Category: Gaming

In the list of things that I expected to do tonight, purchasing (and then moving into) an Astrahus was probably near the bottom of that list, and yet, here we are.

I suppose it’s not a huge surprise, maybe even a natural one in the grand scheme of game play. After all, I’ve done the Orca nomad living thing for a while, why wouldn’t I want to go to the next (obvious) step, and set up a structure.

Of course nothing in EVE is quite that simple. I had to get TO the damn structure, which is of course in a wormhole. To do that, I had to leave the current Wormlife Freeport I’ve been living in, and meander my way through much of the universe, then jump a few times through some other wormholes to finally arrive at my destination.

Rinse. Repeat.

Why? Because of course I need a seed for when I get locked out, (alt on my free account is handling that) and then I also need a few characters to do some of the basic chores like mining, huffing, and clearing some combat sites. I’m also hoping to do some PI there – but I don’t own the POCO, so I need to see if they’re open for public use, and what the taxes are looking like. Then I also need to haul some command centers in. I’m going to wait for a better HS connection to do that one. For now, I’m focusing on just getting everyone into the structure.

But Stargrace, what happens if someone blows it up – which of course, someone will. It is just a matter of ‘when’. I’m hoping to get at least a month or two of use, first. I plan on storing as little as possible in the structure, and leaving everyone logged out in ships. If I lose it tomorrow, so be it, that is the nature of EVE. Maybe I’ll get lucky (hah).

Let’s see where this adventure takes us.

I found myself thinking about the bench again today.

Not a real bench, of course. Capsuleers don’t spend much time on planets. But in my mind, it always existed somewhere beneath a Gallente sky, overlooking distant city lights. A place where two people could always meet, no matter how complicated life became.

At least, that was the promise.

The trouble with promises is that they only work when both people mean them.

For a long time, I believed there would always be a seat waiting for me there. That no matter how many jumps separated us, no matter how many years passed, we’d eventually find our way back to that spot and talk about life for a while.

I know better now.

The promise wasn’t broken all at once. It died slowly. By the time I understood what had happened, the bench was already gone.

Blown apart.

By being treated like an option instead of a person.

I sat cloaked in my Helios beside a forgotten wormhole for a while, watching stars drift across the canopy. In EVE, when a structure is destroyed, all that’s left is a wreck and a killmail. Clean. Simple.

Real life isn’t nearly so tidy.

Eventually, I sighed and closed the old memories like an abandoned bookmark folder.

I aligned toward home, engaged warp, and began the familiar journey back to my Wormlife freeport. The stars stretched into lines, the wormhole chain waited ahead, and for the first time in a long while, I stopped looking for a seat that no longer existed.