Being Bellicose: Hello Mortals

Being Bellicose is the journal of the New Eden pod pilot Hepius.



Hey, I like you mortals. Too much.

It's the reason I am where I am right now. That and being too chicken-shit scared to die.

Caring about your mortal crewmen and not wanting to die turned out to be the two best ways to piss off Admiral "Madman" Madaseen. They also turned out to be the fastest ways to get drummed out of the Minmatar Republic Fleet.

Thanks, Dad.

Look, mortals, I'll just be blunt. Pod pilots don't think much of you. You see, we are going to live forever, and you are going to die. It just isn't worth our time to get attached to someone who is going to die.

I guess I was too new to immortality to casually fly to my death. And I still thought of myself as one of you, so I didn't want to fly you to your deaths. But that's what my old man's orders were, and it is exactly what I failed to do. They call it a "Hero Tackle" and I missed it. On purpose. He knew it. Everyone knew it. And so ended one of the shortest careers in the Republic Fleet. Dad had such high hopes for me.

You can stop crying for me now. I'm going to live forever and you're going to die.

I just died the other day. Fourth time. Did you know that when you die the last thing you see is your own body floating in space, shredded by shrapnel wounds and blistered by thermal damage? Weird huh? You see yourself in the third person. Hello, God, are you there?

Freaks me the hell out. Just for a second. And then you wake up in your new body. Well, you don't. I do. Maybe you actually get to meet God.


But my last death got me thinking about you mortals. And while most pod pilots would shoot you in the face as soon as talk to you, I still like you. Except once you've found a pod pilot who will talk to you, you never stop asking questions. And that gets old fast when you are going to live forever.

That's why I'm writing this journal. Maybe it will answer some of your questions. And then you won't have to bug me for the rest of my life. Which in my case means forever. And then I won't start to hate  you and shoot you in the face.

I died for you, by the way. Yeah, I'm one of those people. Actually trying to make the universe a better place. Better for what? Civilization. Now my dad would argue the same thing. His method is killing as many Amarr as he can lock his guns onto. Any Amarr.

I think there are good Amarr. And good Calderi. And Gallente. And Minmatar. So who do I shoot? The bad guys.

Two nights, just as I had joined the alliance defense fleet, word came out that a red Fleet Issue Scythe was harassing our ships on the Dital jump gate. I don't know if you are familiar with the Fleet Issue Scythe, but it is one fast cruiser. And to make things worse it had a booster ship hidden in system. Nobody could catch the damned thing.

Our fleet commander called for interceptors, the only ships quick enough to tackle the red. Too bad I don't fly intys. I'd already launched in my Bellicose class cruiser, Fusilier. A fast ship itself, just not in the same league as this Scythe. But it did mount a target painter, a type of electronic warfare the Bellicose cruiser excels at. So even if I couldn't grapple with him I could hit him with the target painter, making friendly fire more effective.

The Scythe slipped our grasp a few times until an interceptor finally tackled him. A warp scrambler put the Scythe's microwarpdrive offline and it was over. Without his speed he was finished. I hit him with my target painter while the rest of the fleet took him down. The kill report says twenty-four of us hit him.

Glorious, huh? Twenty-four on one.

I didn't die. Just pressed a button and a thin red beam helped a bunch of people kill someone fifty kilometers away. Well, we really didn't kill him. Him being the pod pilot. His ship died. Some of his mortal crew died. But he didn't die. His pod got away. And even if we had caught it and blown it up, he still wouldn't have died.

He would have woken up in a clone vat light years away. We don't die. You die.