::1.3:: South for the Winter

Autumn arrives in Twinbrook.

Insert clever joke about the Birdhouse living up to its name here.

"Hey, have you been to the community gardens yet?" Shari asks one evening—the sink exploding had reminded her, somehow.

Staci, still wearing her (in her opinion) cartoonish and unnecessary work costume, shakes her head.

"No," she manages to say, and immediately gets a mouthful of water.

"Let's go tomorrow." Shari tosses their leftover mac and cheese in the fridge. "I think you'll like it!"

The demand for her services is slowly increasing, but Shari still has a lot of downtime during the day. If there are no pending clients and she isn't in the mood to make more sketches for her portfolio, she grabs her guitar.

Recently, she's felt more confident in her abilities, and takes it with her as she explores different areas around town. That's how she stumbled across the Twinbrook Community Gardens, sitting clear-across the other side of town from the Birdhouse.

As predicted, Staci is impressed by their little outing. "I had no idea this was here! And we can just take anything we want?"

"Technically, yeah. I figure we're only supposed to take what we need, of course."

Unfortunately, as it happens so often in Twinbrook, they get rained out after less than an hour at the park.

"The sun was starting to set, anyway," Staci notes, trying to fit one final head of lettuce in her backpack.

"We can go wait in the visitor's center," Shari says. "I'll call a taxi."

"Staci, c'mon! The taxi's waiting!"

Staci hovers at the garden entrance. "You go on ahead... I'll catch up by broom later."

"You're gonna get soaked!"

"Umbrella spell!"

But before that, a quick, temporary shrinking spell...

Shari had been complaining that the Birdhouse's winding, creaking staircase was impossible to navigate in the dark.

Staci applauds herself for her creative problem-solving—at least, that's what she tells herself spurred the impulse.

The next morning, Shari is running so late for her newest assignment that she misses the new structure outside the house entirely.

DeAndre Wolfe is something of a celebrity, and most definitely one of the fanciest clients available in Twinbrook. She cannot mess this job up.

However, when she arrives at the house, only Gala Ball, DeAndre's young lover, is there to greet her.

Ms. Ball will be hosting a party by the end of the week, and needs Shari to do as much as she can to spruce things up before then. She also seems more excited to share her party plans than talk shop, and Shari spends the first half of the job getting an in-depth play-by-play on the renting of DJs and the choosing of charcuterie.

"I was thinking to knock this wall out, to completely open up the room for dancing," Gala says when Shari finally brings the conversation back around. She glances at the cat. "Oh, and we're going to need new furniture."

Shari sighs. It's always the furniture with this town.

Still, somehow, by the end of the day, Gala has agreed to a timeframe-appropriate proposal. Shari will be visiting the Wolfe mansion every day for the rest of the week to oversee the changes, but the hardest part—getting the client to agree to a realistic plan—is over.

Now, she notices.

"Staci," she says slowly, finding her roommate reading at the kitchen table inside. "How did that highway-sized street light get into our front yard?"

When she hears Shari's tone is more suspicious than enthused, Staci hides behind her copy of The Fortunes of Fortune Telling. "You said we could take anything..."

It clicks right away. "Anything we need, Staci! Need!"

"We do need it! It would take miles of holiday lights on the stair railing to see anything otherwise!"

Shari feels her blood pressure rising—but then she thinks about buying, unraveling, and running all those holiday lights.

"How is it even lit up?" she huffs instead. "Doesn't it need to be connected to the city power grid or something?"

"Magic?" Staci offers sheepishly.

Anyway, thanks to her work with DeAndre Wolfe, Shari nets her first award. Whoo!

The money brought in by the project is enough for the roommates to finally expand. A second floor is added to the Birdhouse.

There's much debate over who will get the new space. Shari insists she prefers keeping her sleeping bag close to her drawing table. Staci thinks, then, that Shari should move all her work supplies up to the new room and turn it into a studio. Shari says she likes sleeping and working in her little nook on the first floor; it's cozy. She's gotten attached to that nook.

Shari wins by physically moving Staci's purple sleeping bag up to the second floor. The lamp she chose as a comfort item when they first moved in together goes, too.

Staci acquiesces. Touched by Shari's generousity, she doesn't admit that sleeping by herself in the new, barebones room is kind of lonely.

Here's a shot of the house with its freshly-constructed second floor (which is actually the fourth floor, according to build mode, and now the game won't let me go any higher.) 

Staci is coming home from work on a particularly witchy-looking night. Good thing she has that street light to help her get inside!

The expansion whisks away all of their savings, leaving not even enough to furnish it. Still, Shari scrapes together a few spare simoleons to buy her own small reward.

She rolled a wish for a tattoo, and this guy is going to give her one.

"So what are you going for here? What's the vibe?"

"Um... something yellow." Shari supposes she should've sketched up an idea or two herself before coming, but the whole thing is a bit of a whim.

"I dig it." The artist eyes her with a grin. "And what's the symbolism? What does it mean?"

"It means I like yellow."

The artist shows her a botanical piece from his catalogue.

"Flowers for the lovely lady," he explains with a dramatic flourish.

Shari raises an eyebrow, but agrees to the design as-is. It doesn't matter to her if her tattoo is completely unique or not.

At the end of the session, the artist hands Shari her bill—with his number written in the margins.

Shari crumples the paper and tosses it over her shoulder. "Are you serious right now?"

The artist blinks, taken aback. "I mean, we agreed to the price beforehand—"

"I'm not talking about the price, numbskull!"

"I—"

"Did you really think this would work? Give me a break! I can't even imagine doing this to one of my clients! The nerve!"

Long story short, this is Shari's first and last tattoo in Twinbrook.

The encounter makes her wonder, though...

She's always wanted to start a family someday. When she first arrived in Twinbrook, she thought that once she was settled in, she could start looking for someone to share that vision with.

She's settled in now, so why hasn't she started looking?

The weather grows colder. One day, the roommates find Bonne Chance's enclosure empty.

"Do you think he went south for the winter?" Staci asks, wringing her hands nervously.

"I think this is what happens when you leave a bird outside," Shari replies.

//

Shari has the hot-headed trait, so she often enters a lot and immediately finds someone to yell at. The scene with the tattoo artist actually happened backwards—first she yelled at him, then got a tattoo. I switched it to better incorporate it into the story, but the original order was pretty funny.

Staci is fulfilling the My Precious roll with her kleptomaniac trait. I don't know why I chose that one, when collecting literally anything else would've fit her personality better. I also keep trying to find things to steal that I don't feel like I have to go back and re-add so the public lots don't look weird. It's a struggle.

I dunno what happened with Bonne Chance. He was being cared for consistently, so I really did just assume he flew off because I kept his cage outside. Oops.

I feel like in my previous legacies there would be kids in the house by now. I'm usually pretty impatient about getting the next generation born, but for some reason I spent a lot of Staci and Shari's young adulthood focusing on their careers and house upgrades. The next stage is coming soon, I promise!