Joe Phoenix > a professional wanker is not hard to achieve

Things had been strangely quiet around the offices of the IEEE recently. Alarm bells had rang once or twice but very little of interest had materialised in the last fortnight. I found myself staring out the window of our sparsely appointed Perimeter office once or twice too many times in recent days, the strain of Skin-Walking was starting to take its toll. My real body, that is my current clone, was quite unwell after any sustained periods of my concious mind moving around. I wasn't sure if it was the New Eden drugs, the cybernetic implants or the really bad Caldari coffee that the machines here urinate into the plastic cup, but I decided it was time for a rest from all of that sort of thing for a bit. It was time to get out there for real again.

Just as I started thinking thoughts about Rifters and enforcing good Standards on some Achuran jetcan-miners, my PDA beeped.

"Agent Damien McCandless is away from his clone currently, please feel free to leave a message at the sound of the tone. TONE." I quipped.

"Knock it off D, this is P.Q., have you fallen asleep or does Local not get your attention anymore?"

Agent P.Q., one of my oldest associates, barring The Boss himself, had never forgave me for letting Joe get away once because it was 4am and I had literally fallen asleep at the controls of my ship.

I glanced down at the constantly streaming gibberish that clogged the local comms channel regularly. Sure enough, in the "Persons In Channel" frame was a twinkling red dot. A dot labelled Joe Phoenix.

"What the hell....?"


"Yeah D, he's right next door to you and you never noticed, ehh? Lol, you must be gettin' old. See ya outside the Navy Yard in 5."

When PQ says 5, he means 5 ago. So I leapt down the stairs to the flight deck. What to pick what to pick...... er not much as it turned out. My cache of ships was a little low in recent times, most of it spread over a wide area of Providence in very very tiny pieces due to the alignment of the IEEE investigation into Joe and the -A- "investigation" into CVA. I was comforted that the violence in Provi had also caused Joe to become an unwilling refugee too.

Anyway, my Hawk Assault Frigate was sitting at the back of the bay, covered in dust, scratches and was looking very forlorn. Persecutor 13 was probably the biggest waste of money I had ever spent. Statistically a poor ship, I had tried to make the most of this dog by fitting her with Energy Vampire modules and Tackle gear, but had never really had an opportunity to use them. Maybe tonight I would.

So there I was sitting outside the Navy Yard in Perimeter, and Joe had us all blocked on the local chat, so not much was happening as usual. We had a Deputised Neutral pilot with us, let's call him Alpin (in-joke for me), and him and Joe were smacking away in local. At about this time the proximity alarm started to ping, and an Armageddon class battleship heaved its enormous bulk from the station and began trying to occupy the same spacial co-ordinates as PQ's Raven.

"What the….. What is this guy trying to do?!" PQ sounded legitamately annoyed.

The Armag wasn't showing known Imperial Commonwealth designators, but it was showing a known Internal Anarchy registration code. IntAn claimed to be mercenaries, but spend most of their time neutral-repping outside Jita in an attempt to cause fire-fights and generally declaring war for lulz. IEEE had once been decced by them, but we ignored it as we had been elsewhere at the time.

I commed the pilot, a jovial character we shall call SpaceWizard. Before long PQ and I were chatting away with him. It appeared that he was in a long standing feud with Alpin over some ancient slight from literally years ago, and assumed we were friends of his. We explained he had been deputised for the war against the Imperial Commonwealth and was tagging along. SpaceWiz started getting all friendly like, and I started to smell a big ole tarp. This was confirmed when (after talking in a friendly manner with Joe in local and smacking us lightly) he suggested in private that he could get Joe to undock. For lulz I agreed.

SpaceWiz docked up and we moved our battleships out of system. I sat orbitting in my Hawk with a big sausage tied around my neck acting as bait. Joe would come out and it would be Battleships everywhere with me jamming, though I figured SpaceWiz ( and his alt AltBoy) would fall on the winner of the fight anyway.

Fortunately for all concerned, just as Joe came out, the other half of the IEEE fleet, who had been on long range manuevers in low-sec, appeared on local and warped to the station at the wrong time, and Mr Phoenix ran back inside cackling maniacally to himself about failed tarps and victories due to his tactical genius again. Though a botch-job, I suggested to SpaceWiz that as Joe seemed to trust him, he should get AltBoy into the Imperial Commonwealth as it would be very lulz worthy and he agreed. Now, dear reader, I must point out that at no time did I suggest that he spy for us or anything remotely like that. But I did kind of figure having a 30 million skill point psychopath inside the IC ready to gank anyone for lulz would lead to an exciting adventure.

Boy was I right……….