Pilgrimage…

~or, “Tur goes to the EVE Gate.”

I have been ingame for 3 and a half years now. I have been fascinated and involved in the Lore of New Eden, with a special interest in the Lore of Anoikis, for all that time and one of the Bucket List things-to-do in the Lore for many Empyreans is… to go and see the Eve Gate in the New Eden system.

It’s one of those things I have kept telling myself I am gonna do one day… only ‘one day’ is not a definitive date… ‘one day’ is like ‘tomorrow’, it sometimes never comes, or at least, never seems to be the thing to do now. I have been putting it off since the day I first realized it was a place you could go to and a thing you could see… welp, that finally changed.

My friend Space Noob recently posted about his trip to the Eve Gate in a series of posts that are, as always, well written, immersive and descriptive. His take on his trip includes a lore’ish look at the planets and systems that were first explored after the New Eden system was first discovered.

Last night I jumped out the stat and sat cloaked up just off the hole in the lowsec… thinking. I took a look and the static Lowsec, Nasesharafa, was 38 hops (safest) from the New Eden system… Hmmmm… I was on, Sov was on but we weren’t dooin anything really… scanning and PI and just messing about. I switched over to Noobs blog and glanced over his EVE Gate posts… and felt it might just be the time to actually make my Pilgrimage to the New Eden system and see for myself the genesis of all of us here in the New Eden cluster.

For this trip I had been considering an Astero; cloaky, reasonably fast, good droan DPS… but I really didn’t want to fight at all, it was a sight-seeing trip so survival was key… or a Loki; again, cloaky, ok fast, immune to bubbles… but probably catchable with Sebo boosted ‘Ceptor tackle… or hey, I could use an Interceptor mebbe… I had a cloaky travel fit Malediction I use for making bounces and pounces in the hole. It was, of course, very VERY fast, ignores bubbles and, fully stabbed in the lows, probably immune to even Sebo boosted ‘Ceptor tackle… Hmmm…

I swapped into the ‘Ceptor, jumped the lowsec and considered the trip. I told Sov I was thinking of going to see the Gate and he said he had once made the trip… “Purty” said he, huh… that clinched it. I set course and made the 3 low hops to hisec, set the AP to the last hisec system on my route, Imya, then sat back. For the 26 hisec jumps all I did was tap the MWD on landing at each gate. Then I manually flew the last 9 lowsec hops… all told it took only 46 minutes to travel from Nasesharafa to the New Eden system…   and on 116.04.17 at 02:47:39… SARA announced, “Jumping from Promised Land to New Eden”…

When my screens cleared, this is what I saw…

The system was as Noob said… one lifeless barren planet in a close orbit around a K3 small yellow star in its own little nebulae.

Local is clear…  I am all alone with my thoughts and the dead, glaring Gate. I set Dscan to include Cans and I saw the interestingly named cans Noob decribed on scan… on the assumption that the main direction people would go to drop these was towards the gate, so I burned towards the gate while I contemplated this virtual life, its genesis and its future…

After 20,000 km I decided I had gone far enough… no, not the 50k KM that Noob did, but far enough for me. I stopped and anchored a Mobile Depot and named it… like Noob and so many others have, though you’ll have to make the trip for yourself to see my immortal (well, 30 day) words of wisdom.

Once I had dropped the MD I sat for a bit longer… contemplating life, the verse and everything… Then I turned, warped back to the one lone gate and, with one long last look back, I jumped out of the New Eden system… Leaving behind me a MD that would last, if unmolested, for 30 days… and taking with me a memory that would last far far longer.

Now, the return course I set was slightly different from the route I took to get there… you see, while I was burning along at 5,000 m/s and contemplating my navel, Sov had let me know that our static had died and he has scanned down our new one, in Jeni, a mear 14 lowsec hops away from the New Eden system. I manually flew the route home, only once passing a bright red somebody on one gate and a neutral somebody on the other side wondering if they both thought, “What was that?” as I zoomed on by, total trip time home… 13 minutes 41 seconds.

All in all, the total for my EVE Gate Adventure was 3 hrs 40 minutes from jump off to jump in… and here I had been expecting to be away at least a day if not longer. But, one of my personal joys about living in wormholes is the whole ‘travelling without moving’ thing… The simple fact that the wormholes that spawn in our system can lead to ANYWHERE in the New Eden cluster… The map of my travels includes something ONLY wormholers have, systems I have visited with NO connecting hops without cynos… and not even Titan bridging or blops cynos give you the breadth and scope of these daily changes in locale.

So a quick warp to the relay and then home sweet home… I reshipped to my trusty ‘stero and sat back to browse thru the pics I had taken…

I could wax laconic at this point and try and write up some pithy words about Man and Empyrean and their place in the cosmos, but… TBH it was, interestingly for a game, a quite personal experience. EvE has a lot of meaning for me. After the repeated nerfng of the Real World space program I never thought I would get to experience space… Now I grant you, EVE may be virtual, but it IS the only way now that I am ever going to go to space… and that means a lot to me. As it says in my bio…

I am a man who “…watched Neil Armstrong walk upon the face of the Moon LIVE as a young boy....

And then watched the politicians take away his future and birthright...

Let us pray, that one day, we will once again reach for the stars and get off this one lone rock...

And the human race will find adventure, again...“

As I look back on my experience at the Eve Gate, that is the main thing that fills my thoughts… The idea that the strange and fascinating anomaly represents…  The idea that one day we WILL find a way to go ‘out there’…

Fly Wreckless and see you in the Sky  =/|)=