#sims3challenge #sims3legacy #sims3story #thesims3

Now that Winston was out of his crib, Victoria and Edmund finally had a good reason to get out of the same room. Winston took over Victoria’s place.

His sense of style didn’t match Edmund’s either, but they seemed to reach an uneasy truce all the same.

Edmund took his role as responsible big brother very seriously.

Of course, he took everything very seriously.

He and Victoria had never gotten along better. Now that they didn’t have to reconcile their sense of style anymore, they were great friends.

Winston spent most of his free time in front of the television: sometimes watching, sometimes playing video games, and sometimes working out. He claimed it was a good life balance. Dylan and Andria were more skeptical.

Bonehilda started training Connery to play dead.

She was uniquely qualified.

It was the perfect day for the beach. She invited a half-dozen of her best friends to join her.

She also managed to drag along her entire family — including Sawyer, who usually just viewed the great outdoors as a source of dirt and microbes.

Morgana Beach had been build up quite a bit in the last generation. When the Samples of old moved to Avalon, it was just a stretch of shoreline. Now it was a a beach park with a clubhouse.

Angelina Winter came with her brother Roderick.

Also Cortney Pierce-Hodgins.

Winston, who was just starting at Chivalrous Preparatory School, did his best to get to know his new classmates.

Dylan found a nice place in the sun to relax with a book.

Sawyer found a place in the shade to play with Gamora.

Wherever her feet touched the ground, she left a trail of flowers behind her — quick explosions of spontaneous vegetation generated by some side effect of her sim/plant biology.

Sawyer thought she was magnificent. Truly a higher order life form. And he had created her.

Victoria took to the water.

She rented a board from the clubhouse and tried out windsurfing for the first time.

It was as if she had always known how.

As if the sea were in her blood.

“I can’t believe I only saw you yesterday!” Abby said, flushing. “It seems like we’ve been apart so long.”

“We… wouldn’t have to wait that long,” he suggested awkwardly. “We could get a place together.”

Abby stared at him for a moment in shock. “You want to move in together?” she asked. “That’s really serious! Do you think we’ve been dating long enough?”

Chaim shrugged. “I know who I want to wake up to every morning,” he said.

Abby laughed out loud. Then she grabbed him.

“I’ll think about it,” she murmured into his ear.

Meanwhile, Edmund sought out Dylan. “I think it’s about time that I learned to drive a car,” he said. “I was hoping you could be the one to teach me.”

“You won’t be disappointed,” Edmund said.

Dylan nodded. “All right then. Let’s go get the van.”

“Wait,” Edmund said. “I have a better idea.” He led his father out to the parking lot.

“You want to learn to drive in Abby’s sports car?” Dylan asked. “How is that responsible?”

Edmund smirked. “I might never get another chance,” he said. “She’s busy. She’ll never notice.”

“She’ll never notice if you return the car in the same state you found it,” Dylan said severely, “and this is not a good start.”

“Relax, Dad,” Edmund said. “We haven’t picked up any speed yet.”

“Yet?” Dylan said.

“You’ve spent the entire party in the clubhouse!” Victoria complained to Winston.

“I like it in there,” Winston said. “Out here, you can get stand stuck in your clothes or sunburned.”

“It’s cooler if you get in the ocean,” Victoria said. “It’s so much fun!”

“Then you end up with salt dried in your hair,” Winston replied.

“Give it a try?” Victoria pleaded.

It was impossible to say no to Victoria when she decided to be persuasive.

Winston tried out paddleboating, but he couldn’t see a lot of point to it.

He had a strawberry ice cream cone.

That almost immediately fell on the ground.

“I’m glad you’re better with the car than I am with my ice cream,” he told Edmund ruefully.

“Too bad, Dad,” Edmund said.

“I’d share, but that would just be gross.”

Eventually, Chaim and Abby unlocked from each other and played in the ocean.

“What’s that?”

The gray creature slipped under the water and was gone.

“Hey, what’s that? A kid?”

The voice was like an ugly grating sound from the childhood he’d tried to forget.

Sawyer turned around to see Whitney Ursine-Wu, the chief bully who had tormented him in grade school.

“You stuffed me in my locker fourteen times and stole my lunch money every day for a month,” he snarled. “Why would you ever say a word to me now that we’ve graduated?”

“Hey, hey,” Whitney said. “I was just curious about the kid. Besides, I’m sure it wasn’t fourteen times.”

“I wouldn’t have done all that if you weren’t asking for it!” Whitney said. It was either a plea or a taunt, but it wasn’t clear which.

“Don’t pretend you have the right to talk to me,” Sawyer shrieked. “You bottom-dwelling microcephalic sea slug!”

Then he did what he’d imagined every night in grade school.

He struck back.

Sawyer was not to be contained. “You stay away from my daughter!” he shouted. “If I see you come close to her again, I’ll slap you with a retraining order!”

Whitney stared at him, slack jawed. His face was turning red from where Sawyer had hit him.

Then he turned and ran away.

Emily Doctor, a resident who worked at the hospital with Sawyer, watched the old bully run away.

“I saw it all from the clubhouse,” she said. “Way to go, Dr. Sample. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

Sawyer was breathing too hard to answer, so he just watched her as she walked away.

Victoria’s party continued until the sun began to set and everyone had to go home for dinner.

Not a bad Leisure Day, all told.

Cheers.

———-

I had to write this post !@#$ two times because I rebooted my computer with the *saved* draft still open, and Chrome restored it from some previous cache and saved it over the original. Imagine a whole lot more profanity here. This wasn’t an emotionally draining post, but I had to do a lot of image organizing to get the various threads into something readable.

I have to say that I’m not super-thrilled with the way a lot of the water activities work. Windsurfing, paddleboats, etc. are treated like cars — you pick some place you want to go in the water, and the vehicle appears while you’re moving and then disappears when you get there, leaving you suddenly swimming in the water. Who goes windsurfing or paddleboating to GO PLACES anyway?

A whole lot of the action here was autonomous. I left Abby and Chaim on autonomy almost all the time. They spent almost the whole day standing by the water, making out. It was adorable. I thought they might try to woohoo in the showers, but they never did.

Sawyer’s confrontation with Whitney Ursine-Wu was also autonomous. The two are “Old Enemies.” Whitney isn’t in the medical profession, so their relationship must date from school. I kept waiting for a full-on fight to break out, which I’m sure Sawyer would loose. But Sawyer hit Whitney twice. Whitney fired back a lot of insults, but he never got physical. Then he ran away. I guess Sawyer won just from sheer intensity.

Dylan and Edmund autonomously picked Abby’s car to teach Edmund to drive. I wouldn’t have thought of Edmund as the sports car type, but perhaps he was drawn to the dangerous black styling.

It was a fun, very busy Leisure Day, where I got to try out a whole bunch of bits from Island Paradise.