Life in a Wormhole: A Taste of the Good Life #eveonline

It’s been well ove 24 hours since the fleecing of our neighboring class-two system, but the wormhole connection is still up. Very strange, as they typically only last 16 hours.

Oh, wait: it is a new wormhole, connecting to a new system, but the hole is in the exact same location as yesterday. Weird! (Though not unheard of amongst wormhole dwellers.)

The new system is heavily pruned, which I suspect is because some of our alliance mates connected here just two days ago from their home system and did a bit of sleeper maintenance — it certainly doesn’t seem like the locals are doing much of anything.

The system is thick with wormholes, if not sleeper anomalies, however, and I track down an outbound connection to Amarr high-sec (not terribly useful, since we’re currently under WarDec house arrest), an aging inbound from Low-sec (in the aptly named Solitude region of known space), an outbound to Class-One wormhole space, and yet another inbound connection from a Class-Two system like our own. I do a bit of poking around in the other wormholes, but both are similarly picked over.

Still, Moondog is online and looking for something to do that isn’t shooting Customs Offices. I’d like to oblige, and luckily I can — at least a little bit — as there is a single sleeper site up in our home system. I hop into my trusty Gila to join MD in his Harbinger battlecruiser and (with some missile-throwing assistance from Ichi) make short work of the site. Salvage is not great, and Ichi and I donate the proceeds to Moondog’s wallet to give him some spending money.

Moondog calls it a night, and I decide to make a quick run out through the high sec connection located in the neighboring class two system to pick up a new skillbook I’ll soon be able to train. Yes, a wardec’s on, but these habitually war-declaring corps tend to just camp out in high-traffic, centrally-located markets and watch for foolish or overly brave targets to wander in front of their guns — in practice, these things are never so much a war as they are a kind of vodka-soaked duck hunt.

In any case, my destination is the nearest “library” system, with piles of NPC-sold skillbooks on the market (usually, and not coincidentally, these system are often also one of the 20 or so ‘starter systems’ for new pilots, and about as safe and any system in known space is likely to be at this point). I swap the Gila for my nimble and more-importantly stealthy Cheetah covert ops frigate and head out.

The trip is comfortably anti-climatic (aside from the part where I buy the books, forget to move them from the station bays into my ship’s cargo hold, have to turn around and go back); I pick up Recon Cruisers (plus a few other impulse buys), and books for Em, Moondog, and CB, then head home, stopping just long enough to poke my head into the Class One system again in hopes of stumbling across a target. No luck, so I finish my trip, drop off the latest batch of textbooks, and call it a night.