Last time, I hit a point windfall and Jared got abducted by aliens. This time, we deal with the aftermath.
Madison: Wow, what an awesome party! I’m totally not going to acknowledge or react to that suspicious hovercar!
Jared: Well, that was a weird…hallucination? Or maybe a dream. Nah, definitely a hallucination. Connor always said that acid I took in college would come back to bite me in the ass.
Catherine got Jared a birthday gift. She couldn’t give it to him last night because he ran off like a crazy person, but day-after presents still count, right?
Right.
It’s a cane, which should offend him, but Jared is nothing if not contrary, so he’s thrilled.
Jared: Get off my damn lawn you punks!
He puts it to good use as part of his “grumpy old codger” ensemble.
Summer in Sunset Valley is bright and gorgeous, so El takes advantage of the nice weather to hang out with her friends. Connie has to leave early to go to work, but that still leaves Leo and Cheri to hang with.
I think I must have missed some undercurrents between Leo and Cheri – El barely even kissed the boy hello, and Cheri stormed off with a big ol’ person-person-double-minus over her head. It’s especially weird when you consider that she has a boyfriend; Cheri’s been dating Deshaun Frenchfry(Connor’s son with Molly French) for over a week, which is practically married by Sim standards.
It also means that everyone in El’s friendgroup is eventually going to end up as part of her family tree, which is a weird thought.
Brienne is not at all put off by Jared’s new wrinkles and gray hair.
You two. You’re gonna give me cavities. Gross, weird cavities.
Catherine obligingly poses inside the library so I can show off some of its mismatched furniture. None of her traits(or her LTW for that matter) apply to child-sim activities, so she mostly spends her time on free will mode reading books.
Or playing at being a queen.
Tiff: Feeling a lil hefty, there, pal. And both of us know you haven’t working out.
Jared: Oh, what is that feeling..?
Tiff: Here’s an idea; for your diet, you can just give all your food to me!
Jared: Nothing is happening nothing is happening nothing is happening
Tiff: I mean, you still look good, pal. Lookin’ fresh. But you could stand to lose a few pounds, you dig?
Tiff: So whaddya say?
Jared: What the hell is this dog barking about?
Jared: So, I looked up “weird glowing green stomach” and “unexpected weight gain” on webMD and you would not BELIEVE what I found.
Brienne: My love, are you entirely sure that this is something I want to know?
Jared: Eh, maybe not. It’s pretty cool though.
Brienne: I do not-
Jared: I’m pregnant.
Brienne: I beg your pardon? Jared, I believe you may be confusing basic human anatomy.
Jared: No no no, not like, normal pregnant. Pregnant with an alien baby from space. Like, a little green dude with a poky face.
Brienne: But – I – How?
Jared: Oh yeah, I got abducted by a spaceship on my birthday. I didn’t say anything cause I thought it was a bad acid flashback.
Brienne: I believe it says something regarding the type of person you are that I cannot muster any surprise at that.
Jared: Harsh, babe.
Jared takes to fishing at the park across the road, getting in touch with his natural side.
Jared: Hey, it’s happening again! Catherine, how cool is that?!
Catherine: Just a minute dad, let me finish my page.
Jared: How in the hell did both of my kid turn out so rude?
The Golden-Handed Chef is looking quite chef-shaped these days.
Glitch, what glitch?
And apparently the tubbiness has reached critical mass, because after a few days he starts going into labor on the front lawn.
Jared: Someone get this damn dirty dog out of here!
There’s certainly no awkward graphical problems in this game.
Faithful: Rude.
No sirree.
It’s a boy!
Meet Bedivere Gallant, the unplanned-for final member of generation 2. He’s named after Sir Bedivere, one of the legendary Knights of the Round Table, and the one credited with returning Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake as Arthur lay dying. He rolled disciplined and loves the cold as his traits.
A nursery is hastily constructed upstairs. The wallpaper is a little on the nose.
Jared: I MADE AN ALIEN SPACE BABY AND HE’S FUCKING AWWWESOOOOOOOME!!
Brienne: Perhaps you should lower your voice, love?
Brienne: After all, it is our Catherine’s birthday. You wouldn’t want to ruin her day in front of all these people, would you?
Jared: Buzzkill.
There’s a bit of a traffic jam on the way to the cake.(That young man hanging out by the TV is none other than Deshaun, aka Connor’s kid, aka Cheri’s boyfriend.)
But there’s still plenty of people around to cheer Catherine on to teenhood.
Damn, girl.
Catherine ages up unreasonably pretty, and rolls the photographer’s eye trait. So, she’s an artsy basic white girl. I gave her an elegant pastel-goth look to contrast with El’s thrift store party girl style.
Catherine: So, are we acknowledging how dad lost fifty pounds while we were at school and now there’s a weird green kid in a crib upstairs?
El: Nope.
Catherine: Ah, of course not. What was I thinking.
For her birthday, Catherine gets a sexy new grand piano – she really really really wanted a pony, but Brienne was clear that she wasn’t getting a horse until she had an A in school and already knew how to ride and take care of it. A piano is one hell of a consolation prize, but all the same…
Although she enjoys music, and has been absently considering getting into photography, there’s something that keeps Catherine coming back to horses in particular. If someone were to ask her why, she would never be able to articulate it. There was a dream she only half-remembers that left her with a bone deep sense of purpose, but like a soap-bubble, the more she tries to grasp the memory, the further it slips away from her. She’s left with only the vague impression of gentle light and a soft voice in her ear:
You are not ready.
Yet.
…So that happened.
Bedivere is in fact my first full-alien baby ever! I’ve had sims who hooked up with aliens in the past, but abductions are so rare that I’ve never had a male sim “pollinated” before. On this topic, please read my disclaimer at the bottom of the post.
I’m mighty pleased at how Catherine is turning out – there aren’t any proper pics of her face in this chapter, but I quite like her look. Like a little lady, but also like she maybe spends her nights hanging out in graveyards. She’s also locked in her lifetime wish – I’m not giving it away just yet, but you can probably guess based on recent chapters. X)
Next chapter should include El’s age-up to young adulthood, maybe one more to fit in some extra content, and then after that it’s a special one-off chapter and the heir poll!
-Mo ❤
Disclaimer(If there are kids reading this, this is PG-13 AT LEAST, turn back now and skip over this bit): Ok, so, the way EA handles the ‘alien abduction’ thing is pretty fucked up. Like, I get it, it’s meant to be a play on those people on the History Channel who claim that they were ‘probed’ by aliens and the ‘Mars needs moms’ trope, but it’s still too reminiscent of sexual assault played for comedy for it to not skeeve me out on some level. That being said, obviously I chose to include it in this story, and obviously that’s not the interpretation I’m going with in this case. The simple reason is that I want the story to remain, at it’s core, light-hearted; the more complicated one is that I don’t feel confident in my ability to write on the topic in a properly respectful and accurate way. Please feel free to call me on it if I screw up in any way, I’ll be happy to rewrite a chapter to be non-upsetting or offensive. Thanks for understanding!
The Gallant Legacy 
Don’t even stress about the nature of your story – if you want to see a dark story in action, look at mine XD
No but in all honesty there’s a lot of things that EA puts in that skeeves me out, but I never thought about alien abduction that way until now. I totally see it though.
For what it’s worth you handled it perfectly for the light-hearted story you’ve got.
Catherine playing royalty had me snickering mostly because of her namesake. I have a soft-spot for her, especially since she got that beautiful chapter earlier on. I can’t wait to see where you take this!
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Thanks! Honestly, it’s not a HUGE deal to me, but I wasn’t going to mention it in the story and I wanted to bring it up somewhere, you know?
Have you ever noticed that every child sim has one particular action that they’ll do way disproportionately? For El it was actually playing tag – I kept having to go drag her out of the back yard with the dogs. But Catherine absolutely loves the “presiding over court” thing, which fits sooo well.
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