Drown #2: supernova

New Year's Eve, 2084. Justin Kim is 23. Stephanie Day is 24.

* TS2 pictures just because I had some that were sitting on my hard drive for almost 5 years that I never used! It won't be a regular thing though. ;)  New Year's Eve 2084 from Stephanie's point of view. This is the other half of that story, from Justin's point of view. 

Justin's mom had finished three glasses of wine and now she felt like telling embarrassing stories from Justin's childhood. She thought it was cute, but Justin wasn't amused. He was also too miserable to be embarrassed. This story was about that little boy he used to pick on outside Stephanie's house. "Do you remember how mad you used to get?" she said to him. "You'd come home all bent out of shape because she was playing soccer with that boy."

She was exaggerating, Justin figured. Bent out of shape? "I did not," Justin said.

"You did. You were so jealous. You'd come home ranting and raving. I always used to tell you, 'Why don't you just play soccer with them? Then you could all play together?' But you weren't the sporty type, were you? What was his name? Steph, do you remember?"

Drown #1: prepare for lift off

“No matter where you are
I can still hear you when you drown.”
— Smashing Pumpkins



December 16, 2069

It had snowed and already melted, and now everyone lamented that there wouldn’t be a white Christmas this year. It was Stephanie’s tenth birthday, but they weren’t having a party. There were Christmas gifts to buy and dinner arrangements to plan and a large extended family to invite, but she could have Justin over for dinner and then they would have cake and ice cream and birthday candles later. Justin brought her two presents, each wrapped in different paper, because it was her birthday and everybody else was thinking about Christmas. “I didn’t want you to be sad,” he told her, and it made her heart feel warm. She hadn’t told him, or anyone, that having a birthday nine days before Christmas made her sad.

Justin and Stephanie, preface to an epic saga

This post is a recap I made, gearing up to begin this epic story, Drown, for Justin and Stephanie. You can absolutely just dive straight into chapter 1 here, but know that about a third of their story exists on the Lakeside Heights blog. Hence this recap, so you can skip reading those old stories if you’d like to begin here. 

I started writing this for NaNoWriMo 2015 and fell completely and hopelessly in love with it! Considering the outline for it, being at about 16 chapters at the moment (and not small chapters, either—full novel-sized chapters), I realized that the whole story is, in fact, about the size of a novel. Needless to say, I went back and forth and back and forth about whether it would be too big to do on the blog, much less too big for a simmed story (not even to mention that TS4 doesn’t have toddlers and there are many prominent toddler characters in this story).

This is a story I’ve wanted to share since I stopped blogging it five years ago on the LH blog. And the TS4 pictures I’ve managed to get from the game so far are just turning out so good. (Because you know, when the game cooperates and the scenes come into view, there is just something so rewarding about doing these sim-illustrated stories. So much so that I’m considering doing the book version of this as a partial graphic novel, because that’s something I’ve always wanted to do as well.) So whether it’s too big or not, the thing is that I started to blog pieces of it and now I can’t stop. So here we go.

There are essentially three parts to Drown. 1.) what happened on the old LH blog, 2.) what I’m posting here as round 2084: Drown, and 3.) the shared multi-family rotational timeline we will return to after Drown is over, which will, of course, include Justin and Stephanie and their whole crew. 

As for the first part, I don’t expect anyone to troll through an old blog full of hundreds of old stories to brush up on what happened to these guys before. So that’s why I’ve made this recap! There’s just too much to get through, and a lot of the older stories are quite sloppy, so here is a nice summary/reminder for everyone of what happened. However, I will also provide links in case anyone wishes to click over and read some of the older things (the ones that ever made it onto the blog, anyway).

Here we go!

round 2084, aka Justin and Stephanie, "Drown"

Drown #15: how it would end* 

*just this one chapter takes place at a much later date, as part of a future timeline. But I will link it here, too, when it is posted. You can think of it as an epilogue. 

gameplay notes on childhood education

I felt bad after I did these advisory sessions for my current group of high school seniors because I felt like among all of my teenagers, Reid would have probably benefited the most from a senior advisory session. But I wasn’t doing them back then. Most of my other kids had a pretty good idea of what they wanted to do, or at least, in which direction they wanted to start. But Reid didn’t know. He still doesn’t, really. He had no idea how he might apply his skills to the real world, or what he might do with himself besides becoming a bum or a criminal “just kidding, but not kidding.” He doesn’t have much confidence in himself.

Why is that? I don’t know. It’s not because of his parents, his parents are awesome. Or maybe it’s because they’re so blindly accepting of him and the rest of the world isn’t? He doesn’t fit the template of a “good kid” but he isn’t a bad kid, either. So he doesn’t understand where he fits into the grand scheme of things. He has also struggled to trust that Susie really loves him back or that she couldn’t find someone better, though he is gaining a little more confidence in that area, at least. I’m sure the friction with her mother doesn’t help, either.

So flashback to last year, if he would have had a senior advisory session, it would have said this. He’s currently ignoring the advice, of course. Or well, it probably looks like he's ignoring the advice, but I think it's all there, sitting in his subconscious for now.