1.6 The Birds And The Bees... In 25 Words Or Less!

Venice works her way up through the ranks, eventually forming her own band, 'Simphony Of Destruction', who mostly play a mix of pub rock to old school metal, and who specialize in doing metal covers of non-metal songs.  After performing concerts, she likes to hang out, outside the venue, and do a mixture of playing solo, and meeting fans. She makes a lot of friends doing this, and people throw money into her guitar case as well, which is nice.

Lilli continues to be anywhere help is needed, whether it is random repairs at the science facility, helping at the junkyard, or acquiring beds and furniture for some of the poorer folk in town. The couple have finished expanding their home, and now start to consider how to use the giant empty spaces.

Marcus settles into school, his grades slowly climb, eventually gaining an A. This is surprising considering how many times Marcus arrives late. His bedroom is on the second floor, furthest away from the front door, and he doesn't always hear the bus honk.

At the end of the first school week, there is a practice fire drill, he realizes one of the teachers is a fairy like Lilli, there is also a ghost girl, although she is much older than himself. There are supernatural kids at his new school, how cool is that!

The family have breakfast together, before Marcus leaves for school. As he is leaving for the bus, Venice tells Lilli, that she saw a stray dog in the backyard with Gypsy, when Lilli asks what they were doing, Venice takes Lilli by the hand and leads her outside to demonstrate. 

 

Because Lilli and Venice both put so many hours into building an empire to hand down to Marcus, their schedules keep them apart at times. Venice can't cook to save her life, anyway, that's her excuse to herself when she hits ice-cream for breakfast one morning.

Marcus starts bringing friends home after school, only girls his mother notes. Mostly they do their homework together, talk about school, and then they wander off home. The first time Marcus brings home a boy, the boy is loud and excitable.
Marcus briefly introduces Simon to Venice. As Marcus takes his new friend on a tour of the house, Venice can't help but overhear large parts of the conversation.

"Wow dude, your place is freaking huge! Some of the girls at school told me you had a really big house, but dude, this place is monster!"
"Man, my entire house would fit into your pool room, I'm so jelly."
Marcus explains that his mother grew up in an orphanage, sharing a bedroom with twenty other children, and that Lilli, being a fairy, preferred wide open, and well lit spaces.

When Marcus points out the window to Lilli, who is working in the garden, says "That's my other mum, Lilli", Simon is confused.

"But where's your Dad?", asks Simon. When Marcus tells him that he has never had a Dad, he had always had two Mums , Simon tries to educate Marcus. "Marcus, you have to have a Mum and a Dad to make babies. Two Mums can't make babies, and two Dads can't make babies, they don't have the right bits to mash together!", Simon explained, balling his fists together and rapidly tapping them together, as if to explain the whole concept of baby making.

"Wow, I never thought about before.", Marcus admits. Suspecting his new friend may be trying to pull the wool over his eyes, he asks, "Simon, how do you know so much about making babies?"
Simon explained "My Aunty told me, she doesn't have any of her own, but she told me that lots of the girls in her line of work do."

Marcus decided to slowly steer the conversation away from babies. "Oh, does your Aunty work in a hospital or something?", Marcus inquired. Simon thought for a moment, "I think she sells nice things, I'm not sure, I heard my Mum on the phone the other day talking to a friend. She was telling her friend that my Aunty was 'A lady of negotiable affection', sounds like sales to me."

Venice decided she needed to give Marcus an abbreviated, age appropriate, twenty five words or less version of the 'birds and the bees'. She hadn't expected to have to do this so soon!

Venice was pretty sure Gypsy had gotten pregnant to the stray dog that had been hanging around, this would be a perfect time to discuss babies and complicated relationships. Venice had never slept around a lot, in her late teens, not when she was sober, but when she wasn't sober, it wasn't uncommon for her to wake up not knowing who had slept with her. Marcus didn't need to know all of the sordid details, just that she had no idea who had fathered Marcus.

Venice spent some time working out how to broach the subject, and thankfully Marcus went to bed that night without asking.

 


The next friend Marcus brought home stopped halfway down the basement stairs and wouldn't go any further. Marcus always turned all the basement lights and the pool lights on, before he would come down here. But he pretended not to be afraid. The basement had no lights, once you got round the corner, not there was anything at the far end, except for an old book case, filled with older books written in Fae.

It was odd that Lilli kept her books in the darkest corner, Lilli didn't even like the basement and only came down here when his Mums were using the massage table.

At that moment, Bonehilda was summoned and Marcus friend ran screaming from the house, and hasn't returned since.

Bonehilda made one of the beds, ignoring the second one, cleared the dishes, ignored the puddles of water around the swimming pool, and attempted to teach Gypsy to play dead. Venice sighed in relief as Gypsy played along.


Bonehilda regularly attempted to teach Gypsy tricks. If Gypsy was asleep at the time, this meant someone had to assist Bonehilda back to her chamber, carting the extra bones that Gypsy had removed as a reminder that sleep was not to be interrupted. Bonehead would reassemble herself in there before being summoned again.

Success at last for Bonehead.

 Marcus hated doing homework, and this set didn't make sense. In the end he had to admit it to himself, and ask Mum for help.

 

Venice put down a book on 'Greatest Rock Legends Of Simnation' to lend a hand.

Finally, with homework out of his face for the day, he cut a few laps of the garden sprinklers and found a good stick to play 'Fetch' with Gypsy. Marcus complained to Venice, "Gypsy is getting fat and she hardly runs anymore, is she okay, should we take her to the hospital?"

Venice explained that the family dog was pregnant and going to have babies, and that the father was a stray that she didn't know, and who wasn't part of the family. She briefly glossed over reproduction, and how Gypsy's pregnancy was similar to her own, except without the bubbles and alcohol. Marcus appeared to take it all in, without any awkward questions, and it was left at that.

A few days later, Gypsy gave birth to a pair of rambunctious male pups. Venice came down stairs to find Marcus hugging Gypsy in congratulations. "Puppies are cute.", said Marcus school friend, "But kittens are so much cuter!". The little girl got ignored until she went home.

"I call the big one 'Bull', and the little one with the strange eyes, 'Dozer', Marcus proudly announced. Venice checked out the pups, sure enough little 'Dozer' had inherited his mothers heterochromia.

 

Lilly gets a call from Gladys Blackwell, explaining that her husband Horace had died earlier that morning, she drops over the next night to visit.

I'll be heading out of town for a month or two to see our children, and grand kids, "I was wondering if you could open the junkyard once or twice a week for the townsfolk until I get back?", Gladys asked. Gladys plans to try to convince one of her children to move back to town from the city and take over the junkyard.

Gladys hands over a spare set of keys to Lilli, hugs her farewell, and drives her old truck 'Gerty' to the big smoke to reconnect with her remaining family.


Lilli heads to the junkyard the next day and finding a can of paint that hasn't solidified, she paints a sign 'Open Fridays Only, until further notice'. She wires the sign to the main gate with some scrap electrical wire, then makes a smaller sign with opening hours, which is also wired to the gate.

One night as Marcus is eating his dinner, and watching the pile of spaghetti getting smaller and smaller, he begins to ponder his future, in school today some of the older kids were discussing careers as part of their course.

Marcus makes a mental list of possibilities.

• Chef - Lilli's spaghetti was perfect, could he make it even better somehow?
• Scientist - Maybe he could invent spaghetti that was better than perfect?
• Model - Maybe he could model with spaghetti, and make it super trendy?
• Astronaut - How would you get spaghetti into a  space helmet?
• Rock Star - His mother was famous in town, and even in same places overseas. His mother didn't even eat spaghetti that much, she preferred Mac'n'Cheese. Cross this one of the list.
• Veterinarian - He had learned that dogs can eat plain pasta, it was the sauces that people made that made dogs sick. If he was a vet he could tell all the pet owners what human food was safe to give their pets.
• Food Critic - He could travel the world and review the best spaghetti in the whole world! 
• Gardiner - Lilli could teach him to garden, maybe he could solve world hunger with a spaghetti plant!

Marcus list making is interrupted by Venice, who is down stairs chewing out 'Bull', for chewing on the furniture.

Bull responds by sulking and worming his way under his mothers protective paw. Gypsy contemplates how having puppies had made her feel young again. Venice contemplates how having puppies around the house makes her feel old.

Lilly had noticed previously that Gypsy had been hiding her favorite chew toy under her bed, while letting the pups play with the not so favorites, and like all children, they most wanted the one that was denied them. Lilliana solved this crises with a trip to the pet store.

Chapter notes:

Money is piling up in the game, while in the story, Lilli and V are spending every simoleon it, as fast as they can make it.
I am still upgrading houses I find with insufficient beds, etc. to wash off some of the mad cash, but am now stockpiling the money for an idea in an upcoming chapter.

I intentionally chose for the founding generation to not have some epic, far reaching conspiracy plot.  However, due to Horace Blackwell's untimely death, the general direction the story was wandering in, now needs a detour. My intention from the beginning was to have the story lead the game, but sometimes the game insists on getting story controlling privileges :)

Both the game and the craptop have been on their best behavior for this chapter, and I managed to rake up 20k LTR points for Gypsy to buy the young again pet potion, thus roughly aligning her with V, and Marcus :)  My timeline has returned normality.

I have to Photoshop Dozer's right eye from blue to green until he reaches adult, as the game will allow me to edit him in CAP, but doesn't actually show the eye color change.. sad puppy face.

Lastly, here's a pic for notes, I couldn't' work it in to the story without going way further off tangent than I normally might....

I think Old Boney is celebrating that she has eluded Grim for another decade, not really sure...