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Once upon a time, as all stories go, two kingdoms found themselves at war with one another.
After the war ended, the kingdoms made a peace treaty: the heirs to each kingdom’s throne would marry one another. As fate happens, each kingdom produced a heir, and two princesses. It was said this foretold a ominous fate for their eventual marriage, for they would be raised much alike. Their behavior and mannerisms would be too similar, it was said. They could not marry until such concerns were dispelled. So one of the princesses was sent far away to live with one of her family relatives, so that both princesses would grow much apart in demeanor.
Sometime later when both had grown into young women, Sirius of the Symboli Family decided to head abroad.
It was a decision she made to “broaden her horizons,” so to speak, and much of her family had already done the same, but her mother and father fretted over her anyways. She chose a distant place, where she heard many aristocratic families had been once, and coincidentally was filled with a lot of beautiful women. She would go fishing there, she would stand at the billiards all day long, she would take up all sorts of time in the spa, and most importantly, there would be so many beautiful women surrounding her, she probably wouldn’t think straight.
Sirius thought all this on the plane ride there, and through the airport gates, and into the hotel with her luggage rolling behind her. She was finally snapped out of her reverie when she began unpacking everything from her suitcase in her room, and upon making her way to the hotel stairwell and bracing herself to run down, she found herself trawling behind a oddly dressed woman in a beanie. Before Sirius knew it, she heard the door slam open and watched the woman fling herself down the stairwell, with a series of loud thuds following. She felt herself stiffening for a second, before retaining her composure and running down the steps to see if the woman was alright. She heard another thud just before reaching the final stairwell, and when she arrived at the last step, the woman was nowhere to be found.
Sirius thought nothing of the incident afterwards until she found herself near a casino squat in the middle of the city. It was the ideal place to squander a whole lot of money, and she had just the right finances to do so. The glamorous interior was just as she’d imagined it, and she spent most of the day wandering from table to table, playing every game she could get her hands on. One of the final tables she played at was a poker table, and it was dominated by a sharply dressed woman, her green suit and well-groomed looks a sharp contrast to the uncanny resemblance she bore to the beanie-capped woman Sirius had seen the hours previous. During the game all such thoughts was pushed aside, for Sirius had kept losing more and more of her earnings to the green-suited woman, who introduced herself as “Nakayama Festa.”
After a long day Sirius found herself standing in the hallway leading to her hotel room, staring at the dark silhouette of the beanie-capped woman trying to kick her door down. Correction: it was the door to the woman’s room, directly next to Sirius’ room, and Sirius only realized when she was a couple of feet away, just about to push the woman aside.
The woman kept muttering variations of “Darn! Why doesn’t this keycard work?” to herself, before noticing Sirius looking pointedly at her, and finally she grumbled something unintelligible to Sirius and pressed the keycard to the door one more time. There was a faint “ding!” sound and a click, and when the woman pushed down the door handle she felt it swing all the way inside, nearly dragging her with it. One foot in the door later, she flashed a thumbs up to Sirius, to compliment a lopsided smirk. It was a strangely brilliant smirk and it reminded Sirius too much of the smirk Nakayama Festa kept flashing at Sirius whenever she took another pile of Sirius’ earnings, complete with the rapidly encroaching flush that rose on Sirius’ face.
Sirius had known of the Gold Kingdom’s heir that she would marry someday, but the identity was kept so well-hidden from her, that she was unaware the Gold Family’s heir was another princess. It wasn’t until she heard —during a moment of gossip — the sentence slip from her cousin Rudolf’s mouth: the heir you will be marrying is another princess. But Rudolf went clam-lipped after that, refusing to tell Sirius just who she was.
“All you have to know is that she doesn’t live in the Gold Kingdom anymore,” Rudolf said, and that was final.
The next day, Sirius bumped into the beanie-capped woman as they were getting breakfast, and there was no smirk given, only a mysterious smile.
“I suppose you’re just escaping the marriage at this point, miss Symboli,” the woman said, in-between a mouthful of soup. Before Sirius could make a flustered reply, the woman continued, “Oh, I know who you are. And so does the rest of this hotel, I suppose. You’re always on the tabloid headlines.”
“I’m aware,” Sirius said, trying to keep her composure. “Alright, but the gossip rags have run their mouths quite enough. I’m not here to escape a marriage or whatever it is they’re saying —”
She was cut off by the woman’s hasty wave of her arm. “You don’t have to justify anything.”
And suddenly there was a curious look in the woman’s eye. A dark, knowing look. Sirius found herself pressing her back against the chair she was sitting in. The woman stood up, holding her bowl of soup, and walked past Sirius. As she did so, she leaned in close, and whispered, “Let’s run away together, okay? See you at the tables tonight, doll.”