The hospital equipment went wild. Only trained medical staff would have been able to make any sense of the myriad controls and panels on the stacked devices, much less the actual readouts flashing across the two largest pale blue machines. The clinical white doors to the room were flung open as another doctor rushed in to bolster the ranks of the medical staff already present. A panicked scream echoed across the room from the far end.

"What's happening? What's gone wrong?!"

An eighteen year old Koreen was struggling to get out of her hospital bed. Drenched in sweat, having only just given birth, her hospital gown clung to her fur and her hair was only just held in the very untidy ponytail that she had put it in just before being rushed here. One of the nurses, a slim otter girl, eased Koreen back into the bed.

"Ms Sharinda, please! Stay where you are. You won't be able to help, and you'll do no good to yourself either. The doctors are doing whatever they can. It'll be okay."

Koreen attempted to sit up again, but everything blurred and went very strange and far away. She slumped back on the pillow, the room seeming to spin around her. The birth had been extremely difficult, and the exhaustion and chaos had proved too much. She let out a strangled sob, begging them, "Please, just help him..."

Her boyfriend, a snowkitten called Tyrell, held her paw tightly and attempted to convince her, as best he could, that the doctors would make everything okay, and that they knew what they were doing. Tyrell had the trademark snowkitten fur - white all over apart from the black furred ears and a black stripe between his eyes - as well as blue tinted hair, just short of collar length. Koreen barely heard a word he said, and if she'd seen the look in his eyes, she'd never have believed him anyway. She just stared, wide eyed, across the room where the two canine doctors and an assortment of nurses busied themselves around her newborn snowkitten twins.

Except that snowkittens never gave birth to twins. It simply never happened, and in all the long history of the species, there were no known occasions of any twins having born. And yet here they were. The female of the pair seemed to be perfectly okay and her birth had been relatively straightforward. The tiny little girl lay, blinking in confusion, lying on a dark blue blanket, inside what resembled a lidless plastic box. Next to her, in an identical box, was her twin brother, fighting for life.

The male hadn't been an easy birth at all, and the midwife had realised he was in serious trouble even before he had actually been born. But now, triggering alarms, he had stopped breathing completely, and it seemed there were heart problems too. One of the doctors attached a thin white tube onto the child's arm, hooking the other end up to a complex blue machine, and he quickly - but carefully - tapped in a sequence of codes on the main control panel, to indicate what drugs it should administer. A nurse helped out, using a tiny oxygen mask, while the other doctor stared at the readouts from the other devices, frowning and shaking his head.

It wasn't working. Koreen screamed again, and Tyrell tried to stop her leaving the bed for the second time.

Snowkitten twins weren't meant to exist. Maybe this was how it always happened - they just didn't survive.

The tiny female twin looked at her stricken brother. It was regrettable that the two boxes were transparent and side by side, but there hadn't been enough time to ensure they were further apart from each other, despite the obvious upset and trauma it would cause the girl. She couldn't see much - everything was a blur - but her brother's long blue tail was resting against the side of his container, right next to the 'wall' of her own box. She reached out. Though she couldn't actually reach his tail, she was able to place her paw on the plastic that separated them.

The effect was instant. A vivid purple glow surrounded the male snowkitten, so bright that the nurses and doctors were forced to step back. The light spread, till the whole room was bathed in the glow, and then just as suddenly it was gone.

The frantic alarms and readouts stopped, and a silence filled the room momentarily, until one of the doctors stared from the twins to the readouts and back again. "He's... he's okay! He's going to be okay! The readouts are normal and he seems to have stabilised."

The relief among everyone in the room was instantaneous, matched only by the total disbelief in what had actually just happened. One of the nurses removed the oxygen mask gently, stroking the male twin's hair. "Your sister just saved your life, kitten. That was a seriously lucky escape, but you've both made history. And you don't even know it."

While one of the doctors gave out the orders for regular checks on both twins, Koreen just slumped back against the pillow, holding Tyrell's paw. They were both too emotionally drained to speak, but it didn't stop them mentally giving thanks to whoever or whatever had intervened, as if their lives depended on it.

The next three months passed swiftly. Koreen, early on a warm mid-July morning, sat on her worn ("well loved," she called it) blue settee, watching her twins blissfully sleeping in a small carrycot next to her. The male kitten, Eliki, had his tail draped across the girl, Leana, who didn't seem to mind in the slightest.

Koreen's house in Phoenixbrook had been left to her by her own mother years ago, in her will, and Koreen intended that one day it would be passed to the twins, hopefully kept forever as their family home. Koreen was the keyboard player in a synthpop band called Nightlights, which she and the singer - Tamyra - had formed two years previously while they had been at college. The five piece band hadn't made much of an impact as yet, but it was early days, and at least they'd gained a small, but loyal, audience among the students, past and present. She had met her boyfriend, the snowkitten called Tyrell, as a result of playing a few small gigs, and once she'd become pregnant with the twins, all plans for the band had been put on hold temporarily. Koreen still tried writing music from time to time, and her favourite TD100 synth was set up next to where she was sitting, in case inspiration struck. But right now, nothing could have been further from her mind. The twins had been up most of the night, causing baby shaped mischief, and she was exhausted.

Tyrell was out at work, and would be gone for the rest of the day. His job as a cleaner at the Phoenixbrook train station didn't pay all that much, but it was better than nothing, and she knew he was doing his best to support them. Koreen fully intended to return to the band plans once the twins were old enough to go to school. She wished Tyrell was here right now, not so much because of the twins, but because of the news on the front of the local Phoenixbrook Mirror newspaper.

For a time, there had been considerable and understandable press interest in the very first snowkitten twins to have actually survived. Koreen had done all she could to shield her family from the media intrusion, and had done a good job, all in all. In time, interest had faded, but she knew it would now be back with a vengeance. She lived in the west of Phoenixbrook, and yesterday the paper claimed that another snowkitten family, in the east of the city, had also given birth to twins. The Shaylanii clan was vaguely known to Koreen, but she'd heard some fairly bad reports about them. They were rumoured to be "trouble" so she stayed clear of them. Nonetheless, with two occurrences of twins to two different snowkitten clans, in such a short time span, it was impossible not to be intrigued, and the media would be all over it by now. There was very little information about the new twins, except that yet again, one was female and the other was male.

Koreen scratched behind her ear before turning to a different page. Yet another report questioning claims that the racist organisation, the Elysia, was reforming. Koreen sighed. The Elysia had wiped out huge swathes of snowkittens and other people in Aredria well over 150 years ago, before disappearing, assumed disbanded or dead. Nothing had been heard of them for a very long time, but it didn't stop the press stirring up the rumours every so often with another so-called investigation or piece of "evidence," proving that the organization had never really gone away. It all seemed highly unlikely, but of course as ever it made for "a good story..."

Koreen decided she couldn't be bothered reading any more, planning on having a nap instead, so she folded the paper and flung it down. It was sheer bad luck that the paper struck the remote control for the TV, which flared into life, blasting out a banal early morning chat show. The shock woke baby Leana, who decided to start crying loudly - for no other reason than because she could. Inevitably it set Eliki off too.

The exhausted mother rubbed her eyes and sighed, thinking, "Here we go again..."