In the tech cave beneath the garden in the Sample house, the time machine exploded with light. Gamora emerged and landed lightly on her feet. Finally she could travel through that thing with style.

“Are you all right?” she asked Emmett. “Wait, where’s Fenton? Why is he on the floor?”

“Dunno,” Emmett answered, staring at the baby. “Time distortion? He’s fine, though. Didn’t even wake up.”

It was just minutes after she had left — over a year of subjective time ago. The paradox of time travel made her feel a little dizzy.

So much had happened since she last stood in this lab….

Oasis Landing erected a statue to commemorate her funding of generations of planetary conservationists.

(“I think I like it,” Gamora said.

“Somehow, I thought you would,” Emmett said.)

She filled her days cataloguing life forms that had evolved in this clean, safe, environmentally responsible timeline and comparing them to the flora and fauna of the less-hopeful timelines. She was in the unique position of being able to remember the branching of the timeline. Emit almost certainly could do this too, but they never spoke much after the Cloning Incident.

Here, there were luminescent caterpillars that chirped out encouraging messages when you picked them up.

And enormous flowers that gave off a nectar with amazing psychedelic effects. No wonder the people here seemed to be perpetually high.

In due time, Emmet proposed marriage at just the right moment.

And soon after they had a sunset wedding….

…at her absolute favorite place in the city.

Gamora’s new research direction in genetic splicing…

Resulted in little Fenton, a plantsim baby blended from genetic material she collected from herself and Emmett.

(“Are you using my genes or the Time Traveler’s?” Emmett demanded.

“You want the truth?” Gamora asked. “I don’t know, and I don’t really care. It’s all the same genes.”)

At first, she thought she would never return. Life could have been perfect in the future for the rest of their lives. But as time wore on, she thought about Sawyer more and more. She’d never told him goodbye. He didn’t know where she had gone. Without her, her dad would finish his life all alone. And… she missed him.

Emmett didn’t turn out to be as difficult to convince as she’d expected. “Life’s easy here,” he admitted. “I could use a challenge. Plus, everyone looks at me and thinks I’m that other Relevart guy.”

Gamora looked over the time machine one last time. “You sure you’re ready to do this?” she asked.

“I said I was ready,” Emmett said. “You don’t have to ask again.”

She took a deep breath and flipped the switch at the base of the time machine.

It erupted in a fountain of light that continued up into the heavens. Then it went dark forever.

“Here we go,” she said. “I hope you love my dad, because now we can’t go back. I did enough messing with downstream time by accident. The future’s in a good place. Let’s be sure it stays that way.”

Emmett shrugged. “I’m up with it. Let’s go meet this old man of yours.”

Gamora’s all-terrain hovercar was parked outside the Sample estate, just where she left it. The quick drive to her father’s new house on familiar Avalon roads finally made it feel real that she was finally home.

She burst through the door. “Dad! You won’t believe everything that’s happened since I last saw you. The whole family’s moving in with you, so get ready for company. And come meet your grandson!”

———-

Ugh. I assembled this post about a dozen different ways, and this was the best I could come up with. The gameplay was fairly straightforward, but for some reason nothing I did made a coherent narrative.

So this is the best I can do, but I hope at least I’m out of writer’s purgatory.

This is Gamora’s farewell post. She has triumphantly left the active household.

The Time Machine lit up with an incoming signal…

…and dumped Gamora out onto the roof of the Oasis Landing time traveler’s center.

She was just never going to get that landing right.

She stepped to the edge of the roof and looked out over Oasis Landing.

Not bad, if she did say so herself.

She headed down the stairs and out into the town to explore.

No piles of trash? Check.

Crisp clean air? Check.

Happy residents? Probably check, but she didn’t really want to learn enough about anyone’s life to find out.

The rainbows absolutely everywhere were a bit much, but she wasn’t going to complain.

The wind smelled sweet. Her skin drank it in like nectar.

Gamora tried out a kite she had built a long time ago with her dad.

All right then. There was one person she needed to see. It wasn’t difficult to look up the Sample family’s address. It didn’t look like they was doing badly in this reality. Then again, she didn’t know how successful they’d been in the other one.

She was wandering around the grounds of the expansive house when JC Sample conveniently arrived.

“Hello, who are you?” he said. “If you’re from the Orphaned Flowers Association, I gave at the office.”

Gamora blinked. She’d been rather hoping that their time together at the time traveler’s center would have preserved his memory of her in his new time stream. Well, there was no help for it. “Nothing like that,” she said and reached out to take his hand. “I’m here as a representative of Simshare’s Clearinghouse Lottery.”

“A lottery?” JC said. “I don’t know why you’d be here to talk to me. I never buy lottery tickets.”

“We’re the lottery of the next generation,” Gamora said. “You don’t need to buy tickets to win. We can look into the future to see what tickets you will buy.”

“Are you saying I won something?” JC asked, “In a lottery I never entered?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Gamora told him. “I’m here to present you with a check for one million simoleons.”

“What!” JC cried. “Is this real?”

“Completely real,” Gamora said. “Don’t spend it all in one place.”

“I don’t know what to say!” JC cried. “This is what lottery? I’ve never heard of Simshare’s Clearinghouse. What’s your name?”

Instead of answering, Gamora blew him a pollen-laced kiss.

His hand flew to his face, and he stared at her. “Who are you?”

“It’s not important,” Gamora said. “Have a nice life. Oh, and actually don’t to worry too much about buying a lottery ticket.”

Then she jumped on her hoverboard and sped away.

Back at the time travel center, she set about tracking down Emit Relevart.

As usual, he wasn’t hard to find.

“So, that problem with the timestream,” she said. “Fixed it for you.”

Emit stared at her for a second. She couldn’t see his eyes behind the visor, but she got the impression his look was positive. “You did,” he said slowly. “Impressive.”

“I can’t say that I approve of using future knowledge to cheat on a lottery,” he said, “but seeing that you used the seed money to found nonprofit dedicated to the protection of the planet, I think we can let that part slide. You may be reckless, but you’re incredibly intelligent, and you care about doing the right thing. I admire that about you.”

“Thank you,” Gamora said. “I think we’ve found a lot to admire in each other.”

Emit frowned. “I’m not sure I know how to take that.”

Gamora rolled her eyes. “We’ve been dancing around each other through three time streams now. You’ve been sneaking into my dream capsule at night. That’s not creepy at all, by the way.”

It seemed impossible for Emit Relevart’s skin to get any paler, and yet the color drained out of his face. “Ms. Gamora,” he stammered. “I’m sorry if there’s been a misunderstanding, but ah… I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but…”

Gamora just waited for him to finish a sentence.

At last he sighed, and his body looked ten years older. “I am the Custodian of the Time Stream,” he said. “I live outside of causality. I keep time travelers from destroying reality. In exchange, I cannot… engage in any romantic relationships of any kind.”

“You’re lonely,” Gamora said bluntly.

He nodded. “It’s a lonely job.”

“And your vow of celibacy exists why….?”

“Children born outside the time stream are a problem. Let’s leave it at that.”

“That’s convenient,” Gamora said. “I can’t get pregnant.”

Emit shook his head. “You’re right. I like your company. But that’s as far as I can let it go.”

Gamora sighed. “I’m sorry too. I guessed you would say that, but I had to try.”

“Thank you,” Emit said. “It’s good to know you are thinking of me. You are lonely too.”

Gamora nodded. “I’m very lonely. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how to fix that.”

Then she started to laugh. “I think I figured it out. I might be a good time stream guardian, but I had to break the rules somewhere.”

She walked past Emit into the corridor where two time tourists were flirting, and she held up a glass orb in her hand. Her eyes glinted wickedly.

The male tourist’s eyes went wide, and he jumped in front of his date. “What are you doing?”

“Don’t worry,” Gamora said. “It’s not about you.” And he threw the glass onto the ground and watched it shatter.

Where the glass fell, a new person seemed to coalesce out of of the air.

Emit stared at the new sim, who stared back at him.

“Whoa,” said the time tourists, “You could be brothers!”

“He’s you,” Gamora said, “or at least as close as my dad and I could get with cutting edge timestream cloning. I gathered the DNA sample from you a couple of time-shifts ago. You might not remember.”

“You shouldn’t be able to do that,” Emit said.

“I know,” Gamora said.

“Hi,” Emit Relevart’s clone said. “This is a lot to take in. You’re the person who created me? I hope it was for a good reason?”

“I hope it’s a great reason,” Gamora admitted. “But you’ll have to be the one to tell me.”

“Whoa!” the clone exclaimed, his voice muffled against her skin.

Gamora stepped back. “Entirely up to you,” she said. “No pressure. You have a lot of options.”

“Actually, why don’t we do that gain while I figure out what I want?”

“I think this is going to take a lot of research.”

Gamora relaxed for the first time in days and gazed into his face. “I didn’t know you’d feel that way, but I was hoping,” she admitted.

“You have a lot to explain to me,” he said.

“We have all the time we need,” Gamora said. “And if we don’t, we can make some.”

“It’s crowded out here, don’t you think?” Emit’s clone said. “What do you think about getting a room?”

Emit Relevart watched for a while in silence.

Then he moved on.

He had important things to do. Important time things. Somewhere else.

“We could start with a name,” Gamora said. “Do you have any thoughts on what you’d like to be called?”

“I’d like to hear some suggestions,” Emit’s clone said.

“I did have something in mind,” Gamora admitted. “How do you feel about Emmett?”

“Ok, I see what you did there,” Emmett said. “That’s not bad.”

“I’m dying to see your eyes underneath that visor,” Gamora said.

“As you wish,” Emmett said.

The exact moment of Emmett’s creation got messed up, so I did the best I could. It was actually a clone drone potion brewed by Andria, though Gamora did (or should have) collected that DNA sample much earlier in the storyline.

My plan was to clone Emit, but it turns out you can’t clone him either. Can’t woohoo him OR clone him. Good grief. I have no idea why that guy is so locked down. Don’t want him to make babies? No problem. But making a sim you can’t woohoo just seems against the whole philosophy of The Sims.

So she used the potion on the random guy in the room, and I transferred Emit’s genetics over using NRaas Mastercontroller.