>> Mark: Examine Room

[First Guardian]

Your name is MARK. It has been one month since you were SUMMONED to COSTA DEL SOL. You have since acclimated despite IMPERIAL PRESENCE.  A number of CDs are scattered about your EXTREMELY MESSY bedroom. You collect BOOKS, even though you rarely find the time to read them. You instead waste time on the DATAVERSE and listen to ANGSTY MUSIC while taking yourself WAY TOO SERIOUSLY. You are prone to bouts of extreme over-analysis, usually to the point of REALLY PISSING PEOPLE OFF. You enjoy memorizing POINTLESS INFORMATION and regurgitating it to anyone who will listen. You also play CARD GAMES on occasion.

Mark simply continues to type away as he writes up a comment on a controversial video, soon to receive back a few more, each with increasing amounts of aggression at his over-analytical posts. However, it currently does not worry him as he clacks away and indulges in his favorite pastime of navigating the dataverse. While writing, he suddenly reaches out to grab one of the scattered CDs and ejects the one previously in his computer, rapidly switching them out and plugging in some headphones before continuing his thousand word long comment. Suddenly--

Beep!

An alert on his dataverse device notifies him of an update to one of his favorite blogs that supplies his with random and often useless information.

>>Mark: Check blog updates

[Kenpachi Zaraki]

The dark-haired teen sat in darkness, having left every light in his small apartment off upon arriving home from work. It was the way he liked it, and with high frequency of imperial patrols illuminating the area and flooding his room with their spotlighting, it was rarely a detriment. His desk was currently a cluttered mess as it so often was, covered with numerous books, magazines, CDs, and miscellaneous paraphernalia. His computer monitor sat amongst the clutter, bathing him in a bluish glow. Behind him was a simple bed (unmade, naturally), over which hung a poster of a periodic table. He had (hilariously, in his opinion) added a little box next to Hydrogen, scrawling 'Om' with a silver marker. The small room was otherwise empty, save for a small pile of laundry near his slightly ajar closet door.

Mark sighed as he eyed the blinking alert text on his dataverse device. He hadn't yet figured out how to sync the alerts to his computer, forcing him to have to reach over to his bed (his desk offered no space to keep it) every time he got an alert. He considered ignoring it outright; there was a 50/50 chance that the article it alluded to was absolute garbage. With nothing better to do, he adjusted his headphones as he navigated to the site, the first few words of a truly genius post-industrial-sadboy-ultrametalcore anthem buzzing into his ears.

”You don't care, you aren't there!/
You say you're here, but it's clear!/
You're away! There's nothing to say!/
WRRROOOOOOOOOO."

“Geniuses,” the teen muttered aloud, allowing the singer's vocals to wash over him. This was truly the height of musical brilliance.

Mark flicked the scroll wheel on his archaic computer mouse as the emotionally-charged lyrics battered his eardrums. The listicle of which he had been alerted was passable at best, with only a few of the entries interesting him. He mentally filed some the more interesting tidbits away for later, to be unleashed on some unsuspecting person. The average weight of a blue whale tongue would floor his buddies. Without a doubt.

Having had his fill, the teen closed the article and returned to meticulously compiling his witty reply. He had done precisely zero research on the topic he was now spouting about, though it didn't matter. His opponent in this verbal spar had already descended to the 'ALL CAPS ZERO PUNCTUATION' phase, giving him the de facto upper hand. So long as he retained his composure and perfect sentence structure, it hardly mattered if he was 100% correct. 

---

"NervousHabit: Well, it's not as if there's much research on the topic. You're free to believe your comically misguided view. Such a powerful being, if he were to even exist (I can guarantee he does not) would hardly show preference for such a lowly hue as blue. I can assure you that the writings dictate that Omni's favorite color is fuchsia. I'm not surprised that you're not aware of this, but we can't all be right can we?"

---

With a smug smirk, Mark submitted the brilliant comment. It would be a few hours before he got a reply anyway, as the user's location was listed as 'Coruscant'. Users from that verse seemed to only be on for a stretch of a few hours at most, likely due to curfew. The dark-haired teen luckily did not have such issues in Costa del Sol. Though the Empire was in definite control of the city, they had better things to do than worry about dataverse access. 

”GET AWAAAAAY.
REEEEEEEE"

So good. Mark mused, a genuine smile on his pale face. His head bobbed erratically to the beat as the music reached a nearly deafening crescendo. The adolescent’s movements stopped as he caught sight of a new review on his favorite gaming site, E-Sport Propagandist. While not exactly the best source of content, it was really the best that the Omniverse had to offer. While back in his old life he had had a larger pool to pull from for such information, here he'd have to settle. His cursor quickly crossed the screen, bringing up the page.

>> Mark: Read gaming review

[Kenpachi Zaraki]

Ignoring the slew of irritating banner ads and pop-ups that littered the page, Mark skimmed through the relatively brief review. It was decidedly lacking in information, anything that one might consider useful was whitewashed with opinionated garbage. Normally the teen did not take too much stock in these reviews as critics tended to either be payed off by the production company or completely out-of-touch with the fanbase. The game had garnered a questionable 50% rating (5 interrobangs out of 10; god he hated these people) and was utterly lacking in any background information. There were no sales figures listed, nor the name of the production company or even so much as a release date. Despite this, the author posited that the game did in fact exist, he just couldn’t locate any information.

“Tch. Amateurs,” Mark uttered under his breath. His fingers worked quickly, bringing up a new tab and searching for the missing info. 

E-Sport Propagandist was not known to be a shining example of integrity, but something as lazy as this was below even them. The adolescent scanned his search results quickly, finding precisely zero hit for his (admittedly pretty specific) search terms. He sighed, trimming his boolean terms down a bit.

+OSBURB “release date” “production company” -esports -parodist -empire -suburb -superb +game +video +PC

Despite his best efforts, he could find nothing. A basic search of ‘OSBURB’ brought up multiple pages of people discussing the game, yet no one seemed to be able to offer the missing data. It wasn’t like knowing the release date was going to make a difference (especially in the Omniverse, where time was laughably inconsistent), but it was the principal of the thing. Such lack of information was genuinely upsetting to a boy like him. His eyes slowly drifted to his stack of CDs, the tower perched upon a plain-looking brown cardboard box. The parcel’s label was barely visible beneath the tower of sadboy tunes.

Mark Lastname
123 Fake Street  12 Shoreline Ave
Land of 1000 Stormtroopers  Costa del Sol
Holy-Shit-Way-Too-Much-Water-Land  Vasty Deep

The Imperial Postal Service evidently wasn’t too taken with his humor. Being that all citizens were catalogued, they had taken it upon themselves to fix his shipping address. He smirked at the unaltered surname. Upon his ‘registration’ with the Empire he had claimed to have not remembered his last name (such memory lapses were common upon summoning) and had yet to update them. As he was but a secondary, they didn’t seem to care too much about whether or not he actually ever did; they had better things to do. He’d leave the humorous surname as a tiny act of rebellion. 

”YOU CAN’T RUUUUUUN/
FROM WHAT YOU’VE DOOOOOONE”

Mark tugged the earbuds from his ears, growing tired of this particular artist. They weren’t quite as good as he had remembered; he suspected that the Prime that had summoned it had mistaken them with another group of mascara-clad youths. It was hard to tell them apart at times. He wheeled his desk chair toward the tower of compact discs, hefting the stack and slowly placing it on the floor before taking a better look at the small box.

Customer Fulfillment Services
Questionable Purchases Inc.

At the time he had thought the name of the company to be a cute/quirky name for a start-up of some kind, but he was beginning to get the feeling that the name was more apt than he had originally thought. Sighing, he picked up the parcel from the desk and tore the end of the box. Another box slid free from the corrugated confines, this one a simple white background with a green house in the center, cut into various sized blocks as rooms might appear on a blueprint. Below the house was the word “OSBURB” in large block letters. 

“Ohs-burb? O-Sburb? Oss-Burb?” Mark frowned. Even the name was enigmatic.

>> Mark: Investigate questionable purchase

[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