Unlucky for Northern Associates

In XIII, we're developing something of a glossary of our own slang terms. For example, "Pink-boxed" means someone has been lost to wife/GF aggro. "Arting" is the completion of a mundane, ordinary task with...

"Content day" is what happens on the rare occasions when you log in and fight until you log off.

I'd logged in as our people were scouting a new static chain and an incoming C4 chain. The static C5 had a C2 static and a bubble-camp had been spotted in the B274 to highsec in the C2. Stillborn Sun had a bunch of ships. Highsec WH's aren't the best place to fight anyone, so we needed some bait they couldn't refuse. Odidi volunteered his Orca, hoping to pull them away from the hole to tackle him as he landed in the bubble. We fleeted up with as many webbing ships as possible to keep them from jumping to highsec. Given how light the composition was, I foolishly decided to dual-box a Svipul and a Daredevil. It hadn't occurred to me until we were in warp to 'rescue' Odi's Orca how fragile my choice of ships was, and for a moment, I wondered how I'd direct the fleet while keeping both ships alive.

Jay > "Er... Kill.... things. Kill all the things. Kill them hard."

Utari > " . . . I can't believe you just said that."

And we've now got the appending of "...it hard." in the glossary as

Still, even with such epic fleet direction, I still managed to almost lose the Svipul. I was considering how not good it was to hear an armour alarm on a local tanked shield ship when reps from Utari's scimitar landed. And after all that, I only managed to get on killmail for the Catalyst, missing out on the Vexor completely, with my Daredevil seeminly useless and a couple of their ships made it through the connection to highsec.

We thanked them for content and as they were expressing their disbelief that the Orca was actually bait, we realised why they were camping the highsec with a bubble as a Gnosis landed in the bubble.

As we head back, we get called to jump out of a direct null as one of our pilots bit off more than he could chew. At the same time, Gab notices a familiar tag in the chain through an incoming C4 - Unseen Wolves. As a corporation, we'd had our first big fight again these guys a while back. On that occasion we'd be outnumbered by around 3:1 and while our numbers had grown, I still wasn't confident we could field comparable numbers. We had to get guys checking that C4 chain while we committed a fleet to null, where to local renters had expressed their intentions to fight in local - something of a rarity.

I'd usually link a battle report at this point, but things got messy. As we started to engage the locals, Unseen Wolves had beat us to the punch and had moved through the chain quicker than our scouts could find where they were coming from, dropping a once again impressively large fleet on us as we prepared for an altogether different fight. The initial exchange saw us lose several guardians in exchange for a Sacrilege,2 Navy Exqurors and a Svipul. We could have easily lost more, with Unseen Wolves fielding about 10 more ships than us so we called in carriers in an attempt to keep the fleet up, but not before CommanderCane's proteus went down. The Wolves bugged out while they still had the killboard advantage.

All the while, O'nira was lamenting not taking the fight in nullsec. We'd engaged some of their bait on the wormhole to Lazarus, but we knew full well they were waiting with some backup behind the only gate out of the system. And their backup included a Thanatos.

The brawl with Unseen Wolves hadn't taken too long to fizzle out, in terms of some eve fights, so I was still confident that Northern Associates would still be up for fighting. After all, you know renters are serious when they are prepared to commit carriers for a roaming gang. We replenished our fleet guardians and took a couple of ships to engage their bait/tackle.

That was enough to get their carrier both committed and tackled. We'd brought neuting ships in anticipation of this, but as they ship-scanned the Thanatos, they noticed it was fitted with a cyno. I wont pretend that the new information had given me a dilemma. No, we had already committed our fleet and the guys wanted the Thanatos to go down. Northern Associates had other ideas about the fate of the Thanatos and warped in 3 archons to keep it up. Now, this was a dilemma.

With the hole already massed from the fight with Unseen Wolves and knowing the Northern associates carriers were rocking cyno's, our fleet needed a little something-something. Oh well, what's the worst that could've happened, eh? I went and got the Naglfar...

Apparently, they'd called for help that they could cyno in during that fight, but were told it was their mess, so no cyno's were lit. The most interesting part of the evening was squeezing everything back through the wormhole. Cane was the last ship through with his Bhaalgorn before I jumped the Nag home. I instructed him to think thin as he jumped. Thankfully, it worked and the emergency cyno I was preparing wasn't needed.

Battlereport