Mm, it's probably harder to DO the requirements than reading them. 
Just a bit
.
Juggling RequirementsJustin graduated with high honour and, like his grandmother, was voted Most Likely to Achieve His Lifetime Wish.
He changed out of his cap and gown as soon as the ceremony was over and hurried across the road to the park. Good, the proprietor was there. Justin went over, introduced himself and asked to be accepted as a trainee acrobat.
Wearing a mime’s outfit but just standing around in the park felt a bit silly. It’d be more convincing if he tried out a few skills – and he might as well put out a jar, just in case anyone felt like leaving a tip.
Ouch! This was harder than it looked. It was probably just as well that the ‘audience’ were more interested in each other than in watching his performance.
Perhaps he’d do better if he worked out a little: holding those poses was hard work. He headed over to the gym.
The treadmill was effective but boring. He found he preferred jogging around the town, where the terrain was nicely varied for working on different aspects of fitness. The hills were great for interval training and the sandy beaches provided a different sort of resistance.
Out on his favourite route one day, he stumbled, almost literally, over an unexpected find. A large rock. He was pretty sure, from listening to the rest of the family talking about their shared interest, that it was a meteorite. Maybe he should take it home to show them. And carrying something so big and heavy was bound to be good training – provided he didn’t put his back out picking it up.
The astronomers of the family were excited. Dan had seen the meteor falling to the ground and had been about to go out and look for it himself. They went back to their telescopes with greater enthusiasm than ever.
Well, all of them except Pearl. She was still fascinated by the stars but they couldn’t compete with her new deathfish pond.
Justin was still obsessed with insects in general and fireflies in particular. He finally tracked down the elusive
F. caeruleus at the graveyard…
…and completed his collection, although the Simlish Entomological Society refused to recognise his achievement.
Fireflies weren’t the only colourful, glowing things to be found in the cemetery, of course.
Justin became quite friendly with Kimberley and Terry but he knew there were other ghosts he’d never even seen yet. What were they like? So he acquired another hobby – looking up the names on the headstones in the library’s archives and discovering as much as he could about the lives of those who were buried at Lidview. With his athletic training, learning new acrobatic skills and his continuing quest to find new beetles and butterflies, his days were very full, even without the phone calls from the rest of the family.
“I’ve just seen another meteor. Since you’re out and about anyway, could you jog over and have a look for debris?”
Some days it felt as though he was finding more space rocks than insects.
He was becoming a competent mime and juggler and had put together a stage set that reflected his interest in graveyards. Gothic and gloomy – but effective, he hoped. It was time to go public with his act: the upcoming SimFest at Verde Park would provide the ideal opportunity.
He arrived at the park just as a magician was finishing his performance, asked the proprietor whether he could join the contest and, almost before he was ready, he was being introduced to the crowd – if you could call them that. On a weekday afternoon, the park was relatively empty.
The show went well, on the whole. He dropped a couple of batons but managed to make it look like part of the routine. At least, he
thought the audience thought it was deliberate. They certainly applauded rather than booed at the end, although he’d been hoping for a rather more rapturous reception. Maybe he should stick around and watch the other acts – see what the competition was like.
The next performer was a singer. Justin watched as he set up the stage and…
What?!
That was
his stage set! It was identical, down to the last effects pod and spooky doll.
He couldn’t watch this. He jogged backwards and forwards across the park, hoping the exercise would help to cool his anger a little – although not too much. He and the elderly singer would have to have words after the contest. You couldn’t go around stealing other performers' props and expect to get away with it. On the other hand, what could he do? He couldn’t really beat up an old man but such behaviour deserved some sort of punishment.
The singer finished his final chorus, bowed and walked away from the stage. Justin took a deep breath and started to follow, still trying to work out exactly what he was going to say. But then…
That effectively finished the festival. No-one else felt like competing. Once the Grim Reaper had left, the proprietor waked up to the microphone and announced the winner: Justin A. Knott.
He might have won but the SimFest had left a nasty taste. Justin resolved to avoid them in future and to stick to normal gigs. He auditioned absolutely everywhere. Some proprietors turned him down, unsurprisingly for a relative unknown, but a few were prepared to give him a chance.
As he became better-known and his act became more spectacular, he moved on from the coffeehouse and park to bigger and better venues.
A successful performance at Los Sueños Private Club left him very close to the top of his career. After the show, he performed for tips in the lobby and was about to get that final promotion when the proprietor called time.
Well, in that case, he’d just carry on in the car park.
And, a couple of poses later, he achieved his lifetime wish of becoming a Master Acrobat.
Next chapter
That SimFest was just plain weird. Maybe Grim has strong opinions on stealing, although the death penalty seems like, well, overkill.
Justin, like Phil back in generation two, is named after a female Sim. Justina was the generation four spouse in my legacy and my longest-lived Sim.
She and her husband Matthew had three sets of conflicting traits, which didn’t seem to get in the way of their relationship at all. In fact, their devotion became a little irritating at times. Matt, who hated the outdoors, kept throwing increasingly large wishes to stay indoors for
x hours but kept nullifying them by voluntarily going outside to ask Justina to play catch. Goodness knows why – she had supermaxed athletic skill before she was a full adult and Matt had none at all, so she’d slam the ball at him and he’d drop it, going “Ouch!” Not my idea of fun. (Incidentally, what happened to the wishes to stay indoors? They were part of the reason why I chose Izzy rather than Georgie as the generation five heir in the Life States but she never rolled any of them. In fact, I’ve not seen them at all in the past two years or so.)
Matt and Justina had two sets of twins, one pair just after their wedding and the other after she’d become an astronaut. With her one-day-a-week work schedule, she was on maternity leave well into elderhood. Because she was about a week younger than her husband and he died at 90 days, poor Justina spent more than half of her life as a widow. She outlived the older twins, got her wish to have ten grandchildren (three of them SimBots but still…) and met several of her great-grandchildren. She stayed lively and energetic to the end: typically, she was dancing and flirting at a party when she finally keeled over, aged 146.
For the sake of the dynasty, I hope Justin doesn’t take after her in that respect.
