One afternoon, while she was placing some of her diving discoveries for sale at the consignment store, Vickie heard a familiar voice call her name. “Victoria Sample, is that you?”

She turned around to find Danial Ibari.

“There you are!” he exclaimed when their eyes met. “How the heck are you? It’s been too long.”

Vickie took a half-step back. Was this really Danial. He was grinning from ear to ear. When they’d last spoken, he was a shell of a man after his wife Sandra died. She’d been giving him space. “Wow,” she managed. “You look amazing.”

“It’s great to hear that because I feel amazing,” Danial said. “Life is really looking up. I still miss Sasha, but there’s so much living still to do.”

“I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that,” Vickie said. “I was really worried about you. You deserve the very best in life.”

She remembered how Danial had felt crying on her shoulder as she held him at Sasha’s funeral. They’d really had a connection then. Then she’d let Roderick monopolize her time. What a mistake that turned out to be.

“You were with me when I hit bottom,” Danial said. “I never got a chance to thank you.”

Vickie flushed. “I didn’t think about it that way,” she said. “You’re just… you’re a great guy, Danial.”

“I know you understand that part of me died with Sasha. I feel like I’m on my second life now. I have my beautiful daughter with Sasha. You have to meet her, Vickie! And now I’m getting married again!”

“I’m so glad–” Vickie began. “You’re what?”

“I know it’s kind of sudden,” Danial said. His eyes were alight, and the words came out in a rush. “I met Devon Marmalade right after my little girl was born, and we just clicked. She has a huge family, and they adopted me. It’s like all the loneliness was the price I had to pay for this moment.”

“Wow…” Vickie said. “I’m so happy for you.”

After she escaped from the consignment store, Vickie spent the rest of the afternoon with Connery. At least their love for each other was simple and easy to understand.

“You don’t think I missed out with Danial, do you boy? Of course not! I don’t need a guy right now. When I want a boyfriend, there are plenty of single guys out there to find.”

Connery was very supportive.

Was she ready, though? Vickie could never really remember feeling lonely. Attention from boys always ended up awkward. They seemed to want something she couldn’t give. But she could imagine what it would be like to have a partner — a real partner — and it was nice. It just seemed like such a remote fantasy.

The next day dawned bright and beautiful.

“When is the last time I took you out sailing?” she asked Andria.

“I think the last time was never,” Andria said.

“Well, that’s a mistake I plan to fix right now,” Vickie said. “Bring your fishing rods. There’s a lot more I want to learn.”

Edmund rang the doorbell at Marisela’s Flynn’s house and tapped his foot as he waited. She had invited him here, but he couldn’t help feeling nervous anyway.

The door opened, and a scowling man walked out onto the front step. He didn’t say anything.

“I’m looking for… Marisela?” Edmund said nervously.

The man nodded his head and stepped aside.

“Edmund!” Marisela said. “I’m so glad you could come! I see you met my partner Brock.”

Edmund’s eyes darted over to Brock, looming at them just out of reach. “I guess I have now,” he said.

“Things happened so fast when you… turned me back,” Marisela said. “I didn’t really thank you the way I should have.”

“The look on your face was all the thanks I needed,” Edmund said. “The truth is that I didn’t know if I could do it. The Fae Council didn’t know if it could be done. The whole thing might have come to nothing. I hope I could have avoided hurting you.”

“I was ready to take the risk,” Marisela said. “You’re the first sim who ever tried to release me from my undead cage.”

“Was it really a cage to you?” Edmund asked. “I have revived other vampires now, and they all seem relieved. I did not expect that.” He didn’t exactly say that he had been reviving them without their consent, but that understanding hung between them.

“You don’t know what it feels like to be a creature of the night,” Marisela said. Her face looked haunted.” Old sims who sought it out for immortality have had time to regret. I had given up hope.”

“I’m forever grateful for your trust,” Edmund said. “And, uh, Brock, can I help you?”

Brock pushed his way into the conversation. “Hey, did you hear the one about the sim who went to the park and put his car in his pocket?” he rumbled.

“It’s… a joke?” Edmund said.

“Oh dear,” Marisela said. “Don’t let my husband bother you. He has a strange sense of humor.”

“No, really,” Brock insisted. “I have a million of ’em.”

Edmund couldn’t remember when he’d laughed so hard. Some of it was relief, but the guy really was funny. “You’re a great guy, Brock,” he said.

“Because of you, we’re going to have a baby!” Marisela said. “We’ve wanted a family for so long. Please come visit when she’s born. If you’re willing, we’d like you to be our child’s godfather.”

“Wow,” Edmund said. “I’d be honored.”

[Brock’s face! He looked so scary, but all he wanted to do was tell jokes.]

After their house was destroyed, Manisha and her husband Ash had a messy divorce. They now shared custody of their adopted daughter and lived on opposite sides of Avalon — as far apart as they could manage on the island. Manisha reverted to her maiden name of Kapoor.

Ash Sample-Baerwyn wasn’t as easy to track down as she has expected. He had an active Internet life of conspiracy theories about asteroid threats, but when he left his house, his behavior was fairly random.

On evening after work, Gamora finally found him out dancing at a local beach club.

He and his date seemed to be getting on well, and that was inconvenient.

Gamora needed to get rid of her, and she wasn’t entirely sure what to do about it. While she was scheming, Ash’s date seemed to remember something and dashed away.

Well, that was much more convenient.

She remembered the disguise as if she’d used it yesterday. It was strange to pull this identity back on. She’d never expected to use it again.

“Mr. Sample-Baerwyn!” she called out. “I’m so surprised to see you here!”

Ash turned and stared at her. “Wow,” he said. “You’re the one who started it all. Where did you disappear to? What is your name?”

“I found your asteroid apocalypse page online,” Gamora said. “I never imaged so many people would believe that an asteroid was coming to destroy our planet!”

“You opened my eyes,” Ash said. “Did you know that my house was destroyed by a meteor a few days after I spoke to you?”

Gamora managed a believable gasp. “Oh no! Was everyone all right?”

“Nobody was injured,” he said. “I knew then that we are all doomed. We have to enjoy our last days as much as we can, and to heck with the future.”

Yup… that’s definitely how he ended up divorced.

Gamora grimaced. “Well, about that….” she said.

Ash looked alarmed. “Is it coming?” he demanded. “What do you know?”

She looked down and cranked up her pheromone release as much ash she could. Breathe out, breathe in, hope he would be suggestible enough…. “The asteroid has changed course. We’re all saved.”

“What!” Ash said. “How could that happen? We’re all doomed!”

“It’s the new Astrophysics research facility,” Gamora said. “Did you hear about it?”

“That place?” he said. “I heard about it. Great big deep space telescope by the science facility. Built from a grant from some rich science snob named Sample. We’re probably related. What about it?”

“It was founded because astrophysicists read your website,” Gamora said. “They believed you and went looking for a way to solve the planet. A new probe just reached the asteroid and pushed it on a course to the sun instead.”

“You’re a hero, Mr. Sample-Baerwyn.”

Ash was dumbfounded. “You. What. That can’t be right.”

“It is! You saved the planet! If you don’t believe me, send your followers to read the records at the Astrophysics lab.” If they looked, and Gamora wasn’t entirely sure they would, she’d left plenty of clues for good conspiracy-theorists to find.

“We’re not all going to die,” he said mechanically.

“We’re not going to die,” Gamora repeated. “Thank you for everything you’ve done. You gave us hope again.”

Ash blinked, as if the entire world was too confusing for him to understand anymore. “My wife and daughter…” he murmured.

“You should give them a call, Mr. Sample-Baerwyn,” Gamora said. “I’m sure they want to hear from you.”

“But, who are you?” Ash asked again.

“Don’t worry about me,” Gamora said. “I’m nobody. Just a concerned astrophysicist.”

Woo, this one wasn’t easy to write either, but a lot happened!

If anyone is curious about the Flynns….

The next days were hard.

Every time someone walked into the house, they could feel the void of Dylan’s absence.

Andria threw herself into holding her children together. Whenever she saw them, she had a hug to offer or a kind word.

“You’ve been staying out so late,” she told Edmund. “You need to take care of yourself. It’s going to be all right.”

“I’m all right, Mum,” Edmund assured her. “It’s not really about Dad. I miss him, but there’s work I just have to do.”

“I hope it’s good work,” Andria said. “You’re looking so haggard.”

“It is good,” Edmund said, but he didn’t take the hint to tell her what he was doing.

Edmund was focused on cleaning up Avalon’s night. It was the most powerful affirmation of life he could think of.

He found Anton Pierce’s brother William at the beach house at midnight.

When Edmund walked into the building, he and William stared at each other for a long moment.

“Are you all right,” he companion Monica asked, looking frightened. “Should we leave? William?”

William suddenly nodded. “Anton said you’d come for me,” he said. “I’ve had enough. I’m ready.”

“I”m ready to sleep for the first time in many lifetimes,” he said. “Stand back, Monica.”

“William!” Monica said, her voice rising, “What are you doing? Are you sure?”

“I’m ready,” Williams said. He covered his eyes and waited.

Edmund called the magic to his fingers and whispered the words.

“It’s done,” he said. The one-time-vampire took a deep, shuddering breath — the first in a long time.

William said nothing more. He looked to Monica, who was watching wide-eyed from across the room.

They walked out of the beach house together, leaving Edmund alone.

Winston threw himself into his work.

The pub Fiddler’s Green offered him a contract for a series of Friday night performances.

He accumulated a few devoted fans, though he didn’t fill up the pub the way the proprietor was hoping.

Gamora didn’t consider herself terribly close to Uncle Dylan. She was buried in research in her new lab, and she didn’t learn of his passing until days later.

She emerged triumphantly, her eyes wild, holding a vial of glowing liquid.

“Now I just need to test it!” she declared. And who better to test it on than herself.

It felt good.

Aunt Abby found her standing on the grounds of the science complex. “We’ve been looking for you,” she said without preamble. “Why haven’t you been answering your phone? Wait — what did you do to yourself?”

“You look like in you’re in a bad mood,” Gamora said with a fiendish grin. “I can help with that.”

“Of course I’m in a bad mood. If you’d just answer your phone– Wait!”

It was too late. Gamora wasn’t really listening.

Abby stood for a moment, disoriented, as the effect washed over her.

“Does it feel good?” Gamora demanded. “I need to know. For science!”

“Groovy,” Abby said slowly. “Except there was something I needed to tell you about your uncle…”

Afterward, Gamora had some other ideas about what to do with her concoction.

“I bet I can blow the biggest bubble!”

“Whoa. I didn’t see that coming…”

Vickie escaped to the place she felt most at home. But she also was not quite herself. She knew what to do when she found a shark circling in the water — swim away slowly and nonthreateningly.

But just that moment, everything seemed pointless.

The shark swam away with a bruised nose, and Vickie with a few scrapes and a valuable shark tooth she sold in consignment.

It could easily have gone the other way, though. While her heart was still pounding from the fight, she stopped for a moment to take stock. She missed her dad, but she intended to live a good long time still.

She’d been locked inside her own grief for too long. It was time to think about someone else’s needs.

Vickie found her mom standing outside, fishing in a downpour.

“Hey mom,” she said. “You’re soaked to the bone. Come inside you catch cold, and I’ll make you some hot tea.”

“It’s all right,” Andria said. “The rain feels good, and the fish are biting. Look at this catch!”

“If you’re sure you want to stay out, would you like some company?” Vickie asked.

“You’ve never fished before,” Andria said.

“Could you teach me?” Vickie asked.

They returned home in the evening, soaked to the bone, and dried off over a warm dinner.

“You don’t have to be alone without Dad,” Vickie told her. “You’ve always been here for us, but we can be here for you too.”

“I know,” Andria said. “Thank you.”

Bummer of a post, but at least I’m through it.

Avalon gossip column:

Hunter’s unicorn pal has been kicking around in Avalon for generations, but all things come to and end in this game, even unicorns apparently.

Winston missed out on Paulette Callender. She got over her crush on him and married Java Weaver, my simself’s bastard kid with Tewl Langurd. I’m sure THAT will go well….

Java is in the Education career, and he sucks at it. I keep seeing him get promoted and then demoted. Paulette is in sports, and I haven’t seen anything about her in ages.

Townie adventures were all about the Langurds, it turns out. Sam’s simself also said goodbye in the most melodramatic way possible. She kicked her on-again, off-again boy-toy Stephan out of the house while she was on her deathbed.

And immediately after:

Sam has two young kids — a teen Claudia and a child Tammie. I think they were conceived by Sam’s male partner(s) at the time —  who might or might not have been Stephan. They both seem to be yellow hair and gold skin, which I’m pretty sure was Sam’s combination, so I’m not going to get visuals to tell me who their dad was.

At any rate, both got a nice nest egg.

As the simworld turns.

Andria was waiting on the steps when Winston and Vickie returned from Barnacle Bay. “How was your vacation?” she asked, a sly look in her eye.

“The diving there was beautiful,” Vickie said. “I’ve never seen crystal caves like that…”

“And what about that boy of yours? Roderick is his name? Did you have fun with him?”

“Yeeeess… What are you getting at, Mom?”

“I just think he seems like a nice boy,” Andria said. “Maybe the kind of boy to settle down with and, you know, give me some grandkids.”

“Mom!” Vickie said. “That is way too personal!”

“I’m just not getting any younger,” Andria said. “I thought you could use a reminder.”

Vickie decided to go sailing for the rest of the day.

On the spur of the moment, Gamora called her dad and invited him to dinner. She and Sawyer didn’t see each other nearly as much as they used to.

“It’s nice to see you, but you don’t have to eat food to keep me company,” Sawyer said.

Gamora shrugged. “I like the irony of a plant chewing on meat.”

Gamora caught up on Sawyer’s genetic research, and she shared some carefully curated insights from the future. Neither of them brought up Gamora’s mother Manisha or the asteroid that had strangely hit her house. Gamora had to admit that it felt good. Her father was the closest she really had to a loved one, and she was aware of that in a way she’d never been before.

“We should do this more often,” she said as they got up to leave. “I want to know what the rainbow radiation does to your siminovium bacteria cultures.”

Sawyer opened his mouth to share more bacteria trivia when a fanfare erupted on the patio.

“You played the lottery,” Sawyer said. “And won?”

“I did!” Gamora crowed. “Isn’t it amazing?” She looked very pleased with herself and not nearly surprised enough.

Sawyer, on the other hand, didn’t look pleased at all.

“You did this with knowledge from the future!” he shouted at her. “Do you know what this could do to the space-time continuum? We could all dissolve into our component molecules? How dare you take that risk for some extra funding!”

“Oh that’s just great!” Gamora shouted back. “Can you give me a little credit? How stupid do you think I am? When is the last time you solved a tachyon combustion equation anyway?”

“I don’t do research that could blow up human lives,” Sawyer snarled.

“You did with me!”

They stood there for a long moment, staring at each other. Gamora could tell that underneath Sawyer’s scowl, her barb had hit home.

“I didn’t grow you to hurt anyone,” he said quietly. “I grew you because I wanted a child. A child who was just as special as I could make with science.”

“Wait,” she said. “I don’t want to fight. It’s not what you think.”

Sawyer let out his breath with a whoosh. “If you give me more data, I can think something else.”

“The future has already been contaminated,” Gamora said. She couldn’t bring herself to admit that it might be her fault. “I want to fix things, and the lottery is the first step. I wasn’t even sure that I’d be able to use information from the current future to inform this present. This experiment proves that the rest of my plans should work.”

Sawyer pondered this for a moment. “If what you say is true, it has enormous consequences to the Theory of the Immutability of Time Travel,” he said. “I won’t interfere with your scientific work, but I’d appreciate it if none of us die of time paradox.”

“You won’t,” Gamora said. “I’m going to make sure of it.”

Sawyer nodded. “1.5 million simoleons is a lot of money,” he said.

Gamora grinned. “Yes. It’s a lot more than I was expecting. With this kind of funding, I can expand my project.”

She bade her father goodbye and jumped on her hoverboard to return to her lab. She thought about Sawyer and Manisha and Manisha’s husband and their adopted kid. She heard Emit’s accusatory voice and remembered the trash piled up in the polluted haze of the future. She wondered which exact choices she had made were the most important to this time stream.

If she’d been a different kind of person, perhaps one who placed more value on her impact on others, what might have gone differently?

She wondered.

Vickie ventured back to the house around dinnertime. She found Winston in the living room, ready to leave for an evening performance. He looked anything but psyched to perform.

“Still no word from Luisa?” she asked?

Winston shook his head. “She’s not going to call,” he said. “I don’t know how I misread that whole situation. Why didn’t she just say she wasn’t into me? I thought… wow, I thought we really connected. I wish I knew what I did that drove her away.”

“Maybe she didn’t want to fight for your attention from all the other girls,” Vickie tried to tease him, but the look on his face told her that was a bad call.

Winston scowled. “I’m not that much of a player,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with you. I know you’ll find someone, and she’ll be lucky to have you for a boyfriend. Maybe… Luisa didn’t think she could handle something long-distance, but she didn’t want to wreck the moment when you were both having a such a good time. …Maybe she couldn’t facing hurting you when she could see what a great guy you were.”

Winston gave her a probing look. “Things are not going well with Rod, are they?” he asked.

Vickie cringed. “I didn’t mean to make this conversation all about me.”

“Here’s to two wrecks on the love train.”

Edmund waited patiently at the market until nearly midnight. The plaza was nearly deserted, save for a few sims who drifted in and out according to the theater’s schedule.

Finally his quarry arrived.

Edmund placed a bookmark in his book and rose deliberately. “Anton Pierce!” he called across the plaza.

The other man looked around to see who was calling him. “That’s my name,” he growled. “Or so they tell me.”

“You’ve troubled Avalon for more than three generations,” Edmund said. “Your time is up.”

Anton met Edmund’s gaze with unnerving, luminescent eyes. “Oh. Now I understand. I heard of you and what you did to Marisella Flynn. I wondered when I would see you.”

“I’m going to clean up this town, one vampire at a time,” Edmund said. “Now is your turn.”

Before Anton could react, he raised his hands.

Anton was caught mid-strike. Terror flashed across a face that had not shown fear in a very long time.

As the magic enveloped him, color returned to his deathly skin, and the glow in his eyes faded. He let out a surprised sound, half-grunt, half-growl.  “Yarrrrgh… that–”

“This feels amazing…”

“I– I never thought I’d be saying this,” Anton stammered. “But thank you. I had forgotten what it was like to be alive. It’s wonderful.”

Edmund smiled. “I didn’t expect to say this either, but you’re welcome.”

Anton took a deep breath, clearly relishing the air in his lungs.

Without another word, he got back into his car and drove away.

Andria met Victoria at the front steps after her return from vacation travel to ask her for grandchildren. Way to go, mom. LOL.

The whole winning the lottery animation is bizzarre. You get showered with confetti and a gigantic check appears from nowhere. There are no other sims involved. There wasn’t much of a way to build a story around that, so I just hung a lampshade on it.

Edmund is actually using the strong cure elixirs made by Andria to cure vampirism. Cure elixirs are supposed to apply to his Healer LTW. Unfortunately, it appears that the ONLY thing that applies to this wish is reversing transformation curses. Too bad. So out-of-story his doing a lot of transforming sims in and out of frog state.