Chaos Theory

Eve is all about actions and consequences. The beauty of Eve is that the consequences are highly unpredictable, especially in wormhole space... well, at least on the long run.

Let me tell you a story about a chain of events which started with a random pilot firing a few shots at a random POCO in a forgotten wormhole system and ended with the destruction of a Rattlesnake a few days later in a seemingly unrelated C3 system.

People sometimes like to "gift" us POCOs in wormholes and shoot at them to generate notifications which, they assume, annoy us. I never really understood the behavior, but we woke up one day with this message:

We made some jokes about it in corp chat and then continued minding our own business, but curiosity got the better of me so I looked at the killboard of that system. Indeed, some of us have been in there a while back and probably annoyed the residents a bit. Thinking there was a small chance that this was indeed a real POCO bash and not some random aggression, I started running some locators:

Wasn't really expecting to get a hit - this meant he just fired a few shots at the POCO and then docked inside a station to await downtime. Chances were that Itamo system was the entrance to J124327.

And indeed it was.

The wormhole was empty, no forcefields, only dead sticks. Some POCOs were missing and one of the few left belonged to us, so I decided to sell the wormhole :)

C3 wormholes with high-sec statics are pretty wanted, even if they don't have good P.I. I got an offer in less than a day and sold it for 500 mil ISK. We transferred the POCO, too. Thank you, Ioku Adarger, whoever you are.

Two jumps down the chain I found another empty C3 wormhole with a high-sec static. Talk about luck. I received an offer the next day and ended up selling it for 425 mil ISK after guiding the customer inside. We used a broker, which means he didn't trust me very much, but he came directly in a DST instead of a scout, which was pretty hilarious. Of course we don't shoot our customers during a wormhole transaction, but I advised him to be careful and keep an eye on Dscan.

I left that system and logged out. A few hours later, after I was clearing up some bookmarks, I spotted this on Zkill:

My customer has been killed by none other than Zosius, the "Cloaky Bastard"! He runs a really nice blog which I happen to frequent pretty often: http://cloakybastard.blogspot.com/

Talk about coincidence.

In a way I feel sorry about my customer, even though I did my duty and advised him to be careful. On the other hand I brought more people into the realm of Bob and gave Zosius some practice for his new fleet doctrine. I'm sure he'll write an article about this soon ;)