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rainbowfic2025-06-22 05:26 pm
paradoxcase) wrote in rainbowfic2025-06-22 05:26 pm
Light Black #9 [Tales From the Neighborhood]
Name: 20 Years Later
Story: Tales From the Neighborhood
Plot Thread: Bishop-Curtis Family
Colors: Light Black #9: Knock
Styles and Supplies: Silhouette, Chiaroscuro, Gesso, Acrylics (June 21 2025: "If I didn't love you, this would be easy"), Stain ("Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness." - Desmond Tutu), Novelty Bead ("Deep breath. Fresh horrors. Let's go." - Elanor Janega, given here)
Word Count: 2555
Rating: T
Warnings: Past character death and undeath, and associated trauma; Implied vampire attack; Implied minor mind control and vampire-related domestic abuse
Characters: Bonnie Bishop/Alex Upsnott Curtis, Edith Curtis, Joanna Curtis
Summary: Bonnie returns to her home after a long absence.
Notes: Tales From the Neighborhood is going to be a completely different Sims story from Crimes Against Romance, about my current Sims 2 neighborhood, that I've been playing on and off since 2013. This is not so much a single long-form story as a collection of loosely-related short stories about a community of approximately 200 people who are all related in probably confusing ways. They are assembled into (currently) six different plot threads that follow the same sets of characters. The purpose of these mainly is to use up prompts that didn't fit into my long-form fics, and will be sprinkled in between major parts of the long-form fics. Most of the prompts I need to use up in this way are from the Warm Heart list, so there won't be more of these until after I pick up that list later on.
These are going to actually be somewhat more closely related to things that actually happened in my game, and should be more silly and less serious business than Crimes Against Romance. As I type this, I realize that this one kind of is serious business, actually, so I guess this is more of a promise that most of the rest of them won't be.
Bonnie hovered nervously outside the front door of her old home. It looked very much like it had the last time she had seen it, but at the same time it was also very different; the paint had cracked over the years, the metal of the door handle and the wood of the railings had been worn smooth by the touch of many hands, the porch furniture had worn ruts into the wood beneath it, and patterns of dust and dirt had settled around, clearly indicating the places where people usually walked, and where they generally didn’t. Normally you’d see this happen over the course of years, or decades, and never notice, but here she was, seeing all this change happen seemingly from one day to the next, and it felt less like the house was well-loved and more like it had somehow deteriorated. But nothing strange had happened to the house; something strange had happened to her.
She couldn’t help looking around the left side of the house and into the side yard where she had liked to sit and read in the afternoons, but what she had feared to see wasn’t there. She couldn’t remember it clearly, not without a haze of unreality and terror, but there had once been a large plant there. A monstrous plant, with teeth, and udders. She remembered… no, she wouldn’t. She took deep breaths and willed that nightmare away. The plant was gone. It couldn’t kill her again.
She wandered back to the front door and poised her hand to knock, again. She wondered if Alex was really still here. Had he waited for her here, all these years that she’d been dead? She hadn’t really been able to get a straight answer from Jackie, after the resurrection. She’d just said: “Go to the house, and you’ll see.” It had been so strange to see Jackie, all grown up and with a college degree, and a wife (and a second wife, too, Jackie had told her, living in another house with Melanie, who Jackie's other wife was also married to, and another, fifth, wife who was involved somehow — Bonnie didn’t understand this strange arrangement, but Jackie seemed happy and said that Melanie was, too, and that was what mattered). The last time she’d seen Jackie and Melanie (and Lauren; she would have to find out what Lauren's life was like now, too), they’d only been little girls. If so much had changed for them, surely many things were different for Alex now, as well. And she had a secret to tell him herself, something she had never gotten the chance to say before that fatal day.
She finally worked up the courage, and knocked on the door. She heard Alex’s voice from within: “Coming!” So he was still here, at least.
He opened the door and stood there staring in stupefaction, as if he had seen a ghost. That wasn’t entirely inaccurate, she supposed. He had changed, just as the house had; there were more lines on his face, and his hair was beginning to grey; he seemed more worn and tired than he had ever been when they had lived here together. And I am still so very young, she thought. It hadn’t even been that long that they had graduated from college and moved in here, according to her own memories, but that must have been so long ago, for him.
“You’re not seeing things,” Bonnie told him. “It’s me, I’m real. Jackie says she found a magical lamp, and was granted one wish — and her wish was to see her mother again.”
“Oh!” said Alex, and then again. “Oh. I— it’s so good to see you again, after all these years. But a lot of things have changed now, and I think I had better catch you up. Please come in and get something to eat.”
Bonnie came into the kitchen — her kitchen, but with the same signs of wear and tear, and wow, there were a lot of chairs and a much bigger table in here now. Something in the back of her mind began to worry; maybe Alex was still here, but he probably had not really waited for her. Who would, really? Who in their right mind would wait decades in the hopes that a dead person would some day come back to life?
She sat at the table and Alex fixed her a snack, talking as he went. “It’s a bit of a long story,” he said. “Where to begin? Well, first of all, I want to tell you that I got rid of the cowplant. I couldn’t bear to have it around anymore, after what it did to you, and it definitely wasn’t safe to keep it, what with our girls… the lab wouldn’t take it back, but I was able to sell it on simBay to a couple of college kids, and they came and hauled it away.” He hesitated for a moment. “I’m not exactly sure what they did with it, to be honest. Hopefully nothing too bad.”
“I checked,” Bonnie whispered. “It was the first thing I looked for, to be sure that it was gone.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I understand. But so much else has happened… back then, after your accident, my brother David was also going through some stuff with his wife Edith, except it was more along the lines of his habit of serial cheating making everyone mad. They were still living with our parents at the time, in that huge house they had, and eventually Mom and Christina kicked him out of the house and Edith got her divorce. She stayed with my parents and Christina’s family, though, for a long time after that, and I would see her a lot, over there. I— she’s a very smart woman, well, aside from her arguably poor choice to marry my brother, of course, and she was a bit lost with three kids to raise and no partner to help her. My family did help a bit, of course, but I could tell she wanted another romance, with someone who wouldn’t cheat. And I— I was trying to move on, you understand. You were dead and gone, I thought there was no hope of ever seeing you again. I’ve heard of those genies, but it’s such a rare thing… It wasn’t a romance like ours was, with her. It didn’t have those emotional highs, we weren’t that young anymore, it wasn’t that kind of true love. We were two broken-hearted people who liked and understood each other very well, just trying to make life meaningful again. And I mean… it worked. We’ve been content, here. We’ve raised a large family. I am grateful to see you again, I really am. I could never have hoped for something like this, it is a dream come true. But you see where the problem lies, I think.”
Bonnie sat there, and stared morosely into the tea he’d made for her. Of course she wouldn’t be able to just stroll back into his life like this — the world had moved on, and it seemed there was no longer a place for her in it. Edith must have been married to Alex for far longer than Bonnie had; of course his memories and feelings would be for Edith. But for her, it had been just a few days ago that they had been young, and in love, living in a new house with their little girls and their garden.
From behind the closed door to the master bedroom came a sound — a low, ominous sound of old, creaking wooden hinges slowing opening, but it also felt like it had a distinctly eerie tone layered underneath it. Something about it raised the hairs on the back of Bonnie’s neck.
“Oh,” said Alex, quite conversationally. “It’s 7 o'clock now, so that’ll be Edith getting up. There is one other thing I forgot to mention—”
Before he could mention whatever it was, the door flew open, and a woman stood framed in the doorway. Her red hair was braided into long cornrows that were pulled back into a high ponytail, and her eyes matched it in color. Her skin color seemed distinctly greyish, the color of the old ashes of a long-extinguished fire, and Bonnie wondered for a moment if the cowplant had gotten her, too.
“Ahh, Edith,” Alex said, greeting her mostly warmly but with just a hint of trepidation. “I was just telling Bonnie about you. This is Bonnie, my first wife — due to some truly insane luck, she has returned to us.”
Edith turned her gaze towards Bonnie, her mouth pressed into a hard line. “Breakfast first, explanations later,” she said, simply, and when she opened her mouth Bonnie could see she had a very sharp pair of canines. But she did not move further into the kitchen as Bonnie had expected; instead, she raised her hands towards Bonnie, and Bonnie’s vision was somehow filled with a strange, iridescent purple miasma, and after that, she knew no more.
Bonnie awoke some time later, on a couch in the living room, to see a teenage girl sitting on one of the other chairs and working on a homework booklet. She had Edith’s red hair, Bonnie noted, but in a looser texture, and her skin was very dark. She looked up when she heard Bonnie attempting to sit up.
“Oh, you’re awake,” the girl said. “I’m Joanna. Don’t be alarmed if you have some trouble for a bit, you’ve lost a lot of blood. I’m sorry about my mom, I guess Dad didn’t tell you, but she’s a vampire. I don’t know when it happened, that’s just how it’s always been my whole life. She’s not supposed to bite visitors, usually she just bites Dad — I don’t know why she did that to you. Let me go get Dad for you.” She set aside the booklet and disappeared out of the living room before Bonnie could say anything in return.
Alex returned shortly, trailing Joanna behind him. Bonnie could tell by the tightness of his face that he was angry, but he only knelt down next to the couch and took Bonnie’s hands in his own. “She knows she’s not supposed to do that,” he said. “We had rules — we had boundaries. I’m sorry. She’s gone now, I told her she had to leave, after this.”
“Am I a vampire now, too?” Bonnie asked. That was how it worked, wasn't it? She felt at her neck, and did find the two puncture wounds she had feared to find there, but she did not feel different. And Alex seemed to be fine, and hadn’t Joanna said that Edith had also bitten him?
“I don’t think she has ever actually turned anyone,” Alex said. “She only bites to feed, and you pass out for a few hours, but otherwise it’s fine. It doesn’t kill you, and it doesn’t turn you, or at least it hasn’t so far. And she won’t be getting any chances to do it to any of us again, in the future.”
Bonnie reached up and touched his neck, too. There weren’t any lasting scars that she could see, but… “Joanna said she did this to you, too. How many times…?”
“Most every night, for years. But please, Bonnie—”
Bonnie was struggling to get upright, to jump to her feet, to run out the front door and chase after Edith and — and do something to her. That she had done this to him for years, and all that time, Bonnie had been dead… “I’ll kill her,” said Bonnie. “I’ll kill her.”
Alex put a restraining hand on her shoulder as she failed to make much headway. “You won’t,” he said. “Please don’t try anything like that, you won’t win, trust me. You didn't see her hand my brother's ass to him, while she was pregnant with their third child, and he was no slouch. And, I didn’t mind, not really. It’s not harmful in the long run, and it’s not her fault, she has to eat. Anyway, I think by some definitions, she’s already dead.”
Bonnie sank back onto the couch, defeated. “I guess I’ve probably messed everything up for you, then,” she said, softly. “If you really were happy to live with her like this…”
“Well… sort of,” said Alex. “It was what I was going to tell you, actually, before Edith interrupted us. It was — fine, I guess, with her, we were comfortable enough. But she was only ever my second choice, Bonnie. I only married her because you weren’t there anymore, because I thought you were gone forever. If you had come back at any point in all the time I was married to her, I would have left her for you again in an instant, and that hasn't changed a bit. The problem was never about what to do with you. It was about how I would break it to her. But her choice back there made that very easy, actually.”
“You mean it?” Bonnie asked. She looked into his eyes, and saw him look back at her the same way she always remembered, the lines of age and grey hairs seemed to melt away, and for just a moment, he was young again, and nothing horrible had happened to either of them.
“Yeah, I do,” said Alex. He turned to Joanna. “And you’re still happy with your decision?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I never was all that close to mom, and I’m with Bonnie here, I never liked that she bit you. Jordan didn’t have a problem with it… but he went with her. So I guess he’ll get to have that experience now, if he wants to support her.”
Bonnie looked up at her and smiled cautiously. “I don’t know if I am actually old enough to be your mom,” she said, “but I can give it a try.” She was relieved when Joanna smiled back. Bonnie turned back to Alex, then, remembering something. “There’s one other thing I forgot to mention,” she said. “Really, I forgot to mention it way back when, before I even died — I’d only just found out, you see. I’m pregnant. Or at least, I was. Maybe I’m not, anymore — I died, after all.”
“Oh,” said Alex, and then he laughed. “Sorry, it’s just… there were our three girls, and then there were Edith’s three kids from her first marriage that I raised alongside them, and then there were the alien twins that Edith gave birth to shortly after we married, and then there were Joanna and her three other siblings that came later. So altogether, I think that is now going to be thirteen children that I will have raised. But I will do it. I’ll happily raise another child with you Bonnie. I got something else from the lab, you know. A so-called elixir of life, a serum to extend your years — I’m older now, but I’ll still do my best to be with you until the end. We got a second chance to do it right, and maybe it didn’t work out exactly the way we originally planned, but we’ll make do. Won’t we?”
Bonnie pulled him down into a hug. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, we will.”
Time: As in Crimes Against Romance, we are stuck in a 2004 time bubble here, but I am not putting specific dates on this one. These stories are generally going to be much more accurate to what I actually did in my game than Crimes Against Romance, and sim lifespans don't match up super well to real human lifespans, so if I actually tried to quantify how much time had passed between events in a consistent way, things would be pretty wonky and not make much sense.
Regarding the title of this post, by my calculations, Bonnie was dead for 26 sim days, which is approximately 2/3 of the time sims spend in the adult life stage, or 3 days less than the time it takes for a newborn baby to grow all the way up and graduate from college. I debated a little bit about whether to call it "20 Years Later" or "30 Years Later", but I think it's probably a lot closer to 20.
The Cowplant: The cowplant is a carnivorous sim-eating plant modeled after Audrey 2 from Little Shop of Horrors, but with a cow aesthetic (cow spot coloring and udders) because everything in the game that is evil or antagonistic is cow-related. It is a career reward from the Natural Science career, which was Alex's career for most of his life. Periodically, it gets hungry, opens its mouth, and extends its tongue, which has a piece of cake on the end of it. Sims who are hungry will autonomously grab the cake, which results in them being eaten. The cow udders then fill up with milk, and another sim can milk them and drink the milk, which knocks four sim days off of their current age. In this case, Alex did not drink the Bonnie cowplant milk, the guys who bought the cowplant from him did that.
Resurrection and the Genie Lamp: There are a number of different ways that sims can be resurrected in the game, I won't go into all of them. In this particular case, Jacqueline used a genie lamp, which was introduced with Free Time. Basically, if your sims gain enough hobby enthusiasm, the matchmaker NPC will show up and leave you a genie lamp, and then you get three wishes from it. Usually the only wish I have a use for is for money, since I have a lot of mods to keep my sims poor, but another family had a lamp with one wish still left on it and didn't need any more money, so I had them give it to Jacqueline to resurrect Bonnie. I will say that on the first attempt, Bonnie returned as a zombie, and I decided I didn't like that and quit without saving and reloaded like a filthy cheater and got a better result the second time.
Vampires: In an unmodded game, vampires are actually pretty boring and not really as described here. They have an overlay which mostly just makes them look blue, they have to sleep in their coffins from 7 AM to 7 PM to avoid dying to sunlight, and they don't actually have to bite anyone to survive, only to turn other sims into vampires. Anyway, in my game, I have a better-looking overlay (see the Sim Pictures section for the picture of Edith), and I have other mods that make them hungry when they get up at 7 PM, cause them to become sick if they eat regular food, and allow them to fill their hunger by biting other sims, without turning them into vampires. Here is a video of a vampire biting someone in the game. The bite to feed uses the same animation, except that obviously the target doesn't turn into a vampire afterwards, so this is what I was trying to describe here. It's never stated anywhere in the game, but I feel like the animation does imply some degree of mind control. The modded bite does also completely deplete the victim's energy, as described here.
Elixir of Life: This is an aspiration reward that removes days from a sim's age, similar to the cowplant milk, but it only removes three days instead of four, and the reward only contains five servings, at which point you have to buy a new one (the cowplant can continue supplying you with cowplant milk for as long as you're willing to keep killing sims). In this case, I just had Alex consume all 15 days' worth of elixir from one bottle, which by my calculations, makes him just young enough that he should be able to live to see Bonnie become an elder, which is required for her to be able to satisfy her lifetime want to have a golden anniversary.
Bonnie Bishop began life as this University townie. She looks like this in my game:
I originally killed her because she was boring, and then it occurred to me much later that she might actually be significantly more interesting now if I brought her back to life again. I must have changed her lifetime want at some point, but I no longer remember why.
Alex Upsnott, whose last name became Bishop after he originally married Bonnie, then became Curtis after he married Edith, and then went back to Bishop again after he married Bonnie a second time after the events of this story, is a born-in-game sim:
His mother, and the source of his bachelor name Upsnott, was the premade playable sim Brittany Upsnott, who was originally a member of a sorority at one of the universities. I actually derive great personal enjoyment in taking these sorority girls who EA gave nasty names to and who we are clearly supposed to dislike and giving them happy and fulfilling lives in my neighborhood. Due to my matrilineal naming conventions, this naturally results in a lot of sims with last names like Upsnott, Huffington, and Bratford. Unlike in Crimes Against Romance, the sin of having a silly name is not enough to get you cut from the cast, however. Currently in my neighborhood, there are 13 living sims with the last name Upsnott, and including Alex's now-deceased parents, the name spans four generations now. The other silly names have done less well - there were at one point three sims with the last name Huffington, including the original sorority girl, but she has since died and her two sons have both gotten married to women and changed their names. The Bratford family is still developing - Monica Bratford has gotten married to two different people and now has three children with her last name, two of whom are female and will probably pass it on. One of the people she has married is actually one of the Huffington guys, so his full name is now Eric Huffington Bratford and I think that's beautiful. Unfortunately, he's kind of boring, but the rest of that polycule isn't and may show up in a story eventually.
Alex is one of youngest members of his generation; most of the other stories are about sims from the generation after him, and a few are about the generation after that. Most of the members of Alex's generation have already died of old age in my game. After drinking the elixir of life, Alex and Bonnie will be the very last ones to die.
Edith Curtis began life as this downtownie child. Currently, in my game she looks like this:
She made friends with one of my sims, I can't remember anymore if it was Alex's brother David or not, and I used the Free Time feature to age her up into a teenager along with that person. I didn't realize it at the time, but this causes her aspiration to stay as Grow Up, which is an aspiration that only children, toddlers, and babies are supposed to have. I didn't notice this until she went on her first date with David, at which point I used a mod to give her a random appropriate aspiration, which turned out to be Family. David's aspiration is Romance, which in the game generally translates to either "polyamorous" or "a cheater" depending on how you want to play it and they normally have very bad chemistry with Family sims, who generally want to be aggressively monogamous. However, he still had good chemistry with Edith after she became a Family sim - in restrospect, I think that was only because they were already romantically involved, as that causes several large attraction maluses to be negated. After their divorce, they had negative chemistry which never really recovered even after they stopped hating each other.
Edith became a vampire basically because David had a turn-on for vampires, so this is really all his fault, although in addition to being a Family sim, she is also a Knowledge sim and doesn't really mind this state of being at all. I gave her that hair that point to remind myself that she did have the darkest skin tone under the vampire overlay. She is obviously not a generations-old vampire at this point in time, but she and David actually were significantly older than Alex and I believe she would have been an elder, or nearly an elder at this point in the timeline if her age had not been artificially locked in young adulthood. She and Alex are tied for sixth biggest age difference in the neighborhood at 13 sim days, although there are other stories coming that are about much worse examples. (This metric is counting difference in birth turn, so Alex and Bonnie actually only have one day of age difference by this measure.)
There is another story that involves her and her son Jordan, mentioned here in passing, planned for a long time from now, and I also have Future Plans for her which may merit another story as well.
As a bonus picture, have this one of her kicking David's ass while pregnant with her third child, which I took to illustrate the functionality of the mod that I had to create specifically so that she was able to do that.
Joanna Curtis is a born-in-game sim, the daughter of Alex and Edith:
She is actually fairly interesting, and looks like she will be even more interesting as an adult. I have a story I would like to tell about her, but I don't have a prompt for it right now (or for the foreseeable future).
The kids were split between Alex and Edith entirely based on which parent they liked better. Alex wound up with Joanna and her little brother Mark, while Edith wound up with Joanna's twin Jordan and Mark's twin Alana. (If you're wondering why there are so many twins, it's because there's a Family sim perk that makes twins very common and both Edith and Bonnie are Family sims. This is most of the reason that Alex has so many kids. Also, Bonnie's pregnancy turned out to be twins, too, so he's now up to 14 kids.)
I do at some point also want to tell the story of the five-person lesbian marriage that Jacqueline and Melanie (and also Lauren, in a kind of indirect way) are involved in, but I don't have a prompt for it right now. Edith's third child (the one she was pregnant with when she got divorced) does appear as a major character in a couple planned future stories, and Jacqueline and Melanie's shared wife will appear as an onscreen minor character in a story that's planned for very far in the future. The guys who bought Alex's cowplant are actually the subject of the next six stories for this that I have planned, but they will not post until I pick up the Warm Heart list (which will take another ten Fulcrum posts to get to).
Story: Tales From the Neighborhood
Plot Thread: Bishop-Curtis Family
Colors: Light Black #9: Knock
Styles and Supplies: Silhouette, Chiaroscuro, Gesso, Acrylics (June 21 2025: "If I didn't love you, this would be easy"), Stain ("Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness." - Desmond Tutu), Novelty Bead ("Deep breath. Fresh horrors. Let's go." - Elanor Janega, given here)
Word Count: 2555
Rating: T
Warnings: Past character death and undeath, and associated trauma; Implied vampire attack; Implied minor mind control and vampire-related domestic abuse
Characters: Bonnie Bishop/Alex Upsnott Curtis, Edith Curtis, Joanna Curtis
Summary: Bonnie returns to her home after a long absence.
Notes: Tales From the Neighborhood is going to be a completely different Sims story from Crimes Against Romance, about my current Sims 2 neighborhood, that I've been playing on and off since 2013. This is not so much a single long-form story as a collection of loosely-related short stories about a community of approximately 200 people who are all related in probably confusing ways. They are assembled into (currently) six different plot threads that follow the same sets of characters. The purpose of these mainly is to use up prompts that didn't fit into my long-form fics, and will be sprinkled in between major parts of the long-form fics. Most of the prompts I need to use up in this way are from the Warm Heart list, so there won't be more of these until after I pick up that list later on.
These are going to actually be somewhat more closely related to things that actually happened in my game, and should be more silly and less serious business than Crimes Against Romance. As I type this, I realize that this one kind of is serious business, actually, so I guess this is more of a promise that most of the rest of them won't be.
Bonnie hovered nervously outside the front door of her old home. It looked very much like it had the last time she had seen it, but at the same time it was also very different; the paint had cracked over the years, the metal of the door handle and the wood of the railings had been worn smooth by the touch of many hands, the porch furniture had worn ruts into the wood beneath it, and patterns of dust and dirt had settled around, clearly indicating the places where people usually walked, and where they generally didn’t. Normally you’d see this happen over the course of years, or decades, and never notice, but here she was, seeing all this change happen seemingly from one day to the next, and it felt less like the house was well-loved and more like it had somehow deteriorated. But nothing strange had happened to the house; something strange had happened to her.
She couldn’t help looking around the left side of the house and into the side yard where she had liked to sit and read in the afternoons, but what she had feared to see wasn’t there. She couldn’t remember it clearly, not without a haze of unreality and terror, but there had once been a large plant there. A monstrous plant, with teeth, and udders. She remembered… no, she wouldn’t. She took deep breaths and willed that nightmare away. The plant was gone. It couldn’t kill her again.
She wandered back to the front door and poised her hand to knock, again. She wondered if Alex was really still here. Had he waited for her here, all these years that she’d been dead? She hadn’t really been able to get a straight answer from Jackie, after the resurrection. She’d just said: “Go to the house, and you’ll see.” It had been so strange to see Jackie, all grown up and with a college degree, and a wife (and a second wife, too, Jackie had told her, living in another house with Melanie, who Jackie's other wife was also married to, and another, fifth, wife who was involved somehow — Bonnie didn’t understand this strange arrangement, but Jackie seemed happy and said that Melanie was, too, and that was what mattered). The last time she’d seen Jackie and Melanie (and Lauren; she would have to find out what Lauren's life was like now, too), they’d only been little girls. If so much had changed for them, surely many things were different for Alex now, as well. And she had a secret to tell him herself, something she had never gotten the chance to say before that fatal day.
She finally worked up the courage, and knocked on the door. She heard Alex’s voice from within: “Coming!” So he was still here, at least.
He opened the door and stood there staring in stupefaction, as if he had seen a ghost. That wasn’t entirely inaccurate, she supposed. He had changed, just as the house had; there were more lines on his face, and his hair was beginning to grey; he seemed more worn and tired than he had ever been when they had lived here together. And I am still so very young, she thought. It hadn’t even been that long that they had graduated from college and moved in here, according to her own memories, but that must have been so long ago, for him.
“You’re not seeing things,” Bonnie told him. “It’s me, I’m real. Jackie says she found a magical lamp, and was granted one wish — and her wish was to see her mother again.”
“Oh!” said Alex, and then again. “Oh. I— it’s so good to see you again, after all these years. But a lot of things have changed now, and I think I had better catch you up. Please come in and get something to eat.”
Bonnie came into the kitchen — her kitchen, but with the same signs of wear and tear, and wow, there were a lot of chairs and a much bigger table in here now. Something in the back of her mind began to worry; maybe Alex was still here, but he probably had not really waited for her. Who would, really? Who in their right mind would wait decades in the hopes that a dead person would some day come back to life?
She sat at the table and Alex fixed her a snack, talking as he went. “It’s a bit of a long story,” he said. “Where to begin? Well, first of all, I want to tell you that I got rid of the cowplant. I couldn’t bear to have it around anymore, after what it did to you, and it definitely wasn’t safe to keep it, what with our girls… the lab wouldn’t take it back, but I was able to sell it on simBay to a couple of college kids, and they came and hauled it away.” He hesitated for a moment. “I’m not exactly sure what they did with it, to be honest. Hopefully nothing too bad.”
“I checked,” Bonnie whispered. “It was the first thing I looked for, to be sure that it was gone.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I understand. But so much else has happened… back then, after your accident, my brother David was also going through some stuff with his wife Edith, except it was more along the lines of his habit of serial cheating making everyone mad. They were still living with our parents at the time, in that huge house they had, and eventually Mom and Christina kicked him out of the house and Edith got her divorce. She stayed with my parents and Christina’s family, though, for a long time after that, and I would see her a lot, over there. I— she’s a very smart woman, well, aside from her arguably poor choice to marry my brother, of course, and she was a bit lost with three kids to raise and no partner to help her. My family did help a bit, of course, but I could tell she wanted another romance, with someone who wouldn’t cheat. And I— I was trying to move on, you understand. You were dead and gone, I thought there was no hope of ever seeing you again. I’ve heard of those genies, but it’s such a rare thing… It wasn’t a romance like ours was, with her. It didn’t have those emotional highs, we weren’t that young anymore, it wasn’t that kind of true love. We were two broken-hearted people who liked and understood each other very well, just trying to make life meaningful again. And I mean… it worked. We’ve been content, here. We’ve raised a large family. I am grateful to see you again, I really am. I could never have hoped for something like this, it is a dream come true. But you see where the problem lies, I think.”
Bonnie sat there, and stared morosely into the tea he’d made for her. Of course she wouldn’t be able to just stroll back into his life like this — the world had moved on, and it seemed there was no longer a place for her in it. Edith must have been married to Alex for far longer than Bonnie had; of course his memories and feelings would be for Edith. But for her, it had been just a few days ago that they had been young, and in love, living in a new house with their little girls and their garden.
From behind the closed door to the master bedroom came a sound — a low, ominous sound of old, creaking wooden hinges slowing opening, but it also felt like it had a distinctly eerie tone layered underneath it. Something about it raised the hairs on the back of Bonnie’s neck.
“Oh,” said Alex, quite conversationally. “It’s 7 o'clock now, so that’ll be Edith getting up. There is one other thing I forgot to mention—”
Before he could mention whatever it was, the door flew open, and a woman stood framed in the doorway. Her red hair was braided into long cornrows that were pulled back into a high ponytail, and her eyes matched it in color. Her skin color seemed distinctly greyish, the color of the old ashes of a long-extinguished fire, and Bonnie wondered for a moment if the cowplant had gotten her, too.
“Ahh, Edith,” Alex said, greeting her mostly warmly but with just a hint of trepidation. “I was just telling Bonnie about you. This is Bonnie, my first wife — due to some truly insane luck, she has returned to us.”
Edith turned her gaze towards Bonnie, her mouth pressed into a hard line. “Breakfast first, explanations later,” she said, simply, and when she opened her mouth Bonnie could see she had a very sharp pair of canines. But she did not move further into the kitchen as Bonnie had expected; instead, she raised her hands towards Bonnie, and Bonnie’s vision was somehow filled with a strange, iridescent purple miasma, and after that, she knew no more.
Bonnie awoke some time later, on a couch in the living room, to see a teenage girl sitting on one of the other chairs and working on a homework booklet. She had Edith’s red hair, Bonnie noted, but in a looser texture, and her skin was very dark. She looked up when she heard Bonnie attempting to sit up.
“Oh, you’re awake,” the girl said. “I’m Joanna. Don’t be alarmed if you have some trouble for a bit, you’ve lost a lot of blood. I’m sorry about my mom, I guess Dad didn’t tell you, but she’s a vampire. I don’t know when it happened, that’s just how it’s always been my whole life. She’s not supposed to bite visitors, usually she just bites Dad — I don’t know why she did that to you. Let me go get Dad for you.” She set aside the booklet and disappeared out of the living room before Bonnie could say anything in return.
Alex returned shortly, trailing Joanna behind him. Bonnie could tell by the tightness of his face that he was angry, but he only knelt down next to the couch and took Bonnie’s hands in his own. “She knows she’s not supposed to do that,” he said. “We had rules — we had boundaries. I’m sorry. She’s gone now, I told her she had to leave, after this.”
“Am I a vampire now, too?” Bonnie asked. That was how it worked, wasn't it? She felt at her neck, and did find the two puncture wounds she had feared to find there, but she did not feel different. And Alex seemed to be fine, and hadn’t Joanna said that Edith had also bitten him?
“I don’t think she has ever actually turned anyone,” Alex said. “She only bites to feed, and you pass out for a few hours, but otherwise it’s fine. It doesn’t kill you, and it doesn’t turn you, or at least it hasn’t so far. And she won’t be getting any chances to do it to any of us again, in the future.”
Bonnie reached up and touched his neck, too. There weren’t any lasting scars that she could see, but… “Joanna said she did this to you, too. How many times…?”
“Most every night, for years. But please, Bonnie—”
Bonnie was struggling to get upright, to jump to her feet, to run out the front door and chase after Edith and — and do something to her. That she had done this to him for years, and all that time, Bonnie had been dead… “I’ll kill her,” said Bonnie. “I’ll kill her.”
Alex put a restraining hand on her shoulder as she failed to make much headway. “You won’t,” he said. “Please don’t try anything like that, you won’t win, trust me. You didn't see her hand my brother's ass to him, while she was pregnant with their third child, and he was no slouch. And, I didn’t mind, not really. It’s not harmful in the long run, and it’s not her fault, she has to eat. Anyway, I think by some definitions, she’s already dead.”
Bonnie sank back onto the couch, defeated. “I guess I’ve probably messed everything up for you, then,” she said, softly. “If you really were happy to live with her like this…”
“Well… sort of,” said Alex. “It was what I was going to tell you, actually, before Edith interrupted us. It was — fine, I guess, with her, we were comfortable enough. But she was only ever my second choice, Bonnie. I only married her because you weren’t there anymore, because I thought you were gone forever. If you had come back at any point in all the time I was married to her, I would have left her for you again in an instant, and that hasn't changed a bit. The problem was never about what to do with you. It was about how I would break it to her. But her choice back there made that very easy, actually.”
“You mean it?” Bonnie asked. She looked into his eyes, and saw him look back at her the same way she always remembered, the lines of age and grey hairs seemed to melt away, and for just a moment, he was young again, and nothing horrible had happened to either of them.
“Yeah, I do,” said Alex. He turned to Joanna. “And you’re still happy with your decision?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I never was all that close to mom, and I’m with Bonnie here, I never liked that she bit you. Jordan didn’t have a problem with it… but he went with her. So I guess he’ll get to have that experience now, if he wants to support her.”
Bonnie looked up at her and smiled cautiously. “I don’t know if I am actually old enough to be your mom,” she said, “but I can give it a try.” She was relieved when Joanna smiled back. Bonnie turned back to Alex, then, remembering something. “There’s one other thing I forgot to mention,” she said. “Really, I forgot to mention it way back when, before I even died — I’d only just found out, you see. I’m pregnant. Or at least, I was. Maybe I’m not, anymore — I died, after all.”
“Oh,” said Alex, and then he laughed. “Sorry, it’s just… there were our three girls, and then there were Edith’s three kids from her first marriage that I raised alongside them, and then there were the alien twins that Edith gave birth to shortly after we married, and then there were Joanna and her three other siblings that came later. So altogether, I think that is now going to be thirteen children that I will have raised. But I will do it. I’ll happily raise another child with you Bonnie. I got something else from the lab, you know. A so-called elixir of life, a serum to extend your years — I’m older now, but I’ll still do my best to be with you until the end. We got a second chance to do it right, and maybe it didn’t work out exactly the way we originally planned, but we’ll make do. Won’t we?”
Bonnie pulled him down into a hug. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, we will.”
Time: As in Crimes Against Romance, we are stuck in a 2004 time bubble here, but I am not putting specific dates on this one. These stories are generally going to be much more accurate to what I actually did in my game than Crimes Against Romance, and sim lifespans don't match up super well to real human lifespans, so if I actually tried to quantify how much time had passed between events in a consistent way, things would be pretty wonky and not make much sense.
Regarding the title of this post, by my calculations, Bonnie was dead for 26 sim days, which is approximately 2/3 of the time sims spend in the adult life stage, or 3 days less than the time it takes for a newborn baby to grow all the way up and graduate from college. I debated a little bit about whether to call it "20 Years Later" or "30 Years Later", but I think it's probably a lot closer to 20.
The Cowplant: The cowplant is a carnivorous sim-eating plant modeled after Audrey 2 from Little Shop of Horrors, but with a cow aesthetic (cow spot coloring and udders) because everything in the game that is evil or antagonistic is cow-related. It is a career reward from the Natural Science career, which was Alex's career for most of his life. Periodically, it gets hungry, opens its mouth, and extends its tongue, which has a piece of cake on the end of it. Sims who are hungry will autonomously grab the cake, which results in them being eaten. The cow udders then fill up with milk, and another sim can milk them and drink the milk, which knocks four sim days off of their current age. In this case, Alex did not drink the Bonnie cowplant milk, the guys who bought the cowplant from him did that.
Resurrection and the Genie Lamp: There are a number of different ways that sims can be resurrected in the game, I won't go into all of them. In this particular case, Jacqueline used a genie lamp, which was introduced with Free Time. Basically, if your sims gain enough hobby enthusiasm, the matchmaker NPC will show up and leave you a genie lamp, and then you get three wishes from it. Usually the only wish I have a use for is for money, since I have a lot of mods to keep my sims poor, but another family had a lamp with one wish still left on it and didn't need any more money, so I had them give it to Jacqueline to resurrect Bonnie. I will say that on the first attempt, Bonnie returned as a zombie, and I decided I didn't like that and quit without saving and reloaded like a filthy cheater and got a better result the second time.
Vampires: In an unmodded game, vampires are actually pretty boring and not really as described here. They have an overlay which mostly just makes them look blue, they have to sleep in their coffins from 7 AM to 7 PM to avoid dying to sunlight, and they don't actually have to bite anyone to survive, only to turn other sims into vampires. Anyway, in my game, I have a better-looking overlay (see the Sim Pictures section for the picture of Edith), and I have other mods that make them hungry when they get up at 7 PM, cause them to become sick if they eat regular food, and allow them to fill their hunger by biting other sims, without turning them into vampires. Here is a video of a vampire biting someone in the game. The bite to feed uses the same animation, except that obviously the target doesn't turn into a vampire afterwards, so this is what I was trying to describe here. It's never stated anywhere in the game, but I feel like the animation does imply some degree of mind control. The modded bite does also completely deplete the victim's energy, as described here.
Elixir of Life: This is an aspiration reward that removes days from a sim's age, similar to the cowplant milk, but it only removes three days instead of four, and the reward only contains five servings, at which point you have to buy a new one (the cowplant can continue supplying you with cowplant milk for as long as you're willing to keep killing sims). In this case, I just had Alex consume all 15 days' worth of elixir from one bottle, which by my calculations, makes him just young enough that he should be able to live to see Bonnie become an elder, which is required for her to be able to satisfy her lifetime want to have a golden anniversary.
Bonnie Bishop began life as this University townie. She looks like this in my game:
I originally killed her because she was boring, and then it occurred to me much later that she might actually be significantly more interesting now if I brought her back to life again. I must have changed her lifetime want at some point, but I no longer remember why.
Alex Upsnott, whose last name became Bishop after he originally married Bonnie, then became Curtis after he married Edith, and then went back to Bishop again after he married Bonnie a second time after the events of this story, is a born-in-game sim:
His mother, and the source of his bachelor name Upsnott, was the premade playable sim Brittany Upsnott, who was originally a member of a sorority at one of the universities. I actually derive great personal enjoyment in taking these sorority girls who EA gave nasty names to and who we are clearly supposed to dislike and giving them happy and fulfilling lives in my neighborhood. Due to my matrilineal naming conventions, this naturally results in a lot of sims with last names like Upsnott, Huffington, and Bratford. Unlike in Crimes Against Romance, the sin of having a silly name is not enough to get you cut from the cast, however. Currently in my neighborhood, there are 13 living sims with the last name Upsnott, and including Alex's now-deceased parents, the name spans four generations now. The other silly names have done less well - there were at one point three sims with the last name Huffington, including the original sorority girl, but she has since died and her two sons have both gotten married to women and changed their names. The Bratford family is still developing - Monica Bratford has gotten married to two different people and now has three children with her last name, two of whom are female and will probably pass it on. One of the people she has married is actually one of the Huffington guys, so his full name is now Eric Huffington Bratford and I think that's beautiful. Unfortunately, he's kind of boring, but the rest of that polycule isn't and may show up in a story eventually.
Alex is one of youngest members of his generation; most of the other stories are about sims from the generation after him, and a few are about the generation after that. Most of the members of Alex's generation have already died of old age in my game. After drinking the elixir of life, Alex and Bonnie will be the very last ones to die.
Edith Curtis began life as this downtownie child. Currently, in my game she looks like this:
She made friends with one of my sims, I can't remember anymore if it was Alex's brother David or not, and I used the Free Time feature to age her up into a teenager along with that person. I didn't realize it at the time, but this causes her aspiration to stay as Grow Up, which is an aspiration that only children, toddlers, and babies are supposed to have. I didn't notice this until she went on her first date with David, at which point I used a mod to give her a random appropriate aspiration, which turned out to be Family. David's aspiration is Romance, which in the game generally translates to either "polyamorous" or "a cheater" depending on how you want to play it and they normally have very bad chemistry with Family sims, who generally want to be aggressively monogamous. However, he still had good chemistry with Edith after she became a Family sim - in restrospect, I think that was only because they were already romantically involved, as that causes several large attraction maluses to be negated. After their divorce, they had negative chemistry which never really recovered even after they stopped hating each other.
Edith became a vampire basically because David had a turn-on for vampires, so this is really all his fault, although in addition to being a Family sim, she is also a Knowledge sim and doesn't really mind this state of being at all. I gave her that hair that point to remind myself that she did have the darkest skin tone under the vampire overlay. She is obviously not a generations-old vampire at this point in time, but she and David actually were significantly older than Alex and I believe she would have been an elder, or nearly an elder at this point in the timeline if her age had not been artificially locked in young adulthood. She and Alex are tied for sixth biggest age difference in the neighborhood at 13 sim days, although there are other stories coming that are about much worse examples. (This metric is counting difference in birth turn, so Alex and Bonnie actually only have one day of age difference by this measure.)
There is another story that involves her and her son Jordan, mentioned here in passing, planned for a long time from now, and I also have Future Plans for her which may merit another story as well.
As a bonus picture, have this one of her kicking David's ass while pregnant with her third child, which I took to illustrate the functionality of the mod that I had to create specifically so that she was able to do that.
Joanna Curtis is a born-in-game sim, the daughter of Alex and Edith:
She is actually fairly interesting, and looks like she will be even more interesting as an adult. I have a story I would like to tell about her, but I don't have a prompt for it right now (or for the foreseeable future).
The kids were split between Alex and Edith entirely based on which parent they liked better. Alex wound up with Joanna and her little brother Mark, while Edith wound up with Joanna's twin Jordan and Mark's twin Alana. (If you're wondering why there are so many twins, it's because there's a Family sim perk that makes twins very common and both Edith and Bonnie are Family sims. This is most of the reason that Alex has so many kids. Also, Bonnie's pregnancy turned out to be twins, too, so he's now up to 14 kids.)
I do at some point also want to tell the story of the five-person lesbian marriage that Jacqueline and Melanie (and also Lauren, in a kind of indirect way) are involved in, but I don't have a prompt for it right now. Edith's third child (the one she was pregnant with when she got divorced) does appear as a major character in a couple planned future stories, and Jacqueline and Melanie's shared wife will appear as an onscreen minor character in a story that's planned for very far in the future. The guys who bought Alex's cowplant are actually the subject of the next six stories for this that I have planned, but they will not post until I pick up the Warm Heart list (which will take another ten Fulcrum posts to get to).
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This just needs the story tag.
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Ha, well, there's a hook to start with! This is another interesting set up - and, lol, the Sims really do love their aliens, don't they? I see we've got some more of them lurking here!
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Thank you!
I actually forgot that I had mentioned aliens at all in this one, before you commented, I just wasn't thinking about Edith's alien twins, haha. Looking through the rest of the posts I have planned for this story, it looks like there's actually very few that don't involve aliens at all, although in a number of them you might not find out that there was an alien character until you get to the sim pictures. You've actually made me realize I could maybe tag more of these with Gesso, due to the fact that they involve aliens.
There really is very little to do with aliens in the rest of Crimes Against Romance, though. Most of the tropiness there is actually not Sims-related.
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Hurrah! I'm just really tickled about the aliens, as you can tell, but I did enjoy the rest as well.
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Haha, I'm glad you're enjoying the aliens!
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She was hangry and jealous, haha. She'll regret it later. Thank you for your kind words, I'm glad some serious horror came across even though it's also kind of silly Sims nonsense.