Britt: Welcome to Twinbrook

Welcome back! As stated at the end of the last update, I'm returning to the Medina-Britt household with this update, though I have split the household up as I mentioned I would be doing. I looked into various ways to do it and ended up with a kind of two-fold approach. After saving the game as is a few different ways so I'd have ample backups if something goes badly wrong, I took one of the copies and had the Britts first move to an empty lot in Sunset Valley just to separate their household from the Medinas, then had them move to Twinbrook via the in-game Move > To new Neighborhood command. They did end up with the whole family inventory (most of which I'm going to ignore and pretend it's not there), and I gave them half of the cash the dual household had, but otherwise they took nothing with them.

Since it created a new instance of Twinbrook, I had to choose from existing housing for them, at least to start with. After looking around , I had them purchase a 6 bedroom house called Willow Manor as their first residence in Twinbrook. I hadn't had a chance to look at the house beforehand, but it's really not that bad for a pre-built house, so I'll probably keep them there for now at least and see how it goes. I did do some redecorating and a tiny bit of remodelling, and I may build them something else later if I end up not liking this one for some reason, but for now I think I can work with it ok.

Storywise, I'm going to say that Damien's Insane trait caused him to do something really bad while he was on air (He's a Star News Anchor) and he lost his job in Sunset Valley. He managed to get another anchor position, but it was in the distant, small town of Twinbrook, rather a step down for him and for them, but it was something. Adrianna managed to get an introduction to the local mob there so was able to keep her Criminal career, and I've decided to take steps to extend her life just enough to let her finish her career so I can check it off the list (more on that in a minute). Eugenia is a teenager still, so switching schools wasn't much of an issue for her. Besides the location change, nothing has really changed much for them. Damien and Adrianna have both completed their LTWs already, and Eugenia still hasn't chosen one. One perk of moving the way I did that I hadn't realized is that they were able to keep all of their relationships from Sunset Valley and their family tree is still intact. It has impacted their jobs in that they no longer know their co-workers which will give them a bit of a performance hit for awhile until they meet and befriend them.

As you can see, the family tree is intact, but the ancestors like Byron that aren't showing as ghosts are likely signs of trouble ahead :/

 After getting moved into their new house the family split up to do their own things. Adrianna went upstairs to workout on the weight machine, Damien started work on an article, and Eugenia went to take an Athletics class at the stadium. Once she'd finished there, she went down to the bookstore and got a part time job since she was wanting one. After talking with the manager and getting a schedule, she went out back to go dumpster diving before jogging home. She found a food processor and a table.

The next few days passed in a routine of work and school and starting to meet people around town. Damien made a few trips to the local greenhouse trying to find money tree seeds, but didn't have any luck. Adrianna got a promotion at work, and the purchase of a new sauna gave her the chance of possibly living long enough to reach the top of her career (since she's finished her LTW, she's not allowed to use a deathflower or ambrosia, but I did decide to let her do the rejuvenating mud baths that give her one more day per bath to extend her life a little bit at least).

I'll probably build them a nice sauna building eventually, but for now it's just sitting out in the yard.

On Thursday Eugenia got on the honor roll at her new school, but also kept trying to skip. I sent her in, then saw she was playing on her MultiTab 6000 instead of being in class like she was supposed to. I told her to go to school again, then a little while later she shows up back at the house. I sent her back, and followed her, and saw that there was a big pile up of kids trying to get into the building that was causing her issues. Eventually she did get to go in.

A few odd things have been occurring, and I'm hoping they aren't signs of impending trouble. First, on Wednesday, even though Adrianna's work schedule said she was off, she got the notice about the carpool coming, and when she didn't go in it showed that she was missing work. I sent her in and she worked her shift as usual, then the next day she got her day off as she was supposed to. But then on Thursday I got the notice that Carolyn Britt was getting old and wouldn't live forever. Uh...she's already dead... The notice that she had died came on Friday. So, I dunno. Let's hope things don't go south too badly.

I also got a similar notice about Charles Medina.

On Saturday, Eugenia rolled up The Emperor of Evil as a desired LTW. Not what I was really hoping for in her case (I'd kind of hoped I could do one of the new Ambitions LTWs with her), but I do have the rule about accepting the first unique LTW they roll up, so that's what she got.

Damien also rolled up an interesting wish on Saturday morning. He told me he wants to have 2 children total (because he's Family Oriented). Hmm. Well, Adrianna's already an elder, so unless he has an affair and gets his mistress pregnant (which I don't really want to do, partly from not wanting to mess with all that and partly because he doesn't strike me as the cheating type), another biological child isn't possible. But there's always adoption, and I may well go that route. It would work well since I've pretty much decided that Eugenia's going to be a lesbian, so she likely won't be having any children of her own. I would have had her adopt eventually, but no reason I can't go ahead and do so now instead. So, I locked in the wish, and had Damien make the call. I chose to have him adopt a male child, so Damien now has a son named Edvin. Edvin's traits are Workaholic, Party Animal, and Easily Impressed, and his favorites are French music, Fruit Parfait, and Hot Pink.

Eugenia spent the morning working out on the treadmill with some pretty remarkable results. If only it was so easy to slim down in real life!

Adrianna's boss had asked her to become friends with Dudley Racket, so she headed over to Dudley's house on Saturday afternoon to get to know him.

Still the notices of the imminent or recent passing of people that were long dead kept coming. The next one was for Byron Medina. There were several others, but after his, I stopped keeping track of them.

To round out the busy Saturday, Adrianna got a promotion at work and then had to choose which branch of the criminal career she wanted to go into. Since Eugenia will be doing the Evil branch, and since Adrianna is a Kleptomaniac anyway, she chose the Thief branch. I should probably note that besides extending her life a bit with the mud baths, I also got her the Entrepreneurial Mindset reward that helps the sim get to the top of their career faster.

On Sunday Edvin made a couple of muffins on the child oven and then went down to the park to have a bake sale. I didn't go overboard having him make stuff for it since my main objective here is to try to have at least one sale so I can count it as completed (the rules don't really specify it, but I'm interpreting it as you need to make at least one sale to count the bake sale as completed).

I missed the actual sale when I was checking in with Damien who was trying to become best friends with someone, but Edvin did make a sale to Harwood Clay, so yay! Not sure I'm going to bother with doing the bake sales in future for they seem like a whole lot more trouble than they're really worth.

On Monday night, Adrianna got arrested as she was getting off work. It certainly wasn't her first trip to jail, but it was rather inconvenient since she was dead tired and just wanted to get home and rest.

Tuesday was Damien's birthday. I'd had him at the park most of the day trying to get interviews with people, and I forgot about it, so he aged up to Elder on his own when he got home. At least Eugenia was there to cheer for him.

The next few days passed without anything much happening outside of the ordinary. On Damien's first day back to work after the leave time he got after adopting Edvin his boss gave him the opportunity to get in better with the local news station if he would travel to France and interview some people there for a human interest story they wanted to run. Damien agreed and looked into travel plans when he got home from work. He found a flight leaving immediately.

Since I'm covering the World Adventures stuff fairly thoroughly with Anya Fraser, I won't go into a lot of detail about any trips or adventuring anyone but she does. I'll just make note of anything of particular interest that happens and skip the tedium of showing different sims doing the same tombs. While I did have Damien get the intro mission for France, the main point of his trip was to meet and interview locals, so I wasn't too worried about doing a lot of adventuring with him. Oddly enough, the opportunity he had to go to France and interview 5 locals completed as soon as he arrived there, and he didn't have the interview interaction available when talking with locals there. I decided I'd proceed as though he still had to interview people anyway since he does need more friends to get the last point of Charisma to be at level 10.

Damien explored one tomb from the mission he'd gotten and earned his level 1 visa for France in the process, but otherwise spent his time making friends. While hanging out at the market one day he proved me wrong about not being the cheating type when he got all flirty with the gal he'd been talking with when I left him to interact on his own for awhile. Among the various things he did, he visited the Nectary and learned how to make nectar, bought a nectar making machine to bring home (though whether or not we'll actually get into doing that here will depend on if any of them roll up wishes to do it), then while picking grapes there one evening he found a little gnome that he was able to collect to take home with him.

Damien returned home from France after spending 6 days there and life resumed for the family. Unfortunately there's weirdness going on and I don't think the game file is very  healthy. Besides all the death notices about already dead people earlier on, I experienced a few glitches while he was in France, and after he returned, Eugenia and Edvin suddenly disappeared from the portrait panel for the household while they were at work/school. They still existed somewhere, because Damien still had them on his relationship panel, and still had a wish regarding Edvin locked in, but they weren't showing as part of the household anymore. I was able to recover them by resetting the lot, but it wiped everything that had been in their inventory, including homework, and wiped their saved wishes and opportunities as well. I've saved the family to the library, so I may well try putting them into a fresh game file of Twinbrook before I play them next. They'll lose their relationships, which will suck a bit for job performance, but that can be dealt with easily enough. If anyone has any advice, feel free to leave a comment below.

And on that note I'm going to wrap up this entry. Next time we'll be checking in with Dylan Medina and his family. Hopefully they'll be unaffected by the split since they haven't moved anywhere. Until then, cheers!