YOLOQuest V - Lif's Demise

Some friends were out doing a more or less suicidal frigate roam through Nullsec, creating content for themselves and a couple of rich bastards. This was your bog standard "just re-subbed let's fly around until we die to the new meta" kind of thing.

Then in JMH-PT they see a cyno go up, at a moon. They warp over and shoot it, as you do, and just before the cyno pops, a Lif appears on field. Alone. So they begin shooting it, not even realising what it really is, except it's just jumped in and the cyno is dead so you never know what's going to happen, but either way they can bug out if the cavalry arrives. If not, well, maybe killmail?

So they shoot and shoot and shoot, and the lif enters armour. The pilot them ejects a Phantasm, to shoot them, because of course that's what you do when your shiny hauling boat is tackled. This goes badly.

So there's 3 frigates, orbiting an unpiloted Lif, which is stuck miles and miles deep into the arse end of Scalding Pass. Better yet, none of them can fly the Lif.

So this is where I come in, burning 10 jumps through lowsec and 16 through nullsec, in my Garmur (not even a travel ceptor), and arrive.As promised, a Lif, unpiloted.

I board it, and there's more shit in the ship maintenance bay; an Arazu, a Stratios, and a Vargur. I drop all but the Vargur out and begin plotting my exit route. It's not good; 5 mids just to get back to lowsec. Or, I could boat the Lif 20 jumps through nullsec with an escort, and reduce this to 2. My jump out point is JPL-RA in great Wildlands - this is 11 jumps of hot null to null action.

So, we go down the route, and cross jump some guys in 504Z-V and F8k-WQ. A noob corp alt is in F8K-WQ, and follows to the CRXA gate; the forward scout calls out an onyx is anding on the gate as I'm in warp. Ruh roh.

Comms is something like:

"I'm boned."
"Yeah, you're boned. An Eris now as well."
"Doubly boned."
"LOL, so boned."
"Kill that Eris maybe....no, I'm bubbled."
"Cyno's up!"
(Nag, bunch of Redeemers, Tengus, etc)

SO I eject the Vargur from the Lif
"Where'd that Vargur come from?"
"Uh..." I say, trying not to mention I'd been thinking of holding onto it.
"Wait...did you not tell us? I hope you make it."
"Yeah, I'll make it." i say, noting my afterburner is a Gist X type. I think "Oh fuckballs, what the fuck is this thing fit with?" Keep in mind, I haven't even looked at the fit of the Vargur by this time, I'm just tunnel vision trying to dodge the fuck out of bumps and webs and all this other crap. So I open up the fitting window and drag it to the intel channel and, mid tunnel-vision, I hear someone say "HOLY FUCKING SHIT" and someone else mention "Mizuros, jeez."

Sweating bullets now.

I jump to CRXA-Y and bounce about safes for 11 minutes. But it's a small system, and the enemy probing Tengu lands closer and closer to my limited number of safe options. None of the Serpentis sites are off the ecliptic, so i can't really get any good angles for dumping safes in odd spots, so i eventually have to dump onto a POCO.

It goes south from there.

I share my fit in fleet now I'm tackled. Soon, it's shared with all of Battleclinic.

The Lif, thankfully, was stolen a second time, by Sholupen.

So. I lost a Garmur and a skull ful of implants I pulled (+3's), and a percent ISK efficiency. Tiger prince lost the Lif, a 4B ISK Vargur, an Arazu (see here) and a Stratios (c. 450M), plus his Phantasm. Say, 7.5B ISK, lost to a Worm, a Crow and a Catalyst.

Sure, i didn't make the Great Escape. My motorbike clipped the barbed wire fence and fell into the minefield. My second attempt to combat roll out of said minefield went a bit awry (oh for a 73 AU across system) but it was close. 4 minutes close.

Or, you know, if we'd had our cyno ships a couple of jumps closer and I had less YOLO and more FOMO, maybe the 4 of us would be rolling in dank spacebucks. Either way, that was some intense good craic.