Author Topic: Eight Ways to Live Forever: The Waverly Immortal Dynasty ("Complete")  (Read 334035 times)

Offline RaiaDraconis

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Re: Eight Ways to Live Forever: The Waverly Immortal Dynasty (Ch. 67, 7/15)
« Reply #315 on: July 16, 2014, 12:18:03 AM »
That...was adorable.

I have a feeling though that Franco will be by far the easiest to convince. :P

Offline Trip

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Re: Eight Ways to Live Forever: The Waverly Immortal Dynasty (Ch. 68, 7/16)
« Reply #316 on: July 16, 2014, 11:59:32 PM »
*squeals* Oh my, that last picture, with Heph and Tegan... it is too adorable for words!  Just soooo cute!

It really was! And the two elders looking from a distance just completed it.

That...was adorable.

I have a feeling though that Franco will be by far the easiest to convince. :P

Easier to convince than Lily. I don't know how she'll handle going from having to accept Hephaestus as her brother to having to accept him as a son-in-law.

"An immortal piece of Hannah..." How perfect!

I knew my strategy for spouses would result in something sweet like that. ;)



Chapter 68: Manhattan Project



By the time Spooky Day came, the surprise snowstorm mostly melted and the young ones of Twinbrook stalked the neighborhoods for candy.



Perhaps Franco was too stingy with giving his illegitimate kids sweets, because Ben Knack knocked for a chance to get a fun-sized Kit-Kat bar. Hephaestus gave him two. He was the only person in the house available, not quite as absorbed in sculpting as Julian, not as chained to painting as Franco, not as juice-addicted or as tired and bored as Annette, and not tied to a job like Bronson.

Now Lily?





She had some motherly bonding to do, though Hephaestus watched. Wobbly little Tegan made her first steps for a proud mum, and whatever Hephaestus was to her, he was proud too.

But, speaking of Bronson, his workload increased that year thanks to the military’s newest money-sink. When long-standing neutrality in global conflicts kept their budget stagnant, the people at the military spoke excitedly of re-launching Simnation’s space program instead, and every branch had to step in, even the base in small, foggy Twinbrook. It would eat up the budget that remained after maintaining their weapons stores for another year or century in storage, and it meant that Bronson got a bit of a raise for his engineering prowess.

“She’ll like what I’m doing,” Bronson said to Lily one late night at dinner, “I can’t tear her away from the block table, so I could see her following her daddy’s footsteps.”

“Little Tegan the engineer,” Lily said, with a chuckle, “Decked out in bows and ribbons and engineering fighter planes.”

“I think she’ll grow out of the bows. She’s basically a nooboo,” he replied.

“So, space, huh?” she asked.

“They say that I’m too old to go into space, but I’ll be up there. I know you’ll miss me.”

“I will. It sounds pretty cool.”

“It’s a big thing and we’re keeping this conversation within the family,” Bronson said, lowering his voice, “It’s the closest thing we’ll get to our own Manhattan Project. Emma’s been calling it the Queens Project, which makes her sound like some sort of female supremacist, but I’ll call her out on that later. Anyways, instead of being earth-scum and destroying things, we’re going to space! But keep that a secret or I’m filing for divorce.”

“Don’t want Simnation’s hopes up too high?”

“I’ve stopped being idealistic a long time ago. It’s gonna take a while if we can get this program up at all. Not even the president knows much about this. If he did, well, I wouldn’t have to unleash local vulgarities over the phone to get a budget raise passed.”

“Well, little Tegan won’t spill the beans. Lay the details out on her.”

Bronson scooped her out of the crib after a nap. He was always drained from work, so he refrained from throwing military jargon at his toddler daughter. She still knew his as “daddy” instead of “Admiral Curious,” so he did well there. However, space exploration was a little more child-friendly than trying to speak to her about fighter planes.



So he sat her down for a little talk about stars and rockets. “Rock-et,” Bronson said, annunciating each syllable. He grabbed a plastic one off the floor for effect; Tegan always played with her plastic rocket toy. “Daddy is helping build one of these.”

“’Ket, ‘ket,” she said, skipping the first syllable because r’s were as foreign to her immature tongue as they were to a working class New Simland native.

“Sure, then,” Bronson said. Tegan caught on to the words, though, and she learned how to pronounce the whole alphabet until words like engine and booster and fuel came as easily to her as breathing.



And she looked up to her wonderful father for each lesson with a look of wonder in her cheerful brown eyes.



Tegan could spend days with her butt planted on the floor in front of the peg box, inserting pegs into the slots even when she mastered the art of putting the triangle block in the triangular hole without a single instance of error. If she wasn’t at the box, she played with blocks and built tall, surprisingly stable towers with them. Her parents jumped at the chance to enroll her in the Gifted Sims program at the local school before she came of age and started there. The program offered everything; art classes, junior computer programming, drama, guaranteed placement on the honor roll (which meant a simple ribbon for elementary school students, but it sounded prestigious), and a host of other privileges.

For the most part, it seemed that Tegan was naturally an intellectual little brussel sprout, and she was.



However, Hephaestus might have been the reason she stayed with the pegs for so long. She knew darn well where to put them without his help, but the sound of his voice (a tenor as smooth as polished wood) put her in a lull, regardless of if he was talking about breakfast or the demon that clearly stole a pancake while he got some extra butter in the fridge (in reality, Annette was very hungry that morning).



He kept his side-hobby of putting good luck charms on Julian’s children a secret.

But his playtime with Tegan was interrupted by an eye appointment one Wednesday. Hephaestus complained of his vision going downhill, which was incredibly odd, considering how Hannah retained 20/20 vision throughout her life and, aside from cataracts in his last days, Tay could boast of similar visual health. Maybe it was grandma Gwayne? She wore glasses in every photo he had of her. Regardless, he took control of his health for once and got his eyes checked, and wondered how he’d look with colored contacts.

The only problem was that he had impeccable vision in every sense.

After getting the medical bill, Annette groaned and asked her step-grandson what was up with that.

“I’ve been seeing double, lately,” Hephaestus said.

“Yeah, I do too when I binge a whole series on Netflix. It’s called focusing, dear,” she said.

“Yeah, but it’s like if I’m looking at the sink, there’s a second one right beside it and it says passages from Jack Kerouac’s writing backwards.”

“Um, sure,” Annette said, “Some sort of demon in your messed up head?”

“Probably. They can take on quite a few forms. Ghosts usually appear just how they are.”

She left, ready to prod Franco into taking his stepkid in for a diagnosis. Meanwhile, Hephaestus thought about duplication for a while, and the theme led him to educating himself about tangentially-related things. He researched cell division in his spare time, between all of the stages of mitosis, and its cousin meiosis as well. When gametes bored him, he read the original articles published about the Earthlings and Dolly the Sheep, their first clone, and studies of sim-cloning as well. Dogs, cats, horses? Sure. Sims? There was a report of a silver-colored demonoid in Barnacle Bay who made his own army that way, but that man declined most interviews, and word got out that he wasn’t biologically a full-blooded sim and that all of his clones were the equivalent to six-year-olds, and budded from skin grafts from his thighs.

Huh. If only he could improve on that, and make it a possibility for all sims. As for the guy in Barnacle Bay, his samples couldn’t be stored without degrading, and even with fresh samples, he was the only man the method worked for without error. Annette and company likely came from an entirely different race (as much as Annette denied it, Hephaestus always insisted that they were from Dragon Valley and probably elven or dragon-tamers, and that old Nettie was being ignorant or deceitful), so they couldn’t benefit from the graft. Lily’s friends couldn’t either.

So one morning, Hephaestus found his possible solution, right before waking Tegan up.



“I can just super-charge the development of a zygote, of course!” he said, raising his finger to emphasize his discovery.

“And...what now?” Annette asked, after she was done poking the nursery’s fireplace.

“It’s to clone sims. I might be a revolutionary here!”

“You know, if you can clone those ungodly expensive truffles I just bought, I’ll fund all of your research.”

Annette bought Hephaestus the latest model of a genetic analyzer, mostly through begging Bronson’s little sister and top cell biologist in Twinbrook, Kristen, to give her one with the promise that Franco absolutely would not drag her to the back of the movie theatre when he felt lonely. He had other women for that anyways.



Tegan then played with her peg box alone when Hephaestus instead devoted all of his energy to sculpting or replicating fragments of DNA. However, mommy was always there for a snuggle and plenty of tickles.



If Hephaestus breaking ground in biology was going to give Lily more time with Tegan, she would campaign for him to get the Nobel Prize if it meant days alone with her lime-colored love. Now, it wasn’t that she disliked Hephaestus, and Annette and Franco kept their lips airtight about what they secretly wanted from him and Tegan, but her daughter meant everything to her, and Hephaestus could otherwise take up a lot of time with Lily’s everything.

Like every parent, she wanted Tegan to stay young, and she wanted her to grow healthy and strong. Annette wouldn’t have the former, and after a fight involving shattered plates thrown by Lily and a cup of warm coffee poured on Lily’s upper leg by Annette, Lily gave in and scheduled a birthday party for Tegan. She’d make for a cute older child too, right?



And hearing Bronson’s laughter wasn’t a bad thing, was it?



“Oh, god, Lily,” Lilith Jones-Brown said, holding her nose, “That stinker of yours reminds me why I don’t want kids.” But Lily would miss her little stinker’s wobbly legs and simple sentences and how her toddler was an easy excuse to take a hiatus from her career for.



Not so much for Tegan. She leaned towards the cake and blew out the candles without hesitation.



With such a happy, eager daughter and a bundle of birthday magic lightening the mood, Lily still cracked a big, beaming smile in the end.



The birthday magic gave Tegan much more hair than she had as a toddler. It gave her a head of chest-length, thick black hair in tumbling waves. After it kept getting in her eyes, Franco braided it in two long pigtails and let her pick out some clothes. The porcelain-esque color scheme stayed with Tegan, and her wardrobe was full of deep blue and striking white.

“Looking good, princess,” Tegan’s grandfather said, “Aren’t you going to say hi to the guests?” But Tegan sprinted upstairs as fast as her chubby legs could take her before she heard Franco.



As if she could sense it through sonar or ESP, Tegan found the inventing station without going into the wrong room first, and found the toolbox in its right drawer. After two hours of tightening screws and working with sheet metal, she came out with…some sort of toy. Maybe a whale. It moved its flippers when she wound up a crank on its back.

“I can do this, just like daddy,” she said to herself. Wasn’t inventing kind of like engineering?



“Brilliant!” Tegan exclaimed, “I can be just like him!”



Word Count for this chapter: 1,893
Word Count so far: 114,481

So the bit about the silvery guy in Barnacle Bay cloning himself...me, doing a Domination Dynasty? Whatever gave you that idea? ;)
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Offline Shewolf13

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Re: Eight Ways to Live Forever: The Waverly Immortal Dynasty (Ch. 68, 7/16)
« Reply #317 on: July 17, 2014, 03:46:46 AM »
Oh, my heart melted at the picture of Heph there with Tegan at the peg box!  So sweet!  And she's a gorgeous child!

Wait, another Trip dynasty!  Where!?  *follows scent*

Offline RaiaDraconis

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Re: Eight Ways to Live Forever: The Waverly Immortal Dynasty (Ch. 68, 7/16)
« Reply #318 on: July 17, 2014, 07:57:56 AM »
Hehe...it's almsot like Tegan and Heph are made for one another. :P Both intellectual geeky types in their own way (even if Heph's intellectual crosses the border to insanity).

Offline JudesSims

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Re: Eight Ways to Live Forever: The Waverly Immortal Dynasty (Ch. 68, 7/16)
« Reply #319 on: July 17, 2014, 08:13:44 AM »
What great screenshots! And, your storytelling keeps me entertained. Sorry I don't comment much but I surely am reading.

Offline AkonIsAwesome

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Re: Eight Ways to Live Forever: The Waverly Immortal Dynasty (Ch. 68, 7/16)
« Reply #320 on: July 17, 2014, 08:20:38 AM »
Hephaestus is so awesome! And Tegan is such an adorable child. Ooh, a domination dynasty? Now looking forward to hearing more about that!

Offline Trip

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Re: Eight Ways to Live Forever: The Waverly Immortal Dynasty (Ch. 69, 7/18)
« Reply #321 on: July 18, 2014, 02:14:57 PM »
Between the 20th and the 29th, I'll be out on vacation to the exotic, foreign land of Portland, Oregon, though with my laptop. While I hope to get something out in my spare time, my updates will likely slow down.

Oh, my heart melted at the picture of Heph there with Tegan at the peg box!  So sweet!  And she's a gorgeous child!

Wait, another Trip dynasty!  Where!?  *follows scent*

She was seriously a gorgeous sim. Just wait until she grows up!

The scent will lead you nowhere right now, but yes, I have another dynasty up my sleeves. I hope to shake up my writing style a little bit with it too.

Hehe...it's almsot like Tegan and Heph are made for one another. :P Both intellectual geeky types in their own way (even if Heph's intellectual crosses the border to insanity).

A lot of their traits complimented each other very well. I loved the relationship between them, especially all of these strictly platonic bits.

What great screenshots! And, your storytelling keeps me entertained. Sorry I don't comment much but I surely am reading.

Thank you! And don't worry, I trust that you're still reading. I'm a bad commentor too.

Hephaestus is so awesome! And Tegan is such an adorable child. Ooh, a domination dynasty? Now looking forward to hearing more about that!

Soon you will! (Probably some time after my aforementioned vacation).



Chapter 69: Destroyer of Worlds



Bronson signed Tegan up for a before-school activity, so he could be the one to drive her to school and hug her good-bye for the day before designing better engines for rockets until Twinbrook was dark again. Plus, he kept mumbling about how he better make sure to talk about making Tegan his intern when she grew up. If a career in the military was in her future, she had to get used to the early mornings.



Now, her morning class was Junior Choir, and it was only twice a week. Her electives and after-school activities varied more. Junior Shop Class on Mondays, Junior Programming after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, half a class of Junior Painting for one Friday until Franco intervened and removed her from the class and took her out for ice cream instead, and so on. She was booked. However, after a few hours playing with her blocks and dolls at home for Tegan, Bronson greeted her at the door in his navy-blue military uniform and badges and asked her if she did her homework, which she usually had yet to start.

“We’re not putting you in the program for nothing, peapod,” he told her.

“Yeah, but I kind of need your help.”

The two of them spent an hour on Pre-Algebra and on her Junior Programming extra credit assignment. After his refresher on conditional statements stuck with Tegan, he tucked her into bed and read her to sleep with his new developments in the space project. Bronson could go on all night fascinating her with the process of making the lightest, most powerful engine that could also get them into space.

“Have you learned about the Lunar Lakes colony in your history class yet?” he asked. Tegan shook her head no.

“Well, we’ve been out on contact with them for a while. The country used to have a space program, but it fell apart not too long after some of us got to Lunar Lakes. We can go back there if we succeed.”

“What’s it like there? Does anyone know?”

“It’s a land of computers and wires underneath your feet. Like a big computer.”

For a little bit, Tegan fell asleep to her father’s tales from the military, and she dreamt of Boolean operators and Visual Basic. He said that every project needs a programmer, and for the tiniest speck of time, that was Tegan’s biggest dream. Her, sitting in front of the white glow of an LCD screen lined with code.

For a little, tiny bit, Tegan thought that technology was good, until she rode home from school one day with a straight face, and broke down into tears upon arriving home. “Uncle Julian,” fresh from the newspaper office in his beige trenchcoat, did his best to comfort his…whatever Tegan was to him. He asked what was wrong.

Sniffling, she said something about Bryant, the new kid in Junior Programming, who boasted of exploiting security loopholes and ruining the lives of a few bloggers by leaking passwords. Bryant was Tegan’s age and likely just parroting what some teenager he passed by on the second floor of the school said, as opposed to being a hacking mastermind at seven years of age, but Tegan believed him.

“I don’t want to program anymore. Not to be like that,” she sobbed.

“You’re not a bad person. You don’t need to do that to program-“

“The teacher thanked him for it.”

“That’s just because your aunt Nellie isn’t a good person either. She can code very well, but I don’t think all programmers are like her.”

“Can you tell mum and dad to take me out of the class?” she said.



Spineless Julian promised that, as long as Tegan dried her eyes, dressed in her best, and posed for more sculptures. He wasn’t getting a good appraisal on the value of any of the other attempts. She took a coy stance and posed for eight more sculptures.



Julian also promised her a hot dog for her services, and she got that too. After eating a hot dog with Dijon mustard, it seemed like Tegan wasn’t as distraught over Bryant’s antics as she was when she arrived home from school, but Bronson tucked her in again that night and she had the same thing to say to him. She couldn’t be on a bad side, not in the slightest.

He went to the principal for a talk the next day. Poor Bronson was growing soft in his old age.



For Tegan, the use of technology in the house started to bite at her. The video game soundtracks grated at her ears, and the smooth glass of Hephaestus’ tablet felt more like rough sandpaper when he handed her the tablet for a game of Fruit Ninja. The code and processors and RAM sticks soon became her foreign enemy.



She even pretended to ride her rocking horse for the pursuit of justice against the new opposition, against the circuits and LCD screens. Tegan pointed menacingly at the wall-sized television for the whole time.



Without Junior Programming taking up her Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, Tegan biked home at 3 in erratic weather patterns, snow sometimes and 50 degree weather the next day, and got there half an hour later to play with her blocks more, and pester Hephaestus for always using his tablet. Still, she put up with him studying the physics of Angry Birds in his spare time, and sat by him and his blasted technology for a bit of wholesome reading. Bronson had plenty of comic books that he wrote and partially illustrated, born from holing himself up in the upstairs study after a long day of work, and worse, being around other people.

One day, Tegan already read through all of Enigma, her father’s graphic novelization of Alan Turing’s life, so she needed a new comic series. Apples and Oranges was too tech-based, but Feynman Smash! seemed silly and perfect for an afternoon of reading.

The first panel? A flash forward to an illustration of the first atomic bomb, and how it turned the White Sands of New Mexico to glass. Even if the magnitude of its power could not be captured in a full-page illustration of its white and orange glow.

“What?!” she squealed, throwing the book down on the dark blue carpet. Sure, the bomb was a product of those strange Earthlings, but of their military. She thought about it all night. What made Bronson’s job any different?

She swatted Bronson away when he tried to lull his daughter to sleep with new rocket engine developments.

“You’re just want to destroy everything!” Tegan buried her head under the covers and turned away from Bronson, “Like the atom bomb.”

“Peapod, we’re not like that. We’ll never be like that. Heck, even the earthlings keep those things under tight control.”

She heard none of it, and dropped any plans to be like him, even if a job in the military was full of all of the rockets and planes she was told about.

In spite of that, she still kept herself in Junior Shop Class, even through the gears and and metals. Tegan was still a natural at it, handling delicate moving parts and more cranks and wind-up bits. None of those bothered her, as it was all physics that moved the gears which moved more gears. She faced little trouble there, aside from wood splinters when they worked on construction and one small burn from the blowtorch the school allowed children to use.

Math had its own troubles. Not that Tegan barely survived the course, not at all, considering that she walked out of it with an A. But Bryant from Programming took the desk next to her. At first, he did his assignments like a normal student and stayed out of trouble, keeping his round head turned away from Tegan when she finished the classwork for the day three minutes before he did. He turned his head away and faced Tegan only with the mass of jet-black hair on the back of his head when she got her assignments back, scoring in the 90’s much like he did.

One day, he turned towards her, elbowing her in the arm.

“What was that for?” she asked.

“You shouldn’t do math,” he said.

“Why? I like it.”

“You’re a girly girl who wears bows and ribbons. Why don’t you go play with your Easy Bake?”

Again, Tegan came home in tears, after both facing Bryant and tumbling over in the four inches of snow that fell that day while biking home. Neither of her parents greeted her at the door.



Mum had a career to get back on track.

And dad? He obsessed over himself in the mirror, worse than Franco ever did in a week. He ran his hands over his kind-of smooth skin, with the laugh lines and wrinkles. He ran his fingers through his curly black hair, with maybe five grey strands in it. He sighed deeply each time he finished, then admiring the signs of his youth again.



When Lily came home, he had to say good-bye to all of it. Good bye nice skin, good bye black hair, good bye muscles. Good bye to the attractive younger wife? Hopefully not. She still cheered for him.



While Tegan made amends with her father over the military thing, still wary of what he could do but in a friendlier way, she ducked out of his last birthday party with Hephaestus for some hot chocolate at the winter festival. He stepped outside in a manly lilac sarong and no shirt instead of anything that could keep his noodle arms from freezing off. After a cup of hot chocolate for the both of them, they played tag, at Tegan’s request. Warm and cozy in her hooded dress, stockings, and furry boots, she didn’t complain about the temperature. And neither did Hephaestus.



She trusted that dad was doing just fine.



But as Bronson got dressed in a conservative violet sweater, someone at the festival fell with a thud muffled by the thick snow.

Hephaestus was down, with his skin pale and blue in the winter cold.

“Guys, help?” Tegan asked, scared for her friend.

“Oh, we keep a hairdryer around for these things,” the worker said, “It’s battery-powered.”



She ran it for ten minutes, nearly exhausting all of the battery’s power, for the sake of saving Hephaestus’ skin. But after those ten minutes, he could move his joints, and lifted himself up from the cold powder. After buying a cup of tea for the road to soothe his freezing body, Hephaestus quickly piled himself, Tegan, and the tea into the car. In spite of having a game of tag with her best friend, Tegan still sulked in the passenger’s seat.

“Something getting you down?” he asked.

“I can’t do math,” she said.

“But you’re doing so well in that class.”

“Bryant told me that I can’t do it because I’m a girly-girl. I want to take, something else.”

“I’m not letting you give up another passion. I think you can do math better than any guy, and you can double the ribbons in your hair and it won’t matter.”

“Really?”

“That’s actually how it works,” he said, “You’re good at math because you’re good at it. A lot of people don’t like girly-girls, but you know what? The world can use some smiles and sunshine from girls like you.”

She looked out the window and smiled, watching snowflakes blanket the world.



When they arrived home, Lily and Bronson were still occupied.

“Don’t you have a sculpture to finish?” he asked Lily.

“What sculpture? We need to give the new you a test run first.”



In the absence of any other adults, Hephaestus stepped in to give Tegan a hug goodnight.

“So I’m still smart?” she asked him.

“You’re the smartest kid I know. And the best. Good night, peapod.”



Word Count for this chapter: 1,990
Word Count so far: 116,471

I needed some way to justify my inventing technophobe named Tegan, I guess. She kept the ribbons and bows and ultra-feminine aesthetic throughout her life, which clashed with her intellectual leanings until I realized that, you know, girly-girls can be smart too.

The Bryant jerk will make future appearances, in images too! I just didn't get any of him until a little later. Oops.
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Offline RaiaDraconis

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Re: Eight Ways to Live Forever: The Waverly Immortal Dynasty (Ch. 69, 7/18)
« Reply #322 on: July 18, 2014, 02:25:44 PM »
Ya know what? I like Tegan even more now. :) Everyone has met their version of Bryant at some point or another, and as a woman in a scientific field I can absolutely relate. It's all a matter of how you respond, and it looks like Heph is helping her find her way. These two are simply awesome together!

And enjoy your vacation. :)


Offline AkonIsAwesome

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Re: Eight Ways to Live Forever: The Waverly Immortal Dynasty (Ch. 69, 7/18)
« Reply #323 on: July 18, 2014, 04:06:24 PM »
I love all the purple that Bronson and Hephaestus wear. Tegan's dresses are also just gorgeous. I love the way you use patterns.

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Re: Eight Ways to Live Forever: The Waverly Immortal Dynasty (Ch. 69, 7/18)
« Reply #324 on: July 18, 2014, 08:16:54 PM »
Oh my... Poor Tegan!  I want bad bad things to happen to Bryant XD  I've met a few of those kind of people too.

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Re: Eight Ways to Live Forever: The Waverly Immortal Dynasty (Ch. 70, 7/21)
« Reply #325 on: July 21, 2014, 02:04:27 PM »
Posting from moderately sunny...Bellevue (took a side-trip to the Seattle area before going to Portland). I can't get wifi anywhere but in the hotel lobby or at coffee places, but I managed to write something and find some downtime to find wifi and post. :D

Ya know what? I like Tegan even more now. :) Everyone has met their version of Bryant at some point or another, and as a woman in a scientific field I can absolutely relate. It's all a matter of how you respond, and it looks like Heph is helping her find her way. These two are simply awesome together!

And enjoy your vacation. :)



As a woman in tech, I haven't seen as much of the Bryant-types, but definitely a lot of being singled out for being the Brave and Strong Woman Working with Computers (tm). It gets infuriating when I want to be seen more as a peer. Either situation does require people to see past gender and at qualifications instead, so Heph is being a good person.

Enjoying it!

I love all the purple that Bronson and Hephaestus wear. Tegan's dresses are also just gorgeous. I love the way you use patterns.

It took me a while to realize that a lot of people in this dynasty liked purple or shades of it. I think it was four in total.

Tegan was really one of the best immortals to design outfits for. Every pattern looks good in blue and white.

Oh my... Poor Tegan!  I want bad bad things to happen to Bryant XD  I've met a few of those kind of people too.

But like anything in the dynasty, it will take a very long time for Bryant to get what he deserves. ;)



Chapter 70: Blue Bow Battlefield



Annette took the trash out one morning, only to see the remains of a MultiTab inside the slightly-translucent bag. Someone shattered the screen of the device horizontally down the middle, as if they bent it over their knee.

“Welp, there goes the warranty.” With the tablet damaged beyond repair, she carried it out to the trash bin. Over the next few weeks after that, she noticed that Hephaestus never used his tablet, and that deliveries of physical copies of the books he once stored on the slim device came to the front door each afternoon. Annette drew her own conclusions and didn’t say a word, especially because he made great progress on mapping the truffle genome without it.



One piece of technology down! Tegan played her dolls with more peace in her mind, though her male doll was still a valiant prince against the scourge of technology and black-hat hacking, and her porcelain-white female doll stood in for her, because little green dolls required a custom paint job. However, her prince had a multitude of battles to protect her other doll against. Criminals, history homework, yellow mustard (a cheap imitation of her true Dijon)…Bryant. Bryant turned out to be as common of a subject as touchscreen devices.

Lily listened in on her daughter’s playtime, but the age for Lily to play with dolls passed long before that. She heard the name “Bryant,” but had no clue about the guy. She was always busy when Tegan came home in tears over the new meanest thing that Bryant did, and Julian dried the worst of them by the time Lily got home from her magician gigs.



Well, she could justify it. The gigs were time-consuming and ever-confusing, especially when the stage hands messed with her props. White rabbit out, toy truck in, still greeted by an amused audience.



Stage intruders persisted.



And sculptures remained riddled with errors. However, Lily had to shift gears when Julian could no longer dry Tegan’s tears. He had some of his own, pent up inside and announced to the family through the town newspaper instead.

Julian and Lita had many children, just as they wanted. Everyone grew older, with the parents enjoying their twilight years and most of their children grown up and forging a path. Some of them moved out to take reigns of their life, two others stayed at home to figure out life, and two others were still in high school and not expected to forge paths until they got older.

It started with Nikita, his youngest. By all accounts, she was a brilliant girl with a strong artistic streak, but her pencil and charcoal moved in straight lines across rulers, drawing angles on paper and details on columns. Nikki spent her time training for the field of architecture. As in many technical passions, a boy her age showed up and made her life miserable. Julian never learned his name. But in his eyes, that design was subpar, those arches were outdated, and her flat nose and lean jawline made her too ugly to get hired anyways. Time went on, and Julian’s spinelessness rubbed off on Nikita in a hard way. The same boy asked for a kiss. She leaned in, fearing something worse instead.

He also was an extremely reckless driver, even when alone, but he barely cared about Nikita as a passenger either, made all the more worse when he swerved and hit another car. The passenger’s side took the impact. Nikita, dead on arrival.

Julian got the news as he was going to bed. He came into work the next morning on no sleep, thanks to celebrity gossip and speculation over the military’s next big project. Missing that could cost him his reputation and the future of his long-held job. He made the funeral arrangements in between interviews and ordered flowers on his brief lunch break. He set up the funeral for a weekend so that he couldn’t be called into work. And even disregarding how work beat down on Julian at all hours, he still trudged through the pain of burying his own child.

For the following few weeks, he went to work and locked himself in his bedroom straight afterwards. The sculpting studio was sent into a hush, as Hephaestus and Lily practiced without conversation. Annette kept a vigil outside of Julian’s bedroom door, in case he needed an emergency intervention. One weekend, he emerged with no work that day. His once close-cut hair bordered on shaggy, and his maintained stubble grew into a wild proto-beard. Somehow he stayed on the news with it. Without any obligation to dress in his suit-jacket, Julian wore no clothes but his boxers. Annette greeted him with a shy wave. He socked her straight in the nose.

Code Aqua she texted to Lily, using one hand. The other pinched her nose, in hopes of stemming her nosebleed.

While Annette assessed her own damages (nothing broken), Lily knocked on Julian’s locked door thrice, guarding her face just in case he still had ideas. He stepped out and clenched his fists, only to see Lily at the door in her orange jacket. He relaxed his grip.

“Oh,” he said.

“I think that someone needs me,” she said.

“Perhaps, perhaps,” he sighed, as he led Lily to the side of bed for a seat. His bedsheets were unmade.

“You’re a wreck,” said Lily.

“I know. I don’t like being helpless in these things. I…I could have stopped him. That waste of swamp gas could have regretted ever knowing us. I just didn’t take a stand.” He buried his face into his palms. “It’s just my fault.”

At that point, Lily left her lifelong friend cry into her shoulder, letting the disheveled old man lean on her for support while she rubbed the side of his arm. He stayed that way until he had no more breath and no more tears, and when a big wet patch of saline and snot was on her jackeet’s shoulder.

“Fight like hell for your own,” he said, “And bring me something to eat.”

After bringing Julian a plate of stuffed French toast and a spork that he couldn’t harm him or anyone else with, Lily took the “fight like hell” advice to heart, but how? Did Tegan battle something beyond her mother’s senses? Lily tried to tell herself that as she sculpted and worked illusions for the weekend, until she found herself at home one afternoon, and suddenly with a crying Tegan running into her embrace.

“Peapod, what happened at school?” she asked. Tegan told the story about Bryant, the jerk in her math class. He pulled out the ribbon to one of her braids that day, and wrote a vulgar message on her math homework. She trembled and admitted to her teacher that she did it, biting her lower lip and refraining from not violence, but being a snitch. That was enough to drive Lily to apologize to Tegan for not noticing sooner, and for her to find the number of Bryant’s father.

“Hello, Virgil?” The call went straight to message. “This is Lily Waverly, from across town. Yeah, your son is constantly bullying and harassing my daughter. She comes home crying every day because of it. Now, do you want that to continue? If you let it happen, I just want you to remember that I’m an amateur marathon runner with a collection of chainsaws and pyrotechnic equipment. My husband can bench three of you and he has all of the codes to Simnation’s weapons arsenal. If your son lays another hand on my little Tegan, you will wake up a carpet-bombed house and with me standing over you with my best chainsaw. Hope it’s clear.”

Naturally, Virgil took Lily’s threat as genuine and marched the recording straight to the police station. She fessed up and accepted her 60 days of community service (could have been worse without grandma’s bribe money), and was put in her place. Meanwhile, Bryant slammed Tegan's head into her desk, and Lily’s work was not over. But it meant for a more peaceful, pragmatic path.



Mr. Keon Whelohff taught many of the math classes at the town’s school. After a chase around town, Lily cornered him at the consignment shop where he always searched for second-hand textbooks (but not hair clippers). Normally, he would grumble about parents approaching him, them horrified at how their angel could possibly fail his tests, and them demanding that he change the grade. But once he saw Lily’s rainbow skin, he knew that wasn’t the issue.

“Keon, we’ve been friends with your family for a while,” she said, “Why aren’t you doing anything about my daughter?”

“What’s left? She’s an excellent student,” said Keon.

“Bryant Moreno. He’s constantly bullying Tegan, and I know she wouldn’t lie about this. She cries about it every afternoon.”

“He must be good at choosing when to d this. I’ll watch better tomorrow. Anything else, Mrs. Waverly?”

“Nope. Can’t be late for trash pick-up duty either,” she said, “Have a good day.”

“You too. Congrats on the happy marriage.” He looked at his bare fingers and sighed.

Once Keon had a day of observations, never stepping out or taking his eye off Tegan and Bryant, he observed him slamming her head into the desk and immediately sent Bryant to the principal’s office and worked with his schedule to put him in a different class. Bryant got a three-day suspension, Tegan got a few gold stars and a friendly hug from Mr. Whelohff for putting up with the kid for so long, and she was in peace at school.



And there was yet another person dashed from her list of things to defend all that is good against. She rode her toy horse for the heck of it.



Mostly because she looked at the birthday cake for herself, and Annette told her that, considering how big she and Bronson were built, she’d be far too big to ride the toy horse after her birthday. And then Annette started laughing.



It wasn’t enough to decimate Tegan’s wish, though.



Or her lung capacity.



The last of Tegan’s childhood was spent supported and loved, even by the party guests, and even as good old Tristan cheered more than her laughing father did, but that was life. Then it was time for the next part of it.



Though once the sparkles started to engulf Tegan in another dose of euphoric birthday magic, she worried about one thing. “Oh no, what if Bryant crashed the party?” she asked. Then the doorbell rang.

“Bryant, Bryant who?” Annette asked the new guest at the door. Tegan ran back to the closet in order to get dressed. And she clung to her ribbons and bows even harder, finding a big blue one for her tied-back hair.



Bryant’s dad gave in a tiny bit and made him bring Tegan a gift, which was just a gift card to the bookstore, but she appreciated it. She bit her big lower lip and waved to the still-tiny Bryant to thank him.



Posing for Julian was a lot more important, though, because life started to stabilize for him too.



They kept at the sculptures all night.





Julian’s life went back to normal at both of his homes.



And for Tegan, not much changed about her, though she spent much more time at the dollhouse after Bryant celebrated his birthday and showed up on the attendance list for her Literature class. She super-glued her bow together so he couldn’t undo it, and took a seat some columns away from him. She needed to cling to the few remaining passions she safely had.



She pretended that her green-clad doll wore a lilac sweater instead, and then went upstairs to learn about gears and widgets from her real lilac prince.



Word Count for this chapter: 1,971
Word Count so far: 118,442

Julian's youngest child, Nikita, really did die as a teen. How sad! Mostly because she had a super-nice blend of her parents' genes, but I never got any pictures of her either. The rest was me embellishing the story.

I can't exactly go into game while on vacation either, so you have to live with the missing CAS shot of Tegan. And for the same reasons, no Roaring Heights chapters (I have to seriously get on that once I'm back home, because one certain part of that story and one certain part of the actual dynasty need to catch up and be told at the same time, and I have a lot of RH ground to cover before that point).

Keon was the son of Rosy Whelohff and Shamus Drudge. He had his dad's lovely blue eyes and his mum's hideous profile. He also worked as a consignment shop attendant and will make a few more appearances. ;)
No respect, no chance, cease and desist when I chant-

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Offline KRae

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Re: Eight Ways to Live Forever: The Waverly Immortal Dynasty (Ch. 70, 7/21)
« Reply #326 on: July 21, 2014, 02:56:55 PM »
Bellevue is about half an hour south of my house depending on the traffic on I405. Hope you're enjoying yourself. I'm enjoying your story. Bullies are hard to deal with and schools still don't do enough to help.

Offline RaiaDraconis

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Re: Eight Ways to Live Forever: The Waverly Immortal Dynasty (Ch. 70, 7/21)
« Reply #327 on: July 21, 2014, 03:24:18 PM »
How heartbreaking for Julian and Lita. :( I really, really hate it when story progression does that.

Lilac prince. That makes me smile. :)

Offline Shewolf13

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Re: Eight Ways to Live Forever: The Waverly Immortal Dynasty (Ch. 70, 7/21)
« Reply #328 on: July 21, 2014, 03:45:48 PM »
Can't believe he had the nerve to come to her party!  Good thing papa doesn't know about this XD  I'd hate to see him get arrested.  And it's probably a good thing the Sims aren't actually violent for some of the stuff the game does lol

Oh Heph...  A lilac prince indeed!  And I still love Julian.  It's so sad that he lost a teenage daughter!  Bad story progression, bad!

Offline AkonIsAwesome

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Re: Eight Ways to Live Forever: The Waverly Immortal Dynasty (Ch. 70, 7/21)
« Reply #329 on: July 21, 2014, 08:23:21 PM »
Tegan is even more gorgeous as a teen! She's just going to keep getting prettier, isn't she? :) And it's good to know that Bryant will get his comeuppance.