EVE Fiction

Pod Flu

by Kytayn

Getting podded clears the sinuses. Really.

Everyone knows that Pod Flu isn't real, right? It's just a carebear tale, right? I challenge you to ask anyone that's lived in a wormhole about it. They'll tell you, and I'll tell you; Pod Flu is real, and there's only one cure.

My corp lived in a simple class 3 wormhole. I was a kind of jack-of-all trades. Gun mining, Sleeper suppression, scanning, the usual stuff. If you're like me, you get a little punchy when you haven't seen anyone but your corp mates in the hole for more than a week.

It was the ninth day of quiet. No goofballs in mining frigates, no pilots poking around in a Proteus. The guns on my Legion were getting rusty. My Astarte was also getting hungry just sitting there. We'd scanned out the static again, and I had dropped the bookmarks at the POS for everyone to grab when they woke up.

One of my corp mates, Copper, was teasing the Sleepers in an Ares. His name was actually Paul Blart Hole Cop, which he assured us was hilarious, but none of us got it so we just called him Copper. I say to him, "You really shouldn't mess with the Sleepers like that. One of these days they're gonna decide to stop playing nanny and run us out of the hole."

Copper responds with a vid feed taken from one of his camera drones. He zips around the backside of an Awakened Escort takes a pot shot and zips away. He managed to spank the Sleeper drone and get out before a Preserver drone could get a web on him.

"You're insane. E.Plurb is gonna pod you just for screwing around." Our corp CEO, E Pluribus Fragmentum was none too keen on losing ships to the Sleepers when we didn't have to. You went at them in strength or you didn't go.

Copper zipped into view punching out of warp. "There's nothing to do! We need some targets in here stat. Maybe you can go next door and fly a bait Itty around, show a little baboon red and draw 'em back in here."

"We haven't even scouted them out. We have no idea what they'd bring and the rest of the guys are all on downtime right now. You gonna be the one to wake up E.Plurb and Space Fonzie, 'cause I'm not that guy."

Copper locked me, zipped around and shot my backside. He has a thing about backsides, maybe that's why he lives in the ass end of nowhere.

Before he shipped up and decided to play POS bowling I suggested he take a turn at the chores. "Looks like we just lost one of the wanderers. Your turn to scan."

"Pacman Bosley, you suck." Copper switched ships and began scanning down the new hole.

A couple of minutes later (I know; I'm guessing "adult viewing" before scanning) he pops a message my way. "Hey Pac, I found a class 6, let's go look around. Fleet me and warp."

Normally I would find some creative way to insult his clone producer but if you haven't had a live target for a long while you start to get this itch behind your eyes. He had probes so I figured my cloaky Legion would do just fine. There we were, idiots, we two, about to get an adrenalin fix by going into a C6 with a Legion and a Helios. I suppose you could say we deserved what happened next.

"You go first, I got your back." Yeah.

"All right, I'll go first but wait for my say so to come in." This'll be fine, I kept telling myself. I swear I really do know better, it was the lack of live targets, really.

I enter. System J101553. "Crap, my armor resists and cap just got cut in half! Why the frak did you let me take an armor tanking ship into a pulsar system, man?!?"

Copper took my severe annoyance to what, in his tiny mind, constituted a good joke, as a signal to enter.

Our new neighbors, whose lawn we were standing on, decided to take that as a cue to decloak and start locking us up. As more ships began to appear at the hole Copper yelled out "Oh sh..." and popped. I saw his pod warp off, and a quick glance at the overview showed Golems and Tengus. I had been mentally standing on my own GTFO button and managed to get my microwarp drive up and cranking. It got me just enough range to cut it and warp out myself.

Copper had run his pod over to their POS by picking a moon at random. He was always lucky that way. "Uh, Pac... I'm back in hi-sec... are you out? Do you have a bookmark..." I knocked him out of fleet and concentrated on looking like a fleck of random gas.

OK. Deep breath, take stock. You're in a cloaky Legion, they can probe you down but you can keep running. You have no probes or probe launcher... Frak! And you didn't bookmark the way home! Send a message to Fonzie or E.Plurb. They might not see it for a few days. They'll be busy with these guys. These guys think we're morons so they'll march on in after soft targets.

We nearly lost our POS.

It was three weeks before Copper found another way in. Fonzie podded him the moment he showed his face back in our hole, then told him E. Plurb wouldn't talk to him until he found me and brought me back. Three weeks of near misses.

I lost my Legion after the ninth day. I ran around in my pod, getting beaten on by the pulsar and worn away by zero sleep. I had to keep warping, had to keep making mid-warp bookmarks for safe spots that really weren't. I could've just let them pod me, but the implants in my head cost a fortune. So I ran, and ran.

Day nineteen and I wasn't feeling right. The pod pulled to the left when maneuvering, but its diagnostics showed the pod itself was fine. I almost died twice when warping to an old safe spot I had been to before. They were sitting there in a Proteus but couldn't lock me quickly enough.

By the time Copper found me, I was starting to hallucinate. I'm fairly sure there weren't any Jin-Mei dancing girls in my pod with me. I was also reasonably certain my pod didn't have a couch.

---

Written in response to one of Telegram Sam's challenges.

Still in first draft, needs a bit of editing. Feedback welcomed.

All of my yes!

Excellent! And done in short time too!

Edit: "You've deployed void bombs, activated the no-no paste, set your safeties to brown..."

safeties to brown, lol


nice read!

EddieRio's YouTube video can be gotten to by way of this link: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=312429