Catalan, Occitan, Galician, etc.

So, I googled up some Catalan placenames, and I ended up finding some website that had place names for minority languages all over the place. I got a great list of Catalan names (side by side with the more well-known Spanish or French ones), Occitan placenames, Galician placenames, Aragonese place names and Asturian (I quit after those, but that barely scratched the surface.) I also got a census of names (in Catalan, mostly) from Valencia in 1510, which I thought was really interesting.

So, after trawling around in these fantastic and relatively unknown (in the Anglophone world, anyway) languages, I've come up with the brother/sister team of daemon hunters, Rodrico d'Arnau Domènechoz and Francesca de Sperança Domènechoz. They're twins; but poor Francesca got the short end of the stick when she was born a tiefling—her twin brother is full human.

Orphaned at a relatively young age, but heirs to a modest property in the idyllic and pastoral provincial upcountry of Calça, they were raised as wards of the Church at a small priory in Baix Colomers by a strict and hard (yet kindly underneath it all) man of the cloth. This man, Pare Bartomeu de Nicolau Fontanills was very conservative in his outlook, very wary of heresy or anything untoward. Of course, raising a tiefling child also made him a bit paranoid, and perhaps he overdid it to some extent. In his attempts to ensure that the children didn't fall into darkness themselves, and simultaneously to protect them from suspicion (mostly by trying to ensure as few people even knew about them as possible) he actually incited their curiousity about daemonology and Francesca's darker heritage, as well as giving them an insatiable desire to travel and see all the things that the poor pare denied them.

Despite these mistakes (or possibly exacerbating them) the pare arranged for the best possible education for his wards; they were trained in languages, art, math, science, geography, and fencing, and learned woodcraft and other more practical skills that would help them eventually manage the estate they were to inherit. That never came to be.

Ironically, it was not Francesca, the overtly daemonic-featured sibling who engaged in questionable behavior, it was her brother Rodrico who tampered with forbidden arts, summoning spirits from beyond the world and binding them to his service. While not an overtly evil thing to do, it is one that is heretical and that people fear greatly, equating it (by definition) with witchcraft.

Word of the twins; who had the appearance of daemons (which would be true for Rodrico too when manifesting the sign of a vestige) caused a riot of the peasantry in peaceful little Baix Colomers in which poor Pare Fontanills was killed and Rodrico and Francesca barely escaped with their lives.

More on the twins soon... I've actually started up a space to talk about this stuff. http://darkdnd.wikispaces.com.