Disaster in MQ-NPY

...I woke up late, was very tired from many late nights transporting through lowsec space, and had not yet had any stimulants. Something was off with my capsule enviro-settings too, and the smell in my pod was disgusting - my first hint that this was going to be a very bad day.

I had just received a contract shipment of Zydrine from one of our top customers in Deklein the night before. They wanted it delivered to one of their Empire contacts immediately, even waiving their normal collateral fee (which was surprising given the total value of this shipment was more than 480 million ISK).

After securing the cargo in the hold of my Impel, I climbed into my pod and went through my pre-flight. My cloak was in for repairs (another bad sign screaming "don't go"), and I had managed to squeeze on three WCS, 2 nanos, 1 cargo expander and a standard MWD. With my navcom full of instas between most of the gates, I figured it would be a cake walk...

Passing out of Deklein into Pure Blind, everything went fine. I passed ISS Borealis, a friendly port-of-call, and didn't even think to check whether a cloak was available there. A few more hops towards Empire and I was the only one in local. It was ominously quiet... too quiet.

Suddenly, as I'm already warping to my next gate, a pirate appears in local with me. As luck would have it, I land on my destination gate with him right there waiting for me, drones out, and missiles at the ready. I panicked.

I warped through the gate (was right on top of it with my insta), and aligned for my next gate (frankly I should have aligned to the star and logged off, but that's another matter entirely). He followed me in and began shooting me while I was aligning to jump. I made my first mistake at this point, and set off my smart bomb to kill his drones.

My shields went down fast, but my the Impel was armor tanked a bit, and was holding up reasonably. He had me warped scram'd, so I couldn't warp to the next gate. However in the chaos that ensued, I'm guessing my 3 WCS helped for a brief second, because suddenly I could move and warped out away from him. I only had enough cap at this point to get half way to the next gate. This was a gift in disguise, one that I completely missed (again, where's the stimulants when you need them?), so instead of logging off right then at this random safe spot, I elected to allow my shields to regenerate.

Once they were back up above 95%, I made the decision to back-track to the previous system, figuring he'd be waiting for me if I continued to forge ahead. It was a good move, he wasn't at the gate when I got there. But it still wouldn't let me through because I had used my smartbomb on his drones (agression timer hadn't expired yet). So I quickly aligned for the other gate (to continue on towards Empire), and got up to full speed and waited...

As soon as I saw him warping back to me, I hit warp to gate and took off... buying me a bit of time for him to turn around and align. I made it to the gate, had to approach from 4000 meters (the BM sucked), and as I was about to get close enough to jump through, he came back, scram'd me, web'd me and I was suddenly crawling at 40 m/s towards the gate. I made the smart choice to NOT use my smartbomb at this point (will wonders never cease), and although shields were 0% and armor was 25%, I managed to get through the gate!

Now at this point, he was aggressor'd and couldn't come through the gate, buying me about 20-40 seconds of time before he'd be able to follow me through. This is where I made my fatal mistake. Instead of warping to a planet or the sun, and logging off, I made the mistake of forging ahead with my G2G insta BMs to the next gate, hoping to get a whole system ahead of him. Unfortunately for me, the next jump distance was some 80 AU and the Impel SUX when it comes to warp speed. In the time it took me to get that far (cap was fine, I made it in one jump), the pirate had entered the system, warped PAST me to the next gate, and was waiting when I got there. Once again, I found myself web'd and scram'd, and at that point I couldn't type fast enough to get him to accept a ransom before I was out my entire armor and structure and soon after ...PODDED!

I don't know how long I was "out", but I awoke at the Nonni clone regen facilities with my PerCom beeping in my ear. Seems that my Deklein customer had caught wind of my demise (or more importantly the demise of his Zydrine), and had sent me a bill. Painful as it was, I thankfully had the money to spare (had sold the Providence earlier to get a deal on Deklein POS parts), and paid 90% of it from my personal wallet. Thankfully the customer understood the dangers of 0.0 transport services, and was pleased to recover his money quickly and didn't hold a grudge.

Ugh - it was a very frustrating situation, but I had grown accustomed to the perils of 0.0 space, and chalked it up to a learning experience that had me carefully revisiting my transport strategy and ship setups. Nearly 20 successful trips later with no losses (with 5 of them actively evading PVP pirates), I consider myself a capable blockade runner who has learned from his mistakes and more carefully balances risks with rewards.