Welcome to My Strangetown
This is the broken Strangetown that ships with the game, as I was under the misapprehension that Tarlia’s cleaned version had lost the script that guarantees Vid’s abduction, and I had to get Vid abducted. Therefore, there’s no guessing how long it will last. I tidied up some elements - the extended Curious-Smith family has all proper family ties, for example - using editing tools and then, I just played.
The hood has evolved an elaborate backstory, based partly on the memories and bios, and partly on the way individual sims played. For instance, Circe and Loki had no interest whatsoever in torturing Nervous, or even in using him as a source of easy skilling (I don’t think I’ve ever had Fortune or Knowledge sims go so long without rolling skill wants as these did), so it was Loki and Erin’s parents who got the overworked county social worker to turn the poor schizophrenic kid over to their foster care to benefit from their “innovative treatments,” and turned him into the wreck we all know and love. The older Drs. Beaker died in a mysterious case of apparent simultaneous spontaneous combustion, which Nervous is convinced was his doing despite everyone’s reassurances that this couldn’t possibly be so.
For purposes of this hood, Glarn, Glabe, Buzz, and PT9 were all participants in a Secret War between Simerica and the Great Bear Fleet. All abductees used to be abducted a second time by MIBs and their babies taken to the creche in Area 50.5, where Glarn’s sister Glabe was a nurse. Glarn, a scientist in the Area 50.5 research labs, was abducted three times: once for Lola, once for Chloe, and once, when he was able to pass on to PT9 the horrible news that Buzz’s predecessor had decided to terminate all the children in the creche.  Having come to understand, through repeated contact with Glarn, exactly how unethical his species’s reproductive habits were in the context of sim culture and biology, PT9 publicly and splashily crashed his saucer, which cost him a good chunk of his memory. The Secret War was spectacularly exposed and messily resolved, not without repercussions among our main cast. Buzz walked the fine line between “war criminal” and “traitor” and wound up in charge, with a strained marriage from which is wife disappeared (he blamed aliens). Glabe escaped with Lola and Chloe and raised them on the lam. And then...lots of other Stuff happened. Some of which changes as I get Better Ideas.
Strangetown has a limited economy. The main employer is the military base. All science and medical jobs operate under military authority. La Fiesta Tech also has strong ties to the military, and though the Strange County Sheriff’s Department is theoretically independent you won’t catch them pissing off the General. Some civilian ranching and mineral production occurs, there’s an artistic/paranormal/hippy subculture, the cartels run a lot of drugs through here, entrepreneurs have recently undertaken small businesses of various sorts, and the SCIA may operate under cover as any of these things.
Earlier rounds can be found under the Strangetown tag on my main blog, but I have decided to break up my documentation of my different games into different blogs so as to confuse the Crumplebot. I have also fought off the irrational urge to post Strangetown gameplay to date in its entirety here. If I don’t have the energy to mop the kitchen (and I don’t), I don’t have the energy for that! I’ll just have to summarize relevant info as I go and trust you to figure it out.
So, let us begin, at the beginning of the rotation, up on the hill, on Cover Up Road...
(Don’t forget to click the pictures! I always caption them. Which I know is a pain for those on mobile and the visually impaired, but...I like doing it that way, and it is what it is.)
