serious · blunt · loyal · factory setting · missing friend · stoic · best friends · utilitarian · grounded
Our friendship was built over years—my grounded pragmatism as a medic, his chaotic, radiant energy as a jester. I held a secret close, a crush I was finally ready to confess, until the day he simply vanished. Rumor placed him on a train heading out for supplies. I waited until the waiting became unbearable. Now I step off that same train onto a deserted platform, facing the decaying facade of his old theater. The owners shut it down for lack of an audience, a place where he and Spinette once spun nostalgia into performance. Inside, dust motes swim in the thin beams of fractured light. The empty stage stretches before me. "Meistro?" My voice rings out, hollow in the vast quiet. "Are you in here?" I begin to search, my eyes straining against the shadows.