RIVALS

It is the inevitable consequence of open conflict.  A by-product of Player vs Player warfare and the system of conflagration under which the PvP'er plays the game.  Eventually, somewhere, somehow, someone is gonna get under your skin.  Like an itch you can't get rid of, this person keeps showing up in local, outside your station, cloaked up somewhere, just missing you and you just missing him.  He is annoying, good at his job, and god damn well... annoying.  Did I mention that already?


He is, for lack of a better term, your rival.


He could be one person, two people or an entire Corporation of people.  At some level I suppose he could be an entire Alliance.  But mostly, because we are all individual pilots, it comes down to a single name.  The same name in local that makes your fire burn, your face gets hot and you race to un-dock, or get out of the POS, or jump in, or whatever it might take to take them down.


But rivals are not people that go down easy.  Those are the sheeple, the meat shields, the fodder... no rivals are much more resilient than that.  Like some kind of mad Energizer Bunny, they just keep going and going.


I've had my share of rivals.  Depending on the space I'm living in at the time, but eventually you start to know the names of those that truly annoy you.  And then, after a time, the same names keep popping up, keep killing your scouts, or blowing up your carebears, and then things get ratcheted up a notch.  Then we're talking rivals.


Heck, they probably don't feel the same way about you.  But that doesn't matter, all that matters in this universe is how you feel about them.  I've got one of those sweaty ball suckers right now that is annoying the Hell out of me.  And while I've kilt some of his comrades, I haven't gotten a chance to kill him yet.  Nor has he killed me yet either.  But all the same I wish him nothing less than seventh level of Hell tortures of the eternal soul.  Or a pod death or two.


I know he doesn't feel the same way about me and I don't care.  My single purpose is to hunt him down and destroy him, annoy him, pod him to Empire a few dozen times and eventually never see his name in local again.


Because this is what we do to our rivals isn't it?  We must destroy them, crush them or be destroyed by them.  Or something else, although I wouldn't know what that was.  A long time ago I was forced to withdraw from a rival situation and that was a bitter pill to swallow.  Since then I haven't repeated that ugly scenario.  And this time will be no different.


He might not know it yet, but he will be exploded.  Multiple times.  At the very least he will be run off, never to pop up in my local again.


Until the next rival comes along and the process is repeated.  Fun huh?