Crime & Punishment

The perception that you’ll instantly be set upon and slaughtered by competent, coldly calculating pirates as soon as you enter lowsec seems to be pretty prevalent. This little story is about why all of that might be true except for the competent part:

I’m chilling in lowsec station ship spinning (thank you CCP!) when a corpie ratting sec reports a legion plexing two jumps over. I tell him I’m on my way, undock the nanodrake I use for generally tooling around with (mistake 1), and head on over with the probing alt. I figure I won't bother with coms, since it's soooo much effort to start Vent. (mistake 2)

Me and the corpie both send our alts in to take a look - the corpie has to lend me some probes since I lost seven by leaving them out while drunk the night before, and so I end up with only four combat probes, and thus about half the probing power I normally do. (mistake 3)

Quick check with cores reveals no plexes in the system, so he’s running an escalation. I switch to combats and a comedy of errors follows - I accidently decloak my alt, forget to recloak it, launch combat probes within D-scan range, etc. (mistakes 4,5,6) Neither of us are particularly expecting to catch him at this point, but you’ve gotta put in that good faith effort. A minute of sloppy and semi-afk probing (7) later, I arrive in the escalation to see the overseer’s wreck and the legion merrily warping off. If only I had been on the ball with probing!

Oh well, back to station spinning. But then I notice that the legion has jumped into my main, which was chilling on the gate to the system in that lovely nanodrake. I expect to see the legion decloak, recloak, and blissfully breeze by - but for some reason he’s holding cloak. This is somewhat promising! Wait almost a full minute, and he finally decloaks - spam approach and tackle and all those good things, and magically point the Legion in my unseboed Drake. Hardly believing it, I type in corp something incoherent like "legion tacklefd get here wtdf hrry!", figuring that will be clearly interpreted as 'I've tackled the Legion on the xxx gate, get there and be ready to jump through and tackle it on the other side or get some DPS off me by taking GCC if it does aggress.'

I start shooting it and the legion drops obligingly quickly until he apparently remembers that he has a repper and turns it on. This is annoying, since the sentries are not being kind to my lightly tanked Drake. My alt who followed him in has no aggressive modules and so can’t take GCC to help me, so she just sits there and watches helplessly. I realize I'm rather like a dog chasing a car - I wasn't really expecting to catch my target and definetly hadn't thought about what would happen if I did.

The legion then remembers he has guns, and starts shooting me. This is good because he can’t just burn back and jump out, but also very annoying because his lasers hurt. A lot. My brave Warrior II sentry-shield dies in a fire, and though the legion is dying, I'm definetely dying faster. And I don't even have a DCU on this damn thing, so the chances of pulling of heroics in structure are minimal.

The only good thing is that he apparently doesn’t have a point fit for complete comedy, so I warp out in half structure with him probably still at 75% structure and repping still. About 30 seconds later my corpy types in chat that he’s in warp to the gate to back me up - since he was apparently too busy watching the football game to notice my frantic typing in corp, he's missed all the fun. (I keep telling him turn RL off, but he just won't listen.) Of course, the Legion is long gone, probably having a good chuckle.

TLDR: So many chances to kill a legion, I screw them all up

was coming in here expecting a underdog beats badass, rags beat riches, a stupid beats slightly less dumb story and left dissapoint........... ...you sir owe me 5 minutes of my life back.

The OP made me think of this.