It may not be exactly the same type of hole, but I believe the title is quite fitting for the situation that Marek currently finds himself in. But before I begin, let me share a little information about the mysterious Amarrian known as Ebon, Marek Ebon.
(Author’s note: as much as I would often love to drift into ‘in character’ commentary, and may do so in future, the majority of my posts will be strictly ‘out of character’ unless stated otherwise. I’ll most likely mark these with an ‘IC’ tag or something similar. If my writing style does drift between the two into a somewhat ‘grey’ area then I apologise, and hope it isn’t too off-putting. I’m always open to constructive criticism in the comments section, so please feel free!)
As a new player to EVE (prior to all that ‘New Player Experience’ jazz), I found the character selection a little confounding (heh, can you guess it’s my favourite word?). So Marek was a mish-mash of things that I thought were cool in EVE, things that I thought were cool from a bit of RP that I used to do in WoW and things that I felt would be cool if I got into the RP side of EVE, which I haven’t done as of yet. Also, at the time I was particularly drawn to the look of the Amarr ships.
Marek was created with that jumble of ideas in mind and flitted hither and thither between training for different things as I found my way in New Eden. He underwent many periods of inactivity whilst other characters took centre stage, but was also my go-to guy for a lot of my pondering moments when I thought ‘hmm, that’d be good to try… I’ll go get Marek’.
So, when the opportunity to enter the corp wormhole surfaced (finally a high-sec entrance that isn’t 20 jumps away!), Marek was naturally my first choice. So without wishing to rip-off a popular story that later became a popular film too much, there is a certain sense that I’ve been flung down the rabbit hole and now everything is… different.
For a start, our wormhole POS is actually the first one I’ve ever seen, let alone the first one that I’ve had to live out of on a semi-permanent basis. I’ve already started to miss the little things about station life, but the feeling of having that high-sec exit despawn was both peculiar and rather exciting. I’m making the most of Marek’s trip to Wonderland though and have been familiarising myself with wormhole life - scanning sites and exits, hitting the directional scan rather excessively, and finding a new-found appreciation for the Covert Ops Cloaking Device II.
Last night I fitted up a sturdy Harbinger and took on some Sleepers with a corp mate. It was certainly an experience, I can tell you. The Harbinger’s tank was impressive in the first instance, but soon became wholly inadequate, and my fellow pilot and I engaged in a tag-team sort of system to take the heat off. Eventually after a couple of hours I hopped back to the POS and fitted for some remote repair – this allowed my corp mate’s tank to hold out long enough for him (my DPS was severely lacking) to finish off the rats. Once they’d been dispatched, it was simply a question of the salvaging and the hacking, which I bravely stood by and watched…
It’s been a good first couple of days in the wormhole – I know exactly what skills I need to train now, so I’ll be looking at getting those within the next week, and then it’ll be a trip out to Empire space with a shopping list as long as this blog post to make sure that I’m fully prepared.
I just hope we don’t have any odd visitors wishing to involve me in an oddly skewed, sci-fi version of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Although it does raise the question of what the EVE answer to ‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’ would be – anyone know if the Caldari Navy are keen authors?
Fly safe, and I'll see you on the d-scan.
