I started out early after downtime doing a bit of scanning on a random Saturday, and found an unknown signature in Harerget. First scan with quest probes, I had it at 0.7 AU, and a quick scan with a comb probe had it spot on.
A gate, only allowed frigates and the like. Into a pocket, with a few bunkers far away, and some 60 km to the next gate. Next pocket contained a cruiser and two frigs, also a serpentis armory and some bunkers. Destroying them spawned two more frigs, and gave an escalation - "Mindflood". Yay.
A gate at warpin, with 6 frigs around, one of them Shadow Serpentis. Got a bit of small faction hybrid, and salvaged a nice Interface Circuit (ca. 800,000 ISK). Used the gate - it allowed my battleship through - a couple of frigs warped away immediately and I got escalation number 2.
A lot like the previous site, only no Shadow Serpentis this time. Same escalation type as well, to...
Same site again, but this time there was a Shadow Serpentis Patroller as well. It didn't give me any tech II salvage, but it did drop a Fleeting Propulsion Inhibitor I, sells at about 3.5 million ISK at present. I warped through the gate (no problem with the BS again) and this time it was a little different - two frigs there, and they got a right good hammering. As they died, the escalation popup came, telling me that I'd caught up with two of the three I was chasing, but that the final one had gotten away. The end is in sight...
New warpin site! 10 frigs and destroyed scattered around an Abandoned Ship Yard, all aggroing right away. My drones tore through those, nothing special dropped. 3 more spawned as the last one died, quite a welcoming committee they had for me. As the last of those went down, the final named NPC frig spawned - a Tristan (or Nemesis?) with a 37,500 ISK bounty, name of Elgur Erinn. Better get him!
He wasn't exactly tough or anything, but I have no indication of how he'd fare against a smaller ship - there really wasn't any challenge with a battleship in there. As he died, a message popped up:
Obviously the distress signal made it through to the intended recipients, this was quite a reception. In any case, there's a bit less drug runners in this space after this encounter...
Onto the loot! Salvaging yielded nothing, but the wreck did contain some goodies:
The wreck also contained 3 named tech 1 modules, nothing major though. All in all, this was quite an easy escalation series, which is probably fitting for high-sec. The loot was worth my time, and probably also some of the time I spent hunting for sites over the last three weeks. I made some 40 million in all with a bit of lucky named loot from the early pockets. The idea was good, and I really enjoyed the feeling of chasing someone around from system to system. I would've liked some more story behind it all, though, closer to what you get with a mission.
Verdict: 8/10