A Legacy by Nicbemused and simself Nicki Bemused with possible

commentary by Other Characters

Fortune’s Fancy- Chapter 2 part 3

While Brenda hurried to make the call, Alex returned to consciousness. “What happened?”

“I don’t know! We came back and you were laying on the floor! Stay there while we wait for the doctor!”

“Nonsense. I just feel tired. I’ll go to bed and rest and I’ll be fine in the morning.

Alex might say she was just tired, but that hadn’t caused her to fall unconscious. Leif would wait with her until the doctor arrived. No matter what she said, she was getting examined.

“Well?”

“She is very tired, and has obviously been under stress and is suffering from exhaustion. However, she also appears to have a heart condition.”

“What does that mean? Is she going to die?”

“Not necessarily any sooner than the rest of us. She needs to go to the doctor and get a proper EKG. She needs to rest and have some of the stress taken off of her. She needs to cut back. I’ll leave some medication for her to take until you get her to the doctor.”

“I’m sorry, Brenda, but it’s time for you to take the reins. Your mother and I had discussed it, but she wanted to wait a little bit longer. With her sick, though, it’s time for you to step up. Most of the children are old enough to be informed, as well. Blake goes to college soon and he needs to know before then.”

Brenda hadn’t known what to say. Of course her mother couldn’t keep making all the decisions alone, but she didn’t feel ready either. At the same time, she’s always thought of the kids as, well, kids. And so she walked.

In the end, she raised her face to the sun and sighed. Her father was right. She would take her place as the family heir and tell the kids. There was, however, one more person she needed to talk with before she moved forward.

She met Bastien at the beach. They’d both always liked to watch the waves in motion before a storm and she needed someplace private to run through her reasoning with him.

“Hey Brends, what’s up.”

For a moment she felt 17 again, but only for a moment. “Have a seat Bastien. We need to talk.”

“Sounds serious.”

“So he’s right. It’s time, and the kids are old enough too. Deidre will be contacting them soon enough.” “And if you tell Blake and your older boys, of course they’ll tell my girls.” “Yes. I didn’t want to do it until we’d talked.” “Go ahead. We can’t keep them kids forever, as much as we’d like to.”

It took Brenda some time to figure out how to tell them, but finally she decided that she should talk to each one individually. When Blake asked her to take him to the library so he could research a paper, she decided it was a sign. “Blake, let me know when you’re done.”

Finally Blake was finished. Brenda had sounded tense and she’d been pacing around the library behind him. He wondered what she wanted to talk to him about away from the house. Was their mother more sick than anyone had said?

“OK. I don’t know what you want to say, but don’t beat around the bush. Just go ahead and tell me straight out. Is mom going to die?“ He said it quickly, so that Brenda didn’t have time to delay or go through a long prepared speech.

“Lady no! I’m sorry you even thought anything like that!” Brenda went on to tell the story of Blake’s kidnapping, the deal that they’d made to get him back, and the consequences that each generation could experience.

“Basically this is all my fault.”

“No, it’s our aunt’s fault. If Callie got kidnapped, wouldn’t you try to get her back? Would that be her or your fault?”

“Of course not, she’s just a little girl.”

“You see?”

Pete was supposed to teach Cam to play pool “properly” but when he forgot yet again, Brenda decided it would be a good time to bond with her oldest and tell him about the family obligations that he might end up being responsible for.

It didn’t take Cam long to catch on and as they practiced Brenda worked up her nerve and tried to find an easy way to tell Cam both about the obligations and the fact that he could never inherit.

“Cam, I have to tell you something.”

“It isn’t another baby, is it? I think the four of us and Blake are enough, especially with Callie the way she is.”

“No, it isn’t another baby.”

“So we made a deal to get Blake back and keep the rest of you safe and, as you all get older, you get closer to the time when you all will be contacted for this generation’s task.”

“Wow, mom, that’s a lot.”

Cam considered what Brenda had said. He couldn’t imagine his life without Blake as his constant wingman and he wasn’t sorry. And, in the end, it had been a long time since he believed he could be heir. He knew it would be one of the younger ones.

Brenda cleaned up while Cam considered what she said. She had expected more shock or dismay, but Cam was so close to Blake, he probably saw things the way that she and Bastien had.

“Go ahead, mom, hit me. Whatever it is, I can handle it. Moving to Downtown? No problem. New baby? Sure. Going on SimNation’s Cut-throat Cookery with Chef Morton Swearsy? You’ll take them all down!”

“Nothing quite a simple as that, Con. Before you were born Blake was kidnapped. Your grandmother found a way to get him back and keep any future kids safe, but Bastien, Chloe, and I had to make a deal with the person providing the solution. Each generation will need to perform some kind of task and it’s almost your turn.”

“Don’t worry, Mom, whatever it is, we’ll come out on top.”

“I hope you do, but you need to be prepared because there’s no telling what the task might be.”

Bastien took care of telling his girls and once everyone had been told, they gathered at the legacy house to discuss what they knew and what the next step was. Alex was a bit late arriving.

Once Alex had arrived, Leif began the family meeting. “Does anyone have any questions for me or Alex?”

Blake spoke up, “What happened to Belinda?”

“We don’t really know.”

We know that she was pregnant when she was fired from her housekeeping job.

“But we haven’t been able to find any record of her or the baby.”

“It couldn’t have been easy to find work, with no real job history.”

“Or raise the child on her own, but she isn’t in the public assistance or tax records that we could find.”

“It’s possible that Deirdre kept track of her, but we don’t know where to find her either.”

It’s possible we might eventually run across the child in college records.

Or one of your friends might come into contact with him or her.

Or maybe when that child has a child.

“But right now, we just don’t know.”

Everyone was silent for a moment, then Lettie asked, “What kind of preparation should we be doing?”

“We don’t know that either.”

Alex had argued that preparations should be her responsibility, because she was responsible for the situation, but in the end she was forced to concede that she didn’t have the stamina any more, so she and Leif took the younger children to Twikki island to keep them busy and distracted.

Brenda, Bastien, and Chloe took the teens to the mountains. While they didn’t know what they would be up against, some mental and physical training couldn’t hurt, right?

Pete stayed home to work and watch the house.

Leif and Alex took Callie and Cyr to the same hotel where they had taken the older group earlier. Callie was not impressed.

“Grandma, this hotel is bad! It isn’t even on the beach. This is not a Royal hotel for princesses to stay in!”

“Callie, where do you get these ideas? It’s a perfectly fine hotel. There’s a pool and room service, and everything.

Callie, of course immediately had to try the room service. She was not particularly impressed by it either. “Why are you brining me chili at the beach? And why is it cold?”

Cyr, however, was perfectly happy with the pool. It would have been nice if Callie had come out to play or if there were other kids.

He was happy when another family checked in and the kids came out to the pool.

They visited the pirate ship. Cyr had expected it to be more interesting. Cam had told him that it was a lot of fun, but there wasn’t anyone to play with him. He stared off into the distance pretending the others were here.

He felt very small on the ship and felt like someone was watching him. Callie refused to come onto it at all, saying she was a princess, not a pirate. Cyr convinced Grandma and Grandpa to take them somewhere else.

Soon it was time to go home. Callie was disgusted with her vacation, it hadn’t been glamorous at all. Cyr was just relieved to be headed back. Maybe he’d come back to Twiki when he was older and it would be more fun.

If Callie was not impressed with the hotel, she would have been really unimpressed with the camp cabins at Alex’s new mountain property.

Nobody knew what kind of training would be helpful, but they felt like they should do something, so they sat down and made a plan.

They decided that general survival training would be best and, after the adults scouted a course, the teens began a long backpacking trip.

The four of them hiked into the mountains with Cam in the lead because he had spent a number of years in simscouts.

They fished for their own food.

Sometimes Blake and Cam scouted out ahead. They didn’t seem to feel any sense of the living mountains.

But most of the time they climbed the high peaks together. Lettie felt it was safer that way.

And Blake was taking his role as the oldest very seriously, especially since he still had a nagging guilt that this was all his fault.

Cam was also beginning to feel the burden of responsibility. He was used to being a partner in crime, but with Blake going to Uni soon, his partner would be gone and he would be forging ahead alone.

One day on the way to fish, Lettie looked back to notice that Tara wasn’t following them. She called to Blake and the two of them went back toward camp to see if they could find her.

The caught her at the edge of a cliff, looking out. She didn’t hear them when they called her name. “Tara! What are you doing?” Blake pulled her back.

“Hm?” She seemed dazed. Blake and Lettie took her back to camp and, when Cam and Con came back, they decided to return to the cabins.

Tara couldn’t understand what the big deal was. “We shouldn’t have come back yet.”

“Tara! You were way high up, right on the edge of the cliff and you didn’t even know what you were doing there. It isn’t safe for you.”

Lettie was adamant. “I know you guys don’t feel it, but there is definitely something out there. Maybe it’s part of the danger, maybe not, but it’s there.”

“I agree. Even together it may not be safe.”

While the mountains were stunning and the view from the cabins was gorgeous, it was a dangerous beauty .

Lettie worked on her mother and Cam and Con talked to Brenda.

And they decided it would be best if everyone went home a little early. It was one thing to fight another mortal, but an unseen presence who tried to lure people off a cliff was another thing entirely.

When they got back, Blake took Cam aside to talk. “You need to keep an eye out for the others. Tara will balk but it’s just the usual teenage BS. She’ll accept it, Con and Lettie will be the problems. They think they can handle anything and Lettie, especially, feels like she needs to be tough, but she’s still vulnerable.”

Cam didn’t feel ready to take it all on by himself, but he didn’t want Blake to see it and worry. “No problem. The girls and I have a great relationship. We’ll just hang and they shouldn’t even notice me hovering too much. And Con is still at the ‘It’s cool to be doing things with the older kids.’ stage. You go have fun!”

Having passed on his responsibilities to Cam, at least for a short while, Blake left for University with a light heart. He had some time to play before he had to go back to being the caretaker again.

Blake looked at his dorm. There were a couple of hot older girls going up the steps and a couple of lovely Freshmen moving in, just like he was. “Hey ladies, want some help with those bags?”

Author’s Note: So, the last of Gen 2 is off to college with the knowledge of a precarious future due to his past. Tara and Lettie have rebuilt their relationship, but can they ever get over that breech of trust? Cam, Lettie, and Tara enter their senior year and all of gen 3 is growing up. I got a new computer and then had some trouble with my game, so I disappeared into Skyrim and minecraft for a while. Sorry about that. Thanks for reading!