Aeon's EVE

He was getting tired of living in this wretched universe. He had seen too much, done too much that could never be forgotten. When he landed on Aramea, he was looking for a job to pay for servicing Crimson Skies, his hurricane. Then he was going to venture out into the lawless outer reaches of this constellation and hopefully be destroyed taking as many of those bastard pirates with him as he could.

But life has its twists and turns that can change futures in only a few seconds. Such was his encounter with Saeroth Syrkos, a local nobleman who was looking for a guarded escort for his daughter, Loreena Syrkos. Her studies required her to survey the asteroid belt around Aramea, and her dear father would not let her go there unguarded.

Aeon really was the best man for the job, having not only the fighting experience to keep her safe, but also the astrosurveying equipment required for the job – his real passion being deep core mining. It was to be a nice mission for once – dangerless, good pay, no jumping and with a rather beautiful young lady. It all went completely wrong, of course.

The survey was going along just fine, and Aeon rather enjoyed Loreena’s company. She was smart, and passionate about everything she did. It was a strange reading from the gravitational sensor banks that told him that something was amiss: Aramea’s gravitational pull suddenly spiked, enough to crush anyone living there to pulp right where they stood. Aeon is not the kind of man to just stand idly by and wait what happens – he immediately activated his emergency warp routine that safely warped them out to a pre-selected stargate.

From there, they were able to witness one of the most improbable events in the known universe: a wormhole appearing at the core of a planet, ripping it apart and projecting the remaining pieces into the unknown. Such a cataclysm it was that they had to jump out of system before the aftermath of that encounter destroyed everything else in-system. The ensuing collapse of the wormhole, overloaded by the mass of the planet, was visible even from their location two systems out.

His instincts had saved him, unwillingly robbing him of this golden opportunity to rid himself of this life in a classier way than going down all guns blazing against a bunch of pirate thugs. He knew why however – his passenger did have a say in this, even though she might have wished she died along with all the others. At least she looked like it when he explained the situation. Then the strangest of things happened, he realized this could give him a new purpose, to take care of this lost child – or at least, make sure he kept his promise to her dead father,

He thought about it for a while, and offered to take her to Ammold with him, and help her in any way he could. To his surprise, she agreed without any discussion and he turned back to Ammold, with the faintest of smiles on his lips for what seemed like the first time in a very long time.

In the next few years, Loreena grew very fast and learned even faster. She amazed him every day, and she had filled his life with such new hope that he was transformed. She even became a pod pilot and now works together with him for their joint venture, the Syrkos Technologies corporation. His demons were still there, but they did not scare him anymore. He was at peace.

What the future holds, is yet to be written.

Loreena Syrkos’ life was good in the protection of her family, her studies were progressing well and she showed a lot of promise to enter the ranks of the renowned Caldari scientists conglomerate. She had friends she cared for, and she knew what she wanted her life to look like. Life in our troubled universe being as unpreditable as it is, this was not to happen.

A massive wormhole appeared directly within her home planet’s core, which was obliterated in less than a heartbeat, rendered to pieces and sucked in by the wormhole to an unreachable destination. She escaped the blast by pure luck and the cool mind of the excentric AeonOfTime. She was conducting surveys of the asteroid belt surrounding Aramea, her home planet and birthplace – as life would have it, only the reckless Aeon agreed to venture out there, and when the wormhole appeared he somehow managed to warp out before the attraction of the wormhole got its whole grip on them.

Everything was gone in mere seconds – there was no one and nothing left that had mattered to her. The aftermath of the encounter between Aramea and the wormhole forced Aeon to jump out of system before even the outer stargates would be destroyed by the blast. He seemed to understand her loss in a peculiar way, and offered to take her with him to Ammold V. Minmatar space? She was in no condition to decide whether that was a good idea, but there was no point in staying either. Nothing was left that she could go back to, so she silently mourned her family and friends while a new, unknown future waited for her on Ammold.

In the years that followed, Aeon became like a new father for her, in his own weird way. He took good care of her, even helping her financially to finish her studies. She still could not fathom him, his obsession with mining and passtime mission contracting, allied with a keen interest in all things scientific. She would spend hours explaining her science projects to him even though he probably understood only a third of what she told him. They both enjoyed it, though.

The time on Ammold was both haunted by memories that grew ever more distant and yet more frightening, but also enjoyable because she was fulfilled in her work – and in her training lessons with Aeon which made her a full-blown pod pilot as she reached 23. Her first launch with Thalea, her hoarder, would be for ever engraved in her memory. It was an old tub salvaged by Aeon on one of his mission runs, but to her it was perfect.

From then on, she never stopped studying to perfect herself in scientific research, funding her projets by helping out Aeon on his mining runs, finally creating the Syrkos Technologies corporation and becoming CEO. Where she goes from here is yet to be written.