5.3 Haunting

Ghost really didn’t like gnomes. With the way she treated them, you’d think she had a bad experience in her past. No gnome was safe from her wrath.

Veronica was a spiritual ambassador these days. She gave a constant stream of lectures on the nature of the spirit world, primarily focused on dispelling misconceptions and encouraging sims to approach spirits positively.

She also did a bit of outreach work.

Sometimes reality wasn’t quite as rosy as she made it sound in her speeches. Few spirits locked on the mortal plane were all that happy to be there. Most of them wanted get to back to the Netherworld. Sometimes they were pretty cranky about it.

But she was a persistent and skilled negotiator.

Usually they came around and started working with her to get home.

Then again, some spirits you just couldn’t reason with.

For those, you just had to open up the can of whoopass.

Since the Sample-Royales were such night owls, Veronica was able to take some extra time between assignments to visit her sister-in-law and nephew.

Tomas looked almost too old and wise to be a toddler.

She also took some time on her rounds to test out some fresh inventions.

“Let’s see if this helps you stop obsessing about my husband.”

It might have worked, and it probably didn’t do Ariel any harm.

One place in particular seemed to show up on her spirit reports, but the kind of activity people reported there didn’t really seem like the kind of thing that trapped spirits would do. Eventually, the reports stacked up so much that Veronica couldn’t ignore them. So she made a special trip to an old abandoned crypt on the edge of town.

Well, she’d been TOLD it was abandoned.

For an abandoned graveyard, this place seemed to have a lot of visitors.

She poked around inside for a while and found no real evidence of supernatural activity. Then she ran into a large, menacing, entirely NON-supernatural guard, who escorted her swiftly and firmly back outside.

“I poked someplace I shouldn’t, didn’t I?” Veronica asked.

The man grunted and closed the door. “Poke someplace closer to home next time,” he replied.

Well, THAT had been interesting. Not terribly useful to her work, but interesting.

It wasn’t long after that the doorbell rang at the Sample residence, and Forest opened the door. Standing on the doorstep was a figure that made him tremble just a little bit.

There was something wrong with this creature’s eyes. The longer Forest looked at them, the colder he felt.

“Who are you?” Forest asked. “Are you looking for someone?”

“Sometimes I’m called Flynn,” the figure said. “I just wanted to introduce myself to my neighbors.” The way he said it held some sort of menacing undertone. Forest could have sworn he’d heard that name before…. Wait, no. It couldn’t be could it?

Maybe it was.

Sean Flynn. The legendary lord of the underworld. Some called him the Emperor of Evil.

What on earth had attracted Flynn’s attention here?

Flynn was dangerous, and he knew it. More than that, he made it clear to everyone else just by the way he held his body. And he looked strangely young for someone who had been a legend in organized crime for decades.

His very skin radiated some kind of unreal chill. If he could feel it from here, Forest couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to reach out and touch that hand…

“Ahem,” Flynn mused. “I just came here size up the place, but perhaps I found what I was looking for after all.”

He handed Forest a slip of paper. “If you’re interested, call this number. We can teach you want you want to learn.”

Learn what Flynn knew? Flynn was arguably the most powerful man in the simworld. Of course Forest was interested!

Their hands touched briefly as Forest took the paper. The cold left a tingle on Forest’s skin long after the contact was gone.

Flynn turned immediately to leave. Forest couldn’t wait until he was off the property to make that call.

The very next night, it was Forest outside that “abandoned” crypt.

Except that they offered him a job, and he took it.

——–

So the subtext here is that in the University patch, EA FINALLY fixed the bug in the Ghost Hunter profession that was introduced in Supernatural. Veronica hasn’t been able to do the two top level jobs — Ghostly Presence and Angry Ghost Invasion — since she achieved the level to do them. I’ve mostly been getting her promotions by raising her Logic skill, which is why she spends half of her screen time blown up. Once she was actually able to do jobs again, she topped out the career and reached her LTW very quickly.

Since Forest’s LTW is Emperor of Evil, it was a foregone conclusion that he’d be joining the Criminal career. However, this little sequence played into the plan very well. Veronica got an opportunity where the police asked her to release ghosts in the criminal rabbithole. As she was leaving, Flynn came out, but he dashed away with super vampire speed before I could snap a screenshot. Then when she went home, for whatever reason he followed her, and Forest answered the door to talk to him.

This is the beginning of a truly disturbing friendship.

16 thoughts on “5.3 Haunting

  1. Wow! Flynn and Forest are amazingly creepy together! Though I like the uniform Flynn apparently chose for his guards…

    It's fun to see Veronica's jobs. I'm not sure what I'll do with a non-rabbit-hole career, but I hope someone wants one soon!

    Tomas is the oldest-looking toddler I've ever seen. And so serious, which is weird considering his parents.

    (Poor Ariel.)

  2. Tomas really looks unworldly. I was surprised too. I'm going to keep an eye on him when he grows up. I believe he's a child right now.

    I thought the big topless criminal coming out of the hideout was pretty amusing too. He looked like some kind of gladiator guard.

    Oh, and Veronica really did Ariel a favor. I saw "Zap" in Veronica's action menu and decided to try it out on Ariel. I assumed it was some kind of new Ghost Hunter action. It turned out that it was the Moodlet Manager, which she'd just bought with her happiness points.

  3. Wait. So you saw "Zap" as a choice, had no idea what it did, and decided to try it out on Ariel??? That's just mean! Poor Ariel! It's not her fault that she has good taste in men! (Excepting Puzzle…)

  4. Forest and Flynn. Friends … or something else? I remember your spoiler. I can tell that this will be a very dark and intense relationship. I agree though, Flynn fit very nicely into your plans … it was like he planned it that way all along!

  5. Forest and Flynn, it is ambiguous isn't it?

    Sean Flynn's a leftover cross-pollination sim from CourtneyHelen's deceased Housemate WIshacy. I moved him with the Samples because I liked the idea of having the town pre-populated with a vampire Emperor of Evil, and I figured that EoE would be an international role anyway. He was legacy spouse to Viola Sharpe. I wonder what Courtney would've thought about how he turned out here.

  6. Ah-ha, here's the Evel! Whoa, this is all creepy and potential-y. That look on Flynn's face as he's leaving and Forest is on the phone, to me it's kinda a regretful, I wish this would go right but I know it'a gonna turn out bad, I'm so sorry, look. *Shivers* Hopefully that's just me though.

    Happy for Veronica that she could finally get her promotions! Her whoopass in a can works very well. ;D

    That is a very good-looking toddler, please keep an eye on him, I'd love to see how it translates into adult features. Hmm, that's it, he's got a kinda 'old' looking face already, very interesting!

    I love your story so much! **Squishes story**

  7. I'm so glad you're enjoying it!

    Forest's story is far darker than anything I've written in my sim stories, and I am kind of afraid people won't want to read it. So I really appreciate your reaction!

    I'm mostly not in this to write dark stuff, though I enjoy other people's dark stuff, depending on the story. I usually enjoy writing sims stories as a kind of lighthearted escape, but Forest's story is what he wanted to do, so here we are.

  8. What a creepy chapter! Ghosts, evil vampire and old looking toddler. The fact that Flynn followed Veronica to find out where her family lived with the intention of recruiting her evil son in the criminal career… creeeepy. I really really loved this.

    • I’m so glad you liked it! This is the beginning of Forest’s storyline, which was a huge digression for me. I was pretty nervous about what people would think of it, compared to the rest of my blog. But I told myself that when I rolled the Evil trait, I was going to really play it.

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