Uglacy Challenge

Kaebrianl had invited over the dashing Juan McCullough to watch her transition into an early adulthood, and sparks flew. Juan is a Knowledge Sim who came with full charisma as well as 7 creativity, 6 logic, 4 cleaning and 1 body, not to mention a wardrobe containing every possible NPC uniform, a thousand stuffy business suits, and several sets of sweats. Choosing the solitary example of “middle ground” to be found in the dresser, Juan selected a polo and beige pants as his outfit. A 6/6/5/8/2 who, in that weird NPC body-snatcher kind of way, apparently started life as a 5/3/7/3/7, Juan is the only NPC I’ve seen with more than 25 total personality points. Upon his arrival in the household, Juan had met a total of TWO Sims, Kaebrianl and Aackrod. What a man about town. Kaebrianl and Juan wasted no time (nor decorum) getting engaged and then married by themselves in the den so that they could get down to the business of conceiving an heir. In the meantime, angels swooped down from the heavens and added another floor to their house.

I might add here, as a completely random aside–and there are bound to be a lot of those coming–that Kaebrianl, having ten neat points, makes special sparkly bubbles when she cleans things, and one of the recurring bugs in the Uglacy house is that the Special Bubbles will sometimes keep coming out of her hands after she’s done cleaning, like she exudes some kind of divine force of cleanliness. I have a number of amusing snapshots of her bubbling away throughout her life–sleeping in her bed, waving around her good grades, cooking at the stove, and so on.

Another of the “mistakenly continued effects” problems occurred when the bubbles from the bubble bath never stopped coming out of the tub, which happened simultaneously to the kitchen sink continuously running (and steaming). I tried moving the sink, moving the counter, deleting either one, and the water and steam (and rushing sound) just kept on persisting in space, right where they had been, until I reloaded the game. Anyway.

After an interminably long pregnancy (in real time), Kaebrianl gave birth to baby Norman. For those keeping score at home, we discovered after Norman aged from blob to toddler that he’s a Taurus, 6/9/5/8/2, with gray eyes, brown hair, and Juan’s pasty complexion.

Kaebrianl, a 10/1/8/7/9, has encouraged him, to date, up to a 10/9/5/8/4 and is still working on adding more nice. Norman succeeded in inheriting most of Juan’s big weird face, a true boon to the Uglacy. After his childhood, in which he spent little time skilling because my Sims keep starting their adulthood too smart to get career rewards, he turned into a Romance teen, a perfect foil for Sandy Bruty, whom he has gotten along with famously since childhood. Creepy. (Imagine the photo montage at the wedding reception–”Aw, look, honey, there’s a shot of you watching me play with my xylophone when I was a toddler. You don’t look a day older!”)

Meanwhile Aackrod, a Family Sim like no other, rolled up many a high-scoring, achievable want at the end of his life, and even though he had saved up “Retire” as an easy 4,000-point shot in the arm for his final day, he spent his last afternoon raising his relationship with Norman, which got him rolling want after want related to the boy until he had tickled his last and hulaed off into a lovely platinum urn. He now haunts the Pugsley place in his red sweatsuit for all eternity.

Melissa didn’t quite have it so easy, starting with the fact that she aged into a godawful ugly-ass elder (in a nice low green).

She had saved the “Have 5 Loves” want to whip out as her swan song, but apparently the deceased Aackrod no longer counts in the total. Luckily she had anticipated that and was ready with good friend Ivy Copur, who kept following her home from her chef job, for a dying declaration of love if one was needed. To keep her aspiration high in the meantime, she kept up her liasons with Komei, Dina, and Mary-Sue Pleasant and kept working on the resistant Pao. This led to an interesting bit of information. Melissa was talking to Pao on the phone at the time that he would have been coming to deliver the mail. Cleverly, the game in fact did not have him come walking by the house regardless and pretend he was maybe just talking ventriloquist-style into a hands-free cell; no, it was very slick, and instead sent a different mailman, one I had never seen before. This was one Gordon Bachman, who, while no supermodel, is pretty good-looking in a rugged way…he has character. Kaebrianl rushed out and befriended him even though he was too attractive for the Uglacy, just so we could get a handle on the guy. Still, it was surprising that it wasn’t Pear-Headed Sheldon, a potential benefit to the Uglacy. As an experiment, Melissa and Kaebrianl set up a Sheldon-baiting mailman party where they invited both Pao and Gordon over to the house before the ten o’clock mail hour to see who would appear to pick up the post.

It was yet another new mailman, this one a fairly attractive dark-skinned guy named Stephan Wood whose only weird feature is a rather sharp nose, though it goes well with his face and gives him an overall Ethiopian- or Somalian-type ethnic look. Kaebrianl chatted him up as well, in case they want to invite him over and play “Spawn a Mailman” again in the future. Emboldened and intrigued, as well as bored, a quest was begun to ferret out all the uncommon NPCs to judge their fitness for the Legacy or the Uglacy. Melissa calls for a bartender and gets Cole Stompel (not one of the standard three), who, apart from being a white guy with red dredlocks, is pretty good-looking, fairly similar to Big Ungay Remington, the maid. He works for cheap, too, since he came over, poured drinks, talked to Melissa for hours, and then got dismissed with a big tip, charging them only $10 for the whole shift. Melissa called again to see if the female bartender, Cassidy Pederson, is as ugly as her special-ed portrait icon, but alas, she is actually quite attractive and is another cheap worker to boot. Well worth calling over to the Legacy house so they can have a nonexistent party as well. Huzzah! Juan’s desire to hire a maid results in calling until Lucy Hanby answers the phone; when she arrives, she is deemed not very attractive, but not ugly enough for the Uglacy. She’s rather plain-looking and vaguely Hispanic in feature. A call for a gardener results in Calista Despret, who has caused no shortage of pondering whether she’s ugly or not. It’s just hard to say. Big sexy lips, or freaky monkey face? The line is fuzzy.

Speaking of Calista, her job is to come over every three days and moan that she can’t trim the rosebushes. For some reason, you have to trim rosebushes from the side. No matter that every bush has a “side” out, if you were to stand directly in front of it. No, every time she comes over, I have to move every other rosebush–except the ones on the diagonals–out onto the lawn so she can trim them, and then I put them back later. And they have to be placed very carefully on the lawn because the lot has some weird elevation things going on in front that constantly make Sims forget how to walk down a slope, bitch, moan, and shrug, so there has to be a clear flat space around the displaced bushes or Calista gets all the more frustrated. I’ve tried rotating the damn bushes, too, and nothing seems to work. Freaks. Adding to the outdoor woes is the fact that the Pugsleys’ front door has somehow become undesirable. Sometime after they added the sliding glass door in the back, everyone would walk around and ring the doorbell back there, totally ignoring the front door. After an impermeable fence magically appeared around the property so that the only choice is to go to the front door–which people used to do without incident, you see, and the front door is on the same level as the back door and everything–people now just show up and stand on the sidewalk. It’s particularly irksome when groceries are ordered, because the delivery Sim gets them out of the van, goes as far as possible across the street from the house as if trying to shrink into the background, is unclickable, and waits there for…nothing to happen, because no one can accept the delivery. Eventually either someone autonomously accepts it or the deliveryman leaves the basket at some far point on the lawn and someone can go pick it up. The maid can come through it normally, maybe because she doesn’t ring. At any rate, I have yet to discover what the hell has become so taboo about this front door.

Anyway, Melissa continued her slutty ways, inviting Komei over before Aackrod’s urn had even come fully to rest on the floor. Strangely, Komei didn’t want to WooHoo–maybe he had more taste than that. But eventually Melissa got him back for the deed, after which he stayed a ridiculously long time and then left wordlessly. Then Dina was invited over to complement her public WooHoo with some of the private variety, and she had to be booted out eventually so Mary-Sue could put in her two cents as well. Indeed, every Sim that gets invited over to the house now seems to take the invitation as grounds to stay there for freaking ever. Melissa was hedging her “5 Loves” bet with a shot at “10 WooHoos”, thanks to that bug that double-counts public and private WooHoo. As such, she invited over Pao to seal the deal of their slow-growing relationship. Luckily Pao was game for not only her Hot Tub WooHoo want, but the Bed WooHoo want she rolled to replace it. He ended up staying at the Pugsley place for like a day and a half and was present for Melissa’s final exit, for which she’d called up Ivy as an insurance policy, declaring her “love” at 5:30 PM for a 15,000-point boost that kept her mondo platinum for her final hula. Her platinum Romance tombstone is planted firmly next to Aackrod’s Family one, waiting for the place to be haunted by her ugly ass forever (though, luckily, she worked out on her final day because she had gotten tubby, and nothing could have made Elderly Melissa less attractive except for that gigantic butt she was hauling around, which I didn’t want to see on her ghost for all of time).