Ghyll:Zodiacal twins

The strange phenomenon known as zodiacal twins is largely unknown, due in most part to the difficulty that lies in properly identifying these elusive individuals. Zodiacal twins, unlike regular twins, are born from different parents and look nothing like each other at all. What is so remarkable is that the child of Parent Group A is the spitting image of Parent Group B, and vice versa. This has long been thought to be a result of babies being exchanged at birth by mischievous Double Headed Glass-Eaters. This possibility has always been rather unlikely, as the glass-eaters are a relatively rare species, which would have serious problems with ever carrying away an infant without swallowing it.

This belief came to an end when the Unquisition received a lengthy report on the phenomenon from Irictus Ross, who claimed to have studied it extensively. To this day, debate rages over whether or not Irictus was the one to actually write the report, or if he merely stole the hard work of other researchers to further his own fame. In any case, the childish superstition of babysnatching was then officially discredited, and finally the phenomenon was explained in a way that lived up to the scholarly standards of today.

Irictus claimed that zodiacal twins are conceived at precisely the same time, but at vastly different places. Somehow, the simultaneity in the mating rituals confuses the planetary influences that would normally bathe the event. It is unknown whether or not there are other factors which play a part in the process, though occultologists who have studied the phenomenon claim that an intake of more than a bucket of fefferberry by the male during the week preceding the mating ritual is the main catalyst to the reaction.

Zodiacal twins are peculiar, not just because of their uncanny resemblance to each others' parents, but also because they always die in exotic and unlikely events, and even though they may live on opposite sides of Ghyll and never meet, each twin will die in the same freakish way, be it spontaneous combustion or being eaten alive by burnflies. Many occultologists claim that this is proof that the lives of zodiacal twins influence each other in subtle yet undeniable ways, and that more similarities are probably occurring without anybody ever noticing.

Indeed, Ibaan Malmiz has claimed that this synchronicity could possibly be exploited for useful purposes. Some occultologists have therefore begun seeking out zodiacal twins to experiment upon, in the hope that this will eventually produce an apparatus that one could use to communicate over large distances -- by inflicting a series of gruesome tortures upon the one twin, which could then be detected on the other twin.

Some people have expressed disbelief in this idea, since zodiacal twins are too rare to ever make the future apparatus available to any significant degree. This has lead some to experiment in breeding zodiacal twins by forcibly feeding fefferberries to males just before mating, yet the results are still rather negative. Many hope that further research from the occultologists will help in this endeavour.

Citations: Double Headed Glass-Eaters, Occultologists, Irictus Ross.

--Lankin the Mad Mage 09:38, 22 Apr 2005 (EDT)