Last Best Hope: An Immortal Dynasty - Chapter Thirty-Two (7-21-15)

[Playalot]

No! I'm not ready for Pascal to die... argh. RIP Pascal you were one amazing dynasty spouse. Alden...*sigh* you're going to have to give up on the revenge buddy. I can see it from his perspective though but honestly.. just 'get with the program' man! It was lovely seeing more of Ajri, your buildings are really wonderful.

[mpart]

Alden lost his wife, but his dad told him about the things that would happen. He needs to give up his revenge, RIP favorite dynasty spouse ever. I will miss you! 

[intl_incident]

No! I'm not ready for Pascal to die... argh. RIP Pascal you were one amazing dynasty spouse.

RIP favorite dynasty spouse ever. I will miss you! 

Aww. Such love for Pascal! I loved him too. I didn't miss Fjord or Joline much, sorry to say, but I was really attached to Pascal.  I really like Rukhsana, too, and Amelia's spouse -- maybe I'm just more invested in the story now, because I really do feel kind of bad when they die.  I used to only get sad about the pets, because I am a softy that way.

Anyway, next post on the way!

[intl_incident]

After Pascal's death we hung a picture of him in a prominent place in the workshop, and we thought of him often.  But as he would have wanted, we got immediately back to work, planning for the construction of our portal. 



Amelia had grown into a creative, enthusiastic member of the team, and she picked up where Pascal had left off:  Grandfather and I continued to come up with conceptual notions grounded in magic or science, and she managed to somehow translate them into prototypes and models that actually worked.



We hadn't as yet built anything full-sized, but she was doing an outstanding job testing and modifying materials in ways that I never even thought of.  I think that maybe I was too well-versed in typical lab protocols.  I tended to overthink things and talk myself out of them before I even tried them.  Amelia, on the other hand, was supremely confident as an inventor, and far more willing to take the kinds of risks we needed to take in order to make the kinds of incredible intuitive leaps we were going to need to make to bridge the gap between science and magic.



Of course, sometimes her confidence got her into trouble...



And sometimes all of that intuition and creative thinking made her seem a bit eccentric.  But it usually worked out in unusually useful ways.  Like when she decided to build a giant yellow monstrosity of a machine, for instance, and spent weeks digging around in the backyard, pulling up all kinds of debris and making an unholy racket that the perception charm thankfully kept from disturbing the rest of the neighborhood.



Between the two of us, we had built an incredibly efficient, self-sustaining greenhouse to keep our collection of exotic plants alive in Aurora Skies' harsh climate.  And she even built a machine to help harvest them, by tugging them gently off their vines and stems with a finely tuned vacuum -- nothing I would have ever dreamed up myself.



Of course, it was the vacuum, combined with her aforementioned eccentricity that got it into her head that the easiest way to gather more raw materials for her experiments would be to blow the items in the in the local junkyard into scrap. 



The next morning, she was off on her usual rounds to the various thrift stores and consignment shops in town, looking for more strange treasures to use in her inventions.  And perhaps unsurprisingly, there was a policeman across the street from the junkyard, looking for witnesses to whatever had happened there the night before.

Amelia made a quick dive for the consignment shop door, but she wasn't quite fast enough.

"You there! Stop where you are!"



She put on her best innocent smile and turned around to greet the officer.   "Good morning!" she said cheerily, stopping just short of vacuously batting her eyelashes.  "My goodness, what happened over there?"

"Don't even try it," the officer said with a frown. "Security camera caught you in the act."



"Well it was just garbage!" she argued back, dropping the act in an instant.  "It's not like I blew up anything anyone wanted."

"Oh, no...There's no denying it. You blew up--" The officer stopped, perplexed by the sudden admission, and not sure what do in the face of Amelia's defiance.  He frowned at her for a long moment. She frowned back, arms crossed, foot tapping. 



"Listen," the policeman said, regrouping.  "You can't go around blowing things up. It's not safe."

"Ohhhh! Ha!" She laughed -- or, more accurately, snorted.  "Is that what you're worried about?  I was perfectly safe.  It was a small charge, and I was behind the brick wall in back."  She waved a hand, dismissively.  "Couldn't have hurt me."

The officer had cocked his eyebrow at the sound of the snort, and he didn't seem to find Amelia's nonchalance very endearing. "If you're going to wander around town setting off explosives, I could care less what you do to yourself. It's the innocent bystanders I'm worried about."

"Hey!"



"What?"  He tilted his head, mimicking her earlier innocent expression.

"I wouldn't wander around town setting off explosives! They're dangerous!"

"Oh, you think?"  Now he was sarcastic. "Listen, lady--"

"My name's Amelia."

"Listen, LADY," the officer said again, gritting his teeth. "I can't arrest you for blowing up the junk.  Turns out you're just outside the town limits, and the owner's not pressing charges."

"Of course not," Amelia shot back. "I did him a favor. He hasn't cleared that place out in years."

"HOWEVER," the officer continued over the top of Amelia's interruption. "If I catch you in town with anything that even looks like an explosive -- and I mean fireworks, firecrackers, bottle rockets, propane tanks," he was counting things off on his fingers as he listed them, "pressure cookers, gasoline cans, car batteries, fire extinguishers, hot peppers...

"Oh, come on!"



"You'd better not pop a balloon," he continued without pause, "shake up a soda can, put mints in your Coke..."

"Diet Coke," she interrupted again.

He stopped and glared at her.

"I'm just saying," she said. "It won't work right with regular Coke.  It has to be diet. The aspartame makes the reaction bigger, and... the mints have to... they have to be bumpy, and..." She trailed off, as he was still glaring her way.

"WHATEVER," he roared. "Just stay out of trouble."

"Yes, SIR," she said with a mock salute, but she was saluting his back as he stalked off, so she couldn't see the smile he had been trying to hide.



A few days later, Amelia was lounging on the thrift store's ugliest couch, paging through her latest list of pieces and parts required for inventing. "You don't happen to have a tractor tire lying around do you, Wilson," she called to the clerk at the register.

"Does this look like the kind of place that would have a tractor tire lying around?"



"Do you want an honest answer for that?"  She didn't look up from her phone as she made additional notes. "I guess I'll try the junkyard again.  Hopefully the stormtrooper will have moved along by now."

"Well this is awkward," drawled the aforementioned stormtrooper. He'd come in while she was typing, and now he was eyeing her with a raised brow.  "But I had a feeling I'd find you here…"

"Oh, I suppose now you want to arrest me for loitering?"



"No, now I want to know if I can take you to a movie."

"What?"

"A movie," he replied. "Actors. Actresses. Plays in a theater."



"I've been to a movie," Amelia scoffed. "Not usually with a police escort though."

The officer laughed at the wary response.  "I think we got off on the wrong foot the last time we met, but I'm completely different out of uniform," he promised.

"What makes you think I want to see you naked?"  Amelia's tone was sarcastic, but it drew another laugh from the officer, who held up his hands in surrender.

"Stop! OK -- it was a bad choice of words. But I'm a lot different off duty," he tried again. "Come on. Give it a shot…"  He smiled eagerly, and despite herself, Amelia was charmed.

"Fine," she said as she shook his hand.  "But I'm not going to call you 'Officer…'" she peered at his name tag and badge "'Gooden.'"

"It's Jake," he said with a grin.  "And I'll see you Saturday."



That weekend, though, she was standing in front of the theater, typing furiously on her cell phone.

…waiting here for an hour and u didn't even bother to come and I'm standing alone on the sidewalk and some scruffy looking guy in a terrible sweater has just walked up to stare at me so thanx for nothing



She hit send, and looked up with a frown. "WHAT?" she demanded.

The scruffy looking guy opened his mouth to reply, but then held up a finger, and dug in his pocket for his phone as it beeped.  Then he started to laugh.  "Scruffy?"



Amelia's eyes got wide and her cheeks got pink as she realized what had happened.

"I happen to like this sweater," Jake added as she reached out for her hand. "And I told you I was a lot different off-duty."

"What do you do with your hair?"

"Tuck it into the hat."

"Huh." She tried to think of something caustic to say, but was completely at a loss.  Jake's smile was too enchanting.

So they walked in together, and by the time they were out, they were a happy couple.



And few months later, after a few more dates (and a few more arguments)…



…they were in a hot air balloon over the waterfalls of Aurora Skies.



And in no time at all, their unlikely first meeting had turned into a proposal.

[mpart]

Their so cute together!  I loved how they met and especially while she was waiting for him to show up. "A scruffy looking guy with an ugly sweater." Hilarious!

[Playalot]

Aw man! How to make a perfect story even more perfect? Add in a hottie in a uniform.  Awesome story telling as always. Amelia's character is fantastic, her clothes really enhance her personality and her self confidence/sass makes her very endearing.

[intl_incident]

Aw man! How to make a perfect story even more perfect? Add in a hottie in a uniform.  Awesome story telling as always. Amelia's character is fantastic, her clothes really enhance her personality and her self confidence/sass makes her very endearing.

Their so cute together!  I loved how they met and especially while she was waiting for him to show up. "A scruffy looking guy with an ugly sweater." Hilarious!

Ha, ha, thanks guys! I'm glad those scenes were as fun for you to read as they were for me to write.   And good news! As you will probably surmise from some of the foreshadowing in the next post, we are definitely entering prime territory for hotties in uniforms!

Next post incoming!

Oh, and btw, I have not forgotten that I left the Ajri story on a bit of a cliffhanger.  But I'm on a business trip, and my Ajri save files are on my home computer.  So you get more from Aurora Skies tonight, and hopefully some more Ajri in a couple of days. We need to see what Nella and Torin are up to, not to mention the three baddies.

[intl_incident]

Amelia found herself a dress at the consignment shop, as well as a few decorations, and she and Jake had a quiet party in back of the barn, on one of Aurora Skies' rare bright sunny days. 



Jake had acclimated himself pretty well to our strange world.  Amelia had tried to explain it to him up in the hot air balloon, before she'd accepted his proposal, but he hadn't been deterred.

"We're a little different, Jake.  I mean, kind of a lot different. Weird, even."

"I'd noticed," he replied with a smile.



"HEY!" Amelia gave his shoulder an affectionate shove. "I'm not kidding.  It's hard to explain, but--"

"But it doesn't matter," he said simply. "I want to marry you.  I like your kind of weird."



And in fact he'd taken it all in stride: the disappearing barn, the workshop full of scientific equipment and magical potions, Amelia's great-great-grandfather not just alive and kicking but just as sharp or sharper than the rest of us.  He'd traded one amazed look with Rukhsana  --  who remembered very well what it was like to wonder what she'd just gotten herself into -- but his soon-to-be mother-in-law just grinned back, shrugged one shoulder, and poured another bottle of gem-infused potion into the unlikely machine we used to contact our relatives in the other world.

So now he was one of us, married into the family, and fully invested in the odd little world we called home.



And a few months later, Amelia was pregnant with yet another den'Rhelys heir. 



That curtailed some of her mining, and Jake had convinced her to stop blowing up parts of the countryside so she wouldn't call attention to herself.  But she kept up her tinkering, and before long she'd put together a machine she thought might magnetize all the lodestone we’d need.



Heliolite, it turned out, what just another name for sunstone, which was relatively easy to find.  And by the time little Lucas was born, we'd amassed a large stash of it.  Pallasite, on the other hand, was another conundrum.  It turns out it was a type of meteor that was run through with peridot crystals.  We could get our hands on meteors, and we could get our hands on peridot, but Grandfather insisted that neither one of them on its own would suffice.  Trying to fuse them together mechanically was almost impossible, and the little bit of success we had used massive amounts of raw material for very little return, all of which was likely to fail in the final design of the lotus.



So while we were making some progress, we were still looking for adamantine, and now we were looking for pallasite as well.  Rukhsana spent hours with her telescope, looking for meteors, and teaching Lucas about the stars and planets and all the other strange objects filling up the galaxy.



He was completely enthralled by it all, collecting rocket ships and making mobiles, papering his room with posters about science fiction movies and outer space discoveries, and dressing up like a robot or an astronaut to play out one fantastical adventure or another.



He didn't spend all of his time with comic books and video games -- in fact, he was a star athlete on his youth soccer team, and he made the most of Aurora Skies' winter weather to go snowboarding as well.



But unfortunately for the local high school's sports program, who would have to make do without his athletic talents, he had his heart set on attending his dad's alma mater of Fort Starch Military School.  And so just like when I'd headed off to University, and my mom and dad had wished me well, Jake and Amelia sent Lucas off with hugs and proud smiles… and Amelia's last minute advice: "Don't let them turn you into a clone!  You're weird, Lucas! Remember that! "



"I don't think he heard me."

"I think the entire neighborhood heard you."

"LUCAS! STAY WEIRD!"



While he was gone, we made some significant changes to the barn, pulling out the last of the old stables, and replacing the wood and hay with a modern laboratory.  We sold off some of the items we'd already experimented on in order to buy the equipment I needed to continue testing various gems and metals for the properties of adamantine, and that Amelia needed in order to build a new device that Grandfather had dreamed up, to fuse together materials in a process he referred to as transmogrification.

Amelia was still digging up all sorts of new materials with her mining equipment, and the barn was starting to look like either the world's most livestock-friendly geologic museum, or a strange excuse for a jewelry shop.



All of the activity kept Rukhsana and I busy in front of the lab equipment or out by the telescope, but we both knew that we were both getting older, and that eventually we'd have to part, just like my mother and father.  Grandfather had already made sure I'd eaten the special meal that had preserved him and my mother for so long.  But it wouldn't work on Rukhsana any more than it had on Pascal, or Joline, or Fjord.



So we made what time we could to be together, whether working with each other on complicated research, or taking simple walks under the fall trees.



And when she slipped out into the brisk night air to search the sky for meteors, I was never far behind her with a cup of coffee or tea.



“I don’t suppose you’d humor an old man, and watch the stars with him like you did when he was young?”

Rukhsana laughed, and stood up from her telescope, stretching her tired shoulders as she reached for the warm mug. “I suppose I might, if you don’t mind sitting next to an old woman.”

We lowered ourselves to a blanket, not quite as agilely as we’d done it at University, but just like on that night at school, I reached out to touch Rukhsana’s hand as we stared up into the heavens.



“I don’t think I see Aldebaran,” I said, squinting upward.  The auroras that were the town’s namesake were obscuring much of the view.

“Why do you need to see Aldebaran, Mr. Moon God?” she teased me, linking her fingers in mine. “I thought I was your beautiful star.”



“Always,” I said with a smile.  We sat like that for a long few moments, chatting about Amelia and Jake, and about Lucas, off at boarding school.

“Well,” she finally said, struggling to her feet. “I should get back to work.  The sky won’t search itself, and -- oh!  Etienne, I think-- I--“  Her hand went to her head as she looked my way, startled and then sad.



And then moments later, with no more ceremony or fanfare, she was simply gone.

[mpart]

That was a sad ending.  I love Amelia,"Stay Weird!" 

[Playalot]

That was a beautiful send-off for Rukhsana. That's the sad thing about dynasties, losing the spouses (well, if you are fond of them!). I loved Amelia's 'stay weird' lol that was just so like her. I can't wait to see what Lucas really looks like but the screenies with him as a nooboo and toddler were very cute, just there but tucked away to the side. Cute!

[intl_incident]

That was a sad ending.  I love Amelia,"Stay Weird!" 

That was a beautiful send-off for Rukhsana. That's the sad thing about dynasties, losing the spouses (well, if you are fond of them!). I loved Amelia's 'stay weird' lol that was just so like her. I can't wait to see what Lucas really looks like but the screenies with him as a nooboo and toddler were very cute, just there but tucked away to the side. Cute!

Yeah, I will miss Rukhsana.  She was a really cheerful, happy Sim to have around.  I think she had the family-oriented trait, so she always wanted to play with the kids, which was awesome, so that I didn't have to keep them out of mischief.   I know I've said it before, but it bears repeating: the best thing about this dynasty for me is that I am playing with a bunch of traits and LTWs and careers that I have never tried before.  It's been like a totally new game for me, to the point where I am thinking about doing a Life Statres Dynasty after this, or a 4x4, to see some of the other stuff I've missed.  (For example, I had Geoff drink a witch potion, so he can play with wands for some upcoming stuff. I never played a witch before!  And Geoff's not even doing most of the witch stuff, like broom-riding, or casting spells, etc.  He's just sitting in his room playing with his wand -- which, uh, sounds kinda bad when you say it that way. )

Anyway, Lucas is a hottie in a different way from Etienne.  I'll see if I can get a short post up later tonight or tomorrow, so you can see him before I get back to work on the next Ajri post.

[melancholy_anju]

I had almost forgotten how gorgeous the whole of Ajri was. That palace is amazing. I'm so glad Jaff knows Ajiana is alright, and of course being the sap that I am I totally teared up at that scene. Losing Pascal and Rukhsana was also sad, but I couldn't stop laughing at Amelia. Can't wait to see what dear Lucas brings to the table so to speak.

[Trip]

It's good to stay weird but bad to lose beloved dynasty mortals.

And just a little note but I like the detail of the meal only working immortals whether they want to use it others or not. The alternative just made the challenge and the immortals sound cruel without some further explaining.

[intl_incident]

Hey guys -- No new post yet (sorry!) but I wanted to let you know I have not forgotten about this story or the Ajri one, and I WILL wrap them up!  Work has been insane recently (I am the director of a government facility and our workload has gone up by 300%, it's been the end of the fiscal year, plus we've got a gigantic VIP visit tomorrow). 

Hopefully (fingers crossed!) I will get a new post up no later than Friday. So sorry I have been neglecting this story again!

[RainBeau]

Indy! This story keeps getting better! I haven't been caught up in so long. I was raving to my husband about it. The logic behind the dynasty makes my brain happy. As always I want to say more but I am struggling with a baby on my lap. So I'll just hope for more story soon.