#10

21st Jan 2014 at 3:36 AM
I'm currently working on an entire town's worth of sims. My inspirations vary, but this one was actually adapted from one of my TS2 games shortly after I got ITF, so I put a lot of that stuff in, and then this happened.
The town I'm working on is Boringville. It's a very modern and advanced town, with food synthesizers in every breakroom, holo beds in the therapists' clinic, male impregnation perfected...oh, and this is set in the 1950's.
The leading family is the Ring family. They pretty much run the place, and they're responsible for all the advanced technology popping up. They're also pretty lucky; half the time, one of them wins the lottery (though considering the sheer number of them, it might be more implausible for someone out of the family to win. However, they're also pretty nice. They built everything in town with their own money, regularly donate to charity, set up scholarships for kids in their town, and are unfailingly polite. At the head of the family, we have Bo Ring X, who's just taken over from his retired dad. And then he learns the family secret: everything they ever achieved was done through the aid of time travel. His ancestors weren't inventors, they just took some of the free tech from the future and marketed it. They looked up - and still look up - lottery numbers.
Bo Ring X has a choice: go along with the family conspiracy or expose it to the world. Boringville is a tight-knit community, cut off from the rest of the world; revealing the secret would crush everyone's faith in the town. And then what would happen to the people who live there? But the secret weighs heavily on Bo, and one slip is all it takes to collapse the world around him.
Also living in the town is his reclusive great-great-great-great-Idon'tknowhowmanygreatsI'msupposedtoputhere-aunt Irene, who's the daughter of Bo Ring I, founder of the town. She makes bots for a living - plumbots, simdroids, and sexbots - and also dabbles in alchemy, botany (she's the inventor of the Omniplant), and other forms of science. Also, she's immortal and is pretending to be her own somenumberofgreats granddaughter. And then a very determined niece of hers comes by, looking to do a thorough genealogy study, which is a bit awkward when several generations of your family don't exist. With her falsified documents scrutinized and rejected, Irene is called out and rejected from the family, her last ties to the world. Is it worth it to pursue them, to fight to make them acknowledge her or to wait a while and begin the deception anew? Should she explain her immortality to them, with all the trouble that might cause? Or will she just slip further into her own self-contained world, surrounded by facsimiles of people?
On the lighter side, we have the Doves. Katherine and Christopher have had a solid relationship from the start, with nothing big in their way. Which is what's terrifying Christopher. He's read all those novels about romance and mysteries where someone in a couple ends up dead. And, of course, all of them start out with "Couple X had a great life...UNTIL!" and it's just completely wrong to have a romance this way: first act, they meet, second act, they love until the end and the BIG SECRET is revealed that makes someone freak out and/or leave the other and then they have BABIES EVER AFTER unless the big secret was infertility, in which case it's ADOPTIONS EVER AFTER! Why can't real life follow the convenient plot of romances so that Christopher can get the dark spot over with? And can this relationship survive one partner who's always on edge, ready to accuse and leave his beloved at the slightest hint of a BIG SECRET?
I have a gossip columnist - Shay Greene - who loves her job. In fact, she's built her entire life around it. Her roof is covered in telescopes, and her living room uses tvs instead of wallpaper. And then she gets promoted to editor. She no longer has time to do her gossip column. The telescopes and televisions go unused, and every time she goes home ragged and worn out, she has a reminder of what life was like. So, she has the brilliant plan of getting demoted back to columnist without getting fired. And if she knows anything, it's gossip.
And then her sister got SIV and a divorce, and desperately needs money for a cure. With her cushy yet stressful job on one side, and a relaxed future with a dead sister on the other, Shay knows which one she wants. Problem is, she's already sown the seeds for her fall back, and they're set to bloom at any moment.
The Belles and the Zephyrs: what to say about them? The former family is branched off from the Rings, the latter immigrated several generations ago. By all rights, they should hate each other. I mean, Fiona Belle and Daniel Zephyr once got into an argument over the last pomegranate in the grocery store! What else are feuds supposed to be started over?! In fact, the town has divided into teams to fight their battles for them. Problem is, the families don't need teams. They get along pretty well with each other. But the townspeople need something to hold onto, even if it has to be someone else's nonexistent grudge, so they play along.
And then Robby Belle and Juliana Zephyr happen along. They're pleasant acquaintances, but they're from feuding families and just look at their names and they're in two of the same classes out of six, so it must be love! When Julie gets caught sneaking out of her family home to visit Brian Ring IV, local hot-doctor-in-training, the fans get frenzied. Everyone conspires to get Julie together with one of the two or with both at the same time or with her hot sister, and she's had enough. With her would-be-beaus (and hot sister) teaming up with her, whatever happens is sure to cause an impact in the town itself.
Except blowing open a conspiracy is a little difficult when you're trying to convince the conspirators themselves.
Virgil Buck, Virgin Casanova, is here to "woo" every woman in town into lesbianism. The number of stories he will tell you about having sex are higher than the number of minutes he's been alive. In reality, the closest he's ever gotten to it is taking algebra and staring longingly at the last three letters. As his list of exploits grows longer while his actual experience remains steady, he feels the pressure to succeed mounting. But who wants to sleep with a guy who won't shut up about sex and claims to have an STD only obtainable by having a fifteen-some?
At the edge of a nervous breakdown, he checks himself into a mental ward. If his mindset won't change, he will never be healthy again, but when an immovable stubbornness meets the irresistible force of a failing body, something has to give before he gets crushed in the impact.
I got some more if anyone wants to hear them, but I think I'll leave it here for now.