The in-Eve 4Chan community has gone through many iterations and splits and mergers over the years that it has existed. Autistic Sharks was kicked by Montolio from Test after several months, then disbanded. They reformed in Curse and flew with Concordiat for a while before being invited to join Test again, but things were messy with the transfer of moons, and it took a while to sort out. Between getting the boot and then what was perceived as foot dragging, there was some bitterness, but they decided to move to Fountain anyway... and shoot Test ratters with rifters while they waited.
They reformed to their own alliance eventually, Elite Space Guild, and were set blue within the CFC. After crashing on Goonswarm's couch briefly, they moved into Fountain with Test. Their numbers swelled with mining corporations and other carebears, but divergent views on what the focus of the alliance should be eventually led to it crumbling from within. As ESG began collapsing, Lynch Squad (the small scale PVPers of ESG) and Lacco’s draektrain (a Finnish corp) joined together and formed Confederation of Pizza. Their goal was to stick to small scale combat, and their first target was their former alliance, ESG. When ESG finally - and spectacularly - exploded, they could think of no one else to shoot next but Test.
Interestingly enough, some of the former Broski elements have ended up in alliances such as Test and Black Legion. So, while they shoot Test, they usually are more than happy to chat with Test before, after, and during fights. When a particularly hard target shows up, especially lately, Black Legion is only a ping away.
This leads us to recent events...
Black Legion (and Pizza) have been harassing Test in Delve. Black Legion primarily sticks to reinforcing structures while Pizza focuses on making ratting difficult. Add in the GSF roams into the area, and Delve has turned into the place to be for small-to-medium scale warfare in null. Fights happen almost hourly.
Around mid-day (USTZ) 2/20/2013, a small Test fleet had roamed to the NPC system of KFIE-Z to see if they could pick a fight with Pizza. This is pretty close to Test’s worst time for numbers during the weekday, so they were being cautious. Pizza had been making life difficult for alliance logistics to move supplies into Delve for a few hours and it was decided that something should be done about it. Pizza brought out carriers to rep subcaps that were fighting Test subcaps. A couple of Test blapdreads jumped in to cause havoc. Then, surprisingly, the Pizza carriers began engaging the Test subcaps. Smelling a trap (word came back that Black Legion may be waiting), the FC called for Machariels to bridge in and bump the carriers off the undock to allow a few active supers to ninja pop the carriers they could and get out before any trap could be properly sprung on them.
When the cyno went up, the titan pilot heroically clicked jump instead of bridge. I don’t think anyone was expecting that. The carriers began pulling aggro. Subcaps began burning at the titan that had suddenly appeared right beside them. With a shrug of the shoulders, the titan pilot decided to make the best of it, targeted a nearby Thanatos, and doomsdayed it.
The fit? Amazing. Hull tanking capitals is what manly men do, after all. Meanwhile, the titan was bubbled and Black Legion was logging supers on. I don’t have to tell you what the pings on jabber looked like. You can likely imagine. Pants were shat.
Between the few Test supers and capitals that began to miraculously form up, and spies perceiving Pandemic Legion FCs suddenly becoming active to be a sign that this was a trap, BL second guessed jumping in. In BL’s defense, who jumps a titan into the middle of a bunch of enemy subcaps and caps without it being some kind of trap? (Heh.) The subcaps let the titan slink away, and the BL supers stayed within the safety of their tower.
To be fair, if Black Legion had jumped, it would have led to a very interesting escalation. Unfortunately for everyone who didn’t have a super on the line there, we will never know how that fight would have ended. “Supers tackled” can make for strange bedfellows in the spiralling-out-of-control situation that is Eve PVP escalation. CFC likely would have made an appearance, and indeed pings went out and a GSF Delve fleet began forming before the situation de-escalated. The "what ifs" abound. In the end, losses were mitigated to just a couple billion isk.
Maybe next time...