It's terribly inconvenient that I am not personally a nationstate, then.  Whoever is assigned as your liason may have a different answer for you, or may be (1/3)

willing to answer the relevant concerns in a more direct manner, and of course no one can stop you, but if the question is politeness then I wouldn't distin(2/3)

guish.(3/3)

Maybe I'm overgeneralizing from how I'd behave on behalf of my geminis' nationstate if they existed and had one. Apologies.

Accepted.  Please don't hesitate to reach out again with any concerns I'm capable of addressing.

Thanks!

There is.  It turns out that there are already a few similar arrangements in place with other entities including Rome, a subgroup of Archipeligo, and the Alphabet Conglomerate.  Not all of them are strictly monetary; the Alphabet Conglomerate's mainly takes the form of advancing legal standards for the treatment of even folks within Verona's borders.  The gist of the messaging seems to be: 'If you'd dismantle our country, why don't we first see whether we can work something else out?'.  There aren't too many specifics about what sort of resources they have on offer, though.

Well, hopefully he'll hear back about that soon.

He checks his mail.

Nothing yet.

There's a message from Nicholas, though.

Would it be impolite to forward the previous conversation to Veronan representitives?

Go for it.

Felicity approaches.

"At least from skimming, there don't seem to be inherent differences between our even people and your people in general.  Although odd people have a bit of a tendency to take over anything important unless it was set up from the beginning to not let them."

"Huh. Would I be out of place as an even person, do you know me well enough to tell yet?"

"I think the thing with the difference between even and odd, like you kind of said before, is the inevitability.  You could be an even person, if probably a bit of a strange one, because the question is more about what the rest of your geminis are like and whether they would be strange in the same sorts of ways."

"Gotcha. I don't think in my case my upbringing was especially formative but if we omit that part of the equation."

"I think the degree to which you're the same person even with very different upbringings is probably the crux of oddness!"

"How much variation is there within odd birthdays?"

"Oh, quite a bit.  But there's a sense in which it's trimmings around a common core that - well, evens still have that but a lot less so."

Nod, nod. "Nicholas brought up eugeminics, what should I read about that?"

"Hm, I'm pretty sure Ilkskolre had a schoolbook on that; I don't think any of me ever read it specifically but the series is good."

With some digging it turns out the individual book is titled The Aim of the Aims: A History and Philosophy of Eugeminics.  Part of the table of contents is arranged in a normal list format but part of it is a glossy two-page spread of a circle with some birthdays and corresponding page numbers marked along its edge.  It's definitely not all of them; evens all get one chapter to share, but most of the birthdays in the four oddest levels are listed.

Other topics include 'Pre-Astrological Aims', 'Aiming vs. Eugeminics: a Matter of Scale', 'Methods: Soft and Hard, Flat and Sharp', 'Spiritualist Moralities', and 'What's the One's Take On All This?'.

...what does Pre-Astrological even mean here. Is "soft and hard, flat and sharp" a euphemism. What is the One's take.

In this context it appears to mean 'before living people figured out that birthdays did all that', and it turns out that even before there was a cohesive model people had superstitions about babies born on certain days or in certain seasons or what have you, and occasionally tried to do a little primitive aiming about it.  Some of them make sense given what's known in modern day, but others probably just arose out of coincidence or people making up things based off their allies and enemies.

It's a discussion of the axes along which attempts at eugeminics have historically varied!  'Soft' here represents light, non-forceful pressure, like the New Years' financial incentives and writings meant to convince prospective parents to avoid or try for certain geminis.  'Hard' refers most often to laws, sometimes by denying particular birthdays entry to a country or exiling its existing ones, sometimes by carving out exemptions or adding extra strictness (although the authors note that this is only eugeminics insofar as it influences parents or causes people to move; the effect on population numbers is what's relevant here.  Everything else is just sparkling discrimination).  For unknown historical reasons 'flat' refers to preventing or encouraging births on certain days and for slightly clearer ones 'sharp' methods are those which involve people who already exist.  (It's all the murder.  And state-sanctioned geminicide.)

For a while people were worried that it was important for there to be completely equal numbers of each gemini in the long run but the One apparently doesn't think so.  It steadfastly refuses to express an opinion about what proportions of people there should be, refraining even from cryptic remarks!  Here are four cryptic remarks that it made about adjacent things, with a handful of interpretations about what each one might mean.

Okay. So Cam has no problem with flat soft eugeminics and has a problem with hard and/or sharp instances. Good to know. What is a spiritualist morality?

This book seems to assume the reader already knows that and instead goes over some examples of them.  Some people apparently think that any sort of aiming whatsoever is wrong, and believe all astrological knowledge to be harmful.  The strictest of those have spent periods of hermitude in caves in order to attempt to lose track of what day it is before conceiving a child; the milder ones advocate using some sort of randomization method when deciding what days to have potentially kidmaking sex on.

Conversely, other people believe really strongly in extensive research to find the exact best child for you and your partner, even among even days.  Some in this camp have tried to make official registries of what sort of people came from which sorts of parents to find the best matches, and have tried with varying success to enforce adherence to those.

One group of people believes that even if it isn't fated to be necessary, it's still a good idea for there to be as level a proportion of birthdays across the population as possible, and most parents should aim for whoever there's currently the least of.  There've been lots of scandals within this group about its loudest proponents tending to have kids who aren't the very least popular, though, ones more on the 'ignored' side than the actively avoided one.

Who are the very least popular?

Unuary 31.  There are graphs of geminial proportions across the past few strong years and octades, and while there are plenty of dips and hills for the other birthdays, that's the only one that's much lower than everyone else on literally every single chart.

What's up with Unuary 31s?