Cycl0n3 was hard at work on his own (un)life’s ambition.

Game by game, he had fought his way to the top of the town’s chess club, and now he was ready for the final battle.

His opponent, whose name I have forgotten, turned out to be a creepy prick. First he helped himself to the Sample family bar without asking.

Then he stomped poor Cycl0n3 at their chess match.

Afterward, he said goodbye. Cycl0n3, never the most observant guy, went off to bed. Instead of leaving, however, this guy sneaked down into the twin’s bedroom.

He played with their toys on the floor beside Shanni’s sleeping form, and he stayed there until Adjo got up in the wee hours of the morning and kicked him out.

When Adjo told Cycl0n3, Cycl0n3 was mortified. He’d put the kids in danger. And, honestly, who would expect dedicated chess players to be creepy stalkers? Oh, wait, that’s happened a few times before.

Cycl0n3 wasted no time inviting this guy back for a rematch, this time in the middle of the day rather than the evening. This time, Cycl0n3 was victorious, and with that victory he took the Chess Legend title for the whole town.

While Cycl0n3 was celebrating, the creepy pedo made his way back down to the twins’ room, though they mercifully were at school this time. Cycl0n3 found him down there and ripped him a new one.

That was enough. No more chess opponents would be welcome in this house.

(Cycl0n3 really did rip this guy a new one spontaneously. It was pretty cool.)

Cycl0n3 was just a babies kind of guy. He doted on Adjo and Shanni the same way he had doted on Zahra when she was that size. He dashed in to care for them ahead of their parents.

He cuddled and snuggled them whenever he could, which didn’t always please Lance and Layla.

And sometimes he flubbed it up.

When they kicked him out of the nursery, he tried to help them in other ways, like making sure there was food around the house when the parents didn’t have time to make it. The problem was, he was a lousy cook.

One day, he tried to make waffles for breakfast and produced cinders. So he decided to try for mac and cheese.

And set fire to the stove. At least that was marginally less stupid than birthday candles setting fire to the dishwasher.

And here they learned something about the maid, Kyra, who they’d hired when they got overwhelmed by childchare.

She’s a pretty good gal to know in a pinch. She and Lance made a pretty good team.

Of course, that didn’t help the poor stove much.

Man, the Sims and their cooking fires.

Cycl0n3’s lifelong dream was to be a chess legend. In life, he’d gotten wrapped up in his journalism career and not gone anywhere with chess. Now he didn’t really need a career at all, come to think of it, since dead people don’t usually hold down a 9-5. It was a perfect “retirment” to get back to himself.

So he got into the chess club and starting playing ranked opponents.

His first opponent wasn’t sure what to make of him. Cycl0n3 had to spend a good half-hour calming him down before he’d sit down to play. He kept sitting down to start to play, then jumping out of his chair, only to sit down to play again.

Cycl0n3 won! Not a bad start.

He ushered his defeated opponent out the door. The fellow lingered in the font yard, trying to convince himself that he hadn’t lost a game ot chess to a ghost. After night fall, he was still there, staring at the Samples through the office window.

Whoa. He’d have to rethink this chess legend thing if everyone was going to turn into a creepy stalker.

(All true as it happened. WTF with the chess stalkers?)

Cycl0n3 knew something was different as soon as he returned to the Sample house, but it took him a while to figure out what it was. He felt different, even when he engaged in the same hobbies he always enjoyed.

For one thing, he knew he couldn’t go home. Sometimes he wasn’t sure where home was. And people reacted to him strangely at first, though the Samples had at least gotten used to after a while. He settled into Jared’s discarded room. Lance and Layla moved into the master bedroom where Lance’s parents had slept. The space-themed bedroom was left for Zahra when she got a little older. And though he got some weird looks from the older Samples, they let him stay and after a while talked to him.

There were ghosts in the Sample house. Shadows of Connor, Susie, and Jared lingered about some nights after the clock struck tweleve. They did a lot of the same things they did in life.

And a few things they didn’t.

(Jared’s haunting of the toilet would have been far more effective if anyone had been awake to see it.)

The most reclusive of the ghosts was Susie. Cycl0n3 had only seen in the house once, briefly.

The ghosts had no insight into the afterlife.

They didn’t even seem to know they were dead. And they reacted to Cycl0n3 like he was something weird and scary.

(Cycl0n3 and Connor simultanously freak out at seeing a ghost.)

That’s when it dawned on him. Cycl0n3 was dead too. He just didn’t know it. And he wasn’t the same as the others. He could affect the physical world more, for one thing. And most importantly, he could go out during the day. Susie had done it the day she died, in that visit to the Science Center. He had no idea what she’d done. It was pretty creepy to think about. And he couldn’t even ask her ghost because it appeared so infrequently in the house.

But he was here. He might as well make the best of it.

And someone didn’t seem to think he was so strange.