The Twins

The bastard younger sisters of the Baron Richmond. They enjoy murder, torture, and light incest.<ref>They sat shoulder to shoulder, one with a hand in the other’s lap, caressing, the other with a hand at her sister’s chin, tracing the bottom lip with a gloved finger.  Both were leaning forward in the chairs that had been set down for them for a view, but not yet standing or intruding.

In unison, their eyes flicked up at the Duke.  In unison, they smiled, hands going down to their own laps as if they were small children that had been caught doing something naughty.

He didn’t particularly care.  In fact, he would rather they kept to such things if it kept them amused.  Their other form of amusement involved payments to families and quiet threats to ensure those families didn’t ask any questions about the whereabouts of their loved ones. - Excerpt from Interlude 8.x</ref>

Actually there are four of them; the older Twins are hollow and split open to let the younger twins leap out, like wolverines, or bloodhounds, to hunt.

Personalities

Typical sociopathic nobles.

The group has a private language between them, with only their brother understanding it.

Reputation

They are infamous, the archetypal example of mad nobles.<ref>The twins. The words were akin to a bell in Gordon’s memory.

Gordon had heard of the twins. To be exact, he’d heard about them in the context of the mad nobles. On the flip side, mention of mad nobles as a general topic invariably meant mention of the twins. - Excerpt from Interlude 7.x</ref> If not for their brother's intervention, they would likely have died a long time ago.<ref>He moved with a retinue, as if he wasn’t imposing enough on his own. On either side of him were the twins. His bastard sisters. I had nothing against bastards, I was probably one myself, but for the nobles, those things mattered. The Baron Richmond was disenfranchised by virtue of his lower status. Too powerful to deal with the common people on any level, too low in status to wield any meaningful power. The bastard twins were below him in status. Were it not for their brother’s continued hard work, they might have found an early grave to assassins or other subtleties.

They were beautiful, I had to admit, wrapped in heavy coats, though theirs had albino wolf pelts around their otherwise bare shoulders, and were a stark, startling white. Pale skin, pale fur, and white cloth that surrounded them and with the bare shoulders, suggested they weren’t even dressed beneath the overcoats.

They reminded me of Helen, if I imagined a Helen with more bloodlust, and the inability or an unwillingness to suppress it. Their hands were all over their brother. - Excerpt from Counting Sheep 9.3</ref>

Appearance & Abilities

As is expected for a noble The twins appear as ivory-skinned beauties<ref name=9.4e1>I turned my head to look, and saw her looking down at me from her relatively towering height.  All ivory skin.  To call it pale would have been a misnomer.  She was statuesque, - Excerpt from Counting Sheep 9.4</ref>, with straight blonde hair.<ref>The Baronets were identical in a way twins and even clones rarely were, each in old fashioned white gowns with fur collars, with pale, straight blond hair. - Excerpt from Interlude 8.x</ref> A golden seam runs down their bodies where they split apart to release their younger sister.<ref name=9.4e2>like the weaving cut of a jigsaw puzzle or a snake entwining her body, I could see a thread of gold.  It moved as she did, more a liquid vein than something more serious, tracing a corkscrew path down each arm, around her back, down one shoulder, and reaching down to short-trimmed pubic hair, before breaking apart to spiral down each leg.

As she moved, the line, narrow as it was, broke in two.  The two halves of her body separated.  Her breast seemed to leap out and down, before wrenching itself to one side, the skull within stretched against skin as it pulled to one side, opening its jaw wide.  Half of a head of wet golden hair draped out and down to cover the nipple.

The front of the breast was the back of the creature’s head, and that breast, however soft it might have looked, was probably hard to the touch.  Weighing no more than eighty pounds, the creature pulled away from the Twin, leaving her incomplete, nearly half of her body carved away with her none the worse for wear.  Half of the flesh of her legs and feet, half of the flesh of her arms, and much of her chest cavity didn’t exist.  It had simply been a spot for this thing to nestle into, a fit with but one seam.- Excerpt from Counting Sheep 9.4 </ref> The younger twins are small, charcoal skinned, gargoyle-like, claws and eye sockets, with no speech and incongruous gold hair. <ref name=9.4e3>...the thing reached into the void at one side of her body, grabbing hold of her spine, and withdrew two spikes of metal that ran parallel to it.  Like the claws of a praying mantis, the spikes were pointed at one end, sharp-edged, and had knobs of bone at the fatter end.  The creature that had pulled away pressed the ends of its upper limbs into the knobs until something clicked in a very solid way.  Three fingers were now at the ‘elbow’ of a long limb, the spike extending the rest of the way.  It moved on all fours, spikes against the ground.  It was twisted, gnarled, hunched over at the shoulders, a skeletal gargoyle charcoal in color with strips of ivory flesh winding around it, giving it form and the ability to move, crowned by long golden hair that seemed out of place on the figure, draping one side of its face and running down its back.
[...]
The eyes, if there were any, were small and dark, in eye sockets filled with shadow.  No expressions beyond mouth opening and mouth closing, a unique language of gurgles and hisses.  Not social creatures.

They were killing machines.  Fast, strong, with explosive strength. - Excerpt from Counting Sheep 9.4</ref> They have explosive but short-lived strength. <ref name=9.4e4>The Duke was my barometer, the yardstick by which I measured and made guesses about the nobles’ behavior.  Holding the Richmond Twins against him as a comparison, something rang as off about their impatience, wanting to find the twins sooner than later.

Impatience suggested I was right.  That the younger twins couldn’t be out and about for too long before they needed sustenance, rest, and the security of nestling into their elder sisters.

There was a window of opportunity here.  Within a few minutes, maybe five, but no more than fifteen, the killing spree would end, and so would the elder twins’ patience.  But with the younger twins called back and put away to rest. - Excerpt from Counting Sheep 9.4</ref> The little ones need their sisters as a life support system.

References

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