Sims player fourteen generation deep into a legacy. Here's their story! Also, art and builds.
Charlotte’s bedroom… is a pink mess. It’s really pretty, really romantic, really soft. It reflects her interests really well, there’s no doubt. In particular the dressing table. It’s always drowning under make-up, skin-care products, and fashion magazines. Framed by her favorite film posters and a table for her laptop — that she uses for make-up tutorials — this is where she spends most of her time. Charlotte hopes for a career in fashion, and no one can say she’s not putting in the work.
Shanna is the only one, out of my five friends, whose room I would happily live in. The walls are covered in posters from her favorite bands and artists, and centers of interests. She’s achieved a balance of warm and cold tones. It’s comfy, and stylish, and if I’m being honest I wish she would have let us come inside a little more often.
Or at all, really.
Marie’s room is girly, sweet and cheerful. The colors are harmonious. Stepping foot into it puts me to sleep immediately, which I guess, is pretty good. The shift between the softness of her decor and the punkest of her punk outfits is striking, and to be honest, still a bit of a mystery to me.
They called it the Air Complex.
This gigantic building was built with college students in mind, college students with the appropriate college scholarship; but that was no obstacle six trust fund babies couldn’t overcome. With the money on our family-given accounts and the drop of our family name, the doors to the complex opened, and so did the next two years of our lives.
The Air complex was a very modern-looking building from the outside, all in white planes, glass and sharp angles. It had a beautiful swimming pool and an outdoors basketball court, and a few rooms upstairs meant to encourage the practice of sports even more.
There were exactly six rooms there, which we took possession of quickly, and turned into our own. The girls lived downstairs, on the same floor as the common room, and the two boys were neighbors upstairs, next to the common laundry room.
Charlotte and I spent more than one night in each other’s bed, talking till the morning, giggling like the teenagers we were, sharing everything we felt about everything. Living right next door to each over seemed like a perfect dream, until there came a time that we didn’t wish to tell each other everything. And then, keeping secrets from each other — from one another —became a problem.
My bedroom door in the background.
Turns out, when you want to leave the house for the most selfish of reasons, you can’t expect to be fully supported by your incredibly wealthy family.
Fine. I didn’t want your money, anyways.
When you’re a teen with low to no income on your own, you have to get creative to find a place to live — so I did.
Since no matter how long I spent on the Internet I couldn’t find anything that I’d be able to afford on my own, I broadened my filter a little. Until I found the perfect gem.
Oh, it would take some convincing. But on the bright side, it wouldn’t be my parents I would need to convince.
This was going to be great.
I set out to search that perfect place, every day, several hours a day, often as soon as I woke up.
I searched, and searched, tirelessly
I searched in really odd places on the Internet. Until finally…
I found it! The one palace to end them all.
Convincing Charlotte meant convincing the whole group. It took treasures of passion to make her see the potential of my plan.
Thankfully, I had the passion.
The Rascals and I, on one afternoon we decided to stay in — probably because Hugo and I convinced the others. Video games didn’t get everyone quite as excited as it did the two of us.
Being divided in teams meant not everybody could win at once. Rare depiction in this pic of Romain and I wiping the floor with Hugo.
It’s possible that Hugo didn’t spend 100% of his teenage years sober.
Very much possible.
Out of all of our activities, gaming was probably the one Shanna was the least interested in. It showed.
Typical teenagers, the lot of us. Marie, sneaking a selfie before she transitioned fully to her later punk style. Photos of her in a T-shirt became a rarity. This selfie ought to be in a museum.
Charlotte and I were the best of friends. We absolutely were.
Though I did not realize it yet, many things were already brewing in this tight-knit group of friends I thought we were.
And this is where it all truly begins.
But first, I feel like I need to back it up a little. You probably remember our band of Rascals. As a group of teens, Hugo, Charlotte, Romain, Marie, Shanna and I were closer than ever. We were young, and handsome, and for some time at least, we worked perfectly together.
Together, we had the most amazing years.
But who were we exactly, you ask?
Charlotte was my best friend. She was sassy, funny, and in my eyes, and she had a terrific sense of style. Of course, we had very similar styles, so for teenage me, this was a validation of her and me both. Charlotte liked to make fun of people, but since her jokes were never about me, I could never find her really mean. It was, after all, all in good fun, wasn’t it?
Marie blossomed under Charlotte and my care. An introverted child at first, she slowly gained confidence, namely the confidence to show her true self through the clothes she wore. Perhaps influenced by Romain, we saw her ditch the shapeless shirts and large jeans and adopt the leather and plaid jackets. However, her confidence was fueled by the validation Charlotte and I provided, and that was the very basis of our friendship for the longest time.
Shanna was always aloof. Gorgeous, and confident on her own, she didn’t take any of Charlotte’s dubious jokes laying down. She had no problems hanging up on group calls because she was tired of us, or turning a girl’s night out down because she wanted to practice the guitar. Out of all of us, Shanna was probably the best friend you could have. She listened, didn’t judge, talked scarcely but always with great thought. It’s hard to be wise when you’re 16, but Shanna was closer to the mark than any of us. She grounded us all.
Hugo Lopez was new in town. He was barely aware of the hierarchy that exists between families around here. He was not a part of that hierarchy at all. All of my other friends had an ancestor whose name you could find in the region’s archives. The girls even had the same last name as me: no one alive could remember the time when the branches diverged, but the fact remained. Everybody in our group of rascals was descended from a founding family, but him.
What was beautiful about Hugo was, he did not care. He did not own a mansion, or a villa in Oasis Springs. He did not have any strings he could pull and that would guarantee him his dream job. But Hugo didn’t care that we did. He was a laid-back sim with his own ideas of what was important and what wasn’t. His own sense of wisdom.
Unfortunately, according to Hugo, the clothes you wore and putting your dishes in the sink when you were done eating — or better yet, washing them — wasn’t on the list of what was important.
And finally, there was Romain. A bit of an outsider as well, as he was not a member of the Stewarts family. He was a Barcet, a descendant of a family that had found shelter in Oasis Springs around the time that my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother was born, and quickly become the town outcasts. Outcasts though his ancestors were, he was a part of our community, which of course, came with some territory. Literally.
A handsome rebel with the same social status as mine — people rooted for us to fall in love.
And I guess we did. Romain and I, discreete though we were in our affection, were the Brindleton Bay it-couple. And the Willow Creek it-couple. And the Oasis Springs it-couple.
Romain and I, whether we wanted it or not, were the it-couple.
Do you know what the problem is when you’re raised as the cherished, perfect princess of the family?
Nothing ever prepares you for when it ends. And eventually, you realize you were a fool to think that it never would.
Not long after my 16th birthday, Miranda gave us the incredible news. I was going to be an aunt!
Miranda, whose pregnancy was not going to affect her yearning for independence, threw a baby shower that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the pages of a magazine. Without the help of anybody, especially not her kid’s father, whose identity remained perfectly mysterious for a few more months. Miranda says that she didn’t know herself until baby Nolan was born.
It was a perfect day, and a perfectly happy day.
On and on, our mothers gushed about the child to come. The youngest heir, the new life, the endless possibilities.
Mom turned to me at some point, and she said, “Aren’t you excited to take care of your little nephew?”
And I realized that no, I really wasn’t. What my sister had done for me, I couldn’t return a fraction of to her unborn baby. I wasn’t willing to lose my spot as the cherished heir, or to sacrifice the time, and effort, and energy, that I knew I could put towards my goals, my many goals.
So I told my mom that I wouldn’t be taking care of little nephew. I would, in fact, be moving out before the end of the week.
My mothers were dismayed. Miranda — perfect, supportive Miranda — applauded my independence, and she encouraged me, as she always had, to reach for more.
Grandma was incredibly happy to meet her great-great grandkid. Generation Fourteen of our family was kind of a big deal.
I figured now would be as good a time as ever.
She was less excited than I was.
Older, and wiser, and with dreams bigger than ever.
My first great act as a teenager was to re-do my bedroom entirely. It hadn’t changed a smidgen since my own Mom had been a kid. The pink was adorable, and I had loved it as a kid, but now it was time for my style to take over. We exposed the bare stone, got hold of a much bigger bookcase, upgraded my bed and my desk, and to top it off, bought me a brand new computer.
One of the many perks of having the world’s most renown painter as your grandmother is that the funds to customize your bedroom for your Sweet 16 are practically unlimited. And I was Grandma’s darling princess.
My relationship with Grandma only got better as we both grew older. She approved of my new style, which didn’t surprise me. If my head was in electronic circuits and programming languages, my clothes sported the unmistakable touch of a boho, laid-back upbringing. They still do.
Just like Grandma before me, I also chose sports as one of my hobbies, though never to the extremes she had reached. She told me that when she was my age, she was much curvier, more so even than Mom. One day, a new gymnasium had opened in Oasis Springs, and she had found a passion in sports, setting the all-time record on their climbing wall. Then as old age won her body over, she took to yoga.
I just went jogging fairly regularly.
And I wrote, too. Not novels like Great-Grandma Ariana, or newspaper articles like a good number of my ancestors, but in my diary. There, I confided all my hopes, dreams and ambitions. I drew diagrams, schematics, and I wrote about the young boys that spun my head around…
My new and improved room, where I remember eating many, many fruit yoghurts for some reason.
Jogging became a part of my daily routine. It helped me clear my head, and as trapped as leaving enclosed by water could make me feel, the Brindleton Bay Wharf indeniably had some enjoyable sights.
Also helping me clear my head, my dear diary. I liked to write on the poolside patio.
Or I would write in our hall, with the weak, flickering light of our old lamp.
Even though the hall often meant little to no privacy.
The Stewarts Family (and other shenanigans) 