Uglacy Challenge

When we last left newlyweds Michaiah and Carmen, the couple had just conceived what was hoped to be Fionnuala, potential future wife of erstwhile burglar Gordon King. Carmen’s uneventful pregnancy, however, culminated in the birth of a son, Fergal. Fergal, with Michaiah’s blue eyes and Carmen’s black hair, is an Aries 10/9/5/1/9, just like his father. Nice to see personality is entirely on one gene.

Kaebrianl, finally dead after a lengthy terminal elderhood, came out promptly to haunt and offered two bits of interesting ghost trivia. First is that extreme neatness carries from beyond the grave, as the ghost of 10-neat Kaebrianl is considerate enough to occasionally whip out a mop and clean up some puddles in the bathroom or collect and wash the dinner dishes. (Now I need a super-neatnik to drop dead at my legacy lot and follow their drowned ghost around.)

Second is that ghosts possess the supernatural ability to interpret unfinished artwork–if you get a view of a just-started painting through the translucent ghost, you can see what the finished painting will look like (for the standard ones–further testing revealed that custom portraits just look like an empty easel when seen through a ghost).

A day or two into Fergal’s toddlerhood, God, seeing no female ugliness on the horizon worthy of a Michaiah-Carmen offspring, decided to bend the rules and give Carmen a second chance for Fionnuala. She and Michaiah promptly hopped in the sack and heard the lullaby play. It’s a good thing they got that out of the way, too, because then the Jerry Springer drama really got started.

Norman had always had a hankering to fall in love with Carmen, aided in part by a lesson on the fingerprint scanner that got him halfway there. Carmen was careful to break her scanner-induced crush on Norman, but his remained for a while because his relationship with Carmen had been considerably higher than hers with him, and God forgot that any WooHoo between Carmen and her husband Michaiah was then going to be met with fury from Norman. Whoops! This meant that Michaiah and Carmen both landed on Norman’s shit list, which didn’t seem like too incongruous a thing, given how Michaiah’s very birth had sent Norman into aspirational failure. However, in the interest of patching up their relationship a little, God decided to live on the wild side and see if a “leap into arms” hug, which gives a hefty daily relationship boost and served to reconstitute Norman’s trashed relationship with Sandy, would count as a romantic act from Norman to Carmen. Problem is, Carmen ended up wandering out into the kitchen before Norman’s act was initiated, meaning that he leapt into her arms right in front of Michaiah, who was innocently eating his mac and cheese at the kitchen table. Better still, Sandy was apparently nearby as well and came out of the woodwork to beat the crap out of Norman. Michaiah got up to slap someone, couldn’t pathfind his way into the melee, and stood around sobbing instead. Again, given that he was fostering a secret relationship with Komei Tellermann on the side, Michaiah really has some nerve even feeling offended about the whole thing. But of course his relationship with both Carmen (who was presumably innocent in the whole thing) and his father tanks. Thus Michaiah still likes Sandy but not Carmen or Norman, Sandy still likes Michaiah but not Carmen or Norman, Norman still likes Sandy but not Carmen or Michaiah, and Carmen is still happy with everybody.

(That didn’t mean that Michaiah wasn’t man enough to congratulate Carmen on her affair–”Way to go, honey! I didn’t even suspect.”)

Meanwhile Carmen, now big as a boat, was worried that she was carrying yet another son rather than the Mrs. Gordon King she aspired to bear. To hedge the bets for Fergal’s future, Norman was put to work at the phone fishing for new service Sims. Repeated calls for a bartender were answered only by the overly-attractive Cole and Cassidy. The phone at the exterminator was answered by Robi, and then Robi, and then…Carmen. Huh? Did they forget Carmen no longer worked there? Jumping on the opportunity to see what was up, Norman ordered the exterminator, the truck pulled up, and out stepped…Kenya Bar, an exact clone of Carmen. What are the odds that the game spawned yet another Carmen to fill the slot at the exterminator?!? God’s brain instantly boggled with the possibilites. In the short term, Carmen, who you’d think would get along with herself best, waddled out to get to know her identical twin Kenya and provide her with a glimpse of what a utopia her life could be like as a Pugsley–barefoot and pregnant and talking to unneeded exterminators in her underwear on the porch.

The two got along famously, but before they could become friends, Carmen had to rush to the toilet. Luckily Fergal, now a child with a ridiculous haircut, was handy to pick up the conversation before Kenya could declare the house bug-free (ha, Kenya, if only you’d seen the sink that never stops bubbling) and take off. The two of them hit it off as well, inspiring fantasies of a miraculous, non-incestuous way to double up Carmen’s fabulous genes in the Uglacy line. It was as if Kenya was sent straight from Ugly Heaven. Kenya eventually cut off the conversation and hopped back in her truck, but not before Fergal had rolled up some persistent wants to be her friend and interact with her. Ah, a crush at such a young age. They always say a guy secretly wants a woman just like his mother.

The Pugsley men went to bed and left Sandy and Carmen to welcome the newest ugly addition, the long-awaited Fionnuala, who suddenly seemed a lot less important to the Uglacy lineage.