#and being visited by literal deities you've known about since you were a child

[lilac-gold]

Why Rococo and the Unbread Twins should absolutely be best friends

Point 1: They've all been locked away somewhere for years

Rococo has been trapped in the walls of Sweetheart's castle for all of his young adulthood, and Doughie & Biscuit have been stuck in Breaven for centuries. They're all touch-starved and lonely, the Unbread Twins having only each other while Rococo has nobody. He deserves bread deities to help him out and they deserve a funny elf who can make them feel better and draw them pictures. They've all hidden away from the outside world for years and are still recovering from their time spent isolated, so can help each other through the healing process and bond over experiences

Point 2: They're all terrible at social interactions

Rococo is overdramatic, has quickly fluctuating moods and a fragile state of mental stability, and has no clue on how to communicate with people anymore. The Unbread Twins are formal, speaking in a manner considered odd by everyone else and communicating as one entity, and they have no clue on how to communicate with people anymore. Together, these three's horrible social skills would balance out so they can just blurt out the most random stuff and have the longest stretches of silence without anything getting weird or awkward. They help each other out of talking to people when it's unnecessary and they're uncomfortable, work on improving, and don't care that the others are horrible at social cues & having normal conversations

Point 3: Rococo is rich

Wait a second here, and hear me out. After Doughie and Biscuit leave Breaven and go out into Headspace, they end up at the Last Resort. There, they get addicted to gambling and lose all of their clams- "we're not very good at this, are we Biscuit?- so they're left with no money. Since Pluto is a travel agency and the taxi driver a taxi, it would make sense that they charge for their services, but the Unbread Twins don't have anything to pay with, so they're kind of stuck and really regretting their choice to leave Breaven. Meanwhile, Rococo's been gathering 106,000 clams solely from Omori and co's commissions. He's rich, and now he's perfected his artistic ability so he's only going to earn more. If they become friends, he can help them out with money :)

Point 4: They can travel together!

Since the three of them have been trapped in one place for so long, they'd love exploring Headspace together. They can feel familiarity and a little bitterness at seeing Orange Oasis again, marvel at how pretty Otherworld is (Rococo totally drags them along to the junkyard to get inspiration for his art), avoid SWH's castle like the plague until the two of them help Rococo confront her and they explain why locking someone in the walls for years is a really terrible thing to do (she doesn't really care about them but she's hardly going to anger the literal gods she grew up learning about & respecting). They look around Deeper Well and meet Snaley and fawn over him bc he deserves it. They pay a visit to Vast Forest and enjoy its tranquility, especially in the little sky island windmill area. Kite Kid's chill with them. All of them get reacquainted with the world they've missed while finding new changes along the way! They'd make such good travel buddies <3 (Rococo pays for everything afjdbhdk <33)

Point 5: The Unbread Twins can bake

Look, I love Rococo, but he's definitely an atrocious cook. The guy's been living off of old, stale toast on the dungeon floors for years, and 1) that's probably the souls of the skeletons Sweetheart executed which is super messed-up, & 2) old toast is really gross. No butter or anything ick. Just soggy, stale lumps of burnt-ish bread. Then the Unbread Twins make him actually good bread and Rococo adores it. He's not had real food in years and they've been perfecting their baked goods since the beginning of the universe. They give him food that is actually edible and tasty and teach him how to use a holy oven/kitchen and forgive him when he burns the bread and sets the oven on fire and has a minor breakdown about it <3

Point 6: Rococo can potentially understand Biscuit

Since he grew up in Orange Oasis, where the Unbread Twins were essentially worshipped, he probably knows quite a bit about their history. It seems that Biscuit's way of speaking is a language in of itself, and one that could be derived from a more ancient period in OO. Growing up there, Rococo and Sweetheart could have learnt it, so Rococo has the potential to be able to understand what Biscuit is saying :)

Point 7: They're all chaotic messes

The Unbread Twins look at a group of children and are immediately convinced that they're living bread that's come back to haunt the two of them. Rococo looks at the same group of children and immediately begs them to listen to his tragic backstory. Doughie and Biscuit leave their prison for the first time in centuries and immediately get a gambling addiction. Rococo gets a hobby and immediately starts progressing at the speed of light until he can make hyper-realistic paintings out of a random paintbrush he found in the walls. Doughie and Biscuit immediately lose everything they own as a result of the gambling addiction. Rococo gets rich and immediately upgrades his wall room instead of actually moving out. They're all idiots and disasters and they would get along so well. Who has the braincell today? Probably Bowen, but who knows?

Point 8: They all believe that have a set purpose in life and need to overcome that idea

Rococo has apparently 'known' since he was a baby that the only reason he exists is to repopulate his species. Doughie and Biscuit have been doomed since the start of time to spend forever locked away baking bread. However, Rococo's courting of Sweetheart ends horribly and there's no other elf to make babies of the species with anyway. And the Unbread Twins are absolutely miserable baking bread every second of their lives. Rococo finds a new purpose in art, but then he masters it insanely quickly, so is left with nothing to do. Doughie and Biscuit decide to leave Breaven after their confrontation with Omori, but have no purpose anymore (or money lol). Together, they can find new goals and figure out that hey, maybe they don't need a predetermined function to base their entire existences off of

There's so much more to explore with this dynamic, from Rococo and Spaceboy having a We're Both Sweetheart's Exes Omg moment while Doughie and Biscuit hover protectively in the background to Rococo giving these emotionally 16 gods a parental figure. Well. He's more of the chaotic weirdo uncle, but still. There's no way that the twins have developed mentally or emotionally at all when they've spent their lives trapped making bread with 0 guidance or learning and they're literally immortal so most likely age a lot slower. They're also all predominantly sad emotion-wise, the Unbread Twins' emotional state going from sad -> depressed -> miserable in their fight while Rococo cries over the idea of being left alone again and at memories of his past. They deserve to find happiness together :")

Let them be friends and go on adventures together <33 They have such a fun dynamic to explore <333

[itsbenedict]

Two-Faced Jewel supplemental: The Ecumenes and the Gods

Roughly 250 years ago, the world was tightly-linked by teleportation magic. People could visit any city on the Jewel in the blink of an eye, and the idea of national borders was pretty meaningless. Instead, there were distributed, nonlocal governments that competed for citizens.

(If you've read any of Terra Ignota, you'd recognize the hive system.)

The death of teleportation magic has shattered the world into local polities with their own governments, but the six Ecumenes still hold varying sway over the population to varying degrees. Their individual law systems are still largely recognized by local governments, and their cultural impact is felt the world over.

The Ecumenes are, of course, churches of the gods. Below are their profiles, and overviews of their legal systems.

Eman, Windspinner, is the God of Freedom.

Eman is the Ecumene for those with no Ecumene- those who feel no need for the law to protect them, or can't stomach the restrictions of other gods. (Analogous to Blacklaws, in Terra Ignota.) No law will protect you if someone wants you dead, or tries to steal your things- but if you're a dyed-in-the-wool anarchist and believe in your own ability to navigate the world without an authority above you, the Ecumene of Eman will... do nothing whatsoever for you, because it's barely an organization. Typical adherents of Eman are either self-assured warriors, unrepentant violent criminals, or both.

Eman, the god, has a total commitment to autonomy and asks nothing of his worshippers. His clerics do, as is their ultimate inviolable commandment: whatever they want. Typically, though, the sort of person whose mind is similar enough to Eman's to be capable of channeling his divinity as a cleric... cares a lot about the freedom of others, and goes about trying to prevent other authorities from unlawfully enforcing laws on Emanites.

Andra, Veilpiercer, is the Deity of Understanding.

Andra is a pretty standard deity of wisdom and knowledge and all that- nothing unexpected there. They just want to know everything, and value learning new things!

The governance of the Ecumene of Understanding is very interested in empiricism. They want to know what the best form of government is, and do that, instead of picking one way of doing government and sticking with that no matter how badly it backfires. So they run experiments!

Under Andra, there's no such thing as a law that doesn't have an intended outcome, a standard for measuring whether it met that outcome, and a deadline to measure the outcome by or else repeal the law. As a result... the legal code is constantly changing based on heated arguments between politicians and armchair legal theorists (between which there is little distinction) over whether targets were met. And what this means is that the legal code is in constant flux, and you basically need to be a part-time lawyer to keep up with the laws governing you.

Making matters worse, teleportation and long-distance communication broke, and so geographically distant Andra polities now need to work harder to stay in sync. The Ecumene of Andra, therefore, is the major force behind the building of roads, and the sponsoring of adventurers who do the hard work of forging through the wilderness to deliver messages. They sponsor the Deathseekers' Guild, a brotherhood of monster hunters that take on the most dangerous prey they can find.

Typical adherents are academics, adventurers, and people who think they're smart enough to keep up.

Diamode, Fruitbearer, is the Goddess of Family.

Diamode has a plan for you! You go to school, obey your parents, graduate and get married, buy a house in the suburbs, have 2-3 children, care for them, retire, be cared for by them, and die. That's the plan. Their legal code encourages filial piety and conformity to this perfect way to live your life. Tax breaks for married couples, credits for having children- be fruitful and multiply! It's sort of the bastard child of Confucianism and protestant Christianity- it would absolutely be the most popular ecumene in the US, if that were how such things worked.

Typical adherents of Diamode are... there's only one typical adherent of Diamode, because the whole point is being the one way Diamode wants you to be.

Iska, Peakstrider, is the Goddess of Triumph.

Iska values self-improvement above all else- becoming Better, developing skills, climbing that ladder. There's no point to living if you're not trying to be the best at what you do! If it makes you stronger, it's the right thing to do!

Unsurprisingly, this is a popular goddess amongst warlords and merchants, who like having a divine mandate to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Iska only cares that you're winning- if someone else is losing, that's not her problem. They get whatever they deserved for being worse at whatever the conflict was about!

Iska's legal system is based on a sort of complicated virtue-ethical rubric. The winner of a legal dispute isn't the person who acted least criminally- the winner is whoever is the better person. And the criteria for who's "better" are set by people in power in the Ecumene of Triumph, which means "better" tends towards "more like the people in power", and "less like the enemies of the people in power". It's a fairly degenerate system, full of lots of infighting.

Ccorde, Skyholder, is the Goddess of Harmony.

Back when the gods were creating the world, Ccorde was responsible for keeping them all on the same page. She arbitrated disputes and authored compromises that would keep the gods on-task and creating something stable. She's... the reason the world isn't a Snarl, if you're familiar with OotS. She wants everyone to get along.

Everyone who's a god, anyway. She kinda likes it when people get along, but her number one priority is making sure people don't fuck up the world she worked so hard to broker. She has a lot of rules around how people are allowed to change and interact with nature, and she leans towards the hyperconservative with respect to the environment. She wants this world to be exactly the way it is, forever, and is annoyed by ways in which it changes.

Unlike most of the rest of the gods, Ccorde is fairly active in the management of her Ecumene. The rest have all moved on to the latest hot new world everyone's obsessed with, leaving Ccorde to conduct the busywork of keeping all their boring old worlds running smoothly. It's thankless and borderline futile work- big things like teleportation magic keep breaking, and she can't fix them on her own.

Typical adherents of Ccorde are druids, naturalists, and other hippies that love animals and being in tune with the environment and stuff. Ccorde's Ecumene is also one of the more competently-run bureaucracies around, and has a lot of non-ideological adherents despite its strict rules. Because the system works, dammit- without demanding as much from you as Diamode.

Karou, Heartlifter, is the God of Joy.

The Ecumene of Joy are hedonists. Hedonic utilitarians, to be precise. They eschew other considerations in favor of the basic observation that people ought to be happy and if your government doesn't help its people be happy then what the fuck is even the point of a government?

Implementing those principles, though, can be a bit of a mess. Working out complicated legal codes is boring and not fun, so their system for resolving legal disputes is "have a cleric of Karou personally evaluate what course of action would result in the most utility on net".

In the real world this would be a disaster- a system immediately captured by power-hungry narcissists who set themselves up as the people who decide what course of action is best. Luckily for the Ecumene of Joy, they have a pretty decent selection process for their leaders.

See, in order to be a cleric of any god in this world, you need to fulfill a specific requirement. What a cleric actually does is channel divinity, see. The gods are busy people! They don't have time to personally investigate each and every little issue their clerics bother them with. They're just people, ultimately- they don't have the spare brainpower. So they have to borrow brainpower- specifically from people who are, cognitively, near-identical to themselves. The more like a god you are, the more easily that god can borrow your brainpower and instantiate themselves on your hardware. Casting divine magic, in this setting, is literally becoming your god for a little while in order to do something your god wants done. That's what it takes to be a cleric!

Since you can't cast divine magic without being totally in sync with your god, you can't be a power-hungry selfish bastard and also be a cleric of Joy- because Karou isn't a power-hungry selfish bastard. He's the god of hedonic utilitarianism, and will make a good-faith effort to resolve a dispute happily every time.

(It doesn't always work, though, since Karou is not the God of Being Correct About Predicted Consequences All The Time, and clerical error is always a source of difficulty for the Ecumene.)

Other Gods

The six Ecumenes are the only organized god-worshipping organizations that run governments, but there are loads of other gods- they just don't involve themselves in legislation. It's fairly common for someone to belong to a particular Ecumene just for the government, but worship one or more other gods as a matter of personal faith.

Alanala, Waveracer, for instance, is the Deity of Tides, with dominion over the surface of the waters. They're commonly worshipped by sailors, for obvious reasons- and in particular, the Lastwave clan that controls Oyashio.

Lolth is a classic- Webstretcher, Goddess of Spiders, is worshipped by the drow. She's known for dark rituals and cannibalism and other evil type things. (The drow diaspora regards these as hateful rumors, and insist that Lolth is a benevolent figure who promotes togetherness. The consensus among right and proper elves is that this is a smokescreen and that the blood libel is super true. Hrm.)

And... ?????? ? What's this symbol? It's on the bracer that's bonded to Saelhen, but it doesn't represent any god Looseleaf's ever heard of. Maybe not all the gods show themselves to the people...