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After a successful 8 day campaign working for the Brutor Tribe I returned to low sec.  Having run a maximum of 4 missions a day I could see why pilots like to remain in the safety of high sec.  In addition to raising my standings with the holders of the main Minmatar trade station in Rens from 4.3 to 6.8 I picked up 181 million ISK in bounties and mission rewards and 198 million ISK in salvage and drops.  Not bad for someone who only played between 30 minutes and 2 hours a play session.

But high sec just feels wrong somehow so I left most of the big stuff behind and flew back to Metropolis low sec.  Sure, I left all my expensive ships in high but they are big and slow and I have a need for speed.  I guess that is part of being Minmatar.

So what did I do my first day back?  Pulled out the Cheetah and sent out the probes.  I found two signatures, a wormhole and a small dark ochre and gneiss deposit.  A gravimetric site?  I don't find those often so out came the Procurer and Hound and off to work I went.

As usually happens when I mine, the system went from containing no one but my pilots in it to having visitors.  Last night my visitors were a little different from the usual run of faction warfare members fighting over the system.  Those I can pretty much ignore because they stick to the FW plexes.  No, these were pilots in 2-3 man corps with security status of 5.5 and 9.5.  They also were flying some nice ships, a Cynabal and a Tengu.  But with the potential opposition sitting in different corps, I think they were more concerned with each other than with a mere Procurer.  But I was constantly hitting the directional scanner just in case I was wrong.

I think I did interrupt some station games they were playing.  One time after dropping off a load of ore I left the station to see the Cynabal sitting 3,600 meters away.  I didn't wait to see if he was friendly; I just hit Shift-Spacebar to stop my ship and docked immediately.  I looked in the station's guest list and saw one of the pilots.  I threw caution to the wind since the Procurer has already paid for itself many times over at this point and undocked.  Seeing no one on grid I did something dumb and instead of warping to an instaundock point I warped to my bookmark in the grav site.  Actually, that isn't as silly as first appears because the warp path took me back through the station so I remained in docking range.

I also ran right into a Tengu.  I think both of us were surprised as my ship slowed down and then realigned.  The Tengu didn't chase, probably not wishing to take fire from the station guns.  So first day back and I'm bumping into pirate faction and tech 3 ships.  The system definitely got busier when I was away.

The players decided not to shoot at me but the Angel Cartel was a different story.  Once I got back to my mining spot an Angel War General and his elite cruiser escort decided they wanted a mining barge snack.  Wandering Rose in the Procurer and Rosewalker in the Hound proceeded to play ping-pong with the two NPC pirates.  With Wandering Rose's Hobgoblin IIs in pursuit the two ships decided to chase the Hound.  Rosewalker managed to destroy the cruiser and get the battleship into half-armor before having to warp off grid due to excessive damage to the shields.  But he did the job as he lured the NPC 42km away from the Procurer.

Normally I probably would have docked both ships at this point but with the other players showing no signs of wanting to play I left Wandering Rose sitting with her strip miners on and warped the Hound back on grid.  Once the battleship got within 13 km I sprung the trap and pointed him.  Why point an NPC?  Because these War Generals have a disturbing habit of warping off and I wasn't going to let this one get away.  I didn't see the explosion but the 800,000 ISK plus salvage showed I killed him.

After the excitement I finished mining all of the ochre in the site, which was 1,100 units of onyx ochre, 900 units of obsidian ochre and 2,200 units of dark ochre.  Refined that produced 6,675 units of nocxium, 3,339 units of tritanium and 3,339 units of zydrine.  According to the values shown in station that is about 7,480,000 ISK worth of minerals.  In addition, I collected 1,825,000 ISK in bounties and collected up approximately 3.1 million ISK in salvage and drops.  For between 60-90 minutes of work people in the other areas of the game would look down on this and tell me I wasted my time.  But between the excitement at the station and the constant use of the directional scanner while I was mining to track people who clearly like to kill others I had a good time.  It was nice to be back.