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rainbowfic2025-10-24 03:13 pm
paradoxcase) wrote in rainbowfic2025-10-24 03:13 pm
Warm Heart #13 [Tales From the Neighborhood]
Name: Shopping
Story: Tales From the Neighborhood
Plot Thread: Michael, Robert, and Stephen
Colors: Warm Heart #13: Shame
Styles and Supplies: Gesso, Silhouette, Vaudeville, Novelty Bead (carpe diem, given here)
Word Count: 1318
Rating: T
Warnings: Implied semi-public sexual stuff
Characters: Robert Bren, Victoria Ramirez, Bethany Ramirez, Gwen Arnold
Summary: Robert goes shopping for a new jacket.
Notes: And here is the origin story for Victoria's coat.
Bethany stood behind the register at the newly-reopened Cold Issue Clothing. She’d reorganized the store, repainted the interior to match her preferred aesthetic, gotten Theo to help with some special stock, and the business was finally ready to reopen. She’d kept the speakers blasting metal, though; it just wouldn’t be Cold Issue Clothing without that.
Her employee, Gwen Arnold, moved among the racks with the shirts she’d put back on hangers. The first round of customers of the day had been pleasant, and happy to see the store reopened and under new ownership. Hopefully that trend would continue.
A ding from the door announced a new customer, and Bethany looked up in anticipation, but quickly her expression turned into a scowl. It was Victoria. What was she doing here?
Victoria looked over at her as she entered, her mouth forming a pout. “Nice to see you, too, Beth. Don’t tell me you’re going to ban me from coming here now just because you’re still sore about Theo.”
“If you’re here to cause trouble, I will ban you,” said Bethany. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
“Buying clothes. What else would I be doing in a clothing store?”
Bethany pressed her mouth into a line. She really would like to ban Victoria; it didn’t seem right that she should be forced to put up with her here. But it was true, Victoria hadn’t actually done anything wrong yet, at least not in the store. “Alright,” she said. “You’re allowed, for now. But I’m watching you.”
Victoria flashed her a smirk and waltzed off into coat section.
Robert pushed open the door to Cold Issue Clothing. He needed a new jacket, but the store had closed down some time ago, the owner citing money issues. Fortunately, it looked like it had recently reopened.
Just inside the door, he stopped; there was a familiar face behind the register. “You got a job here?” he asked Bethany.
“Nope,” said Bethany. “I own the store.”
“Like own own the store?” asked Robert. “It doesn’t actually belong to your parents, or something?”
“The deed says I own it. Bought and paid for.”
“With whose money?”
“With our money. Well,” she amended, slightly, “Theo’s money. His parents had promised that he would have equal rights to their house along with his sister after they both got married, and he offered to sell his sister his half of the house so that she could have it all to herself. She agreed, took out a loan, and now they have a house and we got the money. I’ve been investing it into our future.”
“Oh,” said Robert. “So that’s why you didn’t dump him.”
Bethany got a very pained expression on her face. “No,” she said. “That’s not the reason I didn’t do that. Well, not the only reason.”
Robert shrugged, and moved off into the store, in search of jackets. Not his disaster relationship, not his problem.
Over by the coats and jackets, he bumped into Victoria, who was admiring a very long, fur coat. “I’m surprised she lets you in here,” he said, conversationally.
Victoria looked up at him. “She almost didn’t,” she said, petulantly, and shot and glance back over to the register. “She’s just watching and waiting for me to do something she can deem to be ‘bad’ so that she has an excuse to kick me out. I figure I better make the most of it and do something absolutely atrocious. What do you think?”
“I think it might actually be better to not try to get kicked out of the store,” said Robert.
“Well, where’s the fun in that? She’s probably going to kick me out regardless.” Victoria held the coat up to her body. “What do you think of this one?”
“I think it really works on you.” He turned back to the rack and perused the other jackets. Alright, there was one he could work with. He took the hanger off of the rack.
“Do you want to help me try this on?” Her voice had taken on a seductive, flirtatious tone.
He looked back at her and rolled his eyes a bit. “It’s a coat, you can just try it on here without undressing.”
“Maybe I want someone to tell me what it looks like without anything else under it.”
Robert’s eyes went back to the register, where Bethany was having a conversation with her employee and not looking their way. Maybe Victoria wanted to get banned from the store with a bang, but he didn’t. He had to admit the idea of fooling around in the dressing room was starting to appeal to him, though, probably because it did come with the risk, and he was actually in the mood for this today. In the back of his mind, Michael Wolf’s voice said to him: You have to learn to live a little, Robert.
Maybe, if they were quiet, they wouldn’t actually get banned from the store, and Bethany would be none the wiser. Suddenly, the appeal of the risk was all-consuming, and now he actually was curious what she would look like in only the coat. “Alright,” he said, folding the jacket he’d picked out over his arm. They headed to the other side of the store where the changing rooms were.
Bethany watched Victoria and Robert head over to the changing rooms. They were only carrying coats, so what exactly were they planning to do over there? “Gwen,” she called out, “can you mind the register for a minute?”
“Of course,” said Gwen, and brought the clothes she’d been re-hanging over to where Bethany stood, taking up position behind the register while she worked.
Bethany made her way back to the changing booths. If they were getting up to something in there, she was going to… She couldn’t think of a particular thing she was going to do, her mind was consumed by black anger. If they were going to besmirch her brand new store in this way, she was going to kill them. With every step she got angrier and angrier until she was incandescent.
Sure enough, when she got to the changing booths, there was giggling coming from one of them. Victoria’s giggling. “VICTORIA!” she screamed, “You are the most inconsiderate and wicked person I’ve ever known! You are banned from this store! You are preemptively banned from every other store I ever open, and someday I will own every business in this town you will be banned from all of them! Get out of there! Get out! Get out!” She picked up a nearby mannequin and beat it against the curtained opening of the dressing room; it struck something solid, and she heard Victoria shriek.
“Stop it!” yelled Victoria, sounding very put-upon. “I’m coming out… I’m coming out…”
After a few seconds of some frantic squabbling, she appeared outside the booth, wearing most of her clothes, and also the coat that she’d been carrying earlier. “You’re so hateful!” she snarled, and then fled the store.
Bethany stalked back to the register and relieved Gwen of her temporary post. At least Victoria was gone now.
Some time later, Robert came up to the register, somewhat shamefaced, with the jacket he’d been carrying earlier. “Sorry about all that,” he said, “but I did actually want to buy this.”
Bethany regarded him sternly. “Do I have to clean that dressing room?”
Robert sighed, closed his eyes, and grimaced. “No.”
“Good. Then you are not banned from the store. However, I am going to have to ask you to pay for the coat she ran off with.”
Robert looked very tired. “I guess that’s fair,” he agreed.
She rang him up and put his jacket in a bag, and pointedly did not ask him to come back again soon. Hopefully by the next time he did come back, they both would have mostly forgotten about this.
Gesso Notes
Cold Issue Clothing, which was obviously named after Hot Topic, is a real clothing store in the game, which is generally the one I use for getting sims new outfits when they age up into something random that's pretty much always awful. It does have speakers that are set to play metal, but it's not actually very goth-looking on the inside, I didn't really change the lot much. Theo does do some free labor here to make custom outfits with the sewing machine that get sold in the store.
Robert really was just there to buy new clothes. After he and Stephen graduated from college, they wound up in predictably inappropriate outfits:
I already knew exactly what I wanted Stephen to wear, so he didn't have to come and actually try stuff on (which is a lengthy process, because there's a lot of lag when spawning the clothing dialog). So I just sent Robert by himself. They look much better after I dressed them, or at least I think so:
Clothing booth sex is kind of a old staple trope of this game. There are a special set of wants and memories for "public woohoo" compared to regular woohoo, and there are exactly two objects that can be used to satisfy and create them: the clothing booth, and the photo booth. It's kind of funny; if you want to, you can put a hot tub or even a double bed in the middle of a public park, but sims woohooing there doesn't count as "public woohoo" because it's not a clothing booth or a photo booth. (Elevators may also count for public woohoo, but I'm not sure, because I've never actually managed to get elevator woohoo to happen, and I don't know anyone else who has, either.) Also, I believe the game used to have a bug in it where woohooing in a photo booth always counted as public, even if it was placed inside a private house. However, I have attempted to exploit this and found that it was fixed at some point.
Anyway, I usually use the photo booth for public woohoo purposes, mostly because I have a mod that automates photo booth woohoo and don't have anything like that for the clothing booth. But as I said, Robert was really there just to buy clothes. This happened more or less exactly as described, where Victoria randomly spawned on the lot, he rolled the want to talk to her, then to flirt with her, then kiss, then makeout, then woohoo (I omitted some of this process from the story). It's a want tree that I'm pretty familiar with, but usually when I actually try to get this sequence of wants to roll (almost always because I want an excuse to make someone pregnant) it refuses to take. Robert is kind of funny; mostly he will exclusively roll wants about skilling, or promotions, or buying expensive crap, or football, and kind of ignore the existence of other people (unless they want to toss a football with him), and then once in a blue moon he just randomly wants to fuck someone. Anyway, I already had other wants locked that I was working on, and if I'd had him take her home with him, the woohoo want would have rolled away and I'd have lost the points. So I said, alright, if you insist.
Normally when sims have public woohoo (i.e. actually in a clothing booth or a photo booth, not in a hot tub in the middle of the park) other sims on the lot will come over and cheer. This time, Bethany came over and started yelling, which I didn't know was an option for anyone other than Mrs. Crumplebottom (who I think has a special purse-beating animation for this that can't be used with other sims). I have no idea why she reacted this way. In-game, she didn't actually hate Victoria yet like she does here, because she wasn't actually there when Theo cheated. I think maybe it was just because she was the business owner? That's the only thing I can think of. Anyway, it was hilarious, and hopefully I captured that well enough. I did let them finish, though, because a) points! and b) I was just sitting there laughing at Bethany losing her shit and had stopped actually controlling the game.
Sim Notes
Bethany Ramirez is a born-in-game sim, another daughter of Tessa Ramirez, and Victoria's younger sister. This is her adult portrait:
As hinted in the previous post, Stephen's dad did actually make her into a witch before she went off to college. Her lot then got corrupted and she lost her cauldron and spellbook not once, but actually twice, and had to buy them back from one of the head witches. However, I replaced her witch hat because I like the hair that I'd picked out for her better.
Bethany is one of the few sims in my neighborhood who rolled the "Have 5 top-level businesses" lifetime want who actually got to keep and satisfy it — it's a lot of work, so the sim has to be someone I like playing a lot. There's one other sim who got to have that life goal, who will show up later. Her other businesses are a witch paraphernalia shop (which will become relevant in future installments of this), a pet shop, and a car dealership. I wound up not needing a fifth business because immediately after the pet shop reached the maximum level and she got credit for it, a customer became unhappy and it dipped back down to the previous level. She then got it back up to the maximum level and got credit for it a second time! Saved me a lot of work. Currently, in my game, the only one that still needs to reach maximum level is the car dealership.
She does not have a super wonderful relationship with Theo. The only reason they are actually still together is because the mod I installed to allow them to confess their cheating to each other was a bit broken and as a result, they both forgave each other. I've fixed the mod at this point, but I've decided they're probably just codependent. Also, it is nice having Theo still around to do unpaid manual labor for the clothing store. (Domestic sweatshop? What are you talking about?) They have a bunch of kids, one of whom is very obviously not Theo's. I do have a couple more stories about them planned for the very distant future.
Gwen Arnold is this downtownie, who you might remember as also being Sadie Gregory in the Crimes Against Romance universe. I think it's hilarious that she got a last name that's also a man's first name in both universes. Anyway, she is still a townie here, she's just also being employed by Bethany, so she still looks exactly the same.
Story: Tales From the Neighborhood
Plot Thread: Michael, Robert, and Stephen
Colors: Warm Heart #13: Shame
Styles and Supplies: Gesso, Silhouette, Vaudeville, Novelty Bead (carpe diem, given here)
Word Count: 1318
Rating: T
Warnings: Implied semi-public sexual stuff
Characters: Robert Bren, Victoria Ramirez, Bethany Ramirez, Gwen Arnold
Summary: Robert goes shopping for a new jacket.
Notes: And here is the origin story for Victoria's coat.
Bethany stood behind the register at the newly-reopened Cold Issue Clothing. She’d reorganized the store, repainted the interior to match her preferred aesthetic, gotten Theo to help with some special stock, and the business was finally ready to reopen. She’d kept the speakers blasting metal, though; it just wouldn’t be Cold Issue Clothing without that.
Her employee, Gwen Arnold, moved among the racks with the shirts she’d put back on hangers. The first round of customers of the day had been pleasant, and happy to see the store reopened and under new ownership. Hopefully that trend would continue.
A ding from the door announced a new customer, and Bethany looked up in anticipation, but quickly her expression turned into a scowl. It was Victoria. What was she doing here?
Victoria looked over at her as she entered, her mouth forming a pout. “Nice to see you, too, Beth. Don’t tell me you’re going to ban me from coming here now just because you’re still sore about Theo.”
“If you’re here to cause trouble, I will ban you,” said Bethany. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
“Buying clothes. What else would I be doing in a clothing store?”
Bethany pressed her mouth into a line. She really would like to ban Victoria; it didn’t seem right that she should be forced to put up with her here. But it was true, Victoria hadn’t actually done anything wrong yet, at least not in the store. “Alright,” she said. “You’re allowed, for now. But I’m watching you.”
Victoria flashed her a smirk and waltzed off into coat section.
Robert pushed open the door to Cold Issue Clothing. He needed a new jacket, but the store had closed down some time ago, the owner citing money issues. Fortunately, it looked like it had recently reopened.
Just inside the door, he stopped; there was a familiar face behind the register. “You got a job here?” he asked Bethany.
“Nope,” said Bethany. “I own the store.”
“Like own own the store?” asked Robert. “It doesn’t actually belong to your parents, or something?”
“The deed says I own it. Bought and paid for.”
“With whose money?”
“With our money. Well,” she amended, slightly, “Theo’s money. His parents had promised that he would have equal rights to their house along with his sister after they both got married, and he offered to sell his sister his half of the house so that she could have it all to herself. She agreed, took out a loan, and now they have a house and we got the money. I’ve been investing it into our future.”
“Oh,” said Robert. “So that’s why you didn’t dump him.”
Bethany got a very pained expression on her face. “No,” she said. “That’s not the reason I didn’t do that. Well, not the only reason.”
Robert shrugged, and moved off into the store, in search of jackets. Not his disaster relationship, not his problem.
Over by the coats and jackets, he bumped into Victoria, who was admiring a very long, fur coat. “I’m surprised she lets you in here,” he said, conversationally.
Victoria looked up at him. “She almost didn’t,” she said, petulantly, and shot and glance back over to the register. “She’s just watching and waiting for me to do something she can deem to be ‘bad’ so that she has an excuse to kick me out. I figure I better make the most of it and do something absolutely atrocious. What do you think?”
“I think it might actually be better to not try to get kicked out of the store,” said Robert.
“Well, where’s the fun in that? She’s probably going to kick me out regardless.” Victoria held the coat up to her body. “What do you think of this one?”
“I think it really works on you.” He turned back to the rack and perused the other jackets. Alright, there was one he could work with. He took the hanger off of the rack.
“Do you want to help me try this on?” Her voice had taken on a seductive, flirtatious tone.
He looked back at her and rolled his eyes a bit. “It’s a coat, you can just try it on here without undressing.”
“Maybe I want someone to tell me what it looks like without anything else under it.”
Robert’s eyes went back to the register, where Bethany was having a conversation with her employee and not looking their way. Maybe Victoria wanted to get banned from the store with a bang, but he didn’t. He had to admit the idea of fooling around in the dressing room was starting to appeal to him, though, probably because it did come with the risk, and he was actually in the mood for this today. In the back of his mind, Michael Wolf’s voice said to him: You have to learn to live a little, Robert.
Maybe, if they were quiet, they wouldn’t actually get banned from the store, and Bethany would be none the wiser. Suddenly, the appeal of the risk was all-consuming, and now he actually was curious what she would look like in only the coat. “Alright,” he said, folding the jacket he’d picked out over his arm. They headed to the other side of the store where the changing rooms were.
Bethany watched Victoria and Robert head over to the changing rooms. They were only carrying coats, so what exactly were they planning to do over there? “Gwen,” she called out, “can you mind the register for a minute?”
“Of course,” said Gwen, and brought the clothes she’d been re-hanging over to where Bethany stood, taking up position behind the register while she worked.
Bethany made her way back to the changing booths. If they were getting up to something in there, she was going to… She couldn’t think of a particular thing she was going to do, her mind was consumed by black anger. If they were going to besmirch her brand new store in this way, she was going to kill them. With every step she got angrier and angrier until she was incandescent.
Sure enough, when she got to the changing booths, there was giggling coming from one of them. Victoria’s giggling. “VICTORIA!” she screamed, “You are the most inconsiderate and wicked person I’ve ever known! You are banned from this store! You are preemptively banned from every other store I ever open, and someday I will own every business in this town you will be banned from all of them! Get out of there! Get out! Get out!” She picked up a nearby mannequin and beat it against the curtained opening of the dressing room; it struck something solid, and she heard Victoria shriek.
“Stop it!” yelled Victoria, sounding very put-upon. “I’m coming out… I’m coming out…”
After a few seconds of some frantic squabbling, she appeared outside the booth, wearing most of her clothes, and also the coat that she’d been carrying earlier. “You’re so hateful!” she snarled, and then fled the store.
Bethany stalked back to the register and relieved Gwen of her temporary post. At least Victoria was gone now.
Some time later, Robert came up to the register, somewhat shamefaced, with the jacket he’d been carrying earlier. “Sorry about all that,” he said, “but I did actually want to buy this.”
Bethany regarded him sternly. “Do I have to clean that dressing room?”
Robert sighed, closed his eyes, and grimaced. “No.”
“Good. Then you are not banned from the store. However, I am going to have to ask you to pay for the coat she ran off with.”
Robert looked very tired. “I guess that’s fair,” he agreed.
She rang him up and put his jacket in a bag, and pointedly did not ask him to come back again soon. Hopefully by the next time he did come back, they both would have mostly forgotten about this.
Gesso Notes
Cold Issue Clothing, which was obviously named after Hot Topic, is a real clothing store in the game, which is generally the one I use for getting sims new outfits when they age up into something random that's pretty much always awful. It does have speakers that are set to play metal, but it's not actually very goth-looking on the inside, I didn't really change the lot much. Theo does do some free labor here to make custom outfits with the sewing machine that get sold in the store.
Robert really was just there to buy new clothes. After he and Stephen graduated from college, they wound up in predictably inappropriate outfits:
I already knew exactly what I wanted Stephen to wear, so he didn't have to come and actually try stuff on (which is a lengthy process, because there's a lot of lag when spawning the clothing dialog). So I just sent Robert by himself. They look much better after I dressed them, or at least I think so:
Clothing booth sex is kind of a old staple trope of this game. There are a special set of wants and memories for "public woohoo" compared to regular woohoo, and there are exactly two objects that can be used to satisfy and create them: the clothing booth, and the photo booth. It's kind of funny; if you want to, you can put a hot tub or even a double bed in the middle of a public park, but sims woohooing there doesn't count as "public woohoo" because it's not a clothing booth or a photo booth. (Elevators may also count for public woohoo, but I'm not sure, because I've never actually managed to get elevator woohoo to happen, and I don't know anyone else who has, either.) Also, I believe the game used to have a bug in it where woohooing in a photo booth always counted as public, even if it was placed inside a private house. However, I have attempted to exploit this and found that it was fixed at some point.
Anyway, I usually use the photo booth for public woohoo purposes, mostly because I have a mod that automates photo booth woohoo and don't have anything like that for the clothing booth. But as I said, Robert was really there just to buy clothes. This happened more or less exactly as described, where Victoria randomly spawned on the lot, he rolled the want to talk to her, then to flirt with her, then kiss, then makeout, then woohoo (I omitted some of this process from the story). It's a want tree that I'm pretty familiar with, but usually when I actually try to get this sequence of wants to roll (almost always because I want an excuse to make someone pregnant) it refuses to take. Robert is kind of funny; mostly he will exclusively roll wants about skilling, or promotions, or buying expensive crap, or football, and kind of ignore the existence of other people (unless they want to toss a football with him), and then once in a blue moon he just randomly wants to fuck someone. Anyway, I already had other wants locked that I was working on, and if I'd had him take her home with him, the woohoo want would have rolled away and I'd have lost the points. So I said, alright, if you insist.
Normally when sims have public woohoo (i.e. actually in a clothing booth or a photo booth, not in a hot tub in the middle of the park) other sims on the lot will come over and cheer. This time, Bethany came over and started yelling, which I didn't know was an option for anyone other than Mrs. Crumplebottom (who I think has a special purse-beating animation for this that can't be used with other sims). I have no idea why she reacted this way. In-game, she didn't actually hate Victoria yet like she does here, because she wasn't actually there when Theo cheated. I think maybe it was just because she was the business owner? That's the only thing I can think of. Anyway, it was hilarious, and hopefully I captured that well enough. I did let them finish, though, because a) points! and b) I was just sitting there laughing at Bethany losing her shit and had stopped actually controlling the game.
Sim Notes
Bethany Ramirez is a born-in-game sim, another daughter of Tessa Ramirez, and Victoria's younger sister. This is her adult portrait:
As hinted in the previous post, Stephen's dad did actually make her into a witch before she went off to college. Her lot then got corrupted and she lost her cauldron and spellbook not once, but actually twice, and had to buy them back from one of the head witches. However, I replaced her witch hat because I like the hair that I'd picked out for her better.
Bethany is one of the few sims in my neighborhood who rolled the "Have 5 top-level businesses" lifetime want who actually got to keep and satisfy it — it's a lot of work, so the sim has to be someone I like playing a lot. There's one other sim who got to have that life goal, who will show up later. Her other businesses are a witch paraphernalia shop (which will become relevant in future installments of this), a pet shop, and a car dealership. I wound up not needing a fifth business because immediately after the pet shop reached the maximum level and she got credit for it, a customer became unhappy and it dipped back down to the previous level. She then got it back up to the maximum level and got credit for it a second time! Saved me a lot of work. Currently, in my game, the only one that still needs to reach maximum level is the car dealership.
She does not have a super wonderful relationship with Theo. The only reason they are actually still together is because the mod I installed to allow them to confess their cheating to each other was a bit broken and as a result, they both forgave each other. I've fixed the mod at this point, but I've decided they're probably just codependent. Also, it is nice having Theo still around to do unpaid manual labor for the clothing store. (Domestic sweatshop? What are you talking about?) They have a bunch of kids, one of whom is very obviously not Theo's. I do have a couple more stories about them planned for the very distant future.
Gwen Arnold is this downtownie, who you might remember as also being Sadie Gregory in the Crimes Against Romance universe. I think it's hilarious that she got a last name that's also a man's first name in both universes. Anyway, she is still a townie here, she's just also being employed by Bethany, so she still looks exactly the same.
no subject
LOl, fair!
This was a fun read - and I laughed very hard at the Sims's definition of public (in a both, yes, in a bed in a park, no!) which is hilarious.
no subject
Thank you! Yeah, the game has its fun little quirks.
no subject
no subject
Yup, haha. Thank you for reading!