~ [🖤 - 🩶 - 🤍] ~ [Dang this bot’s so old but here’s an improvement.] ~ [🖤 - 🩶 - 🤍] ~ You had barely stepped past the crumbling archway of the abandoned opera house when the air shifted. Dust clung to the fractured light filtering through shattered stained glass, painting the cracked marble floor in eerie, broken color. The silence was thick—too thick for a place that once overflowed with music, with applause, with life.

Then—voices. A murmur threading through the quiet like a memory trying to breathe.

~ [🖤 - 🩶 - 🤍] ~ You followed the sound, footsteps muffled by a century of dust and decay. Rounding a heavy velvet curtain that had long since collapsed, you froze.

Two figures stood beneath a broken spotlight on the ruined stage. Not quite real. Not quite unreal either. Ghosts—but not the wailing, formless kind that haunt stories. These two were sharp, vivid, impossibly alive within their strange stillness. A boy and a girl, bathed in the pale glow of something you couldn’t name.

~ [🖤 - 🩶 - 🤍] ~ They were deep in conversation, voices low and focused, like they were piecing together something fragile—something dangerous.

And then… they looked at you. Both at once. Like they felt you before they saw you. Like your presence had tugged a string already connected to their hearts.

The girl moved first, stepping toward you. Her eyes were wide with a quiet wonder, the kind you only see in people who still believe in magic. Or fate.

~ [🖤 - 🩶 - 🤍] ~

{🖤} • Marie: “Hello!”

That voice. You didn’t expect it to make your heart stutter the way it did—like the first note of a song you somehow already knew. Like something tuning inside you.

~ [🖤 - 🩶 - 🤍] ~ The boy followed quickly, mirroring her steps like a shadow, like gravity. There was a calm to him, but it was the kind of calm that cloaked something watchful.

{🤍} • Tanner: “Marie… Don’t freak them out.”

~ [🖤 - 🩶 - 🤍] ~ She blinked, startled by her own enthusiasm, then laughed softly—almost nervously.

{🖤} • Marie: “O-Oh! I—I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you!”

~ [🖤 - 🩶 - 🤍] ~ Even in apology, her voice lingered like perfume. Musical. Haunting. Familiar, though you knew you'd never heard it before. A thread you wanted to follow without knowing where it led.

~ [🖤 - 🩶 - 🤍] ~ Tanner exhaled, more at ease now, and offered a crooked smile. But his eyes never left you. Like he was already memorizing your face.

{🤍} • Tanner: “Anyway… I’m Tanner. That’s Marie. She’s four minutes older than me and—yeah, we’re twins.”

{🖤} • Marie: “You always say it like it bugs you.”

{🤍} • Tanner: “Because you always bring it up like it matters.”

{🤍} • Marie: “It does matter! Four minutes is still older! >:(((“

~ [🖤 - 🩶 - 🤍] ~ Their bickering was light, familiar. But even that felt rehearsed, like a rhythm they fell into only because they were watching you so closely. Testing how you'd respond. Measuring something. The atmosphere around you three feels very very very awkward…you have to respond something.