4.1 Some Immortality

Ada developed an obsession with an upperclassman named Lavar Andrews from her literature class. She looked up his phone number on the school directory and started calling him, trying to persuade him to join her at the art museum. Not anything like a date, really.

Lavar never seemed to have time to talk to her. Then he stopped answering her calls at all. What was wrong? Didn’t the Orbital Mind Control Lasers want him to notice her?

One day, she decided to take matters into her own and called his house. “Oh, yes!” Mrs. Andrews said cheerfully. “Lavar’s home and just watching the television. Come on over?”

But when she arrived, he wasn’t there.

“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Andrews said nervously. “He had to dash out to the store. Maybe another night?”

“I’ll wait for him,” Ada said. And she did.

“I really think you ought to head home, young lady,” Mrs. Andrews said coldly when curfew got close. Ada had to leave without seeing Lavar. The Mind Control Lasers were playing tricks on her.

Charles had heard good things about the fish in the graveyard lake, so he headed out one bright morning to see for himself.

He had the place to himself, except for an old busker and his audience of one.

The graveyard…. What an interesting place to busk.

And there was something terribly odd about the guy who was listening.

(Why yes, that is Sean!)

The fish weren’t biting terribly well, so Charles settled down for a long day. He should have been enjoying himself, but there was something odd in the air. He couldn’t put his finger on it.

“Look!” someone shouted. “In the sky! Get out of there!”

Charles looked up and was paralyzed at the sight. An enormous asteroid, wreathed in flames, was hurtling out the sky toward him.

He should have teleported away, but his mind was empty. His life flashed before his eyes.

Then it hit.

Crimson light flashed. The air was filled with dirt, debris, flame. Then it settled down around him.

He hadn’t felt anything. The asteroid had hit him dead on. He was standing in its crater. He should be dead….

…Unless he already was?

Charles was half-mortal, half-ghost. His skin was warm, but he could feel the pull of the Netherworld that his father had returned to. What was he, really?

He looked across the lawn and locked eyes with the mysterious man he had seen earlier.

They had something in common, he knew suddenly. They were both not quite alive and not quite dead. He didn’t know what the man was, but he wanted to know more.

“Hi, I’m Charles,” he said awkwardly, closing the distance with his hand outstretched.

“What the hell was that?” the stranger said by way of greeting.

Then he collapsed at Charles’s feet. Charles started to check his vitals, but he knew that he wouldn’t find anything. The man was all right, just stunned.

There was more metallic debris lying around the graveyard than Charles had ever seen in his life. He gathered up the scrap to bring home to Mom. She might not need to go back to the junk yard for inventing materials for the rest of her life.

He hauled the meteor itself home and placed it in the lawn as a decoration.

———

OOOOOK. The way this played from the other side of the keyboard:

“Oh, hey, it’s a meteor! I’ve never had a meteor in the game. That’s awesome!”

“Wait. It’s really headed for Charles’s head. I’ll just teleport him out of the way.”

“They won’t let him teleport!! They’re just going to make him stand there and wait? What the heck??”

“Ohmigod ohmigod. Charles is going to die! This can’t be happening! What am I going to do?”

“Dur….?”

*pantpantpant*

So, I’m pretty sure a direct hit was supposed to kill him, wasn’t it? He wasn’t harmed at all. He didn’t event get the soot-face explody hair. I have to assume that’s because he’s a ghost kid?

Gawping at the meteor is apparently like a birthday party. It seems to preempt everything else in the queue, and it can’t be canceled. I don’t understand why you get so much warning if you can’t run away. Bah. Or maybe I was too clever to try to teleport, and he’d’ve responded if I’d just told him to walk. Charles can’t actually run. He just floats at a very slow ghost speed, or he teleports.

It was pretty awesome to run into vampire Sean. 🙂

0 thoughts on “4.1 Some Immortality

  1. OMG! I'm so glad that Charles is ok! It would have been so tragic if he'd been killed by a meteor. I do wonder what that means for his mortality, though…

    Nice to see that Sean made it through, too.

  2. The moment I realised that there was a meteor going down I was afraid that the legacy would be at an end now! I had no idea that ghost kids (and vampires) can't be killed that way!

    And poor Ada, trying to get in touch with that guy and constantly failing…

  3. Well, by legacy rules, Ada would be the heir, and the legacy could continue. But I am madly in love with Charles. I don't know if I'd have the heart to carry on. The truth is that I'd probably have given up all pretense of playing for Pinstar points and reloaded Charles from a save file.

    Charles has mortality like a playable ghost, same as his father. He carries around his own gravestone in his inventory, and at any time I can click it and tell him to "Return to Netherworld." He advances in age the same as a normal mortal, but when he dies of old age, he turns into green mist and vanishes into the gravestone the same way a ghost does.

    So now I wonder… he can "die" of old age, but can he be electrocuted? Can he drown or starve? Clearly he can't be killed by a meteor. I'd read when I created Charles that ghost kids were exactly the same as ordinary sims except for the visuals. Clearly, that's not true because he can teleport (and his dad could not, interestingly — that makes a ghost child something different from just another playable ghost).

    Also, ghost aging is glitchy. I had to annihilate Cycl0n3 because his aging got borked at the end, and he actually did become immortal. Recently, I discovered that Charles's aging had become disabled. That was concerning, but I'm pretty sure that if nothing else worked I could use a birthday cake. However, I did some more reading on Twallan's forums and discovered a debug code that can be used to re-enable aging when this happens. I probably didn't need to annihilate Cycl0n3. Too bad. He has an urn now, but he's still never returned as an ordinary ghost.

    At any rate, Charles lost about 4 days of aging, and I'm probably going to use a birthday cake when he is 4 days until adulthood. I didn't count days, but I wonder if being hit by the meteor is what did it….

    Obviously, I am not going to go on a kill-Charles jag to figure out how his mortality works.

  4. Ghost kids are fascinating! The idea to go on a "kill-Charles jag" reminds me of the part in Groundhog Day where Bill Murray is trying to commit suicide over and over and keeps waking up alive!

  5. Oh my gosh, a meteorite!! One of those things wiped out my original January and Connor. In their experience, they were able to run away…just not fast or far enough. 🙁

    As usual, I'm really loving your spare…although I like Charles a lot, too, and was glad — and fascinated — to see him survive his brush with death. I actually sort of thought for a second there that this was going to be how you transcended into your metallic elven world. 🙂

    Oh, and by the way…I've dl'd Delphy's Dashboard, and apparently have lots of conflicting cc. Sad day. Also, I haven't forgotten about putting January and February on the Exchange; I just haven't quite figured out how to manage it yet (long story short, the computer I use for Sims is no longer able to connect to the internet. Makes things a bit complicated…)

    Anyway, as always, great post! 🙂

  6. I'm glad you found it! It turned out the link I sent wasn't terribly useful other than mentioning it. I looked at a lot of links when I was trying to figure out my lag problem, and that was one of them, but not the most useful one :-p.

    I actually just started to get crippling lag again and ran DD. I only had about four conflicting items. Well, I had four items each with multiple conflicts with cryptically named internal Sims game files files. I disabled all the cryptic files, since this was all stuff I'd installed myself as packages, and the lag disappeared! It was like magic. That wasn't even very many conflicts, so this issue looks like it's pretty real.

    In that case, I didn't lose any content either, since I left the original package files for the CC enabled. I'm hesitantly guessing there might be something going on with the game where it's actually generating some conflicting copies of of some CC? I don't know and can't begin to guess. But if the game can spontaneously generate CC conflicts, that could be why the last Sample house ran fine for almost a generation before I had trouble.

    I didn't know you'd lost a version of January and Connor to a meteorite! Argh. On one hand, it's certainly exciting. OTOH, I'm not really in The Sims for completely random, unavoidable ways to die.

    I thought it was funny that we independently came up with a fairly similar approach to our insane spares :).

  7. Ok, I'm following your blog under my gmail, but I didn't get an update about this new chapter. Anyway, great chapter! I don't even want to know how many hours I've spent playing Sims 3, but I've never encountered a meteorite before. I love how they just stand there and point at it.

  8. I've been playing Ambitions for almost a year, and I'd never seen a meteorite either. Good thing they're really infrequent! It would be nice if you could make your characters be less stupid about something that is going to KILL THEM!

  9. DD is awesome; I can't thank you enough for turning me on to it. After doing some research, I've decided to sloooowly go through my conflicting packages instead of just getting rid of them all outright; however, the interesting thing to me is that my other family doesn't lag AT ALL, and they obviously all have the same CC…so I'm thinking that it must have something to do with the Callenders themselves. My spouse says it could be because they have so many relationships and are on a big lot in a house that I "built" (I use that term very loosely, as I am absolutely not an architect) rather than a premade one.

    Hahaha, I noticed the insane spare similarities, too! Sim minds think alike, I suppose. And wow, that must have been some shower!

  10. I'm glad DD is working out for you.

    Hmmm…. So, how many generations has your other family been running? If the Callendars have been running in the same save file for several generations, that could also be a problem. Sims game files have a tendency to build up corrupted data over time. I assume you have Twallan's Overwatch, though, since I know you have his personalities. That's the best way I know to defend against data cruft.

    There's ALSO the memory system, which really bloats the save files. You might try using MasterController to annihilate all the townie memories. I use a memory mod here (http://modthesims.info/download.php?t=446281) to reduce townie memories, and after Charles's future mate moves in, I'm going to use MasterController to wipe them. (I would just turn them off entirely using this mod, but discovering Fabian's sordid love life when he moved in was just too much fun.) I can just watch my save files get bigger every time I back them up.

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