Poison Garden Legacy

The home of the Posion Garden Sims Legacy Challenge. Replies from Rosessupposesmanythings. WIP

[rosesupposesmanythings]

How it started: A random musing, could I write a challenge that forced me to deviate from playing fundamentally nice/good sims, without having total miscreants and exploring more of the game?

How it’s going: Below, a narrative driven TS4 legacy challenge in which each generation has a “poison” trait to contend with. Their goals are based loosely on the properties/colours/flower meanings of various poisonous or toxic plants.

There is a Sims 3 Version here. I’m playtesting it over at @poisongardensims and tweaking the rules as I go!

More legible Google doc here - or rules under the cut!

Keep reading

[poisongardensims]

Hey yall -- it’s been a while since I updated here coz I have changed the way I sim and it hasn’t fit this save. I’m not giving up on Lupine and her story but I have started an apocalyptic version of my Poison Garden rules on my YouTube, coz I had a mad urge and sims is for fun!

Would love for you to check out Eden’s adventures :)

[poisongardensims]

376 - It is easy to forget that there is a whole world on the edges of my mountain home. Laying false tracks for Sorrel, in case he was mad enough to look after I drugged him, I swirled seemingly random trails through the surrounding counties. 

I’d enter a small town and show my face brazenly, walking purposefully out on a road in the opposite direction to my next destination, cutting back and wide through forests afterwards to wind towards my mountain. 

It comes back naturally, the misdirection and deceit, though this time there is more thrill in my blood than the terror of a year ago. This time I know I can do it. Then, with blood still lingering under my nails, and screaming in my ears each town was a chance to see my face on a screen, on a poster. 

Murderer.

It’s a title that gets easier to bear with every passing day. 

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[poisongardensims]

366 - I gave him a day, more than I had planned but less than my body wanted. When he started to ask questions it was over. 

In that moment, I quieted his questions with kindness. Kisses. But I saw his death in the firelight. Flickering, as yet uncertain, but possible if the path remains unaltered. He must not seek me after this.

I laced his drink with poppy, and as soon as he slept I left. I will take a winding path home. Lay false tracks to manufacture hope and keep us both safe from his reckless caring. 

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[poisongardensims]

365 - I let him find me. An anniversary gift to myself. Against my most fearful urges I have been living on the fringes of Granite Falls for a month. I could not bring myself to choose madness.

In that time I have seen him see me and slipped away, but today I didn’t. I wanted to be seen. To be spoken to. 

Sorrel knows more of herbalism than most I’ve met and was eager to share. I picked a daisy for him to explain to me, feigning ignorance to enable closeness. 

“An anti-inflammatory” he said “and edible”. He smiled.

I was taught to call it by an older name, “boneflower” and to know its true value; its potency hardly useful, its leaves a last resort for a meal that leaves bitterness in your mouth. A flower better left for other children to play at being chained by.

I bite my knowledge into a smile and aim it at him.

“And it’s pretty”. 

I have him

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[poisongardensims]

[poisongardensims]

271: I talked to a fish.

Not in a “Yes! You’re big and tasty” type of way, but in a way that made me think it was going to talk back or become a friend kind of way. It was lying in my bucket, half submerged and as its mouth opened and closed and I could almost hear it. I almost kept it, half dead, for the imaginary conversation.

I caught myself. Killed it. Filleted, salted, smoked and stored. 

But I still talked to it. 

I’m going to go back to Granite Falls. I shouldn’t. I’m still pretending I might not. But I will. Perhaps it is dangerous but so is being alone. 

I think, if I had to choose between being sane and dead or up here, alive and unanchored, I would choose dead. So I’ll go. Soon.

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[poisongardensims]

250 - Round numbers feel momentous but it hasn’t even been a year. 

It’s getting harder to stay busy, to fill my mind with safe, nearby things. The garden is planted, tended. Creatures know well enough by now that the temptation of my garden ends in the smoking shed and stay away. 

I have no reason to return to Granite Falls, no supply so urgent to justify the risk. The things I want don’t matter, living free is my luxury so I must live with lumpy, home made soap, darned clothes, until driven back to town by need. 

I know this.

I know this. 

I’m teaching myself to surface mine as a distraction. Perhaps I will find some ore worth a damn, that will get me further than 60 bucks and a wedding ring when I have to run again. If I have to run again.

I have no reason to return to Granite Falls. 

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[poisongardensims]

220 - There is no amount of distraction to cut out an idea once it has taken root in your mind. 

I made it back from Granite Falls in a day and a half, running when I could, sleeping never. Since then I’ve worked in a way I haven’t since I first left, building things I don’t really need just to hear the saw rasp instead of my own thoughts. 

Before, the scared voices went away after a while. When they called me a murderer I said “yes, but what else could I have been” and they listened. 

This time when they say “He saw you” I don’t have an answer to any of it. I was seen when I didn’t need to be. He knows my face. He... he is in my thoughts. I dream of touching him, of hurting him, of him in a crowd hunting me.

The only thing I can’t dream is that it never happened

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[poisongardensims]

Day 213 - I stayed too long. I was seen. I think I wanted it, but the second he spoke, the moment he asked for an introduction, whatever has been thawing inside me froze.

‘I’m Sorrel’

I nod, chest clenched and mind racing. Sorrel, sour leaf, edible, tender.

‘I’m a ranger here, I’ve seen you about.’

I open my mouth to try and lie and nothing comes. No words. Just panic. He has seen me and it has ended the silence but also the peace, the rainbow pool and the cabin are lost now, with my words. 

‘Are you okay’

He’s looking to closely. I look down. ‘Yes’, I manage and the voice which is so clear and thin in the mountains is croaky and rotten down here. We do not belong. He is searching for the next right thing to say. I leave, quickly but not too quickly, hand curled around the knife in my pocket until I am sure he has not followed.

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[poisongardensims]

Day 209 - Granite Falls is quieter in the Spring. Kinder.

The risk of snow lingers and those hikers willing to take the risk are the quiet rugged kind who nod and smile, but don’t come too close. I found a small clearing with an uninhabited cabin a mile out of town. Breaking in was easy.

Watching my ma slip a lock is one of my earliest memories. Her slantways grin like it was our secret and she’d teach me some day. She did teach me but the grin didn’t last. 

The cabin is near to this lake that turns to a prism in the afternoon. I wish I could hide out somewhere like this, in the light, but it’s too reachable, I’m too recognisable. I’ve toyed with the idea of lying, making up a story that I plan to visit often, making acquaintance of the quiet-lipped locals, returning seasonally…

I’m too old for toys. 

It would only take one missed camera, one wrong answer, one suspicious visitor and my cover would be blown. I cannot let them know me, or it will be over. Sometimes I wonder which of them would hunt me, would it only be my freedom that would be ended, or my life?

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[poisongardensims]

Day 204 - The solar panel failed and with it my self control.

I will go to Granite Falls for the parts. I could give up the panel, the electric fence it feeds. The emergency phone it charges. But I won’t. 

If I am to spend my life up here, hiding from what I did and the reasons I did it then I need some small hopes. A line to the world, even if I never use it.

And to restore that line? People. Safe conversations about rivets and solder. Shop assistants who wont remember me an hour later, but whose half-enthused “can I help?” will punctuate my months of silence. I will save them up and bring them back, and that will be enough for a while. 

It will be enough. 

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[poisongardensims]

Day 202 - I am thinking of going to Granite Falls again, even though I know it isn’t safe. My woods remain still. Silent. 

I am craving noise.

I have not spoken to another soul in months and when I try to speak aloud here - some wormy part of my brain saying that if I don’t try then I’ll forget how -  I sound like someone I don’t recognise. The wind seems to get between my words, wrap them around sharp things and stretch them strangely so I can no longer recognise myself.

I’ve read about isolation warping the mind, marooned sailors hearing their name through the trees, but I thought it would take longer. I thought I was stronger.

After what happened, after the worst happened and I walked away breathing, I felt invincible. The quiet has brought the scared human back out to play. I think I will go. I know I shouldn’t. 

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[poisongardensims]

Day 197 - Spring arrived restless... or maybe that’s just me. I didn’t need the vague companionship of a diary over those glassy winter months but as the snow thawed I felt the need to speak again, to someone. Something. 

Anything.

It feels like everything’s moved slightly since the snow melted. The gaps between things are bigger, sightlines are longer and branches crack louder. 

I’ve started waking long loops out from the cabin, checking for any signs of other people moving in with the thaw; hunter maybe, or builders hefting expensive boards to construct a cabin for use twice a year by bundled tourists who find extreme isolation charming in a weekend package. Nobody.

It occurs to me on the way back from investigating what I thought was smoke but turned out to be thrown up dust from a landslip that with each journey I am as disappointed not to find anyone as I am relieved to be safe. 

How is it that after a lifetime spent craving isolation and safety, of building imaginary boxes of untouchable space around myself, I am now wishing for someone to intrude at the edges. Am I lonely? Or do I simply long for an end to the suspense of waiting for an invader, a chance to test my traps and defences and relive that moment of victorious stillness when the fight is over?

I miss the simplicity of winter.

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[poisongardensims]

Day 122 - I think the snow has saved me.

After Granite Falls things felt impossible. I don’t know what I had hoped to find there, perhaps some sort of community of isolated, incurious people I could move with for a time, but they were the same as everywhere else.

I walked back convinced I was being followed, not from any evidence, but because the forgotten sensation of being watched lingered as an unfamiliar breath on the back of my neck.

I planted out my winter greens in the shadow of that fear, watched their withered little fingers crawl from the hardening earth and wondered if I wanted to make it to Spring and another year of this.

And then the snow fell and I was safe. In this thick, white blanket sounds travel twice as far and footprints stick. Every morning I can walk the edge of my sanctuary and know, by the pristine surface, that nothing bigger than a bird has come for me in the night. The snow has cleaned me the same way it has the landscape, filling in the dark cracks with glittering perfection that will last for a time. 

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[poisongardensims]

Day 77 - I couldn’t write until I was safe back on my mountain. I’ve become so unaccustomed to seeing people that even the gentlest seemed a monster to me. Perhaps this is what becoming a killer does to you. 

Before, when I mixed tinctures, it was theory. This much wolfsbane for dreamless sleep, this much to wound.... this to kill. Now I have seen the killing, been the hand to kill and I know, I know, that the preparations I carry are weapons, not the innocent products of flowers and folk medicine.

What I no longer know, when facing others, is on who the weapon must be turned. Will there be time to kill and run, or will the taste of aconite be my only path to safety and peace. 

I have the seeds and some plants. The questions can wait until spring I suppose.

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[poisongardensims]

Day 71 - Four days walk thanks to a mudslide in the foothills, but I’m here. It’s warmer at Granite Falls than back home. Huh. I never really thought of the mountain hut as home before but I suppose that’s what it is now. 

There are more people than I’d hoped in town. I walked the perimeter, barely blending in with the shiny, weekend hikers in their brand new outdoors gear and looked for the store, for locals who would know what I need to know. 

I’ll go in at first light. 

I’m scared in a way I haven’t been since I escaped. Nature may be immovable, primal, sometimes deadly, but people? People are rarely what they seem. Smiles have teeth, hands hurt as often as they help. Humanity deals in many shades of wickedness between alive and dead. 

I'll mix the aconite before the light fails. Just in case

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