This is going to take a few posts

So I'll just get right into it.  My adventure the night before New Years Eve had me up late and up early again.  That made for a rough, but luckily short, workday.  New Years Eve was another late night, but at least I got to sleep in the next day.  New Years Day was ruined by my water heater dying, so my brother installed a new one, because he's good at that stuff, and I helped.  That night we all went to bed early, and in the morning I started waking up around 5:30.  I think I finally got online around 8:00 or 8:30.  D-scan was lit up, Talos, 2x Vexors, and lots of Bombers.

Curious but not yet scared, I cloaked and bounced around the system looking for them.  Thinking they were in a sleeper combat or data/relic site I did the 5 degree dance unsuccessfully.  Playing with the ranges I was able to narrow it down to planet 7.    Unsure of what they could care about over there I warped to the POCO, and nobody was there.  I didn't have a dead POS bookmark for anything over there, but d-scan revealed one POS within 1 AU, and no force fields.  The planet didn't have too many moons so I bounced to the first and then the second which revealed a bunch of Spacemonkeys shooting a dead POS.

Not just any dead POS, but the POS of Fairlight Avionics, holder of two POCO's with 0% tax rates.  I must have seen this when I moved in because I hit every moon on every planet, but apparently failed to bookmark it.  As it turns out, later I would find a second dead POS I'd forgotten to bookmark also.  That meant the number of dead POSs in this wormhole was a total of four.  But why were they shooting at this one?

Thinking about that started to make me worry.  Were they moving in? Was this specifically about Fairlight?  Should I be packing my gear into the Orca to prepare for the worst?  They might have seen me on scan for a second when I logged in, but I hadn't dropped probes so things still looked quiet.  I decided to watch them and see what happened.  Reacting to their moves as they happened would give me the best chance.  My best guess was that they were going to shoot down the tower and re-use the arrays to put up their own POS.  I sat back and watched, waiting for the tower to disappear from the overview, and the ensuing large fireball.

In all there were 16 pilots shooting at it, mostly bombers.  They were being resupplied by an off-grid Crane.  It eventually showed up on grid and worked from there for a while before the tower popped.  It was just after 10:00am and I expected to see them bring in the haulers to scoop all the arrays.  But then an even stranger thing happened... they kept shooting.  They shot down two medium lasers and six small lasers.  That lasted about 20 minutes.  Then, suddenly, they all started warping off.  Bombers first, Vexors next, Talos last, like an unaligned fleet warp.  There was nothing else on scan, just them, and then they were gone.

As fast as I possibly could I snapped into action.  I was sure those arrays could be unanchored now that the tower was gone.  Still in a Cheetah, I warped to a White Noise Generation Battery from my on-grid safe and tried to unanchor it.  Five seconds later the countdown ended and the array was scoopable.  I warped to the POS, offlined some defenses and got the SMA online.  Jumping in the Prowler I warped to the on-grid safe and made a run to pickup that first array.  I scooped it, cloaked, and warped back to the on-grid safe.  As I was preparing to warp to another, d-scan got a hit, one of the Vexors was back.  It looked like he may have logged off or dc'd and was now coming back.

For almost two hours he sat there all alone, shooting a Warp Scrambling Battery.  I watched him, wondering if he was an alt trying to make some progress while the rest of them were off doing something more important.  He would dc/quit from time to time and I would warp in, unanchor and scoop some arrays, and then go drop them off.  I got another White Noise ECM, two Warp Disruptors, and two Stasis Webs.  Most of those came on his last dc when, for what appeared like no reason, he started slowboating off in a random direction with his drones following him.  About 50km later he e-warped without his drones.  I was just dropping off the webs when he showed up on d-scan again.  For some reason I panicked and switched back to my Cheetah, hoping he wouldn't notice the hauler on scan.  With a quick warp to a safespot I was hidden again and headed back to the on-grid safe.

Maybe he saw me, or maybe this was just when reinforcements would start to trickle in, but shortly after he was joined by another Vexor.  They shot down a medium pulse laser together.  Then three more showed up, a Gila, a Navy Caracal, and another Vexor.  The originals had all been Spacemonkeys, these newer pilots were Western Co-Prosperity Spere.  For whatever reason that made me less worried that this was a move-in operation.  The five of them shot down a bunch of stuff, starting with a White Noise Generation Battery and then 23 other arrays.

To add a bit of perspective, the story so far actually spans 10 hours.  From around 8:30am to 6:30pm   I didn't sit and watch them the whole time.  Even though I was off work I had stuff to do around the house.  My son needed to go to the library to get some books on Alaska for a school project.  The library didn't open until noon, which gave me the morning to watch them.  But of course that last array scooping session took place just after noon.  I was about to give up on him for a bit since we had to leave and sure enough he did the strange align and dc thing.  So we left for a while after that, hit the library and grabbed some lunch.

Around 2:00pm, when the group of five had settled in, I did a lot more AFKing and periodic checking.  That gave me time to put the basement back together after the water heater installation the day before. I went outside and took down the Christmas lights since it wasn't ridiculously cold outside.  By then my wife got home, she'd gone grocery shopping after work.  We put all the groceries away and then took down the Christmas tree.  The time was approaching 6:30pm.  I don't remember which task it was that took me away, but I was gone for about 40 minutes.

Continued...