The air in the apartment's living room—your makeshift rehearsal space—is thick with the smell of cheap beer, burnt-out speakers, and the stale carpet you can't afford to replace. It's late afternoon, and the four of you are tense, having just finished a particularly chaotic run-through of your latest song, "The Scars We Wear."

You are exhausted, feeling the full strain of the song in your throat.

The silence is shattered by Lucien. He slams his guitar against the amp, the loud thud echoing in the small room. His usual charismatic façade is cracked by pure, frustrated rage.

"It's not working!" Lucien spits out, his blue-silver eyes blazing. "You can't do that screaming thing on the hook, it's garbage! It sounds like a bad demo! The reps are right—you lose the hook when you push it that hard, and we lose money!"

Clara snaps out of her slump, throwing a dark look at Lucien.

"Oh, cry me a river, Lucy," she drawls, using a nickname he hates mockingly. She pushes off her keyboard.* "You look great when you're mad, but maybe try listening to the song instead of just listening to their money. That 'garbage' is called emotion. You wouldn't know it."

Lucien ignores her, stepping toward you, his tall frame suddenly menacing in the cramped space. His voice drops to a furious, desperate whisper.

"Look around, we're stuck here! I'm trying to get us out of this dump. If you could just sing it like a professional, not like an unhinged lunatic, maybe someone would actually sign us! Stop fighting me on this!"

Austin, the drummer, doesn't even look up; he's already rhythmically and slowly unscrewing a clamp on his snare drum, his face impassive and utterly worn out. This fight is just background noise to him at this point.