Uglacy Challenge

Fionnuala arrived home from college to little fanfare. Her parents were preoccupied with trying to reach the tops of their careers, which promised to make them happier than Fionnuala ever could. Taking a deep breath, Fionnuala phoned Andrew, her first love, and asked him to come over for a visit. While she waited for him, she went and primped in front of the mirror. No more stylish buns, she thought–she needed a hairstyle that accentuated her wide face. And no more makeup–it only brought out her better features, and she wanted to look her ugliest for Andrew. Au naturel it was.

When Andrew arrived, Fionnuala had to make herself take it slow, let him have a bite to eat and some entertainment to put him at ease before she popped the question. Finally she did it–she asked Andrew to move into the Pugsley house. He happily agreed. His new status made him look suddenly older, and he traded his hippie poncho ensemble for some tight black pants and a beautifully appropriate stained wifebeater tee.

He was a picture of perfection, and a Romance Sim to boot! Fionnuala couldn’t believe her good fortune at being the lucky one to scoop such a prize out of the Kensington gene pool. She embraced Andrew and led him into the downstairs bedroom for some welcome-home action.

The next day Fionnuala asked Andrew if he would make her, if not the happiest Sim in the world, at least fairly perky by accepting her proposal of engagement. Andrew put on what was obviously a big fake smile and accepted with the most convincing joy he could muster. Perhaps he’d seen Fionnuala stopping in the bathroom to hurl before making her big announcement. At any rate, the couple tied the knot under the family wedding arch shortly thereafter, just in time for Fionnuala to take off time from her job as a Rogue Botanist to await the couple’s first baby.

Andrew got himself out of the way by getting a job in his dream Slacker career. That gave him more than just his delightfully thuggish looks in common with his new father-in-law, and the two of them became buddies quickly. They could have passed for old college chums if not for Michaiah’s advancing age–he and Carmen entered their elder years in grand fashion, not disappointing in the least with the ugly countenances they managed to maintain even into their golden years. Fionnuala muttered her jealous disappointment.

As Fionnuala’s belly grew, she puttered around the Puglsey estate while Andrew slept in before schlepping off to his gig as a projectionist. Finally alone in the house, she picked up the phone and dialed Ray Shaw’s number. Ray accepted her invitation for a visit and came right over.

Hardly even noticing her roundness, Ray hugged Fionnuala, and it was as if they had never been separated. “Listen,” she told him as they broke apart. “I’ve never told you the real truth. I’m actually an undercover operative in the Sim Intelligence Agency. I know, it’s a shock, but it’s only because I love you so much that I’m breaking my cover to tell you the truth. The life I have here is all an incredibly realistic farce designed to infiltrate an international llama-smuggling ring. No one can know! But I still want to be with you when it’s all over. Please say you’ll move in with me and wait. And you have to play along with Andrew and the others, pretending he’s my real husband, or we could all be in danger!” Ray took the whole story in and embraced her. “Of course, my love. You and I could never be kept apart. I’ll move in today.”

When Andrew came home from work, Fionnuala greeted him at the door. “Honey, do you remember Ray, from State? Shhh, keep your voice down. He’s had some hard times, sweetie. I think he may be having a breakdown–he seems kind of delusional. As a friend, I can’t let him wander around with nowhere to stay, can I? I’ve let him crash here for a while. Please don’t make too big a deal over it. It’s only until he can find a good facility.” Andrew grunted and shrugged, pushing past Fionnuala to have a bowl of chili. Fionnuala smiled enigmatically.

Soon thereafter, Fionnuala gave birth to a son she named Algurt.

Algurt had Fionnuala’s black hair and Carmen’s green eyes; Fionnuala hoped he would prove to have plenty of Andrew’s features as well. Ray, who loved kids, was quite taken with the youngster and took every opportunity to care for him. “I’ll just be downstairs, feeding your SON–the son you and your HUSBAND ANDREW had together,” he’d say to Fionnuala, talking a little too loudly and following up with a less-than-subtle wink. Andrew didn’t seem to notice, as he filled his time playing chess with Michaiah and going to work. In fact, it was while he was at work one night that Fionnuala pulled Ray into her bedroom and, whispering something muffled and hurried about having disabled the bugs and the secret cameras just for tonight blah blah blah, jumped under the covers with him.

Andrew didn’t seem to think much of Ray sleeping in his bed when he got home. Fionnuala pointed at him, made a “crazy” gesture, and shrugged, and Andrew gruffly headed off to play chess. Fionnuala, meanwhile, headed off to throw up. Ray, upon rising, decided to keep himself busy–and put his economics degree to good use–as an artist, just to get out of the house a bit and keep out of the way of the intrigue and espionage. While no one was paying attention, Fionnuala snuck the cowplant she’d brought home from work into a secluded, walled-off, heavily-treed area in the back of the Pugsley lot.

“Honey, I heard they’re giving away free cake samples out in the yard,” Fionnuala remarked to her husband the next morning. Andrew, who realized he was feeling rather peckish, gave a grunt of approval and headed out the back door.

Fionnuala busied herself with some chores, hoping that no one would notice when Andrew just didn’t happen to show up again. In fact, no one did. Ray kept mentioning that he hoped he could be Andrew’s friend, and Michaiah still talked about hoping the two of them would become best buddies. The only one who seemed to notice Andrew’s absence was Algurt, who had never really interacted with his father at all, but missed him just the same. Eventually everyone sort of mused about how it would be nice to resurrect Andrew, wherever he might have gone, and there was some talk about a fear of seeing him as a zombie, but no one actually remembered his death, so it was all very vague. All the better for Fionnuala’s explanation to Ray, however, who was thrilled that the llama-smuggling investigation had moved on to a new phase and that he and Fionnuala could be more open about their relationship.

It was hard not to be open when Fionnuala’s waist began to expand again. Chaos ensued when Fionnuala finally gave birth to daughter Reumah…AND son Rance before Algurt was even out of diapers. After long, grueling days of everyone being on the brink of collapse while they juggled two infants and a toddler among two cribs, Algurt finally got old enough to move into a bed and relinquished the cribs to the twins. The siblings couldn’t have been more different–Algurt was a 5/7/5/8/8 young man with black hair and green eyes, while his 6/9/2/10/6 sister Reumah had black hair and blue eyes and his 10/4/6/4/6 brother Rance surprised everyone with red hair and green eyes, thus letting out Ray’s little secret that he was not, in fact, a natural brunette.

However, even at their tender ages, it appeared that all of Fionnuala’s children had the Pugsleys’ flat features and broad face, despite the contribution to the twins of Ray’s giant dagger of a nose. Fionnuala tried to hide her disappointment at her children’s resemblance to her, but Ray didn’t seem to notice anything at all–he was in heaven just having the babies around, and not the kind of heaven that Andrew was in, either.

Like Fionnuala, Ray dreamed of having six grandchildren someday, an arbitrary number that seemed to satisfy them both. He also started to hint that, since Andrew hadn’t turned up for a while, he’d like to marry Fionnuala. Ray was so into the kids that Fionnuala was game for the idea as well, but looking at her as-of-yet fairly unhideous offspring, she didn’t think having more babies with Ray was the way to go. She wanted to try again, though, and again, even if it took ten children to find one that could carry on the Pugsley name with dignity.

To that end, Fionnuala mentioned to her good college friend Colby Nott as they chatted on the phone one day that she was about to head out to the boutique to shop for some clothes. “Why, I was going to be up that way myself, I’ll meet you there,” he replied. After a joyful reunion with Colby in the store’s changing booth, Fionnuala had a beautiful, inspiring realization. She didn’t have to wait for Colby to finish college and move back to Kensington to take advantage of his glorious DNA–thanks to some lax security at the fitting rooms, she could have it RIGHT NOW, without Colby even knowing about it! Fionnuala was thrilled, so thrilled that she asked Colby back into the changing room again and again until she knew she’d gotten what she came for. Ahem.

Meanwhile, things in the Pugsley house had gone from bad to worse. Fergal had taken to haunting almost every night, and while the rest of the Pugsley ghosts had always been benign, Fergal was a phantasmic asshole who enjoyed scaring the crap out of everyone, even young Algurt. The fact that he spent the rest of his time floating around making beds was no comfort. Each time he scared one of the Pugsleys, already near bottom from the exhaustion of caring for the kids, it threatened to be their last scare. Although the family would miss having Kaebrianl wafting through cleaning tubs in the night, they decided to call a contractor first thing in the morning to moat off the graveyard. After a long night of everyone in the house trying to take the twins to bed when they were both in greater danger of starving than falling asleep, even though God told them to leave the goddamn kids in their goddamn high chairs for a few seconds so they could fucking eat something before Social Services came banging down the front door (or, in Pugsley visitor tradition, banging down the back door and then getting inexplicably lost on the lot), God was just about ready to smite them all. Would the addition of Fionnuala’s impending fourth baby be the final nail in the coffin for the Pugsleys? Or would they all get marched into a ladderless pool first?