The day after I got my invite I spent the whole day at work scouring for information on Ingress. I found the spreadsheet of passcodes +Bryan Kroger was using and quickly typed them all in to my scanner, when I was done I had what I thought was a nice little cache of gear. I was so naive.
Unfortunately I had plans on Monday night so we didn't get to capture the post office near the house but it was constantly on my mind.
Tuesday night I came home after work after I fed the dogs checked G+. OMG! I had a PM from +Brian Rose! He wanted to give me an invite about a post I had shared a few days earlier about an Ingress Group Meetup in Chicago. I told him I had an invite already but I was really interested in doing a meetup and what was the best way to go about it? He suggested I use a G+ event, so I created an event and sent it to everyone on G+. I thanked Brian for the help and he responded by saying he would give me 10 invites for the event! I was stunned, invites coveted and I had 10 of them to give away. I remember feeling a sense of pride and honor, I wanted everyone to be part of this adventure.
By the time Bryan got home I was buzzing with excitement. Between the conversation with Brian Rose and wanting to go claim the post office I was talking a mile a minute. We rushed through dinner and then headed out the door to claim the post office.
Ya know, in hindsight I'm realizing that those first few days we were very conservative in our playing. In the weeks to come we'd get drive through and stay out late to play.
On the way to the post office I was telling Bryan that I wanted to take down this portal by myself because he was already level 2 and I was still 1000 or so away from 2. When I told him I was getting out of the car to blow up the resonators he asked why. This shocked me, it isn't very often that I know something Bryan doesn't and I expected Ingress to be no different. I explained that the damage was centered around where you were standing so if you wanted to do the most damage to a resonator you had to stand right on top of it.
So here I was at the closed Kent Post Office in the dark with my warm coat and scanner in hand I ventured away from the car in my first solo mission. I walked in what I thought was the general direction of one of the resonators turned out I was going the opposite direction, this was the first hint that I am very directionally challenged at times. Once I reached the resonator I fired off my first XMP and did 1% damage, YES! I was on a roll! Seriously though firing that first XMP felt totally awesome.
I continued to fire off XMP, slowly making progress. As I chewed through bursters and moved around the Portal I learned the lesson that sometimes you can't reach resonators, 2 of the resonators were behind the post office fence. 120 L1 XMP later I destroy the last resonator! Then the portal was grey.
I felt like a badass
Okay well as badass as any early cheering 30s engineer geek girl can feel.
My adrenaline really was pumping as hoped in the car Bryan said "Congrats Honey!!....Are you gonna capture the portal?". Sheepishly I looked down down at my scanner and realized I forgot that part and quickly started deploying as Bryan started the car to drive home.
As I deployed those resonators I felt pride that m name was on it, and then I realized I had leveled! I squealed with excitement. As my adrenaline came down I realized I had made a mistake. I hadn't deployed at max distance the way the guides said to. That was the start of my love hate relationship with resonator placement.
I had seen posts about peoples Ingress adventures and I realized as we drove home this really was going to be an adventure. As an software engineer I didn't really have a lot of opportunity to think creatively outside of code. But that first adventure had my mind spinning and I was already thinking of writing my adventure. The next day when I got to work I wrote my very first first Situation Report (be warned it's terrible).
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