The Locals are Grumbling

I finally caught up with Token Prophets the other day, only via communicator but better than nothing.  It seems she was many jumps away chasing some market goldmine as she put it and became distracted.  Sometimes it's better not to ask.  So soon she'll be back at our base area which will improve our cash flow, at least I hope.

One thing Token mentioned was the Sansha's, now I've been busy with a few things for a while and lost touch with the local goings on.  She mentioned the incursions which I knew about, in the abstract anyway, but also the mood of the locals out where she is.  Their is little protection there so the Sansha have been abducting hundreds of thousands of people at will.  The pod pilots are mostly safe, unless they directly engage the Sansha but the ground dwellers have nowhere to go, right up until they float into the sky and are sucked into the Sansha harvest ships.

Token said the locals are terrified, with good reason probably, and the cashed up ones are trying to pay their way to high security space for the increased safety. Makes sense to me, though it must be a pirates paradise at the moment as they interdict these desperate people and at best steal all their remaining wealth.

So I decided to get out a bit and wandered down to the mixed bar, this place has pod pilots and also station crew so noisier and not as safe but I wanted to gauge the mood.

Grabbed a drink and sat down, employed my station bodyguard to keep an eye out, the usual contract, half now and the other half transferred into her account should I survive.  It's a deal I've done before and she is good at what she does.

Listening to snippets of conversation I hear the system name Yulai a few times.  Now Yulai is a boring system, nothing ever happens there so I didn't know why they were mentioning it, but with the current Sansha thing I was rapidly connecting the dots.

I asked the bodyguard, her name is Zeta, to ask a local over who I'd observed talking about Yulai, it didn't hurt that this local was pretty, but I wanted to find out more.  So buying her a drink I asked my questions and found out the Sansha had hit Yulai with a sizable force and even the citizens of high security space are now scared.  If they can attack Yulai they can now attack anywhere, which it would seem was happening.

So I bid this local goodbye, gave some ISK for her information, from the way her eyes opened quite wide I must have over estimated the local currency exchange rate but no matter, a drop in the Iteron as they say.

I thanked Zeta for a job well done again and retired to my apartment, not forgetting to send the other half of the payment to her least she is not as trustworthy the next time we meet.

Right now though I have some thinking to do, how can we turn this Sansha incursion into profit.