Long ago, in 2006, I wrote a Sims story called Different Shades of Grey (no relation to Bad BDSM Novel published later 😑). It was posted on the now-defunct Mod The Sims community forum, and it was reasonably popular; I worked on it for months and was quite proud to finish it.
Sadly, it has been lost forever. The MTS community forum was moved at some point in the intervening years, but my story was not moved along with it. Only the first page of the original thread remains, visible on the Wayback Machine, containing the first three chapters (out of about 20.) The rest of the links are dead, and if I ever had a backup, I lost it long ago.
Nothing but those few fragments remain of Shades, but I did manage to track down an old Insimenator.org thread where I had uploaded the protagonists, three very different people who met as kids and became friends for life after overcoming many trials and tribulations: Faye Griffith (the redhead), Valentina Esposito and Jason Darcy. Amazingly, the files were still there, so the trio get to live again in my game (after updating their 2006 aesthetic - photoskinned textures and emo outfits on the nude mesh don’t really cut it in 2021, nor do the enormous eyes and teeny tiny chins I was fond of at the time. Funnily enough, my game is a lot more Maxis-matchy now than it was back then.)
I spent ages trying to recover more of the story, to no avail. It affected me more than I thought it would - that something which was a labour of love and brought me so much joy is now gone and exists only in incomplete memories. I only retain a very rough idea of the plot - which had its share of flaws to be sure - but though the story was flawed the characters - and their relationship - are what I remember most fondly.
Jason the shy “emo” boy with the professional dominatrix mother with whom he had a great relationship, Faye the witty punkish girl from a broken family who would do anything for her friends and Valentina, the popular rich girl whose seemingly perfect life was a sham. There was also a love triangle between the three (Faye had feelings for Jason and he liked her too, but he also had a long-standing crush on Valentina.) The story eventually got quite dark, then decidedly weird, going from Valentina developing a drug habit to Jason being shot by her dealer and put in a coma to Faye using a magic ritual to enter his mind and “awaken” him from within. I...can’t actually remember how it ends, but I do believe the ending is a happy one.
So, now they’re back, and attending Summerset Institute, a new uni I made for Evergreen Isles. :]
