucking space tycoon, a financial juggernaut, ready to expand my realm of influence from the monetary to the military. I was going to buy a cruiser, the next step up from the frigate you are given when you first enter the world of Eve.
I did my research, and decided that the best ship for combat would be the Caldari Moa; it was fast, deadly, and had an armament approximately equal to the United States? missile arsenal during the Cold War. Nuclear winter, here I come. I was going to pick it up from a guy named ?OneEye Willie?, a hard boiled manufacturing magnate I met one day in IRC. Willie sold the ship equivalent of an Alienware computer; terribly overpriced, but outfitted with all the best decals, all the best hardware, and most importantly, the best weaponry that money could buy. When you bought from Willie, you weren?t just buying a combat ship; you were buying death incarnate, a million credits at a time.
After an intense bout of haggling, some shouting on my part, and some screaming back on his, I worked him down to 35 million credits. Willie, in addition to being just a little eccentric, manufactured his ships far away from civilization where costs were lower and competition was nil. I suspected that he supplied pirates with their combat ships, but I never could confirm it, because Willie never, ever talked about himself or his other clients. I would pick up the Moa in some near-abandoned outpost in a 0.0 sector in the Caldari region. It would take me 2 hours to fly out there, but I wanted that fucking ship, so it was worth it. Since it would be 0.0 space, and since I didn?t want to have to leave my indie out in the middle of the space equivalent of Bumfuck, Alaska, I would be flying out in my lifepod.
In Eve Online, your lifepod is the final string in the cold vacuum of space which keeps you in the world of the living. Unfortunately, it?s about as strong as an anorexic midget in a world of steroid-laced giants. NPC enemies ignore lifepods completely, but the NPCs were easy to get away from anyway. It was the other humans you had to watch out for, the asshole player killers who destroyed lifepods and set you back hours, not for profit, not for personal gain, just for the sake of ruining somebody?s day.
I had been gliding through space for about 90 minutes when I saw the red targeting cursor. My pod beeped, and I shouted at the monitor, ?FUCKING DAMN IT!? Seconds passed, and I was perplexed; no missiles had hit my pod, and no lasers blasts were ripping through my hull. My speed bar was decreasing. 400 m/s. 300 m/s. 200 m/s. I slowly grinded to a halt. ?Your engines have been disabled,? the notification read. His name was DanielSan, and he had me immobilized in space. My life was in the hands of the fucking karate kid.
His message arrived shortly after, ?give me 500k or I?m gonna blow you to shit.?
?All right, calm down, I?ll wire the money right now.? I groped for the send button, nervously trying to type in 500,000 in the wire transfer box. The way I figured it, giving up the profits from a single 30 minute trade run more than justified the loss of skills and time I would have incurred if I was blown away.
A second before the wire went through, I received another message: ?send it NOW you bitch. Heres a little present.? A single laser blast tore through the mass of my ship, bringing my hull integrity down to 15%. ?Ok, you can leave now bitch, and dont come back.? Thirty seconds later, my engines let out a low whine as they came back to life. Once again, I had narrowly evaded death at the hands of a malevolent prick with a dumb name. My engines were damaged and on fire, only operating at 1/3 capacity. My ship hobbled through space towards the jump gate, beads of sweat broke out on my forehead with each additional meter; I feared that the karate kid would pull the equivalent of a Mr. Miyagi finishing move by blowing me the fuck up. As I passed through the warp gate, I vowed my revenge, and 60 minutes later, I arrived at Willie?s, a broken, burning shell of a man.
?Bout time you got here. Man, what the hell were you doing anyways? You said it would be 2 hours.?
?I got into a little accident. Can I see the ship??
He placed the Moa in a trading window, and it was just as beautiful as I envisioned it. It had 3 long-distance laser racks, 2 high density missile bays, and an ECM ray to drain enemies of their ships? energy. I gave Willie the money, and within minutes, I was flying away from Willie?s base in a shiny new Moa. I had a good idea of who my first target would be, and I was shooting through space with a rage I hadn?t felt in weeks. The familiar explosion of the MWDs sent me roaring, closer and closer, towards each warp gate. He was minutes away, I could feel it in my bones, and I burned with a rage equal to that of the galactic sun.
And finally, I knew it. He was one jump away, and I was only a kilometer from the warp gate. He would be on the other side, camping, bullying, killing, waiting for another innocent soul to pass through his dark grasp. I loaded up my missile bays, readied my left hand over my weaponry hotkeys, my right hand over my targeting hotkey; this was gonna be one hell of a fight, and it didn?t help much that it was going to be the first time I ever fired a weapon in Eve. I nervously gulped and passed through.
Part 4
The heat was on. My targeting system had Danielsan acquired, and I activated my MWDs; I would unload on that motherfucker with the wrath of the Cobra Kai after the halloween party. I quickly reached firing range, and let loose with both missiles. They glided through the air gracefully, passing through each others white trails like two avian lovers mating in flight. The ensuing explosions annihilated his shields and did significant damage to his hull. Oh yes, he would be mine. He fired back pitifully, his laser volley barely denting me thanks to my shield booster. I let out a cackle of delight as I pressed the "fire laser" hotkey, and watched his ship disappear in an inferno. Payback wasn't mine yet, though. I fired my ECM ray on his pod, draining it of all its energy and effectively keeping him from engaging his hyperdrive. I knew it would take about 20 seconds for his pods' capacitor level to reach the point again where he could enter hyperspace, so I wasted no time in messaging.
"Give me 750k or I will pod you, bitch."
Seconds later, the money appeared in my credit box. I was contented now, but not quite happy. For a moment, my left index finger wavered over the fire missile hotkey as my conscience actually questioned whether or not I should blow this fucker up. The two burning hot streaks ejected themselves from my ship, furiously shooting towards their target, and 5 seconds later, Danielsan was no more. He didn't bother messaging me after that; he knew that he had done wrong, and that the Great Magnet had effected its will upon him. I flew back towards civilized space, happy and gleeful and free.
I regaled Trazir with my story that night, saying that he needed to get a cruiser as fast as fucking possible, for the thrill of a fight and the joyous feeling of seeing your enemies slain before you was rivalled by nothing in this God forsaken game. He agreed, but bitched about fiscal problems; apparently he'd done a few bad trade routes where he actually ended up selling his acquired goods for less than he bought them. How this happened, I do not know. Out of the goodness of my heart, I wired him 2 million. Classes had ended for both of us by this point, and Trazir overcame his natural laziness, not by waking up extremely early like me, but by going to bed extremely late. He would sleep during the day, jerk off during the night, and wait until the servers came up at 7 AM to start doing his trade routes. Within a week, he was worth 60 million credits, and I was nearing the same. But then, one morning after I logged in, it happened.
I was running my trade routes as usual, when I came upon a pirate named Lando Griffin. No big deal, I thought to myself, just hit the MWD key and blast off towards the gate.
"Your ship does not have a sufficient amount of energy to use that."
"WHAT THE FUCK?" I slammed my finger into the MWD hotkey again; this must be some sort of joke, some temporary bug in the game.
"Your ship does not have a sufficient amount of energy to use that."
The bullets from his machinegun pinged off my shields, doing considerably damage, and I knew it was only a matter of time. I watched in terror and heartache as my ship slowly cruised towards the warp gate; each bullet into its side was like a cut into my heart. I was carrying 30 million credits worth of goods, and I was NOT going to let those goods be destroyed. My only hope was to try and enter hyperspace, try and get away, try ANYTHING to recover my money. But alas, a moment before my finger stroked the hyper-drive hotkey, his ECM ray drained my ship of its energy. I messaged Lando, desperate for survival.
"I'll give you 5 million credits if you let me go. PLEASE MAN."
He responded with a dual-volley of Phalanx Rockets. My formidably armored industrial ship was now on fire, each lick graphical lick of flame consuming the last vestiges of my morning optimism. I was dead now, and I knew it. I force-ejected from my ship, hoping that he wouldn't destroy it if it was unoccupied. My pod hovered in space, like a small child seperated from its parent. I jammed my finger into the hyperspace key, and moments later, I blasted off into the stars. By the time I was tens of kilometers away, I saw a small speck of light in the galactic horizon. The fucker had destroyed my ship.
I wasted no time in calling Trazir on the phone. A few days earlier, he had purchased a cruiser of his own, one that I knew was just as powerful or even more powerful than my own. It was an Amarr Maller, a ship with more combat slots on it than a fucking space station. He told me that the purchasing price was 40 million, so I knew that unless he got ripped the fuck off, which was quite possible for him, each of those slots possessed a piece of ordnance capable of ending a star system. I flew back to my Moa, which was about 15 jumps away in Caldari space, and had him meet me there. We were going to exact revenge, and unless Lando had Han Solo and the entire rebel armada with him, he was going to have the space equivalent of dry, painful prison rape.
About an hour later, we arrived at the space sector where I had been attacked. We were on the phone with each other, which made instant communication possible, and I hoped that this would tilt the advantage in our favor if Lando had any other pirates with him.
"Listen," I said, "If there's more than one, I'll call out a target, and we both unload on him. Focus fire. Open up with missiles, keep the pressure on with lasers, and once you think his hull is at about 50%, fire your ECM."
"Okay, but what if one of us gets badly damaged?"
"Fight to the death. We need to rid the game of these kinds of scum."
We engaged our hyperdrives and darted towards the jump gate where I had been destroyed. Vengeance would be mine, and my foes would rue the day that they crossed me. Or so I thought.