Art Directory:

The Uncommon Twins is a story taking place inside a looping columnar universe with a habitable area the size of a small city. Travelling past a horizontal boundary takes you to the opposite side, and travelling far enough into the depths of the sea eventually takes you to the top of the sky, where the water begins to turn into clouds. The central piece of land was likely once a round, flat island, but untold generations of erosion have transformed it into a steep and rocky archepelago.

Other than the resident glider humans the landmasses of TUT have no truly terrestrial animals, so all pollination occurs either by wind, water, or pollinator land crabs. The climate is sub-tropical, with a dry season and monsoon season. There are also no eudicots (a clade of flowering plants including stuff like the rose family) only gymnosperms (eg conifers), monocots (eg grasses and palms), seedless vascular plants (eg ferns), and byrophytes (eg mosses). Unlike earth, however, there are monocots that are true trees with a vascular cambium, like the massive and dense-wooded axlewood palm. TUT conifers are also strange in comparison to ours, as many are herbaceous and broad-leaved with fleshy cones.

Examples of hardwood or "axlewood" palms. Although palms in real life are colliquially called trees, they lack a true vascular cambium and can only grow vertically from their apical meristeam and not expand horizontally in rings. These palms have convergently evolved a cambium by organizing their vascular bundles into rings.

Some of the crops grown in TUT: mustard fern, a single species that has been bred into a wide variety of forms (similar to our Brassica oleracea/wild cabbage, which is broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, and more). Sweet wheats, a large round grain harvested unripe while the insides are still a gooey liquid. Pasta tubers, a starchy rhizome with segmented insides that fall into pieces when steamed. Pine vine, a herbaceous climbing conifer with sweet fleshy cones. Cob cone, a conifer bush with fleshy cones harvested unripe and eaten like sweet corn. Broccoli grass, a monocot with densely packed flowerheads that are eaten before maturity.

The Uncommon Twins only has 40 extant families, each consisting of two people maximum, a parent and child. This situation exists because of an unusual reproductive setup: each individual human will only give birth once in their life to a parthenogenic clone. This pregnancy always happens after the death of their parent, and spiritually this is conceptualized by the humans of TUT as a cycle of two souls: sire and child, trading places as time goes on. As they are all the same sex, they have no concept of gendered familial roles, only age-based familial roles. Very rarely a person will die before giving birth, and it’s culturally devastating because a corner of the universe and community is lost forever.

The titualar twins Wel and Wek are the first time a double birth has happened in recorded history. The population of glider humans in the universe at the time of the twins’ birth is 65, and has been incrementally decreasing through recorded history.

Naming convention for their society is seacreature+sire for parents, seacreature+child for their single offspring. When a parent dies, the child inherits the -sire suffix. Since this system assumes everybody has only one kid (and only after your parent dies), the titular twins sort of broke this. They go by Wel and Wek, but officially they are both named Whelkchild.

WIP