With Autumn Comes the Long Night

 

    In the early days of their marriage, life for the Lassiters was good. Cora's garden was flourishing, and she had even won an award from the city for her contributions to the local food scene. Yves was an aspiring sculptor, so he spent most of his days in his studio in the basement, working away with clay or wood. Cora quickly learned which crops sold for more and started focusing on those, while Yves toiled almost endlessly to improve his skill, coming up from the basement only for what amounted to the basics of survival. They barely saw each other, even though they both worked from home and were on the same lot 24/7. 

    

First moments of labor

    Even with all that work, there was time enough for other activities, and it wasn't long before they found themselves expecting their first child. The birth kinda snuck up on us all, and once again they were pitifully broke, living bill to bill, harvest to harvest and sculpture to sculpture. 

Even in sleep, Cora dreams of work.

 They were both exceptional parents from the beginning, taking turns to watch over their son, Jean, who for a sim baby seemed remarkably fussy.  He demanded a lot of their time, and Cora began to see her garden fall into decline as she had less time to care for it.

   Cora and Yves were two ships passing in the night, and barely spoke or acknowledged each other. Even with Yves having 'workaholic' as one of his traits, he began wanting to spend time with Cora more than he wanted to sculpt or sell his work, and that was how I knew they were really falling deep into their own isolation.
  

    
     Autumn was marching stolidly onward, though, and many nights covered the garden in a layer of frost so thick that it took a few warm days to remove. So, when she could not garden, she spent extra time with Jean, doting on him. As they saved up some money, she also purchased some planter pots and moved some of her more valuable plants inside, to continue the growing season even through the increasingly colder days and nights.

Cora and Jean among the plants of her tiny conservatory.

    Even as her food harvests diminished and their profits (or in many cases, barely breaking even) fell with it, so too did their budget, and more and more of her harvests began to find a home in their own larder instead of being sold at the local market. Their home, though poor, was a beacon of warmth and love, a pool of golden light sheltered from the increasing frost and meager meals.

A quiet book on a frosty day.

 
      Jean was never hungry, though many nights his parents might have had less than they wanted or eaten leftovers for the umpteenth time in a row, keeping careful track of which were oldest so that nothing was spoiled or wasted. Jean knew nothing but love and attention, and Cora doted on him.

Yves worked

And worked.

And he worked. Exhaustion was a regular thing for him.

The new second story, with Cora enjoying a rare warm day.

        More and more, Yves worked while Cora raised Jean. While there was plenty of love, the labor was not quite shared. His sculptures were regularly bringing in about 1300 simoleons each. With the extra money, they scrimped here and there where they could, and with a little work they added a second story to the house, literally a wall or a room at a time as they could afford it. Even when 'finished' with paint and flooring, many of the rooms sat empty, devoid of furniture or light fixtures, or anything except the hope that one day the whole house, not just their few little ground rooms, would be full of life and light.

Jean's birthday and a cake they couldn't afford

 And a good thing too, Jean was having a birthday and would soon be starting to school. As a present they bought him furniture for his new room.








 But Cora was still worried about money. Yves tried to reassure her, confident in his growing skill and too prideful to admit that they might be struggling. Also maybe a little too focused on his work to realize he wasn't even really getting dressed each day, just stumbling down the stairs to the studio in whatever he had passed out in the night before.

     All I could think of while watching them fret was of the common meme making fun of the HGTV show "Househunters." Click the link if you're unfamiliar with the joke.

"Hi, I'm Cora, a home gardener and this is my husband Yves, a freelance sculptor."

You get the idea.

To compensate, he spent even more time in his studio, and she saw him only for a few minutes here and there, in passing, at night, in the early hours, whenever they could squeeze in a cup of coffee together. And once again, even those few fleeting moments were enough to add another small, looming reason to be worried: she was pregnant again. 
      In a moment of frivolity she had taken Jean to the autumn fair and gotten her face painted. Now, in the early morning, with the reality of a second pregnancy and even more bills piling up in the face of the oncoming winter, that one tiny act seemed stupid and wasteful.

Cora with Rickard.

     Their second son, Rickard, was born in the last week of autumn. Her garden was barely producing, spending more time dormant than workable. Yves, too, like the roots of her garden seeking nourishment below ground, spent more time in his basement studio than above it, frequently napping on a small futon down there instead of coming up to bed. He would come up to grab a plate of leftovers from the fridge, or to shower or use the toilet, but then he was back at work.

Then, the unthinkable happened.

 

A Slap in the Face

I said once in an earlier post that I was thankful Sims never had fertility issues or miscarriages. I never considered child death to even be a possibility. I knew that if you didn't take care of the children, social services would come and take them away, but I never knew that the children could actually die. Even pregnant women seem to have a sort of immunity against death.

I say all this because the other day, I watched one of my Sim children drown. No, I did not trap him in the pool intentionally. In the Sims 3 you have to actually build walls around the pool to trap them in, since simply removing the ladders does not prevent them from exiting the pool (they are able to climb out of the sides of the pool). No, he just floundered and died.

Truthfully, I didn't even know he was in the pool. I was on the other end of the house, watching Fedaykin teach baby Marcus how to walk, and occasionally glancing over at Caspian painting in the living room. It was an otherwise calm and collected Sunday afternoon. Suddenly, the event camera jerks me over to the pool, just in time to see Pye slip beneath the water. I paused the game to stare in shock at his corpse, just suspended in the water. The knowledge that there was nothing I could do, that he was dead, that I had played for several hours without a save so I couldn't reload, that all the plans I had made for him were now useless. Pye was gone.

 I un-paused the game and watched as the Grim Reaper showed up and most of the family ran outside to mourn and cry in shock. I have decided that this shot is one of the saddest and most horrifying screenshots I have ever taken in any of my Sims games. Pye, the child, begging for his life from the Reaper, who watches coldly while the child's grave lies between them. I will admit, I cried a little bit, not because I particularly liked Pye or anything, but because he was a child. A child.

Forgive me if the deaths of children hit me particularly hard.

Forgive me as well if the idea of a child, who for whatever reason must die, dies by drowning - is also particularly painful - I had a close brush with drowning as a child and was narrowly saved by one of my little sisters and my dad.

I suppose I had been living in this dreamworld where I felt the Sim children were immortal, unable to be harmed by fire or flood or famine, and that the worst thing that could happen was to be placed into state care. It was quite the slap in the face to learn otherwise.

Not something I ever wanted to see.

Two Things

  So far, two things have happened in the Morel household. Aegon has died, this time of old age and completely naturally, in his sleep at the ripe age of 95 days. Mojo did not plead for him to stay this time, although you can see from the plumbob in the screenshot that he was witness to the death, if rather out of sight behind the desk. Aegon's wife Jodie, who had been separated from him for a while, had moved back into the house now that Virgil's other five siblings are grown and on their own, and she and Virgil watched Aegon leave. I am trying to remember how many sims have died in this room, in that bed, passing in their sleep. At least three, now, with Aegon. I should probably redecorate or something. Maybe it's the wallpaper that's killing them.

 Virgil mourned his passing after a quiet graveside funeral. It is still the depths of winter, and the snow was so deep it came up to the seats of the park benches. I had the Morels buy the cemetery when they first came into their vast wealth, and since then I have rearranged it a bit so that they have a private, fenced area, shaded by oaks in the summer and lit by lamplight in the winter, where all the ancestors and forebears of the family are interred. So far I haven't put any siblings in plots, but only because they usually end up moving out before they die, and it's impossible to procure ashes off another lot.

Jodie, Aegon's widow, has been a bit senile lately and has taken to wandering about in the snow. Then, rather unexpectedly, this happened:

I've no idea where Jodie is, or how long she will be gone. But for now, the Others have her.

Back from the Dead

Today, something unprecedented happened in my legacy game.

It all started with Aegon tinkering away at his workbench, as usual. His granddaughter Sybil was off at the school dance, his son and daughter-in-law were upstairs watching tv. Then, something unfortunate happened. An explosion echoed throughout the basement, and Aegon ran screaming up the stairs, on fire.

Aegon makes a run for the shower.

I tried to get him to the shower in time to put himself out, but I didn't think about how far apart the shower and the workbench are, and how he had to use the elevator to get up from the basement. He jumped in the shower, but it was too late, he had burned to death.

The Grim Reaper appeared, and despite the cries of Virgil and Mary, and the pleading of the ghost of Aegon himself, it was no good. Death ordered Aegon to go away.

The fiery ghost of Aegon,

Then, Mojo, the cat, who had been adopted by Aegon when he was just a little kitten, did something unexpected. He walked up to the Grim Reaper and put up such a howling and crying that the Reaper ... gave in. He brought Aegon back. I didn't even know that was possible, much less for the cat to be the one responsible for bringing him back.

Mojo, the cat who saved Aegon's life.

Aegon is still old, 92 to be exact, and he will probably die again soon, this time permanently, unless the cat intercedes on his behalf again. Until then, though, I will remember what happened today.

Yet More Family Drama: A Shocking Turn of Events!

It seems that this legacy game in the Sims 3 is turning out to be the most emotionally involved Sims game I have ever played.

Last time we checked in with my sims, the young mother Lily had just married, after an emotional break up with Rashad and the birth of her first son, Aegon, whom she had with Rashad and is illegitimate. Things were tough for a while, but she married Davon, a guy she met in town, and things started to become better. She became pregnant again and had another son, whom she called Aemon. Life seemed to be all well and good for all the Morels and the Lassiters.


Then, it happened. On a perfectly normal Sunday afternoon, Lily had gone downstairs to the kitchen to cook dinner for everyone, and I saw that the dishwasher was broken. I told her to repair it, and then turned my attention back upstairs, where Davon was working on a woodcarving and his stepson Aegon was painting. Next thing I know, I hear a horrible bzzzt noise and everyone rushes downstairs. I look to see what the trouble is, and there's Lily, curled up dead on the kitchen floor. I stared in shock. This was a horrible turn of events.

Death showed up and took Lily away, and left nothing but the urn sitting on the floor next to where she had died. Mio took her daughter's remains to the cemetery and put her on the family plot with the rest of her predecessors, and she stood there for a while and mourned. This was the first time I had buried a child before the parents in the Sims 3. I sat for a minute and quietly mourned with Mio. This was not how it was supposed to happen.

Everything was different after that. Davon, who had been a perfect gentleman before the death of Lily, took a bad turn. Maybe he was mentally unstable anyways, and couldn't handle life with his in-laws and his stepson while the memory of his young wife's death was so fresh in his mind. Maybe he couldn't stand seeing Aegon every day, who looked so like his mother. Maybe the house was too full of memories. Whatever it was, he couldn't handle it, so he gathered up his toddler son Aemon, took one last look at his stepson, who was sleeping fitfully, and walked out.  He got a cheap house on the other side of town, and despite Mio's attempts to contact him and try to convince him to move back in and help take care of his stepson, it is no good. I guess Davon never liked Aegon anyways, but was too enamored of Lily to say anything about her previous misfortunes with Rashad.


Now the big old house is very quiet, and Aegon spends his days trying not to think about how he is suddenly all alone in a house that is much too big for a little boy and his grandparents. This was not the way I had imagined my game going. I hope the grandparents live long enough for him to reach his teen years, otherwise my legacy game might be cut short.

Death Dances Tonight: Guest Submission!

Today we have a guest submission from a reader, doodlebrain, who is an avid Sims fan. Here's the screenshot she submitted and the story that goes with it:

Here's the story: My character Issabelle Montgomery, is a celebrated 5 star chef. She lives in Bridgeport and owns several businesses and night spots, one of which is The Grind. As a master mixologist, she was given the task to moonlight at the Grind. The bartender on duty happened to be very elderly and as she walked out to the dance floor while my girl tended the bar, she died--on the dance floor. Death comes, and sends her away to the hereafter, however, Death did not leave, but decided to have a little fun and dance. On the table. Weird. Very weird.

Even Death needs a little fun every now and again! Thanks for the submission, and happy Simming! 

Have a funny gaming story of your own? Want to submit a screenshot? Tell me everything at elfingamer@gmail.com

Sneak Attack for x3.0 damage!

 I am posting this on both my blogs because I felt it overlapped between gaming and being a wifey. You can check out my other blog here.

Yesterday, I stumbled across something on the internet that gave me an idea. So I went to the store, gathered the necessary surprise, and then called my husband at work to let him know I had a little 'surprise' planned for him. He tried to weasel it out of me, but I told him sweetly that I would be waiting for him when he got home.

"This is all highly suspect," he said, sounding moderately intrigued. I smiled as I hung up.


I set everything up, then waited in a dark, quiet house for him to get home from work. I heard the garage open. I heard him unlock the door. I could see the light in the kitchen flick on from my hiding place on the opposite side of the house. Then I could almost hear the wheels turning in his head, even from the other side of the house as he examined the surprise I'd left for him. I had left a nerf gun, loaded, with some extra ammo, on the small island in our kitchen, where he'd be sure to see it.

Also, I left a note. In case you can't read my horrible purple sharpie handwriting, it reads: "Oh hai. This is your gun. It's loaded. I have one too. Prepare to defend yourself." Then I drew a heart, because hearts make the threat of imminent attack so much more bearable. I was smiling uncontrollably at this point, almost giggling, even though I knew that my 'life' depended on my staying quiet and going through with my sneak attack. For a long time, silence reigned. Did he not think it was a good idea? Was he going to think I'd wasted money on children's toys? Despair began to flood through my womanly wifey mind, and my joy turned to despair. I was stupid. I'd picked a bad surprise. I should have gone for the lingerie.

Then, I heard a noise. Was that the kitchen drawer? The one with the... the flashlight? OH. Oh ho hahahaha. My smile came back, and I cocked my gun, then checked my pockets to make sure my extra ammo was still there. This was going to be fun.

Now in my head, I was expecting to be all cool and awesome, like I am in video games. The truth is - I am a girl. I was also a girl in the dark, wearing socks on a wooden floor. That  attempt to run behind the couch and duck down? Yeah, it ended in me slipping and falling on my behind, but I was laughing the whole time. As my mother told me my whole life, my secret middle name is Grace. About this time is when the cats ran for cover. I don't think they knew quite what was about to happen, but they knew it was going to be scary. I got back up and peeked up over the edge of the sofa to see if my husband had come out from cover yet.

This is not my husband. This is, however, how he came around the corner.

My husband, as I had thought from the sound, had gone for the flashlight, and came peering out from around the corner like a cop or something. My elation turned to fear as I suddenly realized he was going to be much better at this game than I was. Especially when not a shot had been fired yet and I'd already done nothing but fall down. I guess in the end, girls play fps games and are still just girls. Guys play fps games, and well, they become comfortable with guns. He handled that thing like it was real. I was kind of awestruck, if being awestruck with how your husband handles a nerf gun and a flashlight is ... a good thing. I guess it was one of those little moments where it hits you, for the umptybillionth time, that you married an amazingly cool man.

In the end, the shots flew thick and fast, and we both scored good 'hits' on each other. He even said, in a perfect Aussie accent "Boom, headshot," after landing a particularly good shot on my face, that ended with me making a temporary tactical retreat while laughing hysterically. I rebounded with a dirty shot to his nethers, which missed. I hit his knee and made an "arrow to the knee" joke in my head. We ended laughing, and he declared that it was a good surprise. The next morning, in between creating his characters on SW:TOR, he was playing with the gun and seeing how fast he could fire off six rounds, since these pistols are in no way automatic (I went for the cheap guns, in case this was a bad surprise. Now I wish I'd gone for the bigger, fancier guns).

He even took the note with him to work today to show his friend and is going to look up videos on youtube on how to mod the gun to remove the air restrictors.... whatever that means.

I guess that's one point for wifey? Or is it one point for husband, for being awesome?

The End of Winter, the Birth of Something Unexpected

I have had my second age bow for almost a year. Well, I had it. I finally crunched it last night because of a very unexpected gift from a dear friend. I was able to craft my first 1st age weapon last night using something I never thought I'd hold - The Symbol of the Elder King. It still needs a great deal of work, and it makes me sad that with the expansion coming out just right around the corner (literally, it's Monday) that the bow probably won't last long before I crunch it it as well for a level 75 piece. It would be nice if the weapons actually leveled with you so you could hold on to them, but that would take too much grind out of the game I suppose and then people would have less of a reason to continue playing lotro.

Any way, not that any of you care, my imaginary readers, but here is the last look I ever took at Winter's Breath, and the first happy look I took at my new 1st age (who is yet without a name. Suggestions? Still not to the last reforge).

The first rule of being a Dungeon Master.

wall of text alert. You have been warned.

Last week we finally managed to get a Dungeons and Dragons group together (what, you didn't know that was something we have been trying to do for .... a year?) and the first foray was, without a doubt, hilarious. I have no idea how accurate our gameplay was, and I'm sure our newly established houserules would shock more experienced players (hey, I'm a new DM, my answer to almost everything was: "Sure! Of course you can do ___!").

First, for those of you who may be mildly interested (or at least feigning interest), let me introduce the cast of characters.

The DM (me!)
Piers Ravenwood, the human wizard (and my RL husband!!)
Raylana, the elven cleric (one of my coworkers. Ugh, day job)
Kegslow, the dwarven paladin (and Raylana's RL boyfriend)
Amata, the shardmind avenger (Raylana's RL brother)
Also two bystanders, who had never before witenssed D&D, and did nothing but laugh the whole time at our antics :)

Now that I look at it, the cast of characters sort of centers around Raylana. /shrug. Oh well.

Our adventure of choice (or rather, my choice), was to be The Slaying Stone, a prepublished adventure set for characters of the first level. On my first reading, it didn't seem too difficult, and I felt it could be something I, as a totally virgin DM, could handle.

First rule of DMing: the players will always do something unexpected, usually more than once.

We started out, did the first encounter with the wolves without too much hassle ( I say this figuratively, as most of us were still getting a feel for each other and how to actually play the game, as more than one of us was a total newbie and one or two of us were veterans. I'm not saying who), and then was thrown for my first loop when the players started to ask questions about the old woman, Treona, who was giving them their quest to fetch a mysterious stone with dark arcane powers. They were sensing doubt in this woman. Something shifty. Something not along the lines of lawful good. So after questioning her, and me giving her a shiftier side just to satisfy their seemingly insatiable curiosity (she really was fine in the book, THEY MADE HER EVIL), Amata, the avenger, decides he wants to attack her. Why? Who knows. Because he can. While I was frantically looking for random stats to assign this woman since she now had to fight them, Kegslow began to intercede and attempt to calm our randomly aggressive shardmind down. It's a good thing he succeeded with that Diplomacy check too, because I was about ready to throw a level 15 Hag on their level 1 tails.

That should have been my first clue. I have said it before (and if I haven't, I should have) and I will say it again, I do not always catch the obvious the first go-around.


The heroes started out on their journey, and came upon the forlorn ruins of Kiris Dahn, torn apart by goblins. I present them with a map of the city and show them their options for entering. 1, the front gate, but it is heavily guarded and they are attempting stealth as the goblins vastly outnumber them. 2, across the river to the north, but it is very wide. 3, the forest to the south.

Kegslow: "Why can't we go this way?" points to the eastern edge of the map
DM: "Because there is a lake there."
Amata: "How many goblins are at the gate?"
I really didn't want them to go that way, so I sort of railroaded them. "Fifty. Bad idea."
Amata: "How wide is the river?"
Kegslow: "You want to swim?"
Amata: "Well, I don't breathe, I'm made of crystal, so technically I can't suffocate. I say the river."
Kegslow: "Easy for you to say. Fine, how wide is the river?"
DM: "200 feet." It originally was only about fifty feet, but my realization that his class made it easy for him to get across, I decided to spice it up and keep it mildly difficult.

At this point ensued a hilarious round of watching them try to figure out how to get across the river, whether to carry each other across in the manner of that old children's puzzle, or to try and make a raft, or to .... then suddenly Raylana remembered she had 50 feet of rope in her backpack. Surprise, Piers did too. Did Kegslow and Amata? Sure, why not? So I made them roll strength checks for the knots, then athletics checks to see if they could manage to hold on for the entire 200 feet. Kegslow almost drowned, but they all made it in the end.

Then followed a hilarious episode where our heroes managed to sneak up on a lone kobold who was... attending to nature... and convince the kobold leader to create a diversion with the goblins so our heroes would be more free to search for the stone.

They then stole off through the library, where Amata, or Crystalboy as we had come to call him, managed to one shot the miniboss for this particular encounter. As I was still new to DMing, I didn't have the sense to send a horde of goblins down the stairs in retaliation, so I just sat there numbly while the goblin fell to the floor and then the rest of the party finished off the minions.

Next came the shrine of the moon, where they met a lone npc, who at first seemed non-threatening, if at least distant and mostly unresponsive. So when a horde of goblins burst through the doors, surprising our heroes, and the npc retreated to the corner to shake like a leaf, it is small wonder that the heroes ignored him.

It was not my plan for Piers to one shot the minions  in one end of the room, leaving all the other players to run to the other side and deal with the other goblins and their evil boss. It was not plan for Piers to get left alone on that side of the room with the cowardly npc.

It was, however, my plan for that npc to be a wererat, so when he changed over into his more menancing form, and when he bit my husband's poor wizard in the rear, and when my husband contracted Filth Fever, and when he couldn't save out of it, I couldn't help but laugh. Until Piers started to make a very pitiful face at me because he thought he was going to die, and then I started to cry inside because I was killing my husband. I had the power to save him, but that would be cheating, so I let him fight that wererat alone, while we both waited desperately for the rest of the party to decide he was worth helping.

Eventually, and only after a very long and what was becoming desperate fight, they managed to kill the wererat and the goblins, and are now, for the sake of the story, sleeping peacefully in the now empty shrine.

Next time I won't go so easy on them. I will be bolder, and they will tremble at the sound of my dice.