The Cullen fortune is gone overnight. The rest of the Cullens have to get jobs to support their lifestyle.
What jobs would you suggest for them to experience growth/be the best version of themselves? (minus Carlisle, for whom I'm pretty sure the answer is just doctor, unless you have other thoughts)
Alternatively, what jobs would they be objectively terrible at, but you find really funny to imagine them having just the world's worst day at work doing?
Oh this has got to be the best anon I've received all year.
Right then, the Cullens lose their money, we'll say the wealth-eating vampire Ivan (turned in 1929, this bolshevik is on a mission to create a communist utopia, and has the gift to go with: he has the power of liquidating all assets belonging to private persons and companies and giving it back to the state) set his eyes on them and it's history from there.
For the sake of simplicity, we'll say the year is 2008, they're all still living in Forks.
The Cullens could get by on Carlisle's paycheck, he makes enough to pay the bills and buy them something nice every now and then. It's stretched a bit thin, though, the Forks hospital can't afford as much as a hospital in a bigger city could and there are nine of them. He's got the bills and a shared family car (that he (wait for it) has to buy from Billy Black) covered and not much else.
Alice decides it's time to no longer do what she's good at for free: she's going to become a clothes designer and fashion consultant. With her skill she will take the fashion world by storm, with her family she has the glamorous models in the box already, and with her gift she'll have a failsafe ensuring no idea she has ever fails. She is already planning the Met gala outfits she'll outfit stars in.
The trouble is this: she has no brand and no clients. She's starting at rock bottom.
Never fear: she makes a battle plan for herself. She'll start small with a neat-looking website, promote herself as so exclusive that the reason you haven't heard of her is because she's that big a deal, and she'll attract clients with her amazing concept designs.
She gets Carlisle to invest in the hottest new thing: a stark white MacBook (Image below), gets Rosalie to program the website (Rosalie cries because the programming she knows is from studying astrophysics, she can give you an animation of a sphere's trajectory through a frictionless space if thrown at various speeds, she has no idea how to make a website. She ends up making Alice a blog at Wordpress. It has really nice HTML, though), now it's portfolio time.
Portfolio time goes terribly: Carlisle won't let her publish photos of the family on the interwebz, and the making clothes part of the equation turns out to easier said than done because Alice wants quality merchandise, but quality fabrics are expensive. Carlisle offers to make her fabrics out of wool and hides from the animals they hunt, offering that it would be a rustic look, and she has a horrible feeling he's being serious.
We cut to how Emmett is doing.
Emmett was thinking he'd get work as a lumberjack, it would be fun and manly, but then Alice bought that computer which has a webcamera and he thought, why not become a fitness instructor? That could spell money.
He asks Carlisle if the computer is a family computer and not just Alice's, Carlisle says yes, Alice fumes, and Emmett sets up a studio in the basement. He publishes one video per day, and his ridiculously muscular frame combined with being an insanely beautiful man wearing a blindfold so he'll be less recognizable (Carlisle's stipulation) while physically exerting himself makes him an instant hit among gay men and straight women everywhere.
Esme was inspired by Alice quoting "if you're good at something, never do it for free!" and decided to become a cleaning lady who also cooks. This works really well for the first few weeks: she's incredibly sweet so everyone likes her, she's a white woman so the racists don't worry about giving her access to their possessions, and she's alarmingly talented at what she does. One hour of Esme in your home, and your house smells like cookies and looks cleaner than an operation room.
The problems arise once Esme's instinct to care for others conflict with her work.
Sooner or later someone struggles to pay her, or it becomes clear simply from the state of their house that this, having someone make their house look nice, is them splurging.
Esme was once on her own, working to make ends meet, and her apartment looked terrible not because she didn't try to keep it clean, but because between working, being pregnant, and saving up for a baby she had no money or energy left to do things like fix flaking tapestry or a rocky chair. And having a clean, pleasant space to live in- it sounds frivolous, but that matters.
She decides to lower the price for cleaning people's houses, and expands so she's now home maintenance, not just cleaning. Instantly she has more clients than she did before. So she expands her work hours, and lowers the price again.
Before long, she throws the towel in and starts working pro bono.
The money she made are spent on supplies, and she starts leeching off of Carlisle's paycheck.
The family never sees her around anymore, meanwhile the denizens of Forks are now much happier for having a real life Mary Poppins running around town helping everybody. There's a general sentiment that they should do something for this poor woman, who works pro bono for the town's poorest even when her family lost all their money. Between that and adopting all those kids, the Mr. and Mrs. Cullen are starting to look like saints.
Hey, isn't her daughter trying to start a business?
Alice gets her first few clients, three to be specific. One is Jessica Stanley's cousin who's getting married and thought she could save on the dress by having her cousin's former classmate design it, the other two are forty-something women who were touched by Esme Cullen's initiative and thought they'd do something for her daughter. Can't Alice design each of them a gown for weddings and other formal occasions?
Alice wants to be happy she's finally getting off the ground, except-
Those two forty-something women are not the kind of clients she wanted. They're not young, for starters, and they're... well, she isn't sure how to say this to them but if they want to wear one of her designs they're going to have to lose a few pounds first. And get a makeover. It's fine, she can give them a makeover, and Carlisle can set them up with a diet to lose weight (what's that, he can't? Why not? He's being completely- oh, jeeze, fine. Rosalie can come up with the diet then! Or tell them to just stop eating, period, that works too.), Alice will airbrush the photos to hell in her portfolio, THIS IS FINE.
The ladies get offended and cancel their orders when Alice tries to explain this over the phone, which just goes to prove that Renesmee really needs to learn to leave the room already whenever aunt Alice has a phone call because if she'd been able to See what would happen then she could have found a way to phrase this that wouldn't have lost her two clients.
She's left with Jessica's cousin, who gave her a budget of $500.
And Alice doesn't get to decide anything else, she knows from her gift that the wedding will be- not the worst she's seen, but a pitifully forgettable mediocre with a boring colorscheme and ugly bridesmaid dresses. Nope, she's just going to have to sit there and watch that happen, design a gorgeous dress for this subpar wedding.
Alice tries to reason with Jessica's cousin, and offers to design the dresses for the bridesmaids at a discount. She won't ask them to lose weight, she will pay for the fabric herself if that's what it's gonna take. Fuck, she'll do this for free. Oh, what's that, Jessica's cousin, you already got the dresses? At H&M?!
... this would be a stain on her portfolio. It wouldn't advance her career at all. Alice has got to get out of this.
Jessica's cousin fires her before she can quit.
Jasper becomes a drug dealer.
Edward and Rosalie, meanwhile, both decided that they wanted 9-5 jobs that would get them their paychecks without having to build anything.
Rosalie gets a job as an electrical engineer at an established company that'll pay her big dough, and she now has a bigger paycheck than Carlisle. The problem is that she's a young blonde woman working in STEM.
Rosalie proceeds to spend her workdays being sexually harassed by some colleagues and belittled by others, and has a terrible time.
Still, she stays on the job, because she really really wants to be able to buy things again.
(Rosalie is in the green)
Edward, with his gift and medical training, figures he would do great as a therapist. Steady supply of money, could become a lot of money if he makes a name for himself, and he'd be making a difference for people who really need it.
Carlisle is thrilled: finally, one of his kids isn't telling well-meaning ladies to lose weight, pandering to horny people on the internet (to be fair, no one has had the heart to tell Emmett this. Rosalie moderates his comment section zealously), dealing drugs, or being harassed by sexist pigs! Go forth into the world of psychotherapy, Edward, make that difference!
Edward gets certified (read: Jasper pays Mr. Jenks a visit) and, wanting to prove that he's modest and wants to do good by the world rather than seek money at his earliest convenience, accepts a job as a councillor for college students.
Edward proceeds to spend his days listening to students with petty problems such as doing poorly in class, breaking up with their lovers, and blah de blah. Edward could not care less about their problems. They're lying through their teeth, too, making the whole thing in an exercise in frustration.
Throughout all of this, Bella has been floundering. She has no marketable skills, and... though she won't admit it even now, she did not become a Cullen so that she would have to worry about going to work and making ends.
Just- god, she didn't care about the money, at all, definitely not, it's just that it wasn't supposed to suddenly be gone!
She eventually gets it together and starts applying for jobs.
She doesn't get any of them, not when she's applying for office jobs with nothing to show but a high school diploma.
She starts applying for retail jobs.
The worst application, by far, is calling Newton's and asking if she can have the job back (she can't, they have a new girl. They're very sorry).
Renesmee, wanting to pitch in, asks her grandpa Charlie if she could get a job. He lets her be his secretary, and she makes $30 per hour telling people to go to the waiting room.
(Renesmee is in the green)
Bella's daughter is now networking better than her and making more money than she ever did. Her daughter is less than two years old.
She asks Carlisle if he's got a job for her, and Carlisle takes pity on her. She is to be his secretary, just man the phone and tell people Dr. Cullen is busy when he is in fact eating squirrels in the woods before a surgery.
It's terribly unfortunate, then, that Bella in her awkwardness manages to make it sound like Dr. Cullen is masturbating in there (He's taking care of business, har de Cullen inside joke har har. Seriously though, you don't want to disturb him right now.) and has absolutely no ability to keep things secret so she will openly tell anyone and everyone who is seeing Dr. Cullen and for what (I can't believe Mike's got an STD! And he let it get so far, holy cow I hope somebody told Jessica. Oh my god, someone should tell Jessica).
Carlisle is put in the unenviable position of having to fire his daughter-in-law.
Alice gets desperate enough to try Carlisle's animal hides idea, and Carlisle finds himself working round the clock as he gets home from the hospital, and immediately has to go hunt down good pelts so he can then slave away in the one-man sweatshop she set up making woolen gowns. He makes sure Esme is out cleaning 24/7, lest she be dragged into this as well.
Alice still has no clients, but that she'll think of something.
Emmett gets sued. Turns out his channel was getting people hurt (lift with your backs, guys! When you're stretching, try to make it fast and jerky! Keep pushing if you're uncomfortable, that's when it's getting good!), so now he has legal problems.
Carlisle, Rosalie, Edward, Bella, Jasper and Renesmee each have to pitch in the money they've made to fight this lawsuit and pay the monstrous fine Emmett gets slapped with.
The Cullens hold a strategy meeting.
Who's actually made money, who's going anywhere?
Rosalie's making dough, but she's not going anywhere due to sexism in the workplace keeping her from advancing.
Alice may have gotten off to a rough start but she is going somewhere, she assures them. She just needs to change her brand: streetwear and smart casual are much more marketable, and it can still be high end, she'll just make it more down to earth. How's that?
Edward reads in her mind her ideas for $600 sheepskin tank tops, and grimaces, but he's not suicidal enough to say anything.
Carlisle is already making as much as he can at that hospital, if he wants to make more he'd have to move. And then Renesmee and Jasper would be out of work.
Renesmee is actually doing rather well for herself, she's now running errands and taking small jobs around town, picking up $20 here and $50 there. Everyone agrees Edward's niece is a delightful little girl, and she's successfully gaslighting them that she's always been this tall. Or this tall. Or this tall.
Jasper has progressed as well, he is a cleaner now. No, not the same kind as Esme. He's making more money than Carlisle and Rosalie combined, though, so Forks (Well, Seattle. And the state of Washington, really, his guys know distance isn't really a problem for him) is good by him.
Emmett still has his YouTube channel, he's posting videos of himself flexing his muscles and lifting things. People are strangely willing to pay to see that, he's got commissions to eat and wear various objects and everything. Crazy world, eh!
Realizing that his brothers are now doing better than him, one by being a gangster and the other by posting softcore porn, Edward decides to get back into psychotherapy because goddamnit this won't stand.
Bella asks Renesmee if she too can run errands and be Charlie's secretary. Renesmee readily agrees, her aging was getting too obvious anyway. She becomes Bella's... manager, is the term they land on: Renesmee gets the gigs and Bella does them, both make money.
On seeing Alice struggle without initial capital of her own, Renesmee decides that Alice can run errands too. That way, Renesmee's operation can expand and she will be more effectively be able to compete with the other kids in town trying to make dough or that accursed Esme who cleans and paints houses and mows lawns for free. How do we compete with that? By being cheaper than the other kids and better than Esme!
She has to get more manpower to pull this off, so Emmett and Edward get pulled in as well.
She ends up working Alice, Bella, Edward, and Emmett so hard that Alice's fashionista dreams get put on hold (this is also because she's making such lousy money being a one-year-old's below-minimal-wage-worker that after six months she still can't afford any of the things she needs to get started), while Renesmee has the money to hire the kids who were formerly her competition. To keep them on retainer she has to actually pay them, of course, something she didn't have to do with her family because family will work for $5 a gig.
(Renesmee is in the green)
In the end, Ivan the wealth-eating bolshevik vampire is appalled by the monster he created in Renesmee. In his outrage he takes all the Cullens' assets again, and tells the Volturi on them because he won't stand for such blatant exploitation of the workers!
