Sometimes, he mentions his clone-sibling’s Creatively Anachronistic hobby.

I think I’ve mentioned a few times before that my clone-sibling is a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism… Well, after many years (more than a quarter of a century!) of trying, he finally got his heraldic device approved a few months ago. (The old one was approved back in the nineties, and then the heralds lost the paperwork, and then they said it was un-approved because reasons… Idjits.) Here is it, the “medieval murder-deer” (antelope, actually, which is a good thing, because him having a deer on his device would run afoul of one of my personal metaphors) holding a billhook (a kind of pole arm). This is blazoned (described in “herald-speak”) as Sable per pale vert, an antelope rampant Or, maintaining a billhook Or.  Paul sometimes fights with a billhook, too. (Mental note: must acquire photos of clone’s SCA weapons.) He has always worn black and gold (the colors of a fighting company he’s a member of), and he added green because he needed another color for a “point of difference” so his device wouldn’t be too similar to anyone else’s.

 

 

I can tell you, this device looks great painted on a large shield.

…And, because I feel like it, I’m also going to share the device Grace came up with for herself. (Paul helped her with finding a persona name, and it’s perfect: Gwenllian de Broceliande.) Blazoned as Sable, a gurges argent, overall a martlet volant azure. Translation: a white (silver) spiral on a black field (and she insists it’s very important that it be a white spiral on black, not a black spiral on white), with a blue martlet (a bird that never lands) flying. This one hasn’t been approved yet (because the heralds in the Kingdom of the Outlands are so frakkin’ sloooow), and she can’t use it yet anyway because she hasn’t done whatever unspecified thing SCAdians are expected to do in order to be given an “award of arms,” without which none of them can actually have a heraldic device, even if they do get one approved. It’s complicated and convoluted, and something I’m glad I’ll never have to deal with. (Can you imagine what would happen if I ever showed up at an SCA gathering? They don’t know there are two of us…)