Interlude 1: A Story Progression Update

  Welcome back to the Legend Legacy! We last saw the Legends finally get settled into a house, abandoning lawn living forever. This chapter is not a Legend update, though - it will be a short interlude to the main story, where I pop around some of the neigbourhood Sims and move their lives along if I feel they need it. I'll probably do this once or twice per generation, along with playing spares in different households as needed to give them lives outside of our legacy story. If you only want to read about the Legends feel free to skip to the next chapter!

As an aside, I really hope this works right. I turned ageing off while playing these households so my legacy family wouldn't progress too much without me. I know they will continue to live their lives regardless though so I hope I don't return to total chaos! I also hope that interfering in the rest of the neighbourhood doesn't mess anything about the game's auto-progression up. Story progression for the whole neighbourhood is important to me though - I'll be working to continuously infuse fresh bloodlines into my Sim world as much for the legacy family's sake as anything else - plus I want the Sims that are important to them to also progress with their lives. So, without further ado...



I make a start with the Pancake family, though God knows why. They're so boring. I guess Gaia and Gavin see them around town a lot but this will be their only input from me - after this, them and their bloodline are on their own.



Bob and Eliza have a high enough relationship for immediate woohooing, so I start by getting Eliza pregnant. They don't have the most interesting genetics in the world so I'm not sure their spawn will ever mingle with the Legend's, but Eliza seemed like she'd be a good Mum.



Afterwards I realise that, as older Sims, it would have made a lot more sense to think of Eliza and Bob as an infertile couple (though they may have older children? I can't remember and didn't check) and have them adopt instead. So, I have them adopt as well! I used a randomiser to select Robin from the available orphans. He has more interesting genetics than his adoptive parents so I may poke my nose into his life later on and make sure he has a...productive...adulthood. 



Next, it's over to the Caliente household to see what I can do for Nina - Gaia's good friend. She's still hanging out at the museum she went to with Gaia and spots this fellow, who I think would actually bring some really fun genes into the neighbourhood's future generations.



However, when I realise Nina already has some friendship progress with none other than Mitchell Kalani - Gavin, J and Zoe's other roommate - I figure I can kill two birds with one stone by having them hookup! I progress them to boyfriend/girlfriend status but leave it at that. The rest is up to them to figure out. I know it's unlikely they'll marry or have children (to be honest I'm not even sure if it's possible with the current story progression) but that's fine with me.



During the downtime from working on Nina, I decide I feel sorry for Katrina Caliente, who has a Soulmate aspiration but is single and an elder. So I hook her up with Johan and move him in to the household. Again, they're just boyfriend/girlfriend, but I hope they will keep each other company in their twilight years :)





I also briefly attempt to do something with Don Lothario - no idea why he lives with the Calientes, but he does - however every lady he meets looks utterly disgusted by him. Smart ladies. I give up pretty quickly.



Look who I spot while I'm desperately trying to find someone who doesn't hate Don, though! Gaia looks FAB in the Day of the Dead dress. I see her, Gavin and Artemis a lot during this interlude and when I got back to the legacy household Gaia had at least four more friends, and an enemy. Should have expected nothing less!



Finally, I move on to the most important person for story progression - Gaia's long time best friend Zoe Patel. She's halfway through her adulthood already and it's long past time she moved out of the Roomie household and set up her own life.



I spend several days having her meet every appropriately aged man I can find...



But they are all RUBBISH. The first one, Jean, is insane and a repairman. The second, Milo, is non-commitall - the exact wrong trait for beautiful, goofy, sweet Zoe. And the third, whose name I can't even remember, was in a bad mood when he walked past the house and promptly started yelling at her. 

Are there no decent men left in the world for poor Zoe? Then I have a brainwave...



Maybe there is a very good reason Zoe has always been so unlucky in love...

Dina Caliente is the only one of the Calientes I didn't bother to play while I was in their household, but she is genuinely beautiful. She has great genetics and is Ambitious, Active and a Romantic - everything Zoe could ever want. With the patch that allows same sex pregnancies she and Zoe can even pass on their awesomeness to a future generation, and that would be a cool bloodline to weave into the legacy family one day. At the very least I think Zoe and Gaia's children could be friends! 



Dina is so much more receptive to Zoe than any of the deadbeats she met earlier that I know it was meant to be.



In between getting Zoe a job as a comic - it felt appropriate to her Goofball nature - she sets about wooing Dina with a vengeance. 





They're engaged after just one date - but why wait? Both woman are a little older to be settling down for the first time, and now they've finally found their great love they are ready to dive right in.

 

They elope then and there...



And immediately get started on their family (after I google around a bit to find out how). I move Zoe out of the Roomie household - now a bachelor pad to ladies man J and recently-hooked-up-with-Nina Mitchell - and Dina out of the Caliente household, and into a tiny, cute one bedroom place in Willow Creek - where the Legends live, though on the other side of town.

I play Zoe and Dina until the birth of their first child - a girl they name Ophelia Patel - and then get Zoe pregnant again before leaving them to their lives.

And that brings us to the end of the interlude! I hope you liked this little break from the Legends, who will be back in the next chapter (also to be released today). I dislike it when Sims that have importance in my legacy story - like Nina and Zoe - seem to have no life of their own, so it was nice to weave a little magic through the larger neighbourhood for a change. See you back soon for Chapter 10! 

The Legend Legacy 1.10: Children, Children, Everywhere

 Welcome back to the Legend Legacy! After a brief interlude to engage in what I've learned is called "rotational play" for the purposes of story progression, we can now return to the Legend family. I envision this rotational play style to become more and more time consuming as the legacy progresses buuut it's also pretty fun to take a break from doing things "properly" for the legacy family - getting them out and about doing optional, non-story-progression but good story-telling - things. With the others I can fast-forward through important life milestones without stopping to take a million pictures. So I will be continuing to do this a couple of times each generation, or as needed for story-important sims like spares and close friends of legacy household members. 

If we successfully complete this legacy, I may then investigate the story progression mod that's available for Sims 4 and see what happens if I run a new legacy with that in place. It'd be kind of cool to have a comparison. I suspect it would be a lot faster (as I wouldn't need to play other households at all) but also, potentially, a lot more chaotic since I would have no direct hand in what neighbourhood sims got up to.

Anyway...



Unfortunately I didn't discover until too late that building a gallery house would wipe out all of Gaia's carefully crafted gardens, including her cow plant. I'm not that sad to see the cow plant go but it did mean starting from scratch with Gaia's profession. No do-overs, though, so I simply bought two new planters, pulled some plants out of the fridge, and got her going again. 



The family also has enough money for this nifty elemental display, so I can finally get all the elements Gaia is hoarding out of her inventory. I dream of the day I have a legacy house big enough and expensive enough to have a whole room dedicated to collections, but this is a start!





There's even enough money for Gavin to get a desk and computer to write at, and for Aphrodite to get the art table she needs to progress on her Artistic Prodigy aspiration. Things are definitely looking up for the Legends, although they will have to be careful to earn enough to cover the no doubt massively increased bills heading their way.



Since Aphrodite got her art table, Artemis gets to invite new friend Aldo (the kid from the park in the last chapter) over after school. However, he seems to remember Aphrodite being mean to him and spends his whole visit hiding in Gaia's room, interacting with the babies. Poor Artemis is no closer to the BFF she needs for her aspiration :(



In fact Aldo is the only one around to witness Gaia FINALLY having her adult birthday - her face says a lot about how she feels about that! Like Gavin she is sad no-one celebrated and mopes around for a day. It's really her own fault, though - she's the appointed family cook but isn't high enough in cooking skill to make cakes yet.

And, almost immediately after Gaia's birthday, it's time for her younger twins to age up into children! We're going to have four kids in the household, eep.





Athena is first and...oh boy. She's very expressive, as you can see, but has chronic resting bitch face and is definitely the least pretty of the children so far. Even less so than, erm, interesting-looking Aphrodite. She shares both Aphrodite's red hair and also her Evil trait! So both redheaded children in the family are Evil, one from each set of twins. Wonderful, that should make for some serious family drama. She also rolled the Social Butterfly aspiration despite being Evil. 

I've decided that Gaia's green hair is definitely responsible for the random red hair appearing in her children.





Apollo ages up slightly after his twin, making him officially the youngest in the household. And he is the COOLEST KID I HAVE EVER SEEN. Where older sister Artemis' hair is dark brown, Apollo got his father's black hair. You also can't see it behind his painfully awesome glasses but he's the only one of the children with a new eye colour! Aphrodite, Artemis and Athena all inherited Gavin's dark brown eyes, but Apollo's eyes are a really beautiful light brown. Not quite Gaia's green, but I'm relieved there's some diversity. 

Apollo rolled the Artistic Prodigy aspiration, same as Aphrodite, and the Self-Assured trait - which I love for such an effortlessly cool kid. So that makes two of the children with Social Butterfly and two with Artistic Prodigy, none of which I expect to complete for this generation but we'll see how we go!



Having four children around necessitated a minor house makeover, so this is their chaotic crush of a bedroom. It's not ideal but it will have to do. 



Tell you what though, this arrangement makes the monster under the bed situation, which happens all too often, the most giant annoyance ever. They ALL get disturbed and none of them will go back to bed for ages. 



The next day I send Athena across the road from the lot to start work on her aspiration, and she spends some time getting to know these two ladies. She hits it off with Hot Pink here but her Evil trait soon has Yellow Mini Skirt flouncing off in a huff. 



Apollo also commandeers the art table from Aphrodite to work on his aspiration. It occurs to me finally to dig through the family inventory at this point, and sure enough Gavin has earned two decorations from his Writing career that are Inspirational decor. I install them in the lounge, where the art table and Gavin's computer are, and now both the children and him can be super productive and creative. 



Artemis continues to have Aldo over frequently in a piss poor attempt to get her a BFF, but she so often has sad moodlets from school (she's a sensitive wee bunny) that she's usually not in the mood to socialise properly. 





It doesn't help poor Artemis that her twin, Aphrodite, absolutely hates her fellow redhead and Evil younger sister, Athena. As I predicted the two are constantly arguing and irritating each other. On the plus side this means their respective twins are mostly spared the worst of their Evil whims (which they take out on each other). Artemis and Apollo, the two non-Evil children, also start to get along quite well. 
(Aphrodite is in pigtails when not wearing her beanie). 





Meanwhile, Gaia is stay-at-home Mum extraordinaire. She has a lot of cooking to do with four children around, and she's rapidly improving her skills though unfortunately she's still in a stage of preparing mostly poor quality meals, and the whole family usually have 'gross food' moodlets. She has also expanded and fenced her garden and it's looking lovely! The 'tend garden' interaction is so much easier than having to direct her to water, weed, and spray bugs separately, although it's still a pain in the arse having to fertilise everything. 



Gavin spends a fair amount of time with his kids but most of his spare moments are devoted to writing, and he's off at work a lot too. His royalty cheque is growing steadily and it's a hugely important source of income for the family. I find it amusing that he can knock out 1 to 2 books per day - teach me your ways, Gavin!







When he has a day off work, though, he and Gaia still find ways to keep the romance alive through child-free dates at the park. They enjoy harking back to the early days of their romance, when grilled food was all they ate!



For free spirit Gaia, house-living instead of lawn-living comes with some serious downsides.

Gaia: never had to mop the floor on the lawn *mumble mumble grumble*

Although poor Gavin, with his neat trait, perpetually wanted to mop the lawn and was most put out by the constant puddles left around the garden when Gaia watered it, so the fact he no longer gets upset about those is a huge improvement for me!







Between her gardening and mothering Gaia still has free time to see her friends, though, so I send her over to Dina and Zoe's place to meet their child. I have her take two of the friends she met while I was playing other households because they're both Day of the Dead celebrators (although not in garb, obviously). Both had the Sugar Skull interaction available. Neither deigned to give Gaia their skull despite being friends with her. ARGH. I am beginning to think this holiday is doomed for me, although if I can find a grave maybe the Offering interaction will make it work (I have already talked to Jasmine and obtained the stand, but it hasn't helped). I might also try going out at night to ask people for skulls and see if that works. 



Dina and Zoe's daughter is adorable, and the spitting image of Dina which surprises me because I would have thought Zoe's genetics would be more dominant (not that I actually have any clue how genetics work in TS4). I'm not familiar enough with these Sims to judge if she got any of Zoe's features but she definitely got Dina's colouring. I don't mind, she's adorable and has the Self-Assured trait, just like Apollo. 



Zoe's second pregnancy has also progressed a lot and it's Gaia's turn to be excited for her friend's growing family! Gaia's child-bearing days are complete now - four is quite enough and I'm NOT risking another set of twins - but she'll be a fantastic godmother to Zoe's children. 

And we'll leave it there for this chapter. Gaia is enjoying familial bliss (and chaos) and has four lovely children to Gavin. The family are financially stable - though still poor they have all they need and are saving enough to expand the house as they need to. Their transition from lawn living to civility has gone as smoothly as could be hoped, and Gaia is delighted with life at the moment. How will it go as the children grow into tempestuous teenagers? Tune in next chapter to find out!