Crumpleton: Nature Most Unnatural

I’m trying to set up my town to be self-sufficient. I’ve installed Ani’s No Shopping from Fridge mod so that meals will only be available if the sim has the ingredients stocked in the fridge. If the sim does not have the ingredients they have to go and buy them. However, I want to avoid using the grocery rabbithole and have my sims set up a grocery store and farmer’s market. So it’s important that I play with the sims that produce food to sell. One of my main sim families has a farm, but the plants they grow are only trees, so I needed to set up a sim who produces all the other fruit and veg. That sim is Daric Ordhen from Dragon Valley.

(Note: he was going to be a fisherman but I found another sim who I wanted to assign that role to instead. But he has the ‘green thumb’ trait and a big garden so assigning him to the gardener profession worked too.)

I thought he should be an elder (I like having lots of elder sims in Crumpleton to make the town feel like it has had people living there for generations, and to give it that sleepy English village feel) so I aged him up. He’s a loner, so I imagined he was happy to celebrate his birthday alone, I thought it was sweet that he cheered for himself. His new randomised outfit was surprisingly suitable too! But I changed his shoes to something a little less garish. I made his skin less green too. His face is so adorable with his small chin, big nose and saggy jowls. ^__^

Daric pottered round his little house, making a small meal and washing up, happy to follow his daily routine.

Daric wanted to work in his garden but it was raining heavily and he was feeling a bit sniffly. It was still early and the town was sleeping so he ventured to the garden centre where he volunteers. The greenhouse would keep him dry.

Daric was pleased to see that his friend, the dancing sunflower, had given him some sunshine to fertilise the other plants. ‘Oh, you are a good sunflower! Look how well you have done.’ He had a little dance to celebrate. (All this seemed perfectly normal to Daric, who spends more time with plants than people.)

Then it was time to fertilise, water, and shot words of encouragement to the plants before harvesting them. Daric had completely forgotten about his cold and didn’t realise how wet he was getting!

The rain had stopped, and it was time for one of Daric’s favourite jobs: riding the tractor in the orchard! As he walked to the reliable machine, he picked up a few seeds, including an unusual glowing seed he had never seen before. Maybe it was some kind of pomegranate? Stashing the seeds in his pocket, he began working in the orchard, the pollen haze surrounded him, but Daric was in a happy haze himself and barely noticed. As the sun rose a huge rainbow appeared over the garden centre, it was almost magical!

Daric began to feel really rather ill, perhaps he had inhaled too much pollen after all. He went to the clinic to see if he could get a shot. He generally avoided medicine, unless it was herbal, but he really did feel particularly strange (he had a wish to get a shot, so this is why I allowed it). He arrived at the clinic a bit too early, the doctors had not begun their shift and there was no pharmacist on duty, so he read quietly in the waiting room.

Eventually the pharmacist, Doctor Khan, arrived and Daric explained his symptoms to her (Asha is actually an alchemist from the Supernatural expansion, but I like to think of it more like a chemist or pharmacist). He explained about the itchy skin, the sniffly nose, the fuzzy feeling in his head, the strange feeling in his stomach like something was growing…..

Asha seemed concerned, she waited until Doctor Landgraab arrived for a second opinion. Geoffrey did some more tests and also seemed a it concerned, he wanted to give Daric an experimental new drug, but Daric refused! A shot was one thing… but he wasn’t about to trust some new-fangled scientific experiment!

Reluctantly the Doctors agreed to give him a shot and some allergy medicine. Asha was still concerned and said she would try and work on a herbal remedy for his symptoms. (I was hoping Geoffrey could give Daric the shot but the option wasn’t available, so he had to go to the rabbithole rug hidden at the back of the building).

Daric went home feeling uncomfortable, the shot had helped his sniffly nose but the uncomfortable feeling in his stomach was getting a bit painful. He decided to work on his garden a while to take his mind off it. Daric lives on the edge of Crumplebottom National Park, and is the park-keeper, his garden overlooks the park and I love the little path that leads down from his garden). He planted lots of new vegetables like cabbage, leeks and asparagus (from icemunmun).

His stomach was really rumbling now and he was feeling very dizzy! Daric thought maybe he was hungry so made a green salad with herb sauce. Then… something strange happened. The rumbling stopped. The pain was gone. And through the haze in his mind, Daric saw…

…the green dragon.

(Note: I was as surprised too! I didn’t place the dragon, it just appeared! The lot is from Dragon Valley so it must have had an egg hidden on it somewhere. But the timing was so perfect, and it fit the story I was going for which was that Daric spent so much time with plants, inhaling pollen, that something supernatural was happening to him! So… he had a dragon baby. XD

I don’t ususally play with the supernatural elements too much, but Daric’s green skin, his love of plants, his loner trait, and the allergy moodlets prompted the idea and I couldn’t resist!)