The Secret Message, Part 1

Another lazy day in a small, unassuming highsec mining corporation.

Meet Original Lucky Maroon. He's one of the thousands of alpha players who were drawn to the idea of a free-to-play EVE. Though EVE's marketing highlights the game's massive nullsec fleet battles, Original Lucky Maroon ended up in a highsec PvE corp.

It could've been worse, though. Original's corpmate, RD Mackstorm, was a permit-carrying miner. Ever since Original joined the corp, RD had taken the young miner under his wing.

EVE is also marketed as a cruel game of deception and betrayal. Yet there seemed to be no hint of any distrust between the two corp members.

After a routine trade run, RD returned to the Osmon ice anomaly where Original was parked. At Original's request, RD brought an Orca. When he arrived, however, RD was perplexed by what he saw.

There was already another corp member's Orca sitting in the ice anomaly next to Original. That Orca belonged to starbounddudu starbound, who appeared to be AFK. More troubling, though, was the fact that Original seemed to be attacking the Orca with his Vexor's drones.

RD knew that Original was an innocent newbie, but this was ridiculous.

Original's Thorax had removed most of the Orca's shields. And now he had RD's Orca tackled, too.

RD answered the confused newbro's questions, but he was losing patience. And their mutual corpmate's Orca was losing hitpoints at an alarming rate.

The situation went from bad to worse: With his drones still firing away at the Orca, Original went AFK. This presented an unthinkable scenario: What if the drones destroyed the Orca before Original returned to his keyboard? That would be quite a lesson in the perils of going AFK in New Order territory.

Crisis averted? Original returned to find that the Orca was still alive--barely. Now he could deactivate his attack drones. If he chose to do so.

However...! A shocking twist was in store for our friends in the highsec mining corp: Original Lucky Maroon was not the harmless alpha player that he seemed. He was, in fact, secretly the alt of Agent Nitetime Video. And the truth had been there all along, in an encrypted message contained in the alt's name.

To be continued...