Space is pretty big. I'm not going to do a pastiche of Douglas Adams here, but its pretty fecking huge. Suffice to say it took me about two months to track down Rabbit. It turns out he came out of a Caldari vat about three weeks before I did and after bumming around the safe systems for a while signed up with one of those small mining concerns that seem to exist in their thousands around places like Jan, where the minerals are good, but the can-flippers are common as well. Guess he wanted to work on his combat skills too. He'd made a bit of money from missioning and was mining for Isogen when I found him. It was quite a surprise for us both because I was about to flip his can when he recognised me.
He had had a total reconstruction job, one of those ones the Techs were offering for those who came out of their vat with a Genetic Integrity of over 97%. He was looking 15 years younger, 30 lbs thinner (which was quite a feat for such a skinny chap as Rabbit) and very very Achurian. I thought the look suited him, but he claimed he simply wanted to avoid any undue entanglements with anyone that might recognise an old friend of "Macca" McCandless. It also turned out his combat skills were better than mine, and after towing my capsule into his Retriever's cargo bay, we had a "no hard feelings" drink, a few Drop hits for old times sake and he gave me a cheque that would cover a couple of replacement Manticores and an old Badger transport ship he had gathering dust in the Vaajaita station he was working out of. Niether of us had managed to catch up with /Emote yet but we knew that if s/he was still alive, it would be her/him that caught up with us.
I suppose I should explain about /Emote. /Emote was a huge fan of a skill we cultivated back in the old days called "Skinwalking". Possession would be an old-Earth term for it. Since the installation of my cybernetics, I discovered I had a much lessened ability to bend reality to my whim, and so it was with great regret that I had to give up this rather fun ability. /Emote however can only exist in this matter as his/her original body was "killed" many years ago, and we never could work out if he/she was male or female. I always tended to assign female attributes to /Emotes reactions, so from now on I will refer to her in the femmine form.
Anyway, we expected that /Emote would be out there somewhere raising hell. Of the three of us, Rabbit is the sensible head. He likes to follow the rules and be the good guy, he generally never smart mouths off and is excellent as a spy because he takes his job really seriously. /Emote is... well she's a fecking psycho really. A bundle of hatred thats all too easily stirred up. She has really twisted views of good and bad. There are no grey areas for /Emote, and her exaggerated sense of justice led me to suspect she would end up either dead within seconds or furiously hunting down some poor guy who called her out on something minor and then exacting revenge far in excess of the original (probably imagined) slight.
Me? I like to have fun. I go and do things simply because they are funny. I didn't think that I was going to find big lulz out in New Eden, so I was going to sit stealthed around some dying sun, drunk out of my mind, taking huge amounts of Drop with a cargobay full of cheap rentboys having a great old time.
I thought that until the day things started to change.
Until something other than gratutious self-interest came along.
Until I met the one person who actually managed to press all the wrong buttons with me.
Until I met Grand Commander Joe Phoenix of the Imperial Commonwealth..........
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