Once upon a time, the Sun King and the Moon Queen created the world together.
They both agreed that they wanted there to be a world, but disagreed on just about everything else. The Sun King liked things orderly and brightly lit and friendly, and the Moon Queen liked things messy and violent and goth. So the Sun King made the Kingdom of Day just how he liked it, and the Moon Queen made the Kingdom of Night just as she liked it, and they have been at war ever since. The balance of power shifts with the cycle of seasons: Day has the upper hand in summer, Night in winter, and spring and autumn are more transitional.
At night, the Sun King is a golden statue; during the day, the Moon Queen is a silver statue; but they are both awake during the twilight hours.
The majority of citizens of either kingdom are content with their culture and their ruler, but there are some malcontents, who tend to congregate in the borderlands and distrust both sides.
The map of the Kingdoms looks like a rough circle, with the Kingdom of Day in the south and the Kingdom of Night in the north and a blurry border region in between. The sun rises on the southeastern edge and travels west to set on the southwestern edge, at which point the moon rises on the northwestern edge and travels east to set on the northeastern edge. The roughly-circular continent is mostly surrounded by an ocean, but there are occasional bits where the land runs up against the edge of the world. These places are direly hazardous and you'd have a hard time finding a subject of either Kingdom willing to go within five miles of the edge.
Sometimes a human from Earth shows up*, and they may choose to help the good Sun King defeat the evil Moon Queen or vice versa, as is their preference. Humans from Earth (or, glowfic being glowfic, humans-or-otherwise from arbitrary other potentially-neighbouring universes) have a disproportionate amount of power in the Kingdoms, and tend to fall into a sort of Chosen One role.
There is, however, A TWEEST.
THE TWEEST
A Libby has already been by.
The Sun King was losing to the Moon Queen at the time, and asked for her help. She helped. However, she noticed that when the balance of power between them was out of step with the cycle of the seasons, reality started coming apart at the seams. People sometimes spontaneously turned into mindless all-devouring tentacle-ghosts. Huge chasms opened in the earth and sucked everything nearby into the howling void. This was very concerning. And the Sun King and Moon Queen were still both trying very hard to kill each other for real.
So the Libby assassinated them both and took over their roles, and now she runs the entire war by herself. Nobody else even knows; it's been centuries of local time, which runs a thousand times faster than Earth. If the Sun King and Moon Queen stop fighting, or if the wrong one is winning at any given time, you get void chasms and tentacle-ghosts. She's done her best to deescalate the conflict as much as possible, and generally tries to run the place as well as she can manage, but there has to be a real actual war and people do sometimes die in it.
The reason that things start returning to the void if the Sun King and Moon Queen step out of their roles is because the void was there first. And because the two sides have been at war from the moment they first created the world, that conflict has become part of the structure of their shared creation. If the conflict stops, the creation stops. The King and Queen didn't care, because each of them figured that once the other one was dead they could start over on this whole 'building a world' thing, and never mind the thousands of innocent people that would die in the meantime. Libby, naturally, has a different perspective.
So when she sends someone on a quest to defeat her other identity, what she's actually doing is testing them to see if she can trust them with the truth. People who seem likely to fuck things up get quietly disposed of. If she finds somebody she trusts enough, though, she'll explain the situation and ask for their help. In theory there should be a way to use an outsider's power to adjust the substrate of reality so she can stop waging war against herself and the whole thing won't fall to pieces.
*For some reason, the setting insists that it won't take visitors over 16 years of age or local equivalent. It could probably be made to put up with it if there were interdimensional shenanigans at work, but it will only send out its creepy void portals for people who are 16 or less.
Last edited by Kappa on Tue Jul 11, 2017 6:27 am, edited 3 times in total.
How does Libby manage travelling between two locations on opposite sides of the world? When does she sleep? Why doesn't she spend half her time as a statue?
Libby operates the Moon Queen and Sun King bodies independently. It's a little tricky to do the twilight hours, but she's had practice.
I'm not totally sure what happened to her original body, but it might be a diamond statue somewhere, or might just have dissolved into nothing. She hasn't slept in a few thousand years.
Incidentally this also explains why she no longer qualifies as an outsider and therefore doesn't have any outsider's power to throw around. She had to make that trade to stop the world from immediately ending. The combined power of the Sun King and Moon Queen is a pretty decent trade, and in fact is more useful for many purposes, but for the specific purpose of changing the underlying structure of the world, she needs human help.
I am so glad everyone likes my TWEEST so much!!! :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D
