If you haven’t had the chance to see one of EVE’s newest batch of mobile depot advertisements, all along the route from Dodixe’s Federation Assembly Plant to Jita 4-4, and on almost every in and out gate in between, you will find several depots titled “My dad can beat up your dad check my bio.”
When you open up the character page of the depot owner, Calyle Les-son, you find this gem of a bio: “Long story short, my dad Calyle Morrison is the best pilot in the galaxy. His corp and his alliance ‘Mince n Tatties’ have never been beaten by anyone, even CODE and GOONS are afraid of him. His fortress is in Noghere btw, and if you really think you’re hot stuff pay a visit to Yvangier – Revenge of Pirate Hooker Haven (Turbo-Encabulator LLC). But you won’t because you’re not even worth the dust your ships will create. He says he’ll be waiting with overheated highs because resources mean that little to him!”
There’s a link to Noghere, my name, my alliance, and my corp’s Yvangier station. I have to say this entire debacle is hilarious and I love it.
Okay, so I need to start off with I do not have any actual kids. Not in real life, not in game. I am in no way associated with Calyle Les-son. This is in no way a publicity stunt on my behalf or that of my corporation or former alliance. While the added uh… “content”, though little so far, has brought many laughs, this wasn’t how we had planned to get more content to enjoy. The content I’m referring to has been that someone else with three different characters all showed up a few days ago looking for their “daddy.” Needless to say, they were looking for me and to join up. The conversation that ensued was in every facet of the word “awkward.” While I’m not going to kink-shame anyone, being called “daddy” isn’t really my thing, so when random characters show up, start calling me that, and offer fellatio in return for membership to my corp… things got really weird really fast. They’ve since disappeared, thank God, so that’s three less to worry about for the time being. But where did this all start? Grab the popcorn and let’s begin.
Introductions
Sorry for another pause. Last one I promise. I need to preface that while this retelling will be as accurate as possible, there will be some speculation from my side. I will note this when it occurs. Also, for the sake of more damage to a group that has primarily newbie players as well as not to give more “glory” for lack of better terms to my agitators, I will not be naming any parties involved outside of myself as well as other already known parties since everyone who’s seen the depots knows who is who. Instead, I will use stand in names where necessary. I also apologize in advance for any names that turn out to actually belong to players, corporations, or alliances. None that I will replace, to my knowledge at the time of writing this, are associated with the actual parties involved.
This tale began a few months ago, towards the end of February. I had recently returned to the game and set up my corp at the time, we’ll call them Transport Intergalactic or <TIG>. At the time I had returned, TIG only had 3 characters; myself and two other alts of mine. So basically it was a one man corp, however I had a decent amount of assets and a new desire to put them to use. I decided to peruse the English Recruiting channel in hopes of either finding new players for my corp or to join/ally with another corp. It was here that I met Rachel Hinata. Rachel was the recruiter for a small time mining corp called Intergalactic Industrialists Union, or <INDIU> for short. I joined their public channel and struck up a conversation with Rachel. This conversation probably lasted around an hour or so, ranging from what I was looking for to what her corp needed, what I had to offer as well as where her corp wanted to go. INDIU were primarily focusing on Ice mining near Dodixie, which I thought was quite nice since I happened to have an Athanor station I was looking to place down. I brought this to the table and Rachel was very interested. I offered INDIU the ability to utilize my station and it’s assets for free, as well as request it be placed wherever they wanted as a moon mining platform. The counter was for them to provide enough Ice to fuel the station and allow me to accompany them on fleets with my characters. Rachel was extremely excited about this proposition because many of her fellow members wanted to get back into moon mining; their corp had lost their last station to a wardec a few weeks prior. However, her leadership weren’t interested in the slightest. The issue? Me.
According to Rachel, they were skeptical about my true motives. They didn’t trust me at all, and to be fair I did come out of left field, from out of the park. Our corporations had zero working relationship, barely knew each other past the initial introduction and yet here I was offering a juicy deal in exchange for a little ice. They were convinced it was too good to be true and applied malice where there was none, but that didn’t bother me. They had just gotten out of a war a few months ago that was surprised on them by their incompetent alliance leadership who left them out to dry. And now here was this random guy offering to ally with them and have a station dropped. I get it. But things would happen soon that would give them an actual reason to distrust me.
My Sins
In the home system of INDIU, there’s a small contingent of highly mined ice fields. INDIU were amongst the large group of miners there that would harvest the Ice, but the system, despite being 0.7 sec, had a plague. CODE and Goons constantly ravaged the belts, slaying every miner they could get their lock on. When I would mine there with INDIU, I would often fly combat ships to protect them and the other miners in the belt I would be in. Often times, with a proper jamming ship, it was an alright deterrent. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked well enough. But this system also had another agitant that harassed the miners, we’ll call him Benny Arnold. Benny would come up to the belts and challenge the miners to a duel or would flip their cans. The result, if engaged, would be Benny returning with a solo combat ship to nuke the target off grid so he could boast about his “elite PVP”. Between this, he’d often chat PVP to get one sided fights. Well I fell for this ruse after he managed to escape in an indie ship in about 20% structure after I engaged him for can flipping. He challenged me to a fight, so I agreed. I reshipped to my tengu and returned to find him in a rattlesnake. The result was me losing my ship to his neuting rattler. I took it on the chin with grace and tried to move on, however Benny wouldn’t let it go. To this day, if we cross paths, he attempts to publicly shame me for the loss. So I stayed in INDIU’s home system for about a week or so, with Benny and I constantly chat PVPing in local. I was bored alright, sue me. As a result, INDIU’s director, Caleb Lightninghand, kicked me and my alts from fleet and banned me from their fleets unless I blocked Benny and ignored him when he came into the belts. This is when I met one of my current corp mates, Araleth.
The Silent Campaign
Araleth and I were of the same mind: you cannot ignore gankers and hope they go away. EVE is a PVP game, it is completely unavoidable. You will at some point in your career come across someone who either wants to see you die or wants to beat you in some regard. It is, unarguably, unavoidable.
We would constantly tell this to INDIU and their leadership. Araleth showed me their home system of Noghere, where I eventually moved to and set down my first station. We started bringing INDIU’s members there to mine, and they loved it. However our assets and advice would fall on stayed feet and deaf ears. INDIU’s leadership would have none of our offers to move permanently to Noghere and mine in peace. But they were plenty happy to utilize our assets and relative safety net from gankers and harassers. And as history has proven, kindness can only be extended for so long without reciprocation. Araleth and I, along with other friends that had returned to the game and found INDIU like we did, had had enough. INDIU’s leadership was a lost cause, but their newbros and veteran members were not.
Not only were the leadership incompetent in almost every aspect of the game, (for example Araleth found a shield buffer dual command link ferox with an armor AND hull repper), but they did not care at all about their members. One night while everyone was mining in Noghere, INDIU had regrouped to fleet warp to a triglavian conduit site so they could mine the ore there. Their FC, however, was either completely ignorant to how FC’ing works or was a royal prick. He fleet warped the entire mining fleet into the newly spawned conduit. He did not verify that it had been cleared. He did not tell anyone he was doing this. He just warped everyone into the conduit, which went live as soon as they landed on grid. He then proceeded to turn around and solo warp out. Rachel panicked and started trying to get everyone to warp out of the conduit because they were all in mining barges and orcas, not combat ships. However one newbro was afk in a venture and was not responding to warp commands. So Rachel turned her Gila to the trigs and grabbed aggro. She battled the trigs furiously, pleading with the newbro to warp out. He finally returned, but to Rachel’s dismay, had forgotten how to warp in his panic. He was literally only days old. She continued to tank the trigs, but her Gila was buffer fit, not active, so her ship’s lifetime was limited and shrinking fast. As her ship fell into deep structure, the newbro finally figured out how to warp. He warped away as her pod ejected and her Gila exploded.
So what was her reward for her heroic deed? Suck it up. Get over it. It’s just a ship, you can get a new one. It was an accident, you shouldn’t be this mad about it. Araleth and I immediately offered our own Gilas to Rachel, which she accepted Araleth’s because their fit she could actually fly. And with her new Gila in hangar, she now saw better where she stood… and it was not with the leaders she thought were her friends.
So we began a silent coup. We whispered in the ears of those that would listen what we had to offer; 0.0 experience, station assets, mining defense, PVP and PVE opportunities, everything the INDIU members were craving. Gradually, they began to come to our side, but like us they wanted to tell the rest of INDIU. But Araleth and I were rusty in our OPSEC.
During our campaign, INDIU had had a questionable person enter their public chat looking to join. Rachel, while a very engaging recruiter, was very green and did not properly know how to vet people in the interview process. Araleth and I had seen this questionable person join and immediately began looking into their history to help Rachel properly interview this individual. It turned out, this guy had flown with goons several years ago but was trying to play dumb, like he was a newbie player. We pointed this out and Rachel thanked us for our help as she prepared to reject him. But Caleb had overstepped her and immediately, without questioning the potential spy, accepted them into INDIU. Caleb then began vetting the suspect in corp chat, to which the spy was happy to play along as a complete newbro. The spy milked it for all it was worth, and this was the beginning of the end of Rachel’s patience. That night, the spy was in a belt with INDIU. As soon as I found out, I raced a jamming ship and bumper to their fleet. After spending no less then 5 minutes on grid with them, we were attacked by CODE. And this was a pinpoint attack against me personally. They targeted the bumper, then my jammer when I stopped them from killing the bumper. No one died, but that showed immediately that I would be there when the spy was. To my knowledge, the spy never logged into that character again as long as I held a relationship with INDIU.
In an attempt to help the vetting process, I had found a site that could sync characters and all their information like the old API system. Araleth and I both used the site then linked our character pages to Rachel to show her leadership how it worked.
A few days later, Rachel notified Araleth and I that Caleb was boasting about his freighter. He claimed that it was brick tanked, but more alarming, that he was actively autopiloting while being AFK. This hadn’t been the first time, and Rachel had stated she’d brought this issue up only to be shot down. So between this and Caleb’s growing open hostility to Araleth decided to anonymously contact CODE to arrange a gank on Caleb. The message did not include a target, nor did any subsequent convos, however the wording made clear to those in the know of who the target was. And because we had given the site links to the INDIU leadership, they could see these mails. This is what burned the bridge between my group and INDIU.
After several other major events where she had been left out to dry by INDIU’s leadership, or was completely overstepped in her role as an officer and recruiter, Rachel had had enough. So following INDIU finding the mail mentioned above and purging EVERYONE suspected of being remotely associated with us, she finally began preparations to leave the corp. However Caleb beat her to it. He quit and then squarely leveled his sights on Mince N Tatties.
The Backfire Declaration
Caleb turned to a local mercenary group to exact his revenge against us. He paid them to dec us and flatten our stations. He boasted about his boundless resources that would be leveled against us to ensure that we never had a safe haven so long as we could log in. His arrogance swelled so much, he would often roam our local systems in a Porpoise to bait us to gank him. But the sun is hot when you fly too close.
While Caleb could see the majority of our assets, what he could not see was that we had much more spread across our characters. We spoke to the merc group and payed them to end the dec. But we were aware that if we offered the merc’s a new target, it would make the surrender agreement all but certain. And after some digging, we managed to find Caleb’s alt corp he had planted an Athanor with for INDIU. We offered 1bil and this Athanor to the merc group, who were elated and accepted. After a week without a shot being fired, the war ended in our favor. And shortly after, Rachel and a handful of others joined our ranks. The greatest, sweetest irony in it all? This same merc group that we payed to take down INDIU’s new athanor was the same group that took down their previous one and had run them out of their previous home system.
Since end of the war, none of us have seen Caleb in space nor heard anything from him in going on two weeks now as of this article. I even went to the length of using a locator agent to see if he had moved away in shame. He hadn’t, he just quit logging in. Then we found the depots.
My Bastard Children
I was running an anomaly site roughly a week or so ago when one of my corpmates, Caern, told me that I had depots in Dodixie with my name on them. Now I do use mobile depots, but I’ve never dropped one as an advertisement, so this news perplexed me. When I asked him what they said, he responded with “my dad can beat up your dad read my bio”. I immediately laughed and dispatched one of my alts to see for myself.
“Oh my god, there’s some at the outgate… and the ingate!”
I laughed again and asked if there were any in any other systems. Caern was making a Jita run, so he decided to see. Sure enough, there were depots in almost every in and out gate along the entire length of the trip from Dodixie to Jita. I had arrived on my alt in Dodixie by this point and began counting the depots around the main trade station. There were 39 in all. Thirty-nine depots by this one character. I asked Caern how many he thought were along the trail. He hadn’t been keeping count, but he estimated about 20 or so more. He hadn’t even made it to Uedama yet. As Caern continued his run, he came across more and more depots in various quantities.
“Oh my god, they’re even in Jita.”
That’s right, Jita. My kid wanted people to know my name so badly that he went through the trouble of dropping these depots from Dodixie station to Jita station and everywhere in between along that trade route. Not only that, but a few days ago we found even more depots in surrounding systems along the Dod to Jita route.
As a result of this, I’ve had three other characters show up wanting me to accept them as my children. I’m not here to kink shame anyone, but to those who have similar ideas, I’m sorry-not-sorry to say I’m not into daddy play.
We still laugh about it, Caleb
In all, we’ve estimated that there maybe around 80 to 100 depots, though we think it’s a little higher. Right now in Jita, mobile depots are going for about 1.285 million ISK. Based on that, we estimated that my kid had dropped over 128 million ISK-worth of depots. Just to spite me. And we all absolutely loved it.
We cannot prove exactly who dropped the depots, but we’re fairly certain it was Caleb. We came to this conclusion because my kid had been created the same day that the wardec on Mince N Tatties had been declared. The same day Caleb started roaming in his Porpoise. The same day Caleb boasted about his boundless assets that would be leveled against us. And we laugh when we talk about it, knowing that we infuriated Caleb to such a degree that he went to the such a length to vilify us and aim to bring all manors of war to our doorstep, all for it to fail miserably.
A few days passed after the trio of would-be kids showed up, my editor contacted me about these depots. At the time, I was unaware just how far my… fame? infamy?… had reached. I don’t get on Facebook a whole lot, and even when I do, I don’t spend a lot of time there. So unbeknownst to me, a post had been made in the EVE Online Facebook group I’m in inquiring about these depots. My editor had asked me for comment, and so I gave him a brief synopsis that he posted on my behalf. Thoroughly intrigued, I decided to look at the post myself. My stomach was hurting for about 30 minutes from non-stop laughter.
Several posts claimed it as OP’s alt, others my alt. Some suggested it was a publicity stunt, others thought it was an RP that got a bit too serious. However, the speculation of my actual identity was by far my favorite ideas.
One person said that I was Elon Musk. Another said that I was Satan Incarnate. My personal favorite ideas, though, are Donald Trump and the legendary Chuck Norris. I seriously laughed for 30 minutes reading through the comments.
So to those that commented and are laughing at this with me and my friends, thank you. I had no intention of this story ending like this, but it’s honestly a real EVE way for things to end. Thank you for reading this story, thank you for your glorious comments and thank you for laughing and enjoying this bit of content.
