Ama emerged unscathed after her night in the Cursed Sarcophagus of the Kings, merely feeling oddly powerful and with an athletic skill to match her sister’s – but maybe she should sleep in her bed in future. (In fact, I had to put the sarcophagus into the family inventory because they all seemed to be irresistibly attracted to it. I’d have thought a comfortable bed would be a far more appealing sleeping place.)
Lara was determined to prepare herself thoroughly for any future encounters with mummies, working out whenever she got the chance and, on their next trip to China, visiting the Academy to start learning martial arts.
Ama had registered as a self-employed photographer just after her teen birthday and less than a week later she reached the top of the career.
There wasn’t much point in continuing with schooling. Lara was close to ageing up anyway and Ama joined in with the early birthday cake.
Those are Lara’s work clothes, by the way – she’d rolled a wish to get a part-time job and so was temporarily working at the mausoleum. The girl behind Ama, on the left of the screenshot, is a babysitter who’d been called to look after Fleur several days before. She was asked to hang out so that Ama could get the ‘Babysitter’ photo and had somehow failed to go home again.
Both girls had chosen their lifetime wishes long before and Lara was looking as though she’d finish hers pretty quickly. She’d already explored six tombs in Egypt and six in China with her father. Now she took a solo trip to France to polish off the final six. Except it wasn’t that easy. By this stage, the game was getting pretty buggy from all of the travelling and it hit Lara in a very big way. After her first day in France, she was no longer able to do anything in tombs other than ‘use stairs’, even when there weren’t any. Research online showed that this isn’t that unusual a bug, even though I hadn’t seen it before, and suggested that the first day of any given trip was likely to be OK, even if the Sim was affected by the glitch otherwise. So Lara cut short her holiday, went home to recover from the travelling and then back to France as soon as the moodlet had faded. With the aid of a teleporter in their holiday home, she rushed around getting to the final room of various tombs as fast as possible and managed to complete the sixth before the day was over.
Marco was fast approaching his elder birthday and still hadn’t completed his own lifetime wish. He was having a real problem with the James Vaughan Command Centre: the family who lived in the house above were always out until late at night, even though they had young children, and then insisted it was too late to visit when they did come home. It took two trips to Egypt just to catch them in – and then Marco couldn’t find one of the codes. He’d used the loo and turned on the stereo but where was the book with the final number?
Maybe I’d remembered the wrong bookcase…. No, there only seemed to be one. Finally, after pausing the game for an inordinately long time, it occurred to me that Marco might not be able to interact with the bookcase because it only contained basic skill books and he was a pretty skilled Sim by this point. Fortunately, Ama was along on this trip, getting another set of Egyptian photos, since her original ones had forgotten where they’d been taken as soon as she arrived back home. I sent her over to the house and, yes, there were skill books in the bookcase that she could read – and, in the first one she picked up, the missing code. Now Marco could start exploring the tomb.
Or not, as it turned out. The family decided that Ama was acting inappropriately and kicked them both out. And then it was too late to visit again. And then the family went back to being out all the time. And then Marco’s visa ran out.
Finally, on his next visit, he was able to complete the tomb and continue with the adventure chain. After that, he whizzed through the remaining tombs, picking up his final visa level and achieving his lifetime wish on the way.
(I didn’t managed to get a screenshot of the big numbers over his head, because there was a pop-up about the next stage of the adventure in the way.)
The day after his return home, Marco aged up to elder and, immediately afterwards, Grim came for Crystal.
(You’ll notice that Marco, like his twin, tended to revert to minionhood when he aged up.)
I wasn’t sorry to lose Crystal. She and Marco had never managed to repair their marriage. Their relationship bar was still maxed out, thanks to Marco’s charisma challenges, but they acted as though they were only acquaintances. And then there was her other odd behaviour. In the last few days of her life, Crystal had taken to wandering to the front edge of the lot and just standing there – for hours, if I didn’t notice and tell her to do something else. Sometimes she needed resetting. Given the number of things I was trying to do in this house, I was quite glad not to have to keep an eye on her any more.
Time passed. Inigo and Fleur aged up to teen and were both taken travelling by their dad. Fleur spent most of her trip to France either photosynthesising…
…or hanging out with plants in Tuatha’s Garden and the cellars of the Landgraab château.
Soon after her return, Fleur reached an ‘A’ in school and took the chance to overtake her elder brother.
She chose the Bottomless Nectar Cellar LTW…
…and achieved it at once, thanks to the venerable vintages Marco had collected in his travels.
The entire cellar was sold immediately thereafter. I wasn’t sure whether the existing bottles would count towards the self-employed nectar-making career but I wanted Fleur to do it on her own anyway.
Fleur turned out to have inherited the mascot trait, even though she’s not genetically related to Crystal and Marco.
That costume looks really odd with a green face
.
The morning after her birthday, she went down to the cellar and started on her new skill.
Ama was still trying to complete her supermax and lifetime wish. I’d thought, in my out-of-date Simming innocence, that ‘Pleading to the Sphinx’ would be the only tricky shot in the ‘Sims in Motion’ collection. Wrong. Last time I tried it, rifling through bins was dead easy. I assume it was the University patch that took it back to where it was in the early days of Sims 3, when only police, journalists and private eyes could do it. Well, if dumpster diving had become something you did in actual dumpsters, maybe they’d also updated the requirement for the photo.… No, apparently not. I got several family members to try but ‘Dumpster Diving’ failed to register on Ama’s camera. OK, then, why not put someone into a job where searching through bins was desirable? So Lara became an investigator.
It seemed to take a long time to get a suitable case but, in the meantime, she was asked to investigate an outbreak of hacking by her Aunt Chi. It was nice to see her again.
Finally, a case required searching a bin and mailbox for clues. I called Ama over… and nothing happened. Again, the photo was only ‘Family Member’. Once that stage of the job was finished, I randomly tried clicking on the neighbours’ bin to see whether Lara could interact with it. She could.
And the photo registered! Ama now only needed two more shots to complete the collection and her supermax.
Marco had now completed all of the tombs in the game apart from the Dragon Cave. Repeated visits to Shang Simla hadn’t improved the situation – the assorted locals who became the target Sim still insisted he had to go to China to continue the quest even though he was already there. I sent the whole family on holiday there again and this time, I used testing cheats. After all, Marco and Lara had completed their lifetime wishes – it was only my desire for completeness that was keeping the explorations going. So I went into Edit Town and put an unlocked door next to the locked one. Marco finished the tomb in a few hours – although he continued to be plagued by phone calls from Chinese Sims inviting him to travel out there and continue the quest.
With everything explored, Marco returned to the family’s holiday home to spend time with his children – and maybe with a few other people as well. He was showing signs of turning into the Merry Widower, chatting up every attractive female in town and providing Ama with several missing romantic photos. He’d already acquired a naughty reputation thanks to the flirtatious relic dealer in Al Simhara, so maybe he thought he should just make the most of it.
One evening, the garden suddenly acquired a cheap fireplace and a pile of rugs, which soon needed the attentions of a brave Sim.
‘Fighting Fire’ was the last shot that Ama needed.
Although I have had a couple of other Sims who have supermaxed photography, this was the first time that I’ve managed to get all five challenges to register simultaneously, so I had to take a screenshot.
After clearing up the mess, I left them mostly on free will for a few days. I felt they (and I) deserved a break. Then the unexpected happened again. I’d had the camera on Inigo, who was taking photos at the Academy, when the view suddenly panned back across town to their holiday home. It was Marco. Just like his big sister, he seemed to have spent too long diving – and now it was too late for a rescue. Grim was already on the lot. Making the best of a terrible situation, I told Inigo to teleport home at once. Ama was already there. And so they became my first Sims to successfully snap ‘Death on Vacation’.
Depressed, I sent the survivors home immediately afterwards, only to find that another bug had bitten. I could see them arriving home. I could see Lara playing Gnubb and Fleur tending the garden but I couldn’t look inside the house. In fact, they were no longer the active family. Nor was anyone else.
After a few restarts and no improvement, I concluded that the death of the Sim who’d booked the holiday had probably messed up the whole travelling mechanism and that the only thing to do was to go back to an earlier save, before Marco had drowned.
This time, I fenced off the pool.
All of the travelling, as well as bloating the file to a ridiculous extent (after two generations, it was bigger than most of my dynasties), caused quite a few glitches. The family tree got totally messed up at one point: Inigo was the only one of the kids that still registered as the offspring of both parents. Lara was now unrelated to Crystal, while Fleur was recorded as Crystal’s daughter rather than Marco's. Poor Ama was unrelated to anyone else, which was genetically accurate but didn’t reflect the emotional reality. Laura had disappeared from the family tree altogether, while Damien was suddenly a resident of Champs les Sims, which he’d never even visited. I used Master Controller Cheats to correct most of the errors but was unable to sort out Damien’s nationality or to rescue Laura from oblivion.
Possibly the oddest effect was on the imaginary friends. Riverview had been an IF-free zone until Inigo was born but both he and Fleur were sent dolls by obscure relatives. Inigo’s doll became a fully-fledged IF as soon as he aged up to child, mostly because I wanted to try to complete the Generations photo collection…
…but when he travelled for the first time, Puzzle became just a doll again – and a second IF doll appeared in his inventory. By moving time, he had four of them. Fleur’s doll, Pat, had remained just a doll – but when she came back from France, Fleur found she had an almost-real imaginary friend, called Buddy.
Pat was still in inventory and was later joined by another doll. All very odd.
And is this a Chinese imaginary friend? She’s just a random Sim the family met in Shang Simla but that hair colour looks very IF-like.
