That’s the way

I don’t know how I’m gonna tell you,
I can’t play with you no more,
I don’t know how I’m gonna do what mama told me,
My friend, the boy next door.
I can’t believe what people saying,
You’re gonna let your hair hang down,
I’m satisfied to sit here working all day long,
You’re in the darker side of town.

It’s been a while already. Practicing solitude is a gloomy act for you find yourself being in the pod most of the time. Being a nomad, limiting yourself from access to any and all society-based forms of communication has been… excruciating to say the least. Diane has been running hot for almost a week now, and we haven’t made a dock in almost as long. Thinking of all the modules in my cargo hold makes me feel restless, as a thought of being caught terrified me more than once while I was lulling myself to sleep in the monotonous darkness of a capsule. “I miss my bastards, Diane, I miss my wife as well. The memory of her scent is still carved deeply in my memory. The rattling of the lounge, of Lord LazyGhost teasing everybody. I miss all that.” Sharing my feelings to an A.I. could be as revealing as possible, but it still is unresponsive. “What do you mean, Spaxi?” Is all she could ever say. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll be able to program A.I. to have feelings. It sounds like a good idea right now, but that could just be the biggest crap fest created by mankind. I’m dropping the idea.

The week “abroad” has been well spent in term of my development as a pirate, I have to assume. My personal opinion on this has been influenced by a certain TFS Tibbs by an enormous measure, seeing as he’s on the of the top hunter-pirates, as I’d like to call him in our brotherhood we dare to call The Bastards. There are two sides to every coin, and without either, the coin is incomplete, redundant and worthless. Such is the way of the piracy as well. You have the hunting part, which is based on your ability to limit your blood-lust and catch a moment to (even without spotting one) analyze and deduce who your target is, what he is possibly fitting his ship with, and how he wants to fight. It’s like playing chess and thinking of your future many steps ahead. Then, the other part is how you fly your ship – everything from manual piloting to managing heat, and this is quite possibly less important that the first. Once all your pieces are in place, you just have to make sure not to make a mistake while executing, and the king will without a doubt fall.

I have so far managed to develop only two ways of preying upon the poor souls who try to endeavor themselves in the art of exploration. It is possible to do it one way, but that will reduce the amount of targets you can acquire, quite possibly starving you. Such a fate many animals have to endure, but they still never go hungry to the point which makes them drop and die. However. mixing it up and matching the hunting style to your mood will work miracles. I shall name these methods ‘The stalk” and “The pounce”.

The pounce method is the simplest of the both, and it didn’t really suit the style I was going for. It is perfect for the nomadic of kinds, but not to me. It boils down to settling down to a single system, with high traffic and vicinity of high security space. The system would be having preferably one Relic-type signature. The way I did it was down right simple – when I would enter the system through I gate, I’d drop the Sisters’ core scanner probes and warp Diane to one of more secure locations and cloak up, while she would be running the scan on all of the unknown signatures. Once she would locate on of the Relic-type sites, I would warp the ship to the signature at 100 km and save the current location, then warp back to the spot I came from, and warp back to the place 100 km away from the signature at additional 100 km, then drop the last bookmark and name it “sigcode Pounce”. This is the process of creating a TAC, which allows me to execute the strategy which is as follows – when people scan down, warp to the signature and start hacking one of the containers, I would warp to that container, activate the propulsion module and ram Diane into them to destabilize their align, scram their warp core and then feast.

The stalk method is the one I found myself applying the most, as it is far more dynamic than the previous one, and it completely suit my style of preying on the weak. The galaxy mankind discovered after going through the dubbed Eve-Gate was vast and seemingly limitless, and so was my desire to explore it, see many of the distant suns and of course, pillage everything along the way. I would often find myself just speeding through different systems, entering adjacent constellations and making pilgrimage in all the different regions while having Diane keep her scanner ready and on lookout for either scanner probes or other known exploration-heavy hull types. Once a such thing has been discovered, I would personally drop my own set of probes and do the same thing the unsuspecting capsuleer – try to scan down sites. If I was to find a Data- or Relic-type sites, I would proceed to make TACs while finishing up the scanning. If the system was to be completely devoid of any signatures of significance, I would simply follow the “fellow explorer” and continue to stalk him in the systems far.

This life style has been interesting to say the least, opening up my mind to patience and ruthlessness. Being an excellent pilot was a given for me, as I have spent many hours training with some of the most devious characters of the New Eden, but being a hunter was something completely new and I was ready to dedicate my heart and my soul to establish that part of my personality as well.