Fraser - Finishing China and Getting an Heir

We're back with the Fraser family in Riverview again. Last time Anya finally finished her LTW and was hoping to start a family soon. Her husband Maximus still has a bit to go to finish his, but it'll come with time. I was planning to have Anya get pregnant and have her first child before she resumed her travels to finish up the remaining adventures she has left, but after looking them over I noticed that Maximus has a job opportunity that wants him to go to China to learn the Martial Arts skill. He's already learned it at home from Anya's equipment, but the opportunity requires him to travel to China anyway. So, since they can't both travel with a baby (or I wouldn't want them to anyway - I think you can get a babysitter if needed), I'm thinking the baby is going to be postponed a bit longer until after they take a trip to China together. She still has the travel moodlet from her last trip to France, so I have to wait a Sim day or so before I can send them. While waiting, I have Anya work on the block breaker so she can build up to doing space rocks easily as well as work on the skill challenge to break 150 Oak or better boards.

Besides working on the block breaker, I had Anya go down to the new Consignment store and put a bunch of stuff from her inventory on consignment, including all the gems and metals she'd been stockpiling (I have a mod that lets you sell them through the regular consignment store). She also went by the Science center and donated all the insects in her inventory except for the ones she needed to take to Egypt. Maximus was left to his own devices for the most part while I was busy with her, and I later found him dancing with the sunflowers I'd put out to give them some good fertilizer. I gave the Medinas a bunch of these as well, but never saw anyone do this interaction with them.

Later that evening Anya's travel moodlet cleared and I sent them both to China for an 18 day trip. I wasn't really crazy about taking Maximus along for such a long trip since it's kind of a pain keeping track of him as well, but I figure I'll just keep him busy skilling when I can and leave him to his own devices the rest of the time. Anya needs the time for her tomb exploring and I'm hoping she'll be able to finish up and I won't need to make another trip back with her.

They both headed to the Martial Arts academy shortly after arriving. Maximus started working on one of the block breakers to increase his skill. Anya first went to talk to Bao Louie regarding the opportunity she'd been working on for him, and he told her to practice breaking a space rock so thats what she went to do.

Anya had to perform a few more tasks for Bao Louie, but eventually he deemed her prepared enough to head into the Dragon's Maw once more to confront Dong Huo.

By the time Anya headed into the Dragon Maw tomb I had them on somewhat opposite sleep schedules. This gave me the chance to work with Maximus a bit while Anya was sleeping in her tent, and besides having him work with the board breaker I also had him do some ranked sparring matches at the Academy.

After threading her way through the various tricks and traps of the tomb, Anya came to the final room where Dong Huo was was buried. Only he and a couple of his buddies weren't entirely dead. She managed to lure one of the mummies into a fire trap, fought and defeated another, then finally took on Dong Huo himself.

2nd mummy. Didn't catch it's name.

Defeating Dong Huo Scourge of the Three Kingdoms

Amusingly, at some point after Dong Huo came out of his sarcophagus, Anya got the wish to do a Friendly introduction with him. I didn't notice it until after she's already defeated him but it wouldn't have been possible to do anyway since you can't interact with the mummies other than to fight with them when they notice you and attack.

The exit room of this tomb has a pretty cool floor mural. Perhaps one day I'll have the patience to try to do something like this with flooring in a house that I build. Probably not though.

As an aside here, the hill that the Dragon's Maw cave is on has a great view of the Forbidden City and surrounding countryside.

After collecting her reward from finishing the Dragon's Maw, Anya got another mission from the board at the base camp. This one sent her down into the caverns under the marketplace once more, though she took a break to get a good night's rest in her bed at the house before really getting started on them. She first had to go through the cavern she'd explored before to obtain the keystone for Dong Huo's treasure stash, but after dealing with that she found the stairway that led down into the other caverns and set to it.

One of the odd and slightly annoying things about these tombs is that once you've opened the stairs down into them random sims will come down and hang out in the tomb as well. How far in they'll come depends on what traps there are and whether or not you've cleared them. This can be inconvenient at times if a sim you need, like one of the merchants, has wandered down below. I ended up having to do a resetsim on these two because they just stood like that for at least a sim day, if not longer.

Anya finished the tomb, but was so tired she had to sleep for a bit in one of the beds in the tomb before she could finish collecting all of the loot there. Meanwhile, Maximus managed to start a fire in the kitchen while trying to fix himself some breakfast. As usual, the firefighter didn't show up until he'd already gotten the fire put out himself.

Besides working on his Martial Arts and setting fires, Maximus also got a few opportunities to catch and deliver fish. I had him complete these for something else to do when he was too fatigued to work on the block breaker as they helped him get some visa points for himself. After doing a couple of them he was able to get his level 1 visa for China. He never had any luck getting a Dragon Fish, but he caught all of the other special fish in China while he was there.

All of the work on the block breaker earned Maximus the title of Timber Terminator. Even though he was only at level 8 of Martial Arts still, and Anya had long since mastered it, he still managed to finish this skill challenge before her. Unfortunately he didn't have much luck with space rock blocks yet even though he could break 5 thin stone blocks easily.

While Maximus was busy with his pursuits, Anya kept exploring, going back into a few tombs she'd done in the past to check for things she'd missed, and running a few errands for someone as part of another mission she'd picked up. Soon she was headed into what she hoped would be the last tomb she needed to explore in China, the Tomb of the First Emperor, the entrance of which was down a hill from the famous Terracotta Army.

While Anya was doing a few last errands to obtain the final keystone she'd need to be able to fully explore the Emperor's tomb, a burglar broke into their vacation home while Maximus was asleep. As it happened, Anya was on her way home at the time to rest up and attend to her other needs to be fully refreshed before tackling the tomb, but she didn't make it home in time to stop him. He was able to steal their shower, but her arrival possibly prevented him from taking more. Time to get a burglar alarm for the place I guess.

The next morning Anya headed off to the Emperor's tomb and started working on it. She found she had to tread carefully and pay close attention to her surroundings, for there were traps everywhere. She encountered a mummy in one room full of sarcophagi, but she defeated it easily. When she finally had to take a break, she pitched her tent and went to sleep. This gave me a chance to pay attention to Maximus for awhile, and I had him try doing space rock blocks again. Now that he had finished the block breaking challenge he found it much easier, and he began to get gemstones with most of the boards he broke.

When Anya awoke and started exploring again, she found that she'd been very close to finishing the tomb when exhaustion had made her stop earlier in the day. She finished up, and as she collected her final tomb relic she realized that she had now explored every tomb in China. She still had some relic collections to finish, but she felt quite pleased with herself and determined to just enjoy the rest of the vacation as much as possible.

The rest of their trip was spent working on their Martial Arts skills, with both of them participating in ranked sparring matches when they could. Anya also spent some time excavating around the area hoping to find the last few relics she needed.

Maximus eventually mastered Martial Arts and got to level 2 of the Tournament. After that I eased off the sparring for him and had him break space rocks when he could and meditate once he was too fatigued to do that anymore. Anya also achieved the Timber Terminator skill challenge so hopefully she'll be as good with getting gems from the space rocks as Maximus is now. There wasn't much else of note in their last several days in China, other than the fact that their mailman there was a creepster that liked to look in through their windows whenever he had mail to deliver to them.

Every single time he delivered mail he'd go over and peek in one of the windows for a few moments before running off

Anya stayed with the Tournament, primarily because she rolled up the wish to win it (worth 10,000 points). It took a few days of calling partners over one after the other, but eventually she reached level 5 and was officially a Grand Master.

The vacation finally ended and they headed home to Riverview. Once there, their top priority became starting a family finally since they'd both been wanting a baby for so long. It didn't take very long before Anya realized their attempts to get pregnant had been successful.

A few days later as she was relaxing with a book out back while Maximus was playing in a game at the stadium, she went into labor. She opted to stay and have the baby at home instead of going to the hospital.

Maximus made it home before she gave birth and was there to help her out. Or to just freak out about it as the case may be. She gave birth to a (apple influenced) baby boy she named Beli. He got the traits Loves the Outdoors and Disciplined, his favorites are Kids music, Falafel, and Orange.

The next few days passed fairly normally, and before they knew it Beli's birthday had rolled around. He aged up well to Toddler with a small party with his parents in the kitchen. Shortly thereafter they started on the toddler training, with potty training being first on the agenda, followed by teaching him to walk.

The next day Anya took Beli down to the library to read all of the toddler books she'd bought with him. The reading bonus from the library meant they were able to zoom through them in no time.

Later that day Maximus got a promotion at work that put him at level 9 of the Sports career and completed his LTW to Become a Superstar Athlete. He hasn't really earned that many points for the challenge so far, but I can now count the points he has gained. I may well move him into a different career once he finishes sports.

Here's where I'm going to leave the Frasers for now. I could have sent Anya on to Egypt after Beli was born, and originally had kind of planned to do so, but then decided that I wanted to work on getting Maximus's LTW finished before I went back to continuing to finish stuff in the various countries with her. Now that that's accomplished I'll get back to adventuring, but I also think they'll probably be moving to a new house next time. They have a lot of money now from all the gems they get from breaking space rocks in addition to all the gems and stuff she finds in the tombs, so they can well afford a nice place that has more room now. Also, I've never really been happy with the house since I renovated it. I'm also thinking I should maybe pop them out and put them into a fresh version of Riverview since I've been seeing more little glitches lately here, but I'm not entirely sure on that yet. We'll see what I've decided when I get back here next. Until then, here's a look at how my score stands currently:

Next up will probably be the Bakers unless I decide to start with an idea I've had for another family instead. Until then, I'll leave you with some outtake type pictures of the gnomes since they were kind of interesting to watch but don't really figure into the main narrative here much.

Lil' Leon presides over a meeting while Mr. Gnome makes his opinion of it known

Lil' Leon later makes his displeasure known

The winner and still Champion...