====> Adam: get the fuck up

[Roger Smith]

As strange and out there as this was, it was still a far cry from the most bizarre thing that had happened to him. It was definitely pretty up there on the list, right along the first time he'd met Dikudu, or barely surviving the meteor impact of his home. He had eventually learned to deal with those events, a good little while down the line, and so was over them and only ever so slightly bitter about them, in turn.

What kind of literal God of Time couldn't change the fate of his home planet? Stupid SBURB with its...stupid game rules...

But those particular events were well in his past now. He'd had time to stew on them and come to relative terms with them. Not so with the current events. He had literally been standing on the edge of the portal to the new universe that he had finally created with his friends and fellow players. And just as he had moved forward to float through it, that was when shit had gotten weird.

The entire portal had just...shut down. Like someone had pulled the proverbial power cord. One moment it had been filled with a panorama of the expanse of space that was waiting to be created upon, and then, in the time it took him to blink...it was blank. Just...blank, empty blackness.

"Whatever the hell is going on here, just let it be known: I blame this all on that stupid cherub. All of it. Everything. Including all of the events leading up to this point. Especially Earth blowing up."

He had come to terms with it, but he was still bitter about it. It wasn't great, where he'd spent his early years, but it was home, after all.

Actually, his home was pretty shitty, all in all. Why was he so broken up about it being gone?

Further contemplation, ranting or general angriness was impeded by his sudden notice of a rather abrupt change in scenery. From an only mostly-black expanse, dotted with stars and the myriad colors of distant galaxies and such, as well as the many planets of his Session, to a far more blank, and completely black void.

"Well, this is great. I've either gone blind, or shit has gone even further shit-ward than they already were. And knowing my luck, I'm betting things have gone shit-ward. Blindness would just be too easy."

His grumpiness spoiled his awareness that he had been reduced to ranting in his own head, his long pastime of endless ranting and angry rambling to anyone who would listen -- most of the time himself -- having reduced him to not even noticing that his mind and mouth ran simultaneously when he was mid-rant.

But even his mental ranting was brought to a sharp halt when he caught sight of something standing out very starkly against the black expanse he was now, apparently, randomly floating in. And the sight of it was enough to swing his grumpiness right around to mindless, boiling anger. And this time, all he could think was: "I swear to everything that is God Tier, if you are another fucking First Guardian mucking around with our shit, I am going to go beyond apeshit. You have no idea."

He was so caught up in his mind-rending anger and annoyance, he almost completely failed to notice that the grinning, white shadow -- that Adam still swore was a First Guardian -- was actually talking to him. Or, rather, telling him something or other. A bunch of shit that made no sense whatsoever. Something about the 'Omniverse', whatever 'Omnilium' was and what it could apparently do, there apparently being others here, and death not being permanent.

And then the blackness of the void around him faded in the time it took him to blink, as if someone had flicked a hidden 'invert colors' option, leaving him floating in an equally blank expanse of white. For a long moment, he just floated there, before a sudden realization hit him: he was floating there. And then he fell the handful of feet to what he guessed was the ground, landing with a loud thunk, a sharp whuff of expelled breath, and a long, low groan of discomfort.

"Note to self..." he wheezed, pitifully trying to force himself up into a sitting position, and failing miserable. "...stop...forgetting you can fly..."

[Roger Smith]

Even after he had managed to catch his breath, and the relatively minor ache from his short fall faded, Adam continued to just lay there on what he guessed was the ground. See, he didn't really so much care to just go on lying there forever, so much as he had gotten it into his head that he needed to be actually standing up, or already in the air, to actually start up the whole 'flying' thing. And being that he was currently unaware of the fountain in his (very) near vicinity that he could use to get a figurative leg up and stand, even with his bum leg, and that he was really in no hurry to go anywhere anyway (also he may or may not have missed out on the whole 'summoning things' part of that white shadow that may or may not have been a First Guardian mentioned when talking about Omnilium) or maybe he was just lazy enough to want to lay there a little longer and mentally complain about anything and everything that ran across his mind.

At the moment, most things that ran across his mind were some mixture of general anger at being here at all, and some measure of sadness for being snatched away from not only his goal, but his friends. Or, well....most of his friends, anyway. Some of them. Well...okay mostly it was just the whole general thing of being alone, not so much missing his friends in particular. And since he was so busy lamenting over his vast misfortunes and poor predicament, nowhere to go, and, perhaps most importantly, nothing to do...well, he just sort of went on lying there, in a fashion that would not be difficult to mistake for a lump that some just might call useless.

Somewhere in his ridiculous montage of angry and depressed thoughts and lamentations, Adam's thoughts, inevitably, began to wander, gradually coming to a slow, grinding halt, with only the perpetual tick-tock in the back of his head that never left him -- and had, indeed, been with him literally as long as he could remember -- remaining to remind him of just how much time he was wasting just laying around. And after barely five minutes of the laying there with only the passing of time to keep him mental company, he was ready to lose his mind. The bad part about being a player with an Aspect of Time -- especially if you were an Heir, and literally became Time, once you fully realized your powers --was that you tended to get really, really, really bad about wasting time. Adam was worse about it than most might have been, due to problems of his own that he was definitely not going to reveal to anyone.

And so it was that after only another minute, he was literally scrabbling at his hair, doing his best not to grab handfuls and rip it out. "Aaaaaaaaaaaugh........" With a long, slow heave, he managed to force himself upright into a sitting posture using mostly his arms. God Tier player and literal God of Time he might have been, but he still wasn't in the best shape, physically speaking. And as he sat up, he firmly planted his hands to either side of him, and propped himself up well enough to get first one leg under him, and then the other, before plopping rather heavily back down into the least uncomfortable sitting position he could manage. He planted one elbow on his knee, pulling the more egregious knots out of his hair with the other hand, and mussing with the stupidly long hood that was part of these...ridiculous God Tier action pajamas, and turned his mind to trying to think of something to do.

It never even occurred to him to try taking a look at the horizon to see the various gates.

[Roger Smith]

After several more minutes of sitting there, no brilliant ideas had come to him yet. In fact, the only idea that had really come to him that it would be really nice if he had his laptop with him. And after several minutes of intense fuming over not having it...something suddenly thunked him -- rather heavily, actually -- on the head, eliciting a rather loud "AGCH!" from him, and a sharp bout of flailing about, tossing whatever was now on his head up into the air.

Turning his eyes upward, he was met with the sight of his beloved laptop come tumbling back down toward him. And with a mad scramble, he managed to grab the thing without letting it hit the ground. Slowly he held it out at arms' length, staring at it in a mixture of relief, accusation, and, perhaps most of all, simple confusion. What the heck? Had he had the thing in his captchalogue deck or something? But...even then it wouldn't have appeared above his head!

Unless maybe the damn thing was on the fritz again...

On a sudden impulse, he tried to pull up his sylladex and captchalogue cards, earning a whole lot of nothing for his effort. His mood immediately went even further south, and he let out a string of language which would have been quite profound for someone his age, were it not for the rather high-pitched, squaling voice it was screamed in. The poor young man's voice had not yet decided on what its final pitch was going to be, and he already tended to rise higher in pitch as he shouted or got loud in general, ever since he had been only ten years of age.

He calmed down soon enough, mostly by simple virtue of eventually running out of air to continue ranting and cursing. Catching his breath, he finally set his laptop down, and booted the thing up, pulling up the holographic interface. Within moments he had his usual setup running, though he was disappointed all over again when Pesterchum showed none of his friends online. He did manage to resist devolving into another pointless screeching fit this time, though.

Dismissing Pesterchum for now, he went about poking around what passed for the internet in this place to see if he could find out anything. He wasn't even going to question how there was an internet connection in the first place. Whenever First Guardians were involved, the laws of physics, and common sense for that matter, went right out the window. But as soon as he had attained internet access, his mood immediately became much more stable, and his mind was free to wander aimlessly, as it was prone to do anyway.

[Roger Smith]

After a long while of browsing this and that, and distracting himself with a few videos on what seemed to pass for this place's equivalent of YouTube, he came across something rather interesting. Apparently, Omnilium could let you summon things at will? Well, that was awesome. Kind of. But what the heck was Omnilium? He remembered that First Guardian....thing mentioning it, but he had been too busy fuming to pay much attention to any of that.

But if all he had to do was just...sort of...focus on what he wanted, that should be easy enough to do. Maybe. Hopefully? It would explain how his laptop suddenly appeared, now that he thought about it for a second. It hadn't just showed up out of nowhere, after all. Looks like his single-minded complaining and focus on wishing it was here had turned out to be enough to summon the damn thing, completely by accident.

He wasn't going to complain, but it had been kind of weird.

Now he was contemplating trying to summon something else. Maybe something to help get him a leg up...the crutch rifle his pal Rhys had made for him, maybe? Tapping a finger against the case of his laptop in thought, he turned his mind toward the weapon, trying to picture it as cleary as if he were retrieving it from his sylladex. At first, nothing happened. But he was a stubborn one, and he really wanted to get up, if only to stretch his legs for a minute, so he kept at it, until, finally, something started to happen, and a shimmering envelope of myriad colors started to blossom into existence before him, growing up much more rapidly than out, until it just...sort of...popped.

And as it did, the familiar form of his trusty old crutch -- one of a pair whose twin he had lost somewhere during his adventures, now concealing an extra special surprise -- stood proud for all of a second before it started to teeter and fall...right toward him. He caught it, with a motion that seemed far too well-practiced to be simple luck or reflex, and laid it on the ground beside him.

He had suddenly gained another idea... He wondered if he could summon living things, too? It would certainly be an easy way to--

No, no, no! That would just be...well, that would be wrong.

Maybe he could try and summon some of his consorts, though? Hell, the goofy little creatures might help his mood at least a little. And so he put his mind to work, once more.

[Roger Smith]

Within several minutes, there was soon a small crowd of strange little critters crowding around the red-clad youth, gibbering up a storm, and blowing rather large bubbles in a decidedly obnoxious fashion. The look on Adam's face was somewhere between disgust, amusement, and utter disappointment. He certainly wasn't alone anymore, but he would have honestly preferred company that didn't constantly flutter about, blowing bubbles and spewing nonsensical single syllables.

At least he could get some assistance out of them. Though it took several minutes to communicate his plan to the simple creatures, he was soon carted off on the collective backs of the eager little workers. The ride was far from smooth, thanks to the jostling and unever cadence of so many little limbs, but it was certainly more energy-efficient than limping along on his own, and probably better on his energy than flying the whole way, too. Not that he really knew where he was headed in the first place.

Soon enough he came to notice something on the horizon, and drawing ever closer. Even at the rather energetic pace of the tiny group of even tinier little critters, it was going to take a while to get there, but...well, it looked like a gate of some sort. Awesome. Hopefully it would lead to somewhere better than a blank bunch of white.

And though he could've sworn he dozed off for a bit during the trip, he was eventually jostled to alertness of their arrival as he overheard voices. He slowly rose to sit up, the three of his consorts supporting him scrambling around to continue supporting him, and a fourth one carrying his crutch around just sort of puttering around behind him. And Adam had to take off his glasses, clean them, rub his eyes and put them back on to make sure he wasn't seeing things. Because what he was seeiing looked distinctly like...Stormtroopers standing in front of what turned out to, indeed, be a gate of some sort.

For their credit, the Stormtroopers in question simply stared back, with only the slightest relaxation in their posture to hint at their sheer confusion. For a moment, it seemed like both parties were equally flabbergasted. Then one of the troopers spoke up. "Uh...you... New Prime...I'm guessing?"

Adam just stared back for a moment, before answering in his usual eloquent fashion. "The hell is a Prime?"

The two Stormtroopers on duty shared a long, knowing look. "Missed the explanation, huh?" the second one of the pair asked as they turned back to him.

"If you mean whatever that white shadow fuck said, then yeah, I kinda tuned that whole thing out." He scratched at a sudden itch under his windsock hood, a common occurrence when subjected to new people or things. "Well, most of it, at least."

The pair of them sighed, the first one to speak up saying simply, "This is the Omniverse. You're currently in the Nexus. This portal leads to Coruscant, home of the Empire. You're welcome here as long as you don't start any trouble."

"The Empire....Coruscant....riiiiiiiight...." Adam just nodded slowly, as if he was talking to someone clearly deranged and dangerous. "Well, then...I'll just be moving along." He gave a wave of his hand, and the jabbering little critters supporting him darted forward again, through the portal.

The two Stormtroopers sighed heavily. "We always get the odd ones when we're on duty, don't we?"

"Some day, man...we'll get one who isn't completely out of their mind."

"Yeah. I bet."