Turns out I was born one of a pair of twins. I never had any idea, because I was raised as if I had not been... apparently at the time of our birth, the family was in such a destitute state (and had so many other children to care for already) that my twin was given away to gypsies, there to theoretically have no chance of finding his birth family again.

He apparently spent the earliest part of his life nearly feral, as the superstitious gypsies claimed he had horrible evil within him and abandoned him by the time he was a toddler.

After years of eater smaller the smaller vermin and fighting the larger, he was found and taken in by a retired minister and his wife. Except, turns out the minister wasn't really retired, but had been forced out of the church for heresy.

So after his early life spent as a wild animal, my twin then became a caged one. The minister and his wife, it seems, saw the evil in him as clearly as did the gypsies, and thus had taken him in that they might either drive the demon out, or at least keep it controlled. Basically, he grew up chained in a basement with holy texts as his only influence besides his harshly strict adoptive parents, and the regular "cleansing" beatings he received.

But fate is a tricky one. Demented as the old minister might have been, he was also brilliant, and in his advanced years spent hours conversing with the boy about a million topics, himself often forgetting that he'd meant to shut the young man off from the world.

Well -- y'know, while I might occassionally be a little bit smarter than the average bear -- I don't know, make this one a mystery for the genetics books, or a final answer to Nature versus Nurture, but as it turns out my evil twin is just a freaking genius. He stayed chained to the wall, but it wasn't very long before at least in an intellectual capacity, he was in charge of the old man. Why he stayed in the basement as long as he did is anyone's guess -- maybe he actually felt something like affection for the only parents he recalled?

In any event, he developed with a definite but twisted view of reality. And of course, despite everyone's best intentions, he did not end up spending the rest of his life in a basement. Nor, as it turns out, did he end up "cleansed" as his adoptive father would have hoped.

Nope, having gained freedom, the first thing my brother decided to do was track down his birth family -- and somehow, within just a couple of years, he had. But it gets worse. Being the evil twin, he wasn't tracking us down out of any kind of love -- he was just really, really pissed.

So he came out prepared, and once he discovered the family, guess who got the blunt of his scorn? That's right. The one who, but for a trick of fate, would have had him miserable life.

Yes, for these last few years he's been out there ... his only motivation, his only desire in the world, to see me suffer more by the end than him. He doesn't want me dead-- he wants me sorry. Sorry that I wasn't him. Sorry, in the end, that I was the one that was kept.

But you know, it's really not as bad as it sounds. I mean, oddly enough everything he's done so far has been relatively lame. You know, he orders stuff in my name, he calls people and claims he's me, that kind of stuff. Apparently, it's not really uncommon for him to pose as me. Because I myself am rather introverted -- I stay in a lot. He takes advantage of that by being "me" when I'm actually just hanging out at home...

So, um ... yeah, the only clue I could give you to distinguish between us, as we're perfectly physically identitical, is a funny quirk he has, at least as far as impersonating me goes. I guess maybe due to the whole "it's-better-to-be-me" thing, he absolutely refuses to say that he's me. I mean, he'll sign my name, but he won't actually tell you his name is [strange].

He'll tell you his own name. And while I'm not telling my own name just yet, I will tell you his -- his name is DeShaun.