New Eden's Laundry Services

War...  It is a funny thing, at times.  Allow me to take you back in time a few months...

I remember my time in my first real corporation, Pigothy.  The first time we went to war I was still floating around space in a Navitas.

Oh, how war terrified me in those days, and in truth, not all that long ago at all.  A matter of just a few months in the New Eden calendar showed a big change in how I view war.

Pigothy saw war quite often, and rarely of our own making.  Being that we were a small and newly formed corporation, with very few kills and a fair share of publicized deaths, we became a good target for anyone trying to boost their status via brute force.

My first war in Pigothy led to me hiding out in a space station for several weeks.  In retrospect, I am quite surprised that my Caldari lover did not leave me out of disgust.  It wasn't so much fear, but a feeling of uselessness.  What could I do in my tiny, poorly fitted Navitas?  I used the time to immerse myself in my studies.

My second and last war in Pigothy is the one that changed my perspective.  I had learned that death was a part of life as a capsuleer.  During a particularly long-winded war, I grew tired of waiting around a dock while checking the local comms and eyeballing the other station patrons.  My impatience freed me from the needs of my "precious" ship.

I knew they were there.  Several angry red blips on my neocom had alerted me to my enemies presence long before I undocked my Tristan.  I had no idea what kind of ships they were in -- no intel on them at all.  I merely had hoped that they were not camping right outside the hangar doors waiting for some poor fool like me to come zipping out.

Indeed they were.

From the moment I undocked, I willed my ship to warp.  Just as my thrusters began to fire, my speed screeched to nearly a stand-still and I swore to all the gods.  Immediately I threw on my armor repair module as I felt my shields flicker off under fire from 3 of their ships.  Suddenly, my capacitor was dead.  It took me a moment to realize that as I wondered why my armor was breaking apart and scattering into space so quickly.

At this point I decided to try and dock again, willing my ship to turn around as fast as its crippled thrusters would permit.  I crawled slowly -- so very slowly -- back towards the station and pleaded with the computer to allow me entrance.  The answer on my neocom had me cursing again:  "DENIED."

I let out a big sigh just as my Tristan's structure gave way and exploded all around me, my pod ejected swiftly and tried to propel me to safety behind the flash of the Tristan's death.  They were prepared for that too, however, and my thoughts stuttered for only a moment as I saw the pod engulfed in light only nanoseconds before awakening in a cloning vat.

Coughing and spluttering, I realized I ended up where I was trying to get to in my poor Tristan in the first place.  The Brutor staff that assisted me upon my awakening showed me back to the docks and my remaining Catalyst.  I used the Catalyst's link to report back to the corporation about the events, and let them know I was okay, I just needed to take the ultra-express flight back to my home station.

Several of the members were distraught that I had so foolishly thrown myself into their jaws, but I did my best to play it down as no big deal, and entirely of my own doing.  After my display of stupidity, however, I was asked if I wanted to join the war effort.  I hastily accepted and began fitting the Catalyst with the advice of my corp-mates.

Over the next couple of days, we hunted them down for vengeance on my part, for kills scored on the others' parts, and with new allies in tow to help us prove, once and for all, that we were not just a bunch of push-overs just because we did not have hundreds of kills to our names.  This, of course, was hard to maintain because we each had our own duties to attend to in addition to the war.

We went through another quiet period, and I became restless again.  The war effort had slowed to a crawl with the enemy corporation playing hide-and-seek in their home system.  At some point throughout the dragging month-long war, our leadership found a reason to declare war against another corporation.

I loved my time with Pigothy, but I knew I could not financially handle adding another war to my list of things to do.  I needed to recoup some of the money I had lost to the war.  A friend had asked many times over the past couple of weeks for me to join his corporation, which I had kept turning down.  Well, this time I changed my mind and decided that maybe I needed something more stable.

I spent a couple of days closing out my time with Pigothy before joining my current corporation, A Black Spot.  Apparently, war follows me.  Not a week after I joined, we recieved notice from CONCORD that someone wanted us dead.  I thought, 'No big deal, this corporation is used to fighting, since they like to stay in null sec space all the time.'

As it turns out, I was both right and wrong.  There has been battle on both sides, so I have heard.  We lost a few nice ships, though to me everything is nicer than what I have.

Even so, I have been absolutely unaffected by this war.  I've become so complacent in this war that I do not even remember to check the local comms while I run missions across multiple star systems.  Wherever this war is, it seems so far away from me; and even if it were at my hangar door, I think it would change little for me.

I accept death now.  It happens, sometimes frequently, sometimes sporadically, but inevitably it happens.  I am just thankful that I can overcome it by way of cloning.  Ships are simply an investment of time and money.  You may not be able to get the time back, but as long as you did something you enjoy with that time, you don't need it back, just do it again to get the money back.  Then go get yourself killed again, and then feel welcomed to New Eden's wash cycle.  Rinse and repeat as necessary.