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.

round 2084, aka Justin and Stephanie, "Drown"

2084-2087, Justin and Stephanie, "Drown" -- aka, NaNoWriMo 2015

a preface

nothing's gonna change my world, prologue

Drown #1: prepare for lift off

Drown #2: supernova
Drown #3: teach me how to dance
Drown #4: these bones
Drown #5: everlong, part 1

Drown #5: everlong, part 2

Drown #6: homecoming, part 1

Drown #6: homecoming, part 2

Drown #7.1: the preparations

Drown #7.2: first date at the end of the world

Drown #7.3: the caretakers

Drown #7.4: the rights and wrongs

Drown #7.5: welcome home

Drown #7.6: origin stories

Drown #7.7: drown

Drown #8: reclamation day, part 1

Drown #8: reclamation day, part 2

Drown #9: the best laid plans, part 1

Drown #9: the best laid plans, part 2

Drown #9: the best laid plans, part 3

Drown #9: the best laid plans, part 4

Drown #9: the best laid plans, part 5
Drown #9: the best laid plans, part 5.5

-- intermission: NYE 2086
-- burnt breakfast

Drown #10: the mouse, part 1
Drown #10: the mouse, part 2
-- who gets the cabin?
Drown #10: the mouse, part 3
Drown #10: the mouse, part 4

Drown #10: the mouse, part 5

Drown #10: the mouse, part 6

Drown #10: the mouse, part 7

Drown #11: three little birds, part 0

Drown #11: three little birds, part 1

Drown #11: three little birds, part 2

-- intermission: Stephanie's first day at work
Drown #11: three little birds, part 3

Drown #11: three little birds, part 4
-- pool day picspam

Drown #11: three little birds, part 5

Drown #11.5: to infinity and beyond
Drown #12: hand in my pocket, part 1

Drown #12: hand in my pocket, part 2

Drown #12: hand in my pocket, part 3

-- this
-- wedding prep

-- Amy & Blair: part 1, the wedding

-- Amy & Blair: part 2, the honeymoon

-- family day at the mines

-- everywhere

-- Stephanie's baby shower

Drown #12.5: the scientist

-- mine

Drown #13: the story we tell, part 1
Drown #13: the story we tell, part 1.5

Drown #13: the story we tell, part 2

-- false alarms

Drown #13: the story we tell, part 3

Drown #13: the story we tell, part 4

-- little love
-- stink bug
-- helping out
-- all dressed up

Drown #13: the story we tell, part 5.1

Drown #13: the story we tell, part 5.2

Drown #13: the story we tell, part 5.3

Drown #13: the story we tell, part 5.4

Drown #13: the story we tell, part 5.5

Drown #13: the story we tell, part 6
Drown #14: we go on, part 1

Drown #14: we go on, part 2
Drown #14: we go on, part 3

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. 

(onward to round 2086-2088!)

nothing's gonna change my world

September 2084. The International Lunar Station. Keri Riley was 23. 

soundtrack: Across the Universe, by The Beatles


Keri had fooled herself to think that she could ever be a warrior. She was a spoiled trust fund baby and pampered princess. She never got good grades in school, she was mediocre at sports, and she wasn’t exceptionally talented at anything except spending her daddy’s money. And later, her husband’s money, too.

Justin told her that he would support her, but he didn’t believe in her, either. She could tell. Nobody really believed in her. She’d never been any farther outside the reach of planet Earth than the moon’s orbit. She’d flown in one launch, and now she was here in these long gray rooms with fabricated air and gravity that was 83% wrong and dizzying at first. She wasn't allowed to zoom around the solar system in a little jet. It wasn’t her job to build systems or repair rockets. They would never let her mine ore or quarry rock. Keri’s job was to sit a small gray cubicle, look at a smaller gray monitor, and relay what information she was told to relay into a tiny gray headset wrapped around her ears.

Why couldn’t the headset be colored, at least? Emerald green, like the forests.

“It’s standard issue,” they said. “It just has to get the job done.”

Keri missed emerald green.

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!

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.

aging and laws

There were a couple of things mentioned in the previous story set about the transition between childhood and adulthood (the teen years) and what things they are allowed to do, and when. Like when Reid mentioned that he wouldn't be allowed to rent an apartment until he was 19. These are rules I've made up for my worlds, in this fictional future, based partly on RL laws and also partly on what makes sense for my game.

For example, the age of majority needs to be 19 in my game rather than 18 or some other number, because I need high school aged sims to be able to use the in-game school system and many of my teenagers will turn 18 before they graduate high school.

Another example is that children and babies can be left at home in game, unattended, without any consequences. That just doesn't make any sense to me. So, even though my sims don't need a babysitter, I make them arrange one (like here) for the sake of realism.

So if you were a young sim living in my world, these would be the laws that governed your growing up.

SNU, rules and notes on a fake university

This topic was requested by an anon, but it's one I'm happy to talk about anyway because I've always loved running universities for my towns. I've been faking universities since the early TS2 days before the Uni EP came out. TS4 doesn't have a Uni EP yet, but like all the other versions of the game, I imagine we'll probably get one eventually. And when we do, like in the other games, I'll probably use some of it and mod the rest to work into my own custom university system.



why go to university?

I use a harder skilling mod because of the long lifespans I play, and my sims have plenty of drama and chaos in their busy lives that leveling up is actually very hard for them. Considering their 4 allowed play-days per year, and that they only skill when they want to (and for many of my sims, that is not very often at all!), many of my less studious sims never reach more than a level 2-3 in most skill areas.

The system I'm using was something I made up for my TS3 sims, but nothing really ever came of that project, so I'm using it again here with more luck. With the combination of harder skilling and my town career limitations, going to university is a real benefit for many of my sims.