Xenoverse origins / R-039
The Fishbeck TwinsOrigin story
Two alibis and one very shallow grave
Each twin could prove the other was elsewhere. Neither could prove anyone should care.
Read the origin ↓
Placeholder artworkThe Fishbeck Twins built their business on a simple inconvenience: witnesses rarely agreed which of them they had seen. A purchase could be denied by the other twin; a debt belonged to the absent one; a promise had apparently been made by someone currently unavailable for comment.
Their Xenoverse origin concerns the scheme that made them notorious rather than merely disliked. They attempted to collect the benefits of a death without supplying the usual permanent participant. The plan required cooperation, discretion, and trust between people who had spent their lives treating trust as something to extract from less alert customers.
Two heads are better than one only when they are not both charging commission.
From the dossier
Chapter 01
The brothers in every wrong place
They worked the docks as brokers, guides, and occasional owners of goods whose actual owners were still walking toward the transaction. Their resemblance helped, but their confidence did more. Each could describe an arrangement so briskly that objecting felt like delaying legitimate business.
The dockworkers learned precautions. Deals were witnessed. Payments required marks from both. The twins responded by changing coats, then names, then the order in which they arrived. Every safeguard became another inconvenience charged to the customer. Eventually honest trade became difficult enough that they proposed a larger fraud: one would appear to die in a warehouse accident, allowing the survivor to collect a private compensation fund. The deceased would leave town, return later as a distant relation, and share the money. Neither asked whether a distant relation who looked exactly like the survivor might attract questions. Familiarity had made them careless about their best trick.
Placeholder artworkChapter 02
The funeral with a business plan
They borrowed a coffin, hired mourners at a reduced rate, and selected a burial plot near a drainage passage. The supposedly dead twin would wait inside a modified lower compartment, then leave through the passage after the ceremony. The survivor would collect the fund and meet him beyond the quay.
The first disagreement concerned expenses. The hidden twin wanted a cushion and water. The survivor called both unnecessary additions to a brief performance. The second disagreement concerned who held the receipt needed to claim the money. Each insisted the other should trust him. They settled it by making copies, neither telling the other. This was the closest their relationship came to mutual reassurance. At the ceremony, the hired mourners performed adequately until one recognized the deceased buying supper the previous evening under his own name. The survivor described this as a moving final memory and hurried the burial along.
Placeholder artworkChapter 03
The dead man becomes impatient
Rain had filled the drainage passage. The hidden twin found the exit submerged and began tapping on the coffin’s interior. Above ground, the survivor was delayed by the fund’s administrator, who required a second witness to confirm the identity. The twins had spent years undermining exactly that sort of certainty.
The tapping grew louder. A mourner crossed herself, another requested additional pay, and a dockworker fetched a shovel with the expression of a man finally being offered a task equal to his interest. When the coffin opened, the supposedly dead twin demanded to know where his money was. The survivor claimed shock at the miraculous recovery. His brother, soaked, cramped, and no longer committed to subtlety, described the entire plan. The crowd listened with the satisfaction of people whose suspicions had finally become articulate. The twins had produced the one witness capable of defeating their alibi: each other, sufficiently angry to stop considering the consequences.
Placeholder artworkChapter 04
A partnership survives the evidence
The fund kept its money. The coffin owner demanded payment for repairs. The mourners charged for a second performance, arguing that the original contract had not included resurrection. The twins were left owing more than they had expected to steal, a result they blamed on the weather and several unreasonable interpretations of service agreements.
They could have separated. Instead they reconciled while dividing the bills. Neither trusted the other, but each understood the other’s methods too well to risk working alone. Their shared disgrace became a kind of insurance: betrayal would require admitting enough of the truth to damage both. They left the docks together, one carrying the borrowed funeral clothes and the other insisting that a properly managed version of the scheme might still succeed elsewhere. The reply was a silence containing several years of future argument. Neither abandoned the idea immediately, which tells the reader more about them than any apology could have done.
Placeholder artworkChapter 05
The alibi becomes the warning
In later Toxic Goblin Xenoverse stories, the Fishbeck Twins remain antagonists of proximity and paperwork: the smiling pair who can turn an ordinary transaction into an argument about which person agreed to what. Their origin establishes both the strength and the fracture in the act. They coordinate well until a cost must be borne privately.
The resemblance still confuses strangers. Their reputation helps locals avoid the need to distinguish them. If either Fishbeck offers a bargain, both are assumed to have considered who else will pay. This collective judgment offends them enormously, chiefly because it reduces the number of useful exits available in conversation.
The dockworkers kept the coffin as a storage chest. A sign on the lid reads TWINS: CONTENTS MAY DISAGREE. Travellers laugh at the joke. Those who hear the full story check the lid twice before accepting a seat nearby. Somewhere beyond the quay, the brothers continue discussing which one ruined a perfectly good funeral.
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