>> Mark: Examine Room

[Kenpachi Zaraki]

Nah.

Mark allowed the box to slide from his fingers, depositing it once more upon his cluttered desk. The seemingly forced nature of the ‘mystery’ around this game was starting to annoy him. Surely this was just some guerilla marketing campaign designed to drum up more sales. Frankly, he wasn’t falling for it. No, he’d wait on playing the game until the masses had already picked it over. No sense in tainting his perception of its quality by following blindly behind every other sucker that drank in their ridiculous campaign.

“Stupid,” he muttered, pushing off of his desk chair to get to his feet. He threw another look of disdain at the plain-looking game box before stepping toward the door.

As the dark-haired teen made to cross the threshold, his attention was caught by a single loud thump to his immediate right. The boy looked down, catching sight of a rather terrified looking animal peering around from behind a plastic log. The creature stared at him intently, nose twitching in a quick cadence.

“Geez, Ben. Scared the crap out of me,” Mark commented, his annoyance lost on the critter. “The hell is your damage?”

A medium-sized grey rabbit stared back at him, eyes nearly unblinking. His nose had stopped its normal twitch pattern, indicating an even higher-than-normal level of fear behind the skittish animal’s eyes. Mark stared blankly at the rabbit for a moment before rolling his eyes and exiting the room. As if to agree with his owner’s decision, the lagomorph elicited another loud thump with his broad foot.

“Yeah yeah,” the teenaged secondary responded, waving in the direction of the cage. “Whatever you say.”

Mark wandered aimlessly into his small ‘kitchen’, tugging the door of the fridge open and investigating. Sadly he had put off his shopping for about a week longer than he usually did and was consequently out of just about everything. All that remained was a door full of condiments and a lone bagel. Muttering expletives to himself, he grabbed up the plain bagel and took a bite out of the nigh-stale carbohydrate ring. Bland, but better than hunger pangs.

“God, this is boring,” he said aloud, again to no one in-particular. He heard another terrified thump from his bedroom as he plopped down in a kitchen chair. “Oh, shut it.”

Being a night owl was not nearly as advantageous an attribute in the Omniverse was it was back home. Though he supposed that perhaps living in a place that wasn’t the Empire’s backyard might assuage some of that problem. He hadn’t made too many friends since entering the Omniverse, though he couldn’t remember any of his olds comrades either. He was left in a weird sort of lonely void the majority of the time, which he typically filled with whatever distraction he could find. Recently, it had been trading cards. Just such a stack of collectible cards sat at the table, somewhat askew. Mark stuffed the remainder of his dinner/breakfast/lunch(?) into his mouth and picked up the deck, flipping the top card over. A smile immediately spread across his face as he took in the sight of the amazing Battleborn. The card somehow embodied every facet of masculinity that he could contrive and then some. The powerful warrior stood upon a flaming mountain of skulls, crying toward the heavens whilst brandishing a claymore in each hand.

“Sho fuckin’ coo’,” Mark muttered, masticating the last of the bagel. As he finally managed to swallow the hunk of compressed bread, he heard an audible ding echo from his room. He furrowed his brow at the sound; he could have sworn that he had left his music playing through the earbuds. With a sigh, he jammed the deck of cards into his sweatshirt pocket and headed back to his room.

>> Mark: Investigating weird dinging