This is the linkback story for the December Giraffe Call (and on LJ). If you have linked back to the giraffe call, please leave a note here to receive your additional 50 words.

Names from Fourteen Minutes

In the nation of Quottes in the time of the seventeenth ruler, the birth of twins one male and one female, was believed to be a horrible omen.

Two twins of the up-swing gender lent power to their gender. Two twins of the down-swing could be bartered, sold, or married off for even more power. But fraternal twins, a boy and girl brought into the world at the same time, stood athwart the scales and, it was said, would through everything out of balance. Their chaos gods, in this nation beneath the Quoist Mountains, were fraternal twins.

So when it was that, in the seventeenth year of the reign of the seventeenth ruler, the Queen gave birth to one boy and one girl in one pregnancy, the nation was reasonably alarmed. As went the ruler’s children, so went the nation. And when every other pregnancy that year yielded the same…

…the nation was reasonably concerned. If a royal pair of fraternal twins were a bad omen, an entire nation of such was just about enough to tip the scales on its own.

The upward gender had not been in power for that long, and the downward gender were not ready, not yet, to take back their scepter. It was not time for a reorganization, not yet!

The wise and the clever and the powerful put their heads together, and together, they created a plan. The whole nation, every new parent, came together to fool the scales and hold the status quo.

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