I may as well tell this story from some time ago. Me and two friends were plotting some hunting in the Serpent's Coil in Gallente space. There was Takula in his Riffter, Jang in his Scythe and me in my new Thorax. After some time and a few kills each, Another hunter came into play from some fancy corp. Jang made a joke about me locking his Vexor with my Thorax to see what he does first. I declined on the grounds that I only lock people who I intend to shoot.

Then, as a comical act, I decided to lock Jang as a little joke. In response, his computer auto-locked me back and his threat screen came up. However, right above me at the same time, a Serpentis pirate came out of warp. I saw it and so did Jang. From his view point he could not tell if the raider was behind or in front of me and thought that the threat box that had popped up was from the raider.

He did not bother to check the ID that came with it and forgot about the auto lock system, not realising that it was locking me back as the primary target. You can see where this is going now can't you? Well tough because you are going to read on anyway from shear compulsion to do so.

The raider had actually locked me and was behind me, so I locked the raider in response. Also, Jang did a manual lock on the raider and waited for a target box to appear. However, the first target to appear was me not the raider and without hesitation, Jang fired his guns at me. After the first shot, he realised what he had done and that Concord would show up soon to slap his wrist.

I knew that the large chunk of shields I had lost was to Jang's 650mm and the next thing that happened was him frantically cursing over the com and slamming his ship into warp to the nearest roid belt.

However, Concord tracked him and followed him to the belt and seconds after he got there, Concord did too and jammed his warp core. He ejected and fled to a station before coming back with Tak and me to see if his ship is ok. All we could find was a cargo container with a few rounds of ammo, some shield mods and a drone.

We collected the goods and went back to the station where we had a good laugh about this whole mess. He then got his replacement reaper ship from the insurance company, loaded the salvaged equipment into it and contemplated going home. I checked the market for ships and there was a stabber for sale in that very station for 3.5 million. He was 1.5 million short so naturally I paid him the money out of compensation. I then paid him the rest of the value of his Scythe back too when I acquired the money. The funny thing was, when he got to his stabber, he self destructed his Reaper out side the station but forgot to take his Acolyte drone out of the bay and it went up with the ship. Talk about a bad day.

We returned to Metropolis and carried on life as normal. Naturally I got some sarcastic tellings off from the other people in the Tech School when we returned to Metropolis.

"Target locking is not a toy!" they say. I hear that.