Back with a bump... and a fwoosh

Lets say that I had an interesting first few days back.

Continued where I left off mission wise - Running some level 3's from around the Gulfinoodi area, spent a few days searching out traces of my old Corporation, re-joined them and spent a day or two learning the new faces who had joined (and mourning the loss of a few who had left) since my last foray into space.

Getting back into the swing of things was hard, trying to re-learn skills long forgotten, but thankfully my one stable factor was my passively tanked Drake - because of that ship, I was fairly confident that I could go out and not worry too much about blowing up, just pop in, earn some cheap, easy money, and get back into the swing of things.

Anyway, long story short, I had spent the best part of about 4 hours missioning, having just re-insured my ship earlier in the day. Doing some nice basic 'Kill these Angel mobs and collect their waiting loot to fill the coffers' style missions I got my first mission that sent me into Lowsec space once again.

Of course, I had completely forgotten that I could just simply abandon a mission and as long as I don't do it too frequently, theres no hit to my faction status. Hindsight is a wonderful thing...

I took the risk, and dived into the system, heedless to the dangers. Expecting to meet with a gate camp in a classically very contested area (Bosena gate) I was pleasently suprised to find zero ships, and only 1 corpse. I disappeared to the mission, thinking everyone had abandoned the area and whatever had happened was done with for the moment.

I spent the best part of an hour tidying up the mission, killing every last one but 2 rats and thanking the various Eve gods that I was left alone, when disaster struck.

A nice heavy interdictor flew in to me (these had not been added since I left it seems) and locked me down with its anti-warp sphere. Pinging away at my shields (which were dropping really rather slowly I must say) we spent a few minutes trading blows, and him repeatedly asking for a chat request. Seems that my missiles were never going to penetrate his shields, but he managed to get me down to armour after about 5 minutes of dogfighting.

In the end I sensed that the end was near, so I accepted the chat request just to see what his demands were - normally I would have said it was fairly reasonable - 25 million but theres always the risk of paying up then getting blown away anyway afterwards - add to that the cost of refitting my ship due to insurance was only about 20 million (I wasnt carrying any implants) I just let him have his glory and kill me, at least he could recover what he could from my loot and save face.

With no shields, my Drake ripped apart like paper, the pod was unable to get away because of the warp sphere effect, so in the end I found a nice relocation back to base and a mail from the insurance company paying me out for my troubles... I wonder if they thought it was insurance fraud since it was such a quick turnaround that I claimed.


So first few days back, I'm a little wiser (seems scanning down deadspace pockets is a lot easier now than when I left) but not particularly any worse off, though the 1.0 faction hit was never nice when it takes several missions to gain 0.1 faction increase above 9.0.