Where it All Began

IRL, I love traveling. Sadly, I can't afford to travel as much as I'd like, but every couple of years I go somewhere. I've been to Philadelphia and Seattle, Miami and Minneapolis, Galveston and Houston and Salt Lake City, even all the way down to the Florida Keys and, one glorious summer, a week in St. Lucia.

One of the things that really appeals to me about W-space is that every day I find connections to somewhere new. The first time I visited Solitude was via wormhole. The first time I visited The Cougar Store in Bosena, it was because it was the closest market to where a wormhole chain dumped me out. I get to travel all across Eve, and still have all of my combat ships handy in case they are needed.

Last week, we had a low sec connection to Canard, and one of the guys in corp commented that it was only a couple of jumps from there to the Eve Gate.

So, of course, I had to go see it - especially when he started asking if we wanted to get a small frigate gang together to go check it out.

We jumped through the gate into New Eden and as grid loaded, my overview filled.  I twitched, ready to react to a gate camp... but, no, it was a field of cans.  Lots and lots of floating cans in space, messages from other players.  There was a variety - wishes to the departed, messages to other players, and a few scrawled 'I was here'.  There was one other person in system with us - a condor, a hundred or so km off, planting another container.

I spent a few moments taking it in and panned my camera around (I had automatically centered my view on the shuttle as I eyed it up) looking for the Eve Gate itself.

Living in wormholes, you get used to celestial objects; it's frequent to pass through a system and see a pulsar, red giant, or cataclysmic variable star. The graphical depiction of the Eve Gate itself was a little underwhelming, and Kynric mentioned on coms that it used to be "more aggressive".

Still, in game time, it had been... millenia since the gate went haywire, and yet, there it is, bright enough from three lightyears away to make the sun seem small.  Still open, still pouring out turbulence.  This tiny system, with a white dwarf and a barren planet, was where the story of Eve Online and New Eden started.

We checked out the system a little more and made a live sacrifice (we caught a shuttle coming in) and then I kicked out a can as well. When people leave papers and wishes behind at a shrine, it is like making a small sacrifice of themselves - their time, effort, and desire, and I felt it was appropriate.

Then we packed up, and headed back home. And yes, that was a James Arget for CSM 8 can still floating there.

-K