No blue portals today! I am glad. I have Ingressed rather moderately, hacked a few portals on my way to work and from work, and a couple times after I came home to recharge the portals here in Mandal.

I am stiff and sore in so many places, and I can’t seem to get enough sleep to regenerate my body as fast as it is worn down. Since there’s no way to go to sleep early (noisy neighbors), I’ll just have to limit the Ingressing. I still have more interests than I have time, so it’s OK.

So today this visiting Resistance Agent took out two of our portals which had a heap of links, and which incidentally belonged to other Enlightenment agents (Fullmakt, more exactly, from when he retook the city earlier this summer a few hours after it went blue). Again he left only one or two resonators so I could easily retake them and set up fields again. It is hard to imagine that he is not intentionally helping me advance. Which is nice of him, but…

My body is telling me that it would really appreciate a day of not traipsing around for an hour or more on hard pavement and being baked in the sun.  I am stiff and sore in many places and some of my fingertips tingle much of the time. (Although I suppose the last part could come from something else.)

With a little (unintentional?) help from our Resistance visitor, I got almost to level 5 yesterday. Today I completed it. I spent two and a half hour traipsing around in Kristiansand in the late afternoon when the ultraviolet rays can’t get to me, hacking and recharging every portal except one, and setting up a couple new links, creating a new field that covered even more of the city than before the bluebird flew through.

Someone threw a few bursters at my two portals by the railway station. There were no other attacks, and they were not sustained when I remote recharged, so I would assume it was someone traveling through with train. Trains between Stavanger and Oslo make a stop in Kristiansand. The railway does not go through the city, instead the trains drive into the station and change direction, turning the seats. This takes a while, along with passengers boarding and unboarding, and this fits with the timing of the attacks. So probably a “drive by” attack. Those are the best. More AP for recharging, no lasting damage.

Almost certainly this was a new player, since he did not have enough firepower to destroy any of the resonators and tried anyway. If you attack a portal without destroying any resonators, you get no points for it, while the defender gets points when recharging it. In fact, even if you do manage to take down some of the resonators but not all, the defender gets more AP for replacing them than you got for destroying them. This is why I think it was a newbie attack.

Anyway, with the two and a half hours of continuous movement, plus several shorter trips in Mandal before, my feet had enough. I was also quite hungry. I must have left a trail of dead calories all over the town. ^_^

Each evening, I think: “I could go harvest the two nearest portals, it is less than 15 minutes, but my feet/legs are so sore/stiff, it just isn’t worth it.” And each morning I wake up and my feet and legs feel perfectly OK. I am getting sleepy by midnight, sometimes even an hour before midnight, which probably means my body is aiming for at least 1 cycle of delta sleep, which releases regenerating hormones. (Well, the precursor hormone to Human Growth Hormone, technically, but it sets rolling the snowball of cellular growth throughout the body so it is nice to have. Young people make this several times a night, but at my age it is common to have only 1 or at best 2 sessions of delta sleep each night, in the beginning of the night.) I am only joking when I say that it is the XM from the portals that does this to my body. Science would say it is the exercise.

Like the body, portals also needs a refill from time to time, or they will decay. Well, the resonators will decay; the portal continues to exist but will revert to gray (neutral). Each resonator fades by 15 percentage points per day. That’s 90% in 6 days, so on the 7th day they revert to neutral unless you renew them. Of course, if there is a competitor, they can take it over before it goes that far, and they have an easier job the less energy there is.

To renew portals that I don’t have time to visit, such as those in Grimstad or Vigeland, I can recharge them at a distance. But some of the effect is lost over the distance. For instance, Grimstad is 40 km from Kristiansand, and the efficiency is 98%, so 2% is lost.  Mandal is 34 km from Kristiansand, so it is not smart to recharge Mandal portals from Kristiansand when I am coming back there later in the day anyway. Also the portals in Vigeland are much closer when I am in Mandal. So tactical charging is an issue.