Missionary

Today while mining my own business (<-- pun), I was offered a storyline mining mission. Hey, how bad could it be? ...My past mistakes have taught me nothing.

"Go kill this Gallatean ship"...wait...wasn't this supposed to be a mining operati- ...okay, fine!
I step into the cockpit of my Life Lessons (my Coercer with bad fittings)...hey how bad could it be? I warp to the designated spot in deadspace...I mean it's only one ship that I have to destroy, how bad could it be?

...Yes, a Battlecruiser, a vessel 3 times my size, 6 times better armed, and 12 times as ugly. Fuck. Not again. And this time it's a story mission, I don't have the luxury of screwing it up.

Good thing I have platinum insurance.

The ensuing battle is not of as epic proportions as my panic would have led to believe, as orbiting it at a suboptimal range for my weapons (10km instead of 16), his weapons seem to be completely ineffective, and miss me 9 times out of 10, but when they hit, they bloody hurt. Forgetting dual tanking, I rely on my armour repairer and all is going well.
Sadly, after a few minutes of this theatre, I notice that he's just repairing his armour faster than I can hurt him, there is no way for me to win this battle. A perpetual stalemate. Now I know how those high-sec rats feel when I just keep on mining in my venture while repairing my shields and not paying any attention to them.

But let's see...what has changed since my last bad battle encounter? My corp! fortunately, one of the 4-year leaders is avaiable, and offers me gladly accepted help. His cannons, drones and I turn the battlecruiser into scrap in short order, and then it's off to more adventures! Sadly the defense turrets surrounding us and who'd been leaving me alone until this point chose this exact time to start wailing on me, and I had to warp out within seconds. What an unclimactic end this would ahve been, completing the mission only to be blown apart by bloody robo-sentries.
What did we gain? a few hundred thousand ISK, and most importatnly, I received a 0,70 standing increase to my NPc faction of choice, catapulting me me up to 3,62 standing with Amaar Constructions.

Level 3 missions, here I come!
The sensible thing seemed to stick to mining, so I did a couple of those missions to gauge how much one difficulty level changes things. In a nutshell, they (of course) increased the required amount of minerals to bring home, and send me to drone-infested space...poop. the 1st mission, I could do okay, after quickly training up drone control to be able to use both my attack drones, and mined 6000m3 of worthless veldspar derivative for a bit. I should really wait for my mining barge training to be done.

The second level 3 mining mission I'm sent on asked for 9000m3 of some kind of rocks nobody cares about,  but this time, the mission area was highly defended, by some badass drones. No problem! I just used Life Lessons to mop them up, which was slightly more strenuous than anticipated, and then did two trips with Ace Ventura IV, my Venture-class mining frigate.
No blood, no tears, just a little bit of sweat.

Topping off the day with a bit of Kernite and Japet mining with my reliable corp buddy Mikheal, and it's a wrap.