Protégé

My good friend Katsutro seems to be loving his new life as a pilot. He has been contracting missions from local agents to rake a bit of much needed ISK; life as a pilot requires much more money than his previous, land-bound life. He has been very interested in my career lately, and has persuaded me to introduce him to my trade. My trade being, of course, piracy. So I became his teacher, of sorts. I have to say he has taken to it like a duck to water, even if I have rather cruelly thrown him in at the deep end. The deep end being nullsec raid with my new family, The Tuskers. I have already recorded the details of said raid, and you can read them here. After that things calmed down for him somewhat as I took him on a few little roams, most notably on one such occasion he had tracked down and pointed a Thorax. He then diligently called me in for backup, I had to destroy the drones that were eating away at his punisher, and then I moved on to help him destroy perhaps the worst fitted ship I have ever seen. He also managed to get in on some Tusker roams as well. He's getting heavily into it, and he is even considering moving his base of operations out of the cradle, that is high sec, to the much less forgiving wilderness of low sec.

One day, after I had had a particularly hard nights drinking, I was in no fit state to plug into my ship, let alone fly it in combat, so I conducted that day's lesson from a darkened room over the communications network. I directed him to a well known hunting ground, to scout for targets. He was practising using the ships on-board scanner; something every pirate must know how to use swiftly and efficiently if they are ever going to locate a target. He caught on quickly, and had soon identified a target at an asteroid belt. He warped in and landed in the face of a Catalyst destroyer. He locked, scrambled, and opened fire on the unfortunate ship. His shouts of glee over the comms caused my already considerable headache to send out further pulses of pain. Wincing I turned the volume down. His rampant paranoia had taken a hold of him, by the time I turned the volume back up. Another ship had landed on the belt with them, an Executioner frigate. It was a hundred kilometres away though so I told him not to worry and to finish off the destroyer. It was approaching him at high speed though and his worried enquiries about how to proceed floated over the comms. I urged him to finish off his target then go for the frigate if he wasn't too badly damaged. The Catalyst popped and his cries of happiness burst out of the speakers in my rented room. They were cut short by the Executioners lasers. He immediately engaged the agile frigate, cursing quietly.

This was to be a somewhat lengthy fight. The opposing pilot, while young, obviously knew what they were doing and had fitted their frigate to take advantage of its speed and agility. Kats couldn't get any solid hits on the frigate, as it was orbiting wide and he had close range crystals fitted to his ship. He had, unfortunately, forgotten to put a spare long range set in his cargo hold for just such a scenario. I advised him to disengage, but his assailants speed preventing him from getting out of scrambling range. The tough Punisher, Katsutro's ship of choice, was holding out though. At this rate it looked like the fight would end when the other pilot got bored. Kat's cursing and pathetic cries for help were increasing in volume now, and I was once again forced to lower the volume on my comms. I quickly swallowed a few pain pills to relieve my headache, and tried to get him to listen to me. I told him to get close to the asteroids, and see if he could get the orbiting ship to collide with one. It would be forced to momentarily slow down to avoid the lump of rock and minerals, this would allow the sluggish punisher to close the distance between them and get some solid shots in. It worked, allowing punisher to rip through the smaller frigates shields, but it was soon out of range again. The pilot didn't fall for it again, and was slowly whittling away at the Punisher. He begged me to jump in my ship and come to his aid. If I hadn't had such a blinder of a headache his tone would have sent me into convulsive laughter. The pills I had been chugging all morning had started to take the edge of my headache so I said I would. Laboriously, I climbed into my frigate and set off to save his skin. He'd owe me big time for this.

Several jumps later I landed on the belt with the two sparring frigates. Kudos to Kats he was holding out admirably. The wily Executioner pilot immediately registered me as a bigger threat and set in to engage. I was hitting it initially, but it altered its orbit to a much larger radius, and switched out to longer ranged crystals to pop at me from a safe distance. How tiresome. With a few feints, I tricked the pilot into coming closer and that was the end. The tenacious ship exploded and a torrent of thanks flooded the interior of my ship. Kats really needs to grow a backbone, and stop being such a snivelling wreck all the time. A life of piracy will soon crush that out of him. With my headache significantly worsened I docked up and fell into the rough cot in my room.