Intergalactic Summit

Well ... okay.

The spookiest story I know is one that's kind of close to me. I'm not sure there are any actual ghosts involved, but it might deserve a few. See, a few years back, there was ... you could say "another" Aria. A lot of you knew her. My antecedent. My prior self.

A few things are pretty widely known about her. She was a pirate, an Angel Cartel loyalist who thought of herself as a monster, a demon or ghost, rather than a human being.

What's a little less well-known is that she wasn't especially loyal. Like, at all. Actually, she was a traitor and a spy. Her real loyalty was to capsuleerdom generally. She believed capsuleers could never really thrive alongside humankind-- thought we were in danger of being wiped out once humanity realized what we were, actually-- so she was trying to put the technology together to let us be really, truly independent.

The Angel Cartel was rumored to have access to Jovian tech. This was back before the Sleepers and fullerene technology being all over the place, mind you. So she co-founded Ghost Festival partly to try and get access to it. She wasn't so patient as to spend however long working her way through the ranks, though, and figured the Cartel would never fully accept a capsuleer, anyway, so she put together kind of a team to conduct espionage inside the Cartel.

All that might have eventually turned something up, but, at some point, there was a big shake-up in Ghost Festival. Her co-founder and a bunch of other pilots left for Veto, which was associated with the Guristas-- that is, the enemy. At least that's how the Cartel apparently saw it.

The remaining pilots came under scrutiny. The Cartel discovered the plot, and Aria found her wings clipped.

It's pretty hard to imprison a capsuleer while leaving us useful. It's possible, though. The technique the Cartel apparently used was pretty straightforward-- they infiltrated her staff, surrounding her with Dark Angels, then made it clear that things would get ugly if she didn't cooperate. From then on, she was a loyalist kind of for real. There wasn't much other choice; she had no way of knowing who on her staff was a Dark Angel, and no way of investigating without tipping off the Cartel. So, she played along, for years.

Eventually, though, it seems to have gotten to be too much. She describes herself in her essays as slipping into uncaring abstraction, a sort of "end state" to her transformation into something inhuman. I actually don't think it was anything that grand or dramatic; probably she was just really depressed. Anyway, at some point, she seems to have decided that she had to get away, no matter what.

Aria had a certain ship, a Tengu that Vikarion gave to her as a gift. She tended to name her ships after creatures out of stories-- "Preta," "Gaki," and so on. This one was her favorite, and she called it the Goblin Spider. I still have the ship. What I know of the rest of the story comes mostly from its logs.

One day, about two years ago, my old self took the Goblin Spider out for a cruise. No listed purpose. This wasn't really unusual; it's not like capsuleers tend to file flight itineraries or anything. Thing is, a few hours later, the Goblin Spider returned to dock on autopilot without a living soul on board.

Most of the crew was still aboard; just....

Surrounded with Dark Angels, she'd come up with a way to be rid of all the ones immediately surrounding her: she'd simply, and without warning, vented every compartment on board into space. She'd rigged the ship to get back to dock without her. Then, presumably, she'd disembarked, without her pod. The log doesn't indicate how.

That's the last anyone seems to have seen of her. A couple of years would pass before I'd wake up on a cloning bay floor, not knowing who I was.

To this day, I don't know whether she's still out there.

It's possible that I'm bait for a trap, that the Cartel is trying to lure my former self out of hiding. It's a clever idea. As long as I'm here, this identity is occupied; she won't be able to access her assets without taking her identity back.

I doubt it'll work, if so. My antecedent killed literally everyone around her to ensure a clean getaway. I don't think she'll be drawn out so easily. She wasn't any more interested in wealth than I am; piracy was never about that for her.

The Goblin Spider, though, is still here. It's a beautiful ship, but I don't fly it. Its history aside (and it does feel like it really ought to be haunted), it doesn't feel like something that's mine at all.

If there were any possession she would return for....

Maybe, one day, she might.

Mostly, I just don't want to know.

I only have stories about being dropped by Recon ships. They don't make good horror material.

No, Jump Scare isn't Horror.

Some kind of advanced hearing may be needed to hear something in vacuum.

You're boring.

Disappointed kids lost all their candies.

I've had cases where ships flicker on and off of overview, the wreck of my ship follows my pod to a station, **** like that. Horror stories about what some capsuleers here will do to others, as well, and the reactions of those they go to for help.

Hang on. I recalled there was this one weird thing that happened when I was still a cadet in the RMS. Yes, it's one of those 'friend of a friend' stories.

Back before I was enrolled into the Capsuleer Programme I was a Marine Engineer aboard a pre-retrofit Typhoon-class battleship. During my time there, I found that whoever was assigned to man the ship's sensor suite were labelled as 'cursed'. This got me curious so I asked my XO about it after our shift. Here was what he had to say:

There was, and still is, a rule that one must always shut the sensor systems down and to never, ever, turn the consoles on and activate the LADAR and radio transmitters and receivers, not for even a split second, whenever we jump through a stargate. This regulation was made standard by the Republic Fleet. Nobody really understood why this rule was in place at all so, naturally, people are going to get curious.

So what do you think happens when you warn a person curious about a thing to not do the thing?

Obviously he will conspire to do the thing.

And that was exactly what happened on this ship twenty years ago. At least one member of the sensors technician team switched on equipment at the exact moment the ship jumped through the stargate. As soon as the jump was complete maniacal ravings were being broadcast all throughout the ship. When the marines burst through the Sensors Deck, they found every member of the team screaming and writhing and gibbering, their ears bleeding and their eyes torn out of their sockets. The next day, they were found in the brig with their skulls cracked open and a bloody smear on the walls.

The records about the event can still be found within the RMS Archive. It was not investigated. Nobody knew what drove that team mad, and nobody wanted to find out. Some say that whatever it was that drove the sensors team mad that day was still lingering around the Deck, and that was why whoever's assigned to sensor duty was considered 'cursed'.

So sayeth the person who felt the need to get riled up by being prodded over and over again about your own hypocrisy, because you are so damned terrified that I am going to tear down your little facade that, quite frankly, isn't fooling anyone. At all.

If I were truly a coward, how do you explain the fact that I keep getting involved in fights as shown in publicly available killboards and the fact that I roam solo in lowsec since the end of my first year of operation? All my losses showed, very clearly, that the vast majority of them involved exchange of munitions against targets I am actively engaging. Getting ambushed by Daredevils or running into Recons in medium plexes is a what I call a Tuesday.

They had one.....

If we throw them into a black hole, maybe.....