1. A Bee’s Gotta Do What a Bee’s Gotta Do
Meet Queenie Bee.
She’s a snobby, charismatic savvy sculptor, who dreams of living in the lap of luxury one day. She’s also family oriented and nurturing, but that won’t do her much good for quite some time. In her own opinion, she has impeccable fashion sense; in mine, it leaves something to be desired, but I’m probably just jealous. In case anybody cares, she likes yellow (obviously), classical music and vegetarian lobster thermidor.
Queenie’s long term ambition is to surround herself with lots of little drones and workers, so that she can sit back and sculpt while they buzz around doing the real work. Having set up her hive, she’d then like to live in it forever and do as little as possible. She’s heard rumours that living forever is doable, but that it involves a lot of effort – boring stuff like getting a job and learning skills and completing opportunities. She doesn’t like the sound of the work, and so hopes that the drones will do most of it for her.
When she first landed in Appaloosa Plains, Queenie’s worldly possessions were, shall we say, a little limited.
However, she was confident that she would meet Mr Rich, um, Right soon enough. After all, who wouldn’t fall for such a
striking outfit?
And in the meantime, she could always sculpt herself some furniture. In her underwear, just in case Mr R. walked by.
She managed one chair relatively quickly: how long could the rest of the house possibly take?
Exhausted by such a hard hour’s work, Queenie set off into town to see if she could see anybody who looked rich. Since her underwear had failed to attract any potential spouses, she put her best dress on instead. The dress survived the taxi journey without getting even remotely wrinkled; this may be because Create-a-Style says it’s made of plastic.
There weren’t any townies to be seen, so instead Queenie took the opportunity to have a nice lie down behind the spa.
Once she recovered from her
exhausting taxi ride, she deigned to visit the library. After all, if she was going to find herself a nice hard-working drone to keep her in style, she would need to have some charisma skill.
As luck would have it, Gavin Pinkerton was trying to read a book when she walked in, so Queenie took a moment to talk about herself. Gavin was not impressed.
Since ‘deeply interested in Queenie’ was one of the main features she wanted in a husband (along with ‘rich’, ‘devoted’ and ‘good at making honey’), Queenie decided that she’d only ever been interested in reading a charisma book anyway. She could do
far better than a man who thought
Special Snowflake was more interesting than Queenie Bee.
She could even get by on her own.
In fact, on that first day Queenie managed to do quite a few things for herself. Some of them even required
effort. She earned her charisma point (all the better to chat up the rich and famous with).
She got a job, albeit one that let her stick to her own schedule and take time off whenever she pleased.
She even got her hands dirty picking fruit and vegetables. It was a nasty job and did horrible things to her cuticles, but she had to eat something.
Nevertheless, when Queenie was a little larva, she had always dreamed of so much better. She had considered the possibility of having to dine at home sometimes, or perhaps wearing the same dress for two social gatherings in a row, but not once had she imagined that her life might come to this.
Something had to change.
The backache when she crawled out of her sleeping bag the next day confirmed this conclusion, and Queenie decided that the change had to happen very soon. So much for getting by on her own.
She decided to speed up her search for Mr R., as she had heard on the grapevine the previous day that Benjamin Schmidt, the town’s most eligible bachelor, had already upped and left the town. Instead of heading towards his place, therefore, Queenie wandered south, following the mingling scents of hay and unspent Simoleons.
Johnny Johnson was a lot older than her, but he was clearly rich: not only did his house have walls and a door, but there was even furniture inside it! There were horses outside, too, which was surely a sign of wealth? She didn’t think much of his house – she would have liked a few more mirrors, and lots of lovely yellow, but she figured that a man with such hideous taste might benefit from living with a glamorous sim like her. It would be doing the poor man a favour, really, to sell his icky belongings to pay for some black and yellow stripy throw pillows and a pretty golden yellow sports car.
It turned out that he was a musician, although he didn’t seem to be too pleased about it.
Queenie, however, liked musicians.
She explained that, should he agree to donate all of his cash, um, marry her, he would be required to make lots of sculptures, although at least he would be lucky enough to make some sculptures of her.
Staggeringly, he seemed to be okay with that.
But she truly knew he was the one when he fell for her pick-up line: “Would you like to paint my portrait all day every day until you die?”
He would.
Just to be on the safe side, Queenie took a moment to introduce herself to Johnny’s housemate. She wouldn’t want to end up married to the wrong rich man, after all. That wasn’t cynicism, it was just good sense.
But Chuck was far too canny to fall for her line about the ice sculptures, and so she left him in peace.
Once Chuck had wandered off to tend to the horses, Queenie decided that Johnny was the right man for her after all, and she told him so.
He could dance, and he could cook – what more could a desperate and slightly stinky queen bee ask for?
Her mind made up, she spent much of her remaining money on some flowers for him. If that isn’t love, she thought, what is?
It took a whole day to persuade him to move in, but eventually, Johnny agreed. Though when he saw what passed for her little, um,
home, I suspect he probably regretted it.
