4

Flores

Met on the internet, married in a garden

House-in-a-Box
An ideal home for a couple with no children who want to entertain the in-laws sometimes.

Bedrooms: 1
Bathrooms: 1
House type: Ranch
Max. occupancy: 2
The first place I built this house was The Sims 1, and quite honestly, it works better there. Still, since when have I ever backed down from a bad idea, right? I adapted the place slightly for TS4, namely the slab foundation and some modifications inside, but it's still basically the most Sims 1 house I have ever built... in The Sims 4.

Germán and Rosie had been mutuals on Cheeply for at least 10 years until they met each other at CheepCon V.2.0. When they started following each other, he was a cringey high-school memester and she was just learning how to use her drawing tablet. When they started dating, he was now a software developer and she was drawing the most detailed landscapes you'd ever seen. Now married, they've just moved into the house of their dreams. Online miracles DO happen.

Rosie
Always keen with a packet of coloured pencils, Rosie's made her 2 childhood loves into her living as a landscape architect. It was either that or be a mangaka, and that was just too much work.
Astrological sign: Taurus
Lifestage: Young adult (aged 25)
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Manny
What began as a desire to hack into big videogame developers' servers in high school, Manny turned into a career as a software developer. He found it was easier to simply make his own games than try and leak the ones that other people were making anyway.
Astrological sign: Taurus
Lifestage: Young adult (aged 27)
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Ever since watching a show on public TV in preschool, Emily Maurer loved flowers and plants and bees and everything about outside. When she took up gardening in high school, she decided her middle name, Rosalyn, was much more appropriate and started going by it, answering to Rosie. Her brother, Chris, made the varsity football team in junior year, in hopes of making it to the Sylvania Sowers in college. So, naturally, their mum tried her hardest to get Rosie (or, "Emily", as she still insisted on calling her) interested in cheerleading; but, Rosie ignored Cheer Squad Monthly on their coffeetable to read Garden Showcase instead. Rosie's mum tried to guilt her into joining the cheer squad by pre-printing 50 Christmas cards that identified Chris and Rosie as "future Sowers quarterback and cheer captain, respectively"; but Rosie learned how to build container gardens instead.

Meanwhile, Germán Flores was making memes on Cheeply and discovering that certain large companies were leaving their private files in unlocked servers connected to the open internet. Being almost religious about online privacy, Manny hid behind a multi-hop VPN as he accumulated data on Miyahon Interactive's trade-secret software development kits and game engines from as many not-quite-so-secret databases as he could get into. Known online only as "slone", he and a similarly anonymous collaborator, known to him only as "dudman", were behind the Great Miyahon Dataleak. Since they were both so well-protected, neither the federal police nor Miyahon's rent-a-cops ever found them. However, after the relative ease of finding old stuff out about Miyahon Interactive, the task of leaking current-gen and upcoming games was not as simple. Manny took to learning programming languages in order to write tools that he could use to force his way into servers, but part of his courses in C++ and Javascript involved making simplistic computer games. He realised it was easier to simply make his own games than try to break into game development houses' computers. Making the tool to brute-force passwords taught him how to make other software applications, which he felt was more interesting anyway, so he gave up on piracy.

All this time, Rosie and Manny were mutual followers on microblogging platform, Cheeply, where they were known as xX4lowercr0wnXx and sheer-fart-attack. Since he was so afraid of being caught by federal police officers, Manny never discussed his data leaks on Cheeply. However, Rosie was very enthusiastic about her gardening projects and her drawings. The month after she started following Manny, she used the money she got from her first paycheque to buy a drawing tablet and started drawing in KolourPaint with it. Manny's cheeply was more meme-oriented; he would make memes out of scenes from videogames and films, and recheep other people's memes. Even though he didn't follow many non-meme accounts, Manny liked xX4lowercr0wnXx's nature photos and secretly wished he knew enough about photography that he could make a sub-account for nature pics. When Cheeply announced the return of CheepCon after its rather disastrous and meme-worthy first attempt several years ago, Rosie decided she was good enough at drawing on her tablet that she wanted to sell prints of her OCs at the show. Manny decided to go just to document what he was certain would be another disaster. Rosie set up her booth with her username set in an Art Deco typeface and large printouts of the works that she was selling. When Manny walked by in his Pixelcrate shirt and holding his DLSR camera, he took a doubletake at the name on the sign and saw that Rosie belonged to it. He walked over immediately, accidentally pushing his way through an admin staff photo-op in the middle of the room to get there, saying "Oh, what? What? This is so fucking awesome! This is so fucking amazing! What? Holy shit!" Neither of them had really believed in love at first sight before this, but Rosie fit precisely into the image of xX4lowercr0wnXx that Manny had constructed in his mind. When he introduced himself, Rosie thought his flustered stuttering was the cutest thing ever. He kept bringing her flower-related merch that he found around the show, which she thought was incredibly sweet of him. When he bought one of her prints, he asked her to autograph it; she signed it, "To Manny SheerFartAttack, my sweetest fan! ♡♡Rosie xX4lowercr0wnXx". She was sort of fighting to admit this to herself, but she fell in love with him that day, too.

It turned out to their mutual fortune that Manny lived in San Myshuno's Wright District, which was only 30 minutes' drive from Rosie's home in Landry Lakes. They started dating regularly, going out to places in San Myshuno or Landry Lakes every week. Then, when the school year ended, Rosie invited him to stay with her at her flat near Foxbury, where she was going to school in the fall. Manny jumped at the chance to get out of the city for a change and packed a couple things and drove. It took him an hour and a half to get there, but he loved every minute of it. The trees, the open sky, the green fields... plus, the fact his girlfriend awaited him at the end of the journey. As Manny was en route, Rosie had begun a new drawing; she decided, since she had no other ideas at the moment, she would draw herself. With her face finished, Rosie thought about what to dress herself in and suddenly thought, "wedding gown". As she began the pilot lines, her heart was beating so loudly, she thought she could hear it echo off the walls of her mostly-empty newly moved into flat. By the time she got the basic shape of the dress into Peinture, she was shaking so much, she had to turn off the screen and get a glass of water. Then, her phone chimed as Manny texted her that he had arrived at her building, and she was in such a hurry to get outside that she forgot her keys on the counter. It didn't matter, though; she leapt into his arms and hugged him tightly for about a minute as she told him how much she missed him, vaguely aware of the fact she was fighting the urge to propose to him but not really consciously acknowledging it. They kissed by the carpark lamp until someone came by to unlock the door to the building.

That visit turned into Manny discovering an opening in Foxbury's computer science department, which turned into him being accepted, which became him moving in with Rosie full time. By the time Manny got his stuff in from San Myshuno and the school term began, Rosie finished her wedding gown drawing and also added Manny in a tuxedo. The idea of getting married stopped giving her anxiety and instead started to be exciting. In fact, she used the drawing to propose to him. When he returned home 2 years ago, she was casually playing Larper Story on the couch and asked him if he could get her phone for her. She had intentionally left her phone on the desk in front of the computer screen, which currently displayed her wedding painting, to which she added the text, "Manny Flores, will you marry me?" From her location in the sitting room, she could hear almost exactly the same thing she'd heard at CheepCon: "Oh, what?! What?! This is fucking amazing! What?!"

Now living in a gated community in Willow Creek, Mister and Missus Flores are living their best lives. Manny is a web developer with Fountainhead and Rosie runs her own landscape architecture consultation business out of their home.

Content Warning: Pregnancy descriptions. Click to expand section.

While they love each other deeply and unconditionally, Manny happens to work in the same office with Jim Saxena and is constantly exposed to Jim's enthusiasm for his 24-month-old daughter. He constantly gushes to Manny and his co-workers about something cute that Stacia did that morning or how he's trying to save for Stacia's college trust-fund or something. Manny had never really thought about being a father himself, but working across the hall from a new dad has started to change his viewpoint on that subject. Rosie, on the other hand, despises the thought of it. Once, in order to induce vomiting after eating something made of meat, she read someone's first-hand account of being pregnant. The idea of having something inside her, making her sick, squirming around, limiting her ability to move and breathe, sending her to the bathroom at odd hours, and then making her spray water out her vagina right before causing irreparable physical trauma is, suffice to say, not appealing. Besides, her brother has a kid with his high school girlfriend, 2 kids with his 1st wife, and 4 with his 2nd wife. What business has Rosie got having kids anyway? Manny only pressed the issue with Rosie once. She said, "If Jim had to carry the baby himself, he'd be singing a completely different tune." Quite honestly, Manny doesn't like the idea of parenthood anyway. A third person would ruin their marriage, make it too complicated, all that stuff. If he fancies taking care of something small, he figures he can always get a pet box-turtle.

Rosie is kind of inspired by that girl from TikTok who's obsessed with Crayola dandelion-yellow crayons. I wanted to make a girl with a similar obsession, but without directly referencing crayon girl (after all I just finished adding a social media influencer to the story, I didn't want another one). The idea to use plants and flowers as her obsession occurred as I was building my favourite Sims 1 house in The Sims 4. Originally, I built that house so you wouldn't have to rotate the camera, and that meant a lot of blank space along the street-facing wall. Also, empty space looks good in TS1, but not TS4, so I didn't really have many options here. The way I saw it, I only had books or plants. As I was putting plants onto an endtable by the picture window, I started to see Rosie in my head.

I made her first. From step 1, I wanted to make a super cute girl who you could fall in love with easily. Most of my sims throughout time have been some stripe of LGBT+, but I decided to make Rosie cishet. Basically, I masochistically decided to make someone that I would have quickly fallen in love with back in college and then had a meltdown when I discovered she was married. I had a particular woman in mind, but I decided that Rosie doesn't want to be pregnant. Yeah, that's how I found out the girl I was interested in was married. Let's not go there.

I decided her husband needed to be super cute, too. If Rosie was going to be the girl I had a crush on in college, then Germán had to be the guy I would have a crush on now. I don't know why, but I decided pretty early on that her husband had to have a Spanish name. I kinda let the game decide whether he would be European or Latino when I made him, and the game gave me that broad-shouldered tan dude with the skater hair. You know, the one looking at the girl in chef's whites on the core game's coverart.

The circumstances surrounding their marriage is based on several different things I've read on tumblr (in case you couldn't tell, "Cheeply" is my Tumblr surrogate in this universe): first of all, CheepCon is a thinly-veilled reference to Dashcon, whose 1st attempt in 2015 was such an incredible disaster that we're still talking about The Dashcon Ball-Pit. Apparently, a second Dashcon was held earlier this year that went better, but it too had a ball-pit. It's kind of uncommon, but I read a lot of stories about people meeting each other on tumblr, hooking up in real life, and getting married. I've heard that story 4 times now. Manny's behaviour when he finds out who xX4lowercr0wnXx is, is based on something I did once, except it was to get away from someone I recognised from high school before she could recognise me. I don't want to get too far into that, but suffice to say, the human desire to get from point A to point B at a high rate of speed can be overwhelming at times. Finally, Rosie's marriage proposal is based on a story I started and never finished back in college. Once upon a time, I was really keen on writing sappy young-adult romance stories. Well, I guess I never grew out of it because, like. Where are you right now? What just happened on this page?

Quite honestly, most of their story didn't exist until I came up with it here. Except 1 thing is constant: Rosie absolutely does not want kids. She's read firsthand accounts of pregnancies, read about the physical effects, and decided it's not for her. Her brother having all the kids with all those women is kind of a dramatic trope, but I felt that it fit here. He's supposed to be a football jock, ergo one of the popular kids, so no one ever tells him "no". Anyway, he's a professional American-style football player in a different territory right now, so we're probably never going to see him or any of Rosie's nieces or nephews.

Where did "Manny" come from? Why have I named him "Germán" when I'm consistently calling him "Manny"? HTML mostly. I have to keep typing "á" in order to make the accented A in his name show up. "Manny" is easier to type. "Flores" was so I could make Rosie's name more flowery.