In Search of an Exciting CareerThe next day was graduation. Everyone was very excited about it. Ridiculously so, in Phil’s opinion. None of them had been to a graduation before. Grandma Sophia said they’d not had them in Sunset Valley in her day and Granddad Sam hadn’t bothered to go to his. Too much the disaffected teenager, he said. Mum and Dad had both been too keen to get on with their careers to waste time on ceremonies – which didn’t mean they were going to let Phil get away with it. No, he was stuck with hanging around at the Town Hall for hours in a silly outfit and an even sillier hat.
He'd have to choose a career soon. Zoë had already registered as a self-employed artist, although she had inherited her parents' love of learning and didn't plan to restrict herself to a single skill. Things were different for Phil - but he still had plenty of choices. He quite fancied a profession, although he had a feeling that his mother wanted him to become a doctor. Fat chance. Grandma Sophia, for some reason, wanted him to be a scientist. Well, in fact, he had a feeling he knew what the reason was. She’d caught him playing with fire one evening and he’d had to pass it off as ‘an experiment’.
Dad said he didn’t care what Phil did for a living, so long as he earned lots of money. That was a joke. Probably. In fact, Phil was pretty sure that Dad was expecting him to sign up as a ghost hunter. It was true that he’d been fascinated by the supernatural since he was little. That was Granddad Sam’s doing. He told the best ghost stories.
He said it was because he was descended from a long line of ghosts – and so was Phil. Granddad even said he’d been a ghost himself, when he was younger. This puzzled Phil for a long time. How could someone be a ghost, then turn into an ordinary person? He knew grandfathers liked to tease. Maybe claiming to be an ex-ghost was just part of that – like tickling you into hysteria, asking whether you'd got a girlfriend yet or calling you ‘Pip’ when you were way too old for that kind of baby stuff. He couldn’t quite see the point but, hey, old people were odd.
Some of his schoolfriends didn’t believe in ghosts at all, which was silly. Of course ghosts were real. Loads of them lived in the back garden. Nanna Cassidy was a ghost. A
nice ghost. She read him bedtime stories.
As he grew older, Phil kept getting into trouble for sneaking off to the graveyard after stupid curfew. Going somewhere spooky at night was good fun and the cemetery ghosts had their own tales to tell.
But he wasn’t sure ghost hunting was right for him. A banshee banisher sounded like a pretty cool thing to have but ghosts were people, not
things to banish. Some of his best friends were spooks...
Time to go in. Time for boring speeches. Straighten your mortar board, Phil.
At last it was over. Phil graduated well and was voted Most Likely to Achieve His Lifetime Wish, like his father before him. He had a feeling he might take a bit longer, though. Everyone knew that Dad had completed his wish a couple of days after leaving school. Zoë, who had become the first member of the family to make the honour roll, was Valedictorian and
Most Likely to Join the Cast of The Simpsons Most Artistic.
While everyone was gathering round to congratulate her, Phil made his escape. He’d decided what he wanted to do with his life. Yesterday’s excitements had been the clincher.
They wouldn’t let him start until Monday but the other firefighters suggested he should work on his handiness skills in the meantime. Maybe he could even earn a promotion or two before his first official shift.
His parents were delighted. It seemed they’d been storing up blocked toilets in the basement for some time, waiting for someone who could deal with them. So
that was what the smell was. Everyone was very keen to tell him that his great-grandmother Louisa, who was famous in some other world, had started out the same way.
Stockpiling broken loos; relatives in parallel universes. Sometimes he wondered about his family’s sanity. As if to prove it, Grandma Sophia shooed him away before he’d even finished unblocking the first toilet. Apparently, she was far too desperate to use a functioning one indoors, in private.
At least he got to work on the alarm and the fire engine at the station, even if they wouldn’t let him respond to emergencies yet.
That was rather worrying: he hadn’t noticed his colleagues rushing off to put out fires, either. Even if they did, he wasn’t sure how useful they’d be. Randolph and Jaclyn were pleasant enough co-workers but neither was exactly in the first flush of youth.
Every evening after tea, it was back to the repairs. Once he’d finished fixing the plumbing, they produced his next wonderful graduation present: a broken dishwasher. Also the first of several, it seemed.
He asked Randolph when he’d be allowed to handle an emergency, instead of all this maintenance and upgrading. Ran said it was up to Jackie.
He’d never wanted to be a firefighter anyway. He wanted to sing. In fact, he was going off to the coffeehouse right now to audition for a gig.
So the Fire Department was down to a force of two: a bossy old woman and a newbie.
At last, something changed. Jaclyn sent him to Egypt to demonstrate his ability to disable tomb traps. He wasn’t quite sure of the relevance – OK, some involved fire or steam, and so had a vague resemblance to your standard domestic emergency, but it seemed unlikely that he’d have to deal with anaesthetic darts in Hidden Springs.
Maybe it was some kind of test. The day after his return, he was finally allowed out to deal with a large fire. Now
this was what he’d joined the Service for. Rushing off with lights flashing and sirens blaring.
Screeching to a halt outside a burning building and reeling out the hose.
Putting on protective gear to deal with sudden flare-ups.
Attacking doors with his axe...
...and then kicking them in.
Great stuff. He even got to strike heroic poses and have his muscles admired.
A pity it wasn’t her big sister, though.
And then Jaclyn pointed out that he hadn’t finished upgrading his fire extinguisher. Sigh.
Next chapter
As with Steward and Joe in the Life States, Phil was unable to go to his first few emergencies – they cancelled as soon as he tried. At least he’s not trying to complete the Firefighter Superhero LTW.
I have no idea what happened with Randolph Rico. He suddenly appeared in Phil’s relationship panel as a friend instead of a colleague, with his job given as Sing-A-Gram Novice. He died a few days later.
I realise I haven’t said anything about the names for this dynasty. Like the Gooles, all of the kids will have family names (although most will be more recent) but there is also a second theme for the heirs. Since this dynasty has something of an end-of-Sims 3 feeling, all of the heirs will be named after earlier Sims. Most (as with Adam and Philip) fit both categories.
The original Adam was the founder of my Apocalypse Challenge family. (I abandoned the game somewhere around generation four or five when it became too much like other challenges – largely a question of getting through different lifetime wishes.) Poor Adam never ate a proper meal and was usually hungry. Since he was, almost inevitably, in the military career, he started working out as soon as he got a job and spent his whole life from the middle of the first morning until extreme old age surrounded by nasty green clouds. Despite all of this, he easily achieved a large tombstone. His rather less smelly namesake has followed in his footsteps and had the necessary points before his adult birthday.
Phil is named after a female Sim (
). Philippa Stone was my legacy founder, my first da Vinci (I’d just bought Ambitions when I started the game) and the first Sim I played all the way through to old age and death. And yes, she did marry Christopher Steel. In my defence, that was also a first, at least for me.
