Though he's shared games and conversation with Ewan's ghost multiple times, Drew still faints every time he sees him.
"So, I'm officially a suspect?" Raheem asks nervously.
"You had opportunity and motive, and you don't have an alibi. But there's no hard evidence, or even enough circumstantial evidence to convict you," Archer answers honestly, "The general opinion in town is good riddance, and the department isn't exactly eager to see one of their own go down for this. You understand, I do have to question you, but this case is likely going into the unsolved file."
Saturday is party day. Emery's birthday falls on a Wednesday, so no party for him. He ages up alone in the nursery.
Archer and Meghan have a fourth child, a son called Talfryn.
For the outstanding job he did in keeping a fellow officer from being charged with murder, Archer is promoted to Triple Agent.
Saturday is party day, and this day has three birthdays to celebrate, Carys, Bronwyn and Talfryn. Archer and Raheem also celebrate Archer's success in keeping Raheem out of prison and in the police department.
Griffin and Sommer recently tied the knot, and Griffin took the Merrick name. Drew immediately starts pestering them about grandchildren. He has four, and wants five.
Bronwyn is first to the cake. Dermott's son Reynaldo is too absorbed in his homework to join the festivities.
More cake, more horns and noisemakers.
Bronwyn and Carys become children.
And Talfryn becomes a toddler.
Drew harps on about wanting five grandchildren.
Sadly for Drew, he's not going to see five children.
Talfryn has a brilliant scheme to surprise the maid.
"So now that Grandpa is dead, do we still collect his royalties?"
Once again, Emery has his birthday with no cake and no party.
Emery becomes a teen. He want to be a world renowned surgeon.
Sommer is pregnant.
And so is Meghan. Again.
Saturday brings another round of birthdays, for the twins and Talfryn. Bronwyn introduces herself to teen Alvin Goode-Peddler, who is feeling betrayed by something.
Most probably by Emery's romantic advances on Caitlin Lillard. Whatever was going between Alvin and Caitlin wasn't serious enough for her turn Emery down when he asked her to go steady.
This time Talfryn gets the first cake. Before he has a potty emergency.
Now he's old enough to celebrate his sisters' birthdays.
Bronwyn takes her turn at the cake.
And becomes a teen.
Carys' celebration ceases to be the center of attention as Meghan goes into labor. Archer rushes his wife off to the hospital, and the party continues.
Carys joins her twin as a teen.
Sommer gave birth to her daughter Jaimey the night before.
While Talfryn fulfills his birthday wish to meet a vampire, Meghan and Archer return home with their fifth child, a son named Dylan.
Haunted bed!
Carys has her first kiss at the beach with Kristian Keane-Ball.
Carys gains a boyfriend and an enemy.
Bronwyn has also been finding romance at the beach.
Yesterday, Alvin was feeling betrayed to see Caitlin Lillard flirting with Emery, and today Angela Wolf-Drudge feels betrayed to see him flirting with Bronwyn.
By Sunday's end, both twins have secured steady boyfriends for themselves and made enemies with two of their female schoolmates.
Challenge Notes:
Archer and Meghan have their 5 required children. The 4th, Talfryn is heir. They all have the Eccentric trait for the Runs in the Family requirement.
Archer has reached level 10 of of the Law Enforcement Spy career. He got that a full week before his adult birthday, the youngest of my Sims to reach the top of a career. The overtime really helped with that.
While Meghan does tend a garden and sells most of the produce, I'm not even trying to reach the top of that career. I think she's at level 5.
I've been rolling random traits for all this kids (except for giving them the Eccentric trait), and I mostly can't remember what traits they have. Emery is a genius, Bronwyn is a Bookworm, Carys is my first Sim to have Vehicle Enthusiast. Talfryn is Friendly. Poor Dylan gets forgotten about. He's not even a toddler yet.
Archer throws a party every Saturday for the Partier requirement. The last two were birthday parties.
Drew's last book was a biography of Beau Merrick. That came up as an opportunity, and I was very happy he was able to finish it.
"Are you okay?" Archer asks his wife while they care for their newborn twins in the nursery, "I mean, about your Dad..."
"All I ever knew about my father was from my mother complaining about the child support he wasn't paying," Meghan sighs bitterly, "I never even saw him. To me, Wesley Greenwood's death is just an obituary in the paper."
It's a hard concept for Archer to get his mind around, never having met your own father. Or having children you don't love and support personally.
After work Archer runs into his mother-in-law, Shawn Curious-Kindle with her youngest offspring, Meghan's half brother Donovan, busking outside City Hall. Meghan has no idea who the father of this toddler is. Between her mother and her dead beat father Meghan has four half-siblings. Marrying into the Carlton family was like entering a refuge of stability.
Later that evening, Archer's buzzer goes off, and he has to go back to the station. A body was found in the river that runs through Twinbrook. Before he goes to the station, Archer stops at the Red Rendezvous to talk to fellow cop Raheem Lillard, to give him fair warning.
"They found Kristian Merrick-Curious," Archer tells him, "Dead. Not far from your house. Sharita's house." Raheem recently married Sharita after she became pregnant with his child. Shortly before that Sharita had given birth to Kristian Merrick-Curious' child, and he had moved in with her, along with one of his daughters from a previous relationship. A notorious deadbeat and womanizer, Kristian had continued seeing other women even while living with pregnant Sharita. And then he disappeared right around the time Raheem started dating Sharita. And today he turned up dead in the river.
"They suspect foul play?" Raheem asks.
"Forensics hasn't said yet. I'm on my way in now. I just wanted to give you a heads up. If they call it homicide, Sharita will be the prime suspect."
Forensics did declare the death a homicide. The victim had been strangled before being tossed in the river, his clothes weighted with stones. Archer goes out to the Lillard house the next day for preliminary questioning.
"I honestly don't remember the last time I saw Kristian. I was so busy with the baby, and he was hardly ever home. He'd stay out all night, for days at a time. You know how he was. That's why I hooked up with Raheem. He's steady, you know. He comes home after work, he takes care of the kids. Even the ones that aren't his."
"This isn't about Raheem, Sharita," Archer reminds her. "This is about Kristian. And you."
"Look, he was a deadbeat. And he was cheating on me. And I guess I cheated on him with Raheem. If he ever turned up again, I would have asked him to move out. But I didn't want to see him dead."
Archer isn't entirely convinced of that, but he's also not convinced she killed him, either.
Questioning Kristian's teenage daughter Amy is a lot harder. The poor girl hardly knew her father, she'd only recently moved in with him after the death of her mother. And now he's dead, leaving her with the woman her father bedded, impregnated and abandoned as he had with so many others in this town.
Archer's preliminary investigation ends with a search through the family's trashcan. He doesn't find anything he thinks is noteworty, but he bags it up for the forensics team nonetheless.
This Saturday, Archer doesn't throw his usual party at the Red Rendezvous. Today is Bronwyn and Carys' birthday, so the party is at home, for them.
Meghan reluctantly greets her younger sister, Lilah, with her new husband Kristopher, and their mother. She had wanted to cut all ties to her former life when she married Archer, but thus town is too small to get away from her family that easily.
Archer greets his brother and his date, who at first he thinks is Lucida Merrick, but he quickly recognizes she's not Lucinda, but her mother Sommer, somewhat recently widowed. Her human husband had died of old age while she remained young. Lucinda had recently gotten married to Angelo Wolf-Ball, so of course she wouldn't be dating Griffin anymore. But her mother?
From a brief conversation with the couple, Archer discovers they are planning to move in together. What is Griffin thinking?
Cake time. Going alphabetically, Bronwyn is first to blow out the candles, assisted by her grandmother.
Bronwyn has her mother's hair and her father's eyes.
Carys has her grandmother Shawn's hair and Drew's violet eyes.
After cake, Archer corners his brother for a chat. "You can't be serious about Sommer. I mean, you dated her daughter. She's way too old for you!"
"She's older than me in years, but she'll still be young when I'm an old man," Griffin explains, "Vampires age on a totally different scale from us."
"What is it with you and vampires, Griff? They're creepy! They suck blood!"
Griffin laughs. "Actually, the whole blood drinking thing is kind of erotic."
Archer sticks his fingers in his ears. "I'm not hearing that from my little brother!"
Briar had meant to avoid her vampire grandfather after she became an elder, but she decided to invite him to the twins' party. While the party carries on after the girls have been put in their cribs, Beau slips up to the nursery to get a look at his great-great-grandchildren. They are human, not like him, and thus should have nothing but his contempt. But they are his blood, born in the only family of his descendants who had wanted anything to do with him. The only other vampire at this party, his granddaughter Sommer, didn't speak so much as a word to him, having learned to hate him from an early age by her mother Bree.
As he leaves the house, Beau tries to grasp what he feels about this human family. That he feels anything at all is somewhat of a surprise. Allowing himself to get attached to these humans has brought great pain. But it has also brought the only real joy he's ever found in life.
"That wasn't so bad. I actually had a good time," Meghan admits after she and Archer finish cleaning up the cake plates. She had initially resited the idea of a birthday party, hating crowds as much as she does.
Forensics has analyzed the evidence Archer found in the Lillard's trash. Sharita is no longer a suspect, she wouldn't have had the strength to strangle Kristian. But Raheem Lillard is capable of strangling another man, and he had motive. Archer doesn't like it, but his fellow cop is now the prime suspect.
With three toddlers, the nursery is chaos. Even with his parents here, Archer has had to cut back on his partying and socializing to help raise his children. And he wouldn't have it any other way. It's hard, but he's no deadbeat like Meghan's father, and while he's often tempted, he doesn't want to be a womanizing Kristian Merrick-Curious, either.
Would he kill to defend his wife and family, as his friend Raheem is suspected of doing? It's not a question Archer wants to answer, but it keeps rolling around in his head. If Raheem killed Kristian, it was with good reason, good enough for Archer, anyway.
Challenge Notes:
From the time he turned YA, Kristian Merrick-Curious' MO has been to date a girl briefly, get her pregnant and move on to the next girl. I use the expanded version of Twallan's story progression which makes non-custodial parents pay child support. And sometimes those parents fail to pay their child support. You get pop up notices when they pay or fail to pay. Kristian usually failed to pay (as did Meghan's father Wesley Greenwood).
Kristian was also an ugly troll of a man who was determined to pass on his ugliness to as many children as possible. After impregnating Sharita he started dating again, and I decided to put a stop to it. He's already got 4 or 5 ugly kids in town (I edited his daughter Amy before Archer questioned her. Her lower teeth were sticking out of her chin. When I say his kids are ugly, I mean hideously deformed. He's a Bayless descendant as well as a Curious, and people who've played Twinbrook know what that means)
So, I used master controller to drown him. Ha ha! Yes, I murdered Kristian Merrick-Curious.
I had a moment of ick when I got the notice that Griffin and Sommer were going steady and she moved in with him. But I got over it. If she makes Griffin happy, it's all good.
