Geminites
A Lakelands setting post
Not many years after the Arrival, an Unbound named the Hallowed Instar gathered a small team of scientists in an Illinois university laboratory and empowered them to experiment with the human genome. In particular, the Hallowed Instar encouraged them to create radically novel species of humanoid, designed to solve a set of problems it put before them. No one knows what those problems were. Neither does anyone know whether the geminites were counted as a success. The first generation, a few thousand strong, was released from the laboratories into Illinois southwest of Chicago about 80 years ago, and several other waves emerged over the following two decades, all apparently adults in their twenties at time of release. Now, a few generations later, they have settlements scattered throughout the Lakelands, and have districts in several of the region’s city-states.
Source: Kurt Komoda, 2009.
Geminites take their name from the Latin word gemini, the plural form of the adjective for “twin.” Similarly, they are sometimes also called twinfolk. There are two other names for them, used more commonly abroad: aristophaneans, from the Greek philosopher Plato's Symposium, in which the character Aristophanes posits primordial doubled humans; and cainites, from the Kabbalistic text called The Zohar, in which Cain's descendents are cursed with two heads. The geminites themselves prefer geminites or twinfolk, but all of these names refer to the same anatomical facts: each pair of siblings is identical and dicephalic, meaning they are born conjoined with a single torso from the shoulders down. Twins share motor control and physical sensation of their trunk and limbs, but each can only move and feel their own neck and head. In all other respects, they are physically indistinguishable from mundane humans.
Popular belief has it that geminite twins can communicate with each other psychically. Although some advanced geminite occultists might have developed this ability, that belief is overwhelmingly false. Having grown up with each other for every minute of their lives, geminites know their twins better than any mundane human of the same age is likely to know anyone, which means they're better able to anticipate each other’s responses and they can communicate with each other far more efficiently than most people can. Nonetheless, they are different people with separate minds, and so barring extraordinary psychic ability no geminite can know with certainty what their sibling is thinking, especially because the twins have a natural tendency to individuate.
As a people they are only a few generations old, so the geminites are still developing a distinct culture. Their folkways are still mostly derived from that of mundane humans, from whom they have been learning, and with whom they have been interacting, since they first appeared in the Lakelands. Moreover, the geminites are clearly descended from those humans, and left that Illinois university speaking English and possessed of some American cultural understanding. However, they have a less emotional connection to humanity's cultural patrimony, in that they do not really identify with it or quite see themselves reflected in it, and they have been working out norms and habits suitable a people made exclusively of conjoined twins.
Overall, geminite society is much less individualistic than their mundane human neighbours and pre-Arrival North American culture. First of all, many geminite-majority settlements have a weak view of personal property, where it is fine to borrow a neighbour's things without asking so long as they are returned in good condition, and where the right to roam is observed. Second, and more notably, conflict between twins is taboo, at least in public. They give this taboo a positive name: concord. (It's not, however, taboo for a geminite to argue with a person to whom they aren't conjoined.) Not all communities observe concord to the same degree, but it is a rare pair of geminites who are willing to quarrel in front of others. Generally speaking, even a polite difference of opinion between twins is considered embarrassing if others can see it, while an actual argument is worse, competition over movement of their body is truly scandalous, and a physical altercation between them is worst of all and is nearly unheard of among adults. Children are given more leeway, but as they age they are supposed to get better at agreeing – or at least keeping their conflicts hidden. Learning to do this can be difficult, especially as many adults won't even openly acknowledge, let alone discuss, the conflicts they have with their sibling; however, geminites have developed many strategies to partition decisions or negotiate silently. Geminite children learn these from parents, aunts and uncles, older siblings, and the plays called zanies. Filled with stock characters with stock conflicts, zanies violate concord in nearly every imaginable way. Some geminite moralists therefore condemn the plays, but so far they've been ignored.
Concord is kept most strictly the closer one gets to the geminites' origins in Illinois, and is often less strictly kept farther away, where subsequent generations of geminites settled new towns or neighbourhoods that they might find less restrictive. These new communities are still only somewhat less restrictive, however: nearly all geminites care about concord to some degree.1 Of course, as with all taboos, no one will keep it successfully all the time, and there will always be people who flout it. Occasional lapses will not ruin anyone's life, though they might be the subject of gossip for years to come. Pairs of geminites who regularly can't or won't get along in public, however, are ostracized; these siblings might become hermits, move to a non-geminite community, take up a life on the road, or turn bandit.2
Geminite material culture usually resembles that of nearby mundane humans, but they have some distinctives. In clothing, twinfolk avoid collared shirts and prefer single wide necklines, though they might have separate necklines for each twin on a hooded garment, to allow for two hoods. However, some geminite clothing leaves the shoulders bare and fastens between their necks. The twinfolk have also inherited certain predilections that they picked up in early generations: dormitory living; honeybees, Chinese geese, and Lacaune sheep; custards, both sweet and savoury; pickled eggs, fish, and vegetables in the winter; glaive- or naginata-like polearms for home defense; iklwa-like blades for personal defense. Not all of these commonalities will appear in a geminite community, but many of them likely will.
Twinfolk tend to name their children for virtues or for plants and other natural phenomena, though regular human names are not uncommon either. Many took surnames from the places in Illinois where they first turned up or from the scientific nomenclature of a plant or animal significant to them. For example, the best known geminite twins are probably the travel guide authors Amity and Verity Commelina, whose family name is the genus of dayflowers.
Sample Geminite Communities
Biddenden
Biddenden is surrounded by its llama and sheep farms in what was once Manitowoc County, Wisconsin. It is populated almost exclusively by geminites, with about a dozen mundane humans and a half dozen other sapient peoples scattered among its barracks-style housing. Biddenden is strict in its observance of concord, though some communities farther south are stricter yet. Not only is it rude for twins to express friendly disagreement in public, but it's expected (realistically or not) that twins won't argue much in private, either. Instead, siblings try to build a joint persona according to which both act, privately negotiating and renegotiating this persona as need be. That being said, conflict is inevitable, and the custom is for twins to "go for a quiet swim" when they can't keep it in any longer; any shouting heard near the secluded waterhole that locals call the Yelling Pool is politely ignored.3 Property, except for some personal effects, is held in common in socialist Biddenden and is managed by an elected committee. Twins vote separately in these elections, but otherwise Biddenden law does not typically treat siblings as individuals. They must enter into contracts together, meaning that each pair of twins also marries as a unit. Ordinarily geminite twins will marry another pair, but it has happened on occasion that two twinfolk have wed a single non-geminite. (Locals therefore usually overlook a little discrete adultery when one twin is in a marriage they would not have chosen for themselves.) Twins are also punished for infractions together. Singleton outsiders don't often expect this state of affairs, but Biddenden's geminites don't believe it makes much sense to legally distinguish between twins in most cases, even if they of course insist that twins are morally distinct. Outsiders are often also surprised by the llama-wool pushmi-pullyu dolls and the Biddenden cakes available for visitors to purchase, since these seem tacky; the tourist items are indeed hotly contested among residents, but so far they remain in production.
Castor
About two-thirds of the logging town of Castor are geminites; most of the non-geminites are new hominids. Those familiar with Castor tend to associate it with its pickled fish, but its economy is centred on lumber. Felling trees and planing logs are noisy, dangerous tasks, and life on the shores of Stoney Lake is not easy. Although the land, lumber, and mills are held in common and administered by the Property Council, other forms of property are privately owned, by twins together or individually. Furthermore, a geminite is not bound by a contract their sibling signs. Each twin also marries individually, though marriage is somewhat rarer in Castor than it is in most other places and, in part through the new hominid's influence, polygamy is accepted. As a consequence the town's legal code is complex, having built up common law provisions for various competing claims and obligations. Most sentences are nonetheless applied to each pair of twins as a unit. This often strikes outsiders as unfair or inconsistent, but most residents consider it an inevitable consequence of geminite biology. Unlike in towns farther to the south and west, twins don't violate concord if they disagree in public, though protracted arguments must still be conducted quietly and in private, and struggle for physical control for any length of time is shameful regardless of the circumstances. Precisely how twins adjudicate their conflicts is left up to individual pairs, but it is common for twins to either divide up kinds of decisions (spending decisions to one twin, cooking decisions to the other) or days of the week between them. Games taught to children usually emphasize cooperation between siblings, but the adult siblings often play checkers against each other, in addition to more cooperative games. Of course, children also make their own games that they play when they think the grown-ups aren't looking and, in most of these, conflict between twins is central.
Silvercreek
New Guelph has a small geminite population among a mundane human majority. The twinfolk mostly live in apartments in the Silvercreek neighbourhood of New Guelph, working in the city's apiaries, its wastewater plant, or its dye- and ink-making industries. A few years ago, a group of geminites secured the right to a certain dark blue dye, and they freely license that pigment out to all their people.4 Unlike many larger mundane human towns and cities, which recognize geminites as full individuals, New Guelph law treats each pair of twins as a single person. They own property together and sign contracts together (and one twin can sign for both of them); they must share a spouse and also a ballot in municipal elections. Most geminites consider this terribly unjust. Perhaps because New Guelph twinfolk are denied individuality even while they live alongside singletons, theirs is the most individualistic geminite subculture in the Lakelands, outside certain raider gangs. For instance, reasonable arguments between twins aren't considered more taboo than arguments between any two adults. Not even brief competition over the movement of their body is considered a breach of concord, so long as the twins are under thirty and the struggle does not last more than a few seconds. (Displays of anger toward each other, more prolonged struggle, and actual fisticuffs are all still taboo.) Beyond that, geminite siblings are much more likely to style their hair differently and apply different makeup, insofar as they have resources for makeup at all. Lately a few geminites have tried to take their twins to court, hoping to force the city to recognize them as separate people. For now the law remains the same, however, and geminite siblings must still cooperate in all financial, matrimonial, and political affairs.
Sample Geminites
Haven and Liberty Braidwood
High Concept: Chaplains from a Razed Village
Trouble Aspect: Ridden by the Green-Eyed Monster
Peoples Aspect: Geminites
Other: Apprentice Ghost-Hunters
Other: Handy with a Virge
Other: Two Flavours of Melancholy
Top Skills: Antiquities, Weirdness, Will
Haven and Liberty's mothers raised them to be churchgoers, like most other people in the little Anglican village where they grew up. Libby was pious, but Haven took more after their fathers. Prone to being morbid, she was fascinated when her fathers eventually revealed their Spiritualist beliefs with her and she took up the practice herself. As they grew, the girls became uncomfortable with each others' paths. Understanding that in their village it would be a breach of concord just for them to follow different religions, the sisters spent many an unhappy private hour trying to convert one another. As teens, however, they agreed that they wanted to apprentice to the local exorcists, who took them on. The twins were nineteen when all this was cut short: a gang of pillaging ogre-folk sacked and slaughtered the village. Libby and Haven were among the few survivors, and they moved in with their fathers' family in Tricity. There they trained to join the Chaplaincy, the abjurer-medics who assist Tricity's defenders and enforcers. Although they consistently met the athletic and spiritual benchmarks, after a few years they realized they would never be competent enough medics. Now they advertise their services as freelance adventuring chaplains, Haven as a Spiritualist medium and Libby a lay Christian exorcist.
Haven and Liberty are tall, pallid, and brunette, and neither is known for smiling. They have taken the Tricity custom of wearing aprons, preferring green ones that match their eyes. Under these they tend to wear a loose dress that allows freedom of movement. Under that they've had their family tree tattooed on their back, another Tricity custom they adopted. Each sister has her own book of rites, which they keep bound in leather and hooked on their belt. When on the road, they carry for self-defense a sturdy brass-topped virge that Libby rescued from the wreck of her childhood church. They rarely break concord and they are attentive, compassionate conversationalists, though sometimes one or the other will betray a bitterness about all they have lost that others still seem to have.
As always for my Lakelands posts, everything in this post is provisional and subject to change.
If you wish to use Colin Woodard's American nations, as I discussed in my discussion of mundane humans, then geminites will also be influenced by these cultures. The twins are always much less willing to show conflict with each other than the surrounding culture generally allows, but only relatively so. For example, if Woodard is correct, New Netherland culture values healthy but nonviolent competition in the marketplace of ideas, so New Netherlands geminites might be more comfortable with friendly debate between siblings than other geminites are, though still less comfortable than non-geminites in the same New Netherlands settlement. By the same token, Greater Appalachian geminites might not ostracize siblings who occasionally compete for physical control of their body, though it would still strike them as childish or uncouth.↩
Besides just seeming plausible to me, the goal of this taboo is to reduce the amount of time geminite PCs squabble at the table. Some of the interest of these characters should be in how they manage their disagreements privately. However, not all players will want to observe concord quite as strictly as I've described; fortunately for them, geminites who struggle to get along are overrepresented among adventurers.↩
The Yelling Pool is one of the details I invented for the demogorgonians in my main D&D campaign, as I discussed in last week's post – though there it is a Yelling Rock.↩
New Guelph observes strict sumptuary laws: different families, guilds, military groups, and neighbourhoods hold the exclusive right to use certain dyes.↩