That One Time I Tried Multicrew
23 Mar 2022Purple_Tux
[This is both kind of a meta story and an in-character thing simultaneously, it's a real story but funnier if told from the in-universe perspective]This was in the first few days of my flight license. I convinced a good friend of mine to enlist in the Pilot Academy, and somehow despite several complaints regarding the handling of his Sidewinder, managed to squeak out of Matet with only a small scrape on the mail slot. No idea in the galaxy how the man graduated, turns out flying was NOT his thing. After a subtle reminder where the FSD ignition was, we were in business.... Or so I thought. This part was totally my fault and I even funded the resulting rebuy, broke nomad I was at the time. My friend never said exactly when he jumped, so I assumed he hadn't yet when he asked where to go. I told him the usual spiel about pointing to the desired star and flying toward it.
FOR SOME REASON HE FLEW INTO THE STAR, obviously cooking the sidewinder and sending himself to the medical station the hard way. Oops.
Several minutes later, we finally get him to succeed in getting to the same station I was at. In the meantime, I'd scraped enough credits together for an Adder. We struggled for a bit getting him to transfer over, but eventually the station (probably reluctantly) agreed to it. Keep in mind, I was only a few days ahead of him, so neither of us knew we needed multicrew modules until it was too late. That was embarrassing, especially the awkward ride back to the station so he could get back in his reconstructed Sidewinder. Even more embarrassing was having to explain to the shipyard why I was returning the Adder afterward. It's a good thing the PF district is permit locked, because I could never show my face there again, I'd get laughed out of the system.
The friend eventually decided flight wasn't for him, and last I heard was headed to some backwater ELW to look for alien artifacts or something. [OOC Borderlands 3 launched around then and he never got back into Elite last I asked] He still will sometimes make a joke whenever we meet up about the time I literally navigated him to death.