4

KissimMor

Inseparable stepsisters.

- Content warning: Teen Pregnancy mention

Sister Act
While originally intended as worker barracks for a nearby industrial plant, the project was scrapped and this house was converted into a standard 2-bedroom home for a small family. Redecorated extensively in 2001 by a girl making a bachelorette pad, its femininity could suit two sisters quite well.

Bedrooms: 2
Bathrooms: 1
House type: Ranch
Max. occupancy: 2
I've been much too involved in building "real" houses in The Sims 4. My whole schtick on ModTheSims was building stuff that was either directly based upon real spaces or that could be built in real life with little adaptation. I tried to throw all of that away here and I built the way I used to in The Sims 1, adding rooms as I needed them while still trying to make the place look pretty okay from outside.

Cuter than a basket of puppies and sweeter than a candy store, sisters Katie and Clarissa are fiercely devoted to each other. When their parents started seeing each other, they were already best friends, and best friends make the best sisters! At least, according to them. They love going out with boys, girls, and anyone in between, and will kiss on the first date, but their relationship with each other is more important than any romantic one.

Katie Kissimmee
The cutest girl you'll ever meet, next to her sister, Katie's favourite things to do are watch movies with her sister, play videogames with her sister, and go shopping with her sister.
Astrological sign: Aquarius
Lifestage: Young adult (aged 24)
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Clarissa Morinaga
The sweetest girl you'll ever meet, next to her sister, Clarissa's often found playing videogames. Usually, she plays with her sister, but Clarissa is better at DOOM.
Astrological sign: Pisces
Lifestage: Young adult (aged 24)
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Katie was born when her mum was just 15. She doesn't know who her father is, but her mum is reasonably sure that he died. Her grandparents were adamant that their daughter should stay in school and go to college, so they gladly took care of Katie during the day. Katie's mum converted her walk-in closet into a nursery with some help from grandpa, and they lived there for the next 4 years. With Katie enrolled in the student daycare programme at Northwestern Community College, her mum carried on with her studies to get a Bachelor's degree in communications.

One day while Katie was at daycare, her grandparents' home burned to the ground while they were in it. Apparently, a faulty generator was to blame, and the inquest suggested that they had died of carbon monoxide asphyxia several minutes before the fire started. In any case, it left Katie and her mum homeless. Fortunately, a friend of the family who owned an apartment building allowed them to live in a unit gratis on the condition that Katie's mum stay in school as a full-time student. This allowed her to raise Katie in relative normalcy, even though money was often tight.

On Katie's first day of 1st grade, she was approached on the playground during recess by a girl who introduced herself as Clarissa and asked if she wanted to be her friend. Katie, of course, leapt at the chance to make a friend at this school full of strangers and said yes. When they were deciding what they wanted to do, they both said "Play Voidcritters" at the same time. They giggled at having said the same thing in unison, completely unprompted, and realised they had a lot in common. For the rest of recess, they play-acted the Voidcritter anime as they traversed the Path to Glory. The foursquare arena near the building was Outset Town and the staircase down to the lower level, all the way at the far end of the playground, was Champion's Tower, with each of the playground structures between here and there serving as the various towns, mountain passes, and rivers along the route.

In fact, Clarissa was the daughter of one of Willow Kissimmee's classmates, Colin Morinaga; a former teenage parent himself. Apparently, he and his girlfriend, Stephanie, were set to get married the day after graduation; but one day while Clarissa was in his care, Stephanie's family sent her to live with a relative on the other side of the country and abruptly cut all ties to Colin and Clarissa. He hadn't been so lucky as Willow, as his parents kicked him out of the house and he was forced to stay with his best friend, RJ. Fortunately, RJ and his girlfriend loved playing with Clarissa and she with them, so Colin could work part-time to support her. While Colin and Stephanie were 17 when Clarissa was born, Clarissa and Katie were exactly the same age, down to the day. Colin and Willow were brought together by their daughters. When Clarissa arrived at Katie's flat for a play date, Willow was surprised to see Colin standing there. They hadn't spoken much, beyond "hi, hello, how're you doing", but they had secretly been thinking the other was cute for about 3 months and had been trying to come up with an excuse to talk to each other. Willow was blushing so much, seeing Colin standing in her doorway, that she had to steady herself against the wall and briefly forgot her own name. Rather than Colin returning home to work on his speech for class, as had been his plan, Willow invited him in and made some coffee while their daughters played Voidcritter cards and watched an episode of the anime on DVD. They talked the whole time, about their experiences as teen parents, about school, about random things that had happened recently, and were holding hands by the end of the day. Katie and Clarissa saw this and Katie asked Clarissa, "Are we sisters now?"

That proved quite prescient, as Willow and Colin started dating immediately thereafter, went steady until they graduated from university, and then got married the day before the girls' 9th birthday.

In the years leading up to their parents' marriage, Katie and Clarissa spent a lot of time planning what they wanted to do when they became sisters. They planned everything from how they wanted their room to look, to places they wanted to go and introduce each other as "my sister", even family outings such as picnics and visits to the Natural Sciences Museum. At the wedding ceremony, they decided not to stand on opposite sides of the hall and instead stood on the floor next to their parents, holding each other's hands. When their parents kissed at the end of it, they hugged each other and said "we're sisters!" to each other in unison. Willow joked that their daughters were almost more excited about being sisters than they were about being married.

As far as having any more kids was concerned, the idea didn't sit well with anyone in the family. Colin kept thinking about how his own dad wouldn't even acknowledge that Clarissa was his granddaughter, Willow recalled hating most every moment of being pregnant, and the new sisters were worried that a third-wheel might ruin their relationship; so they never had any more children. After a pregnancy scare on their 3rd anniversary, Willow decided to simply get her tubes tied.

Fast-forward a bit. Katie and Clarissa applied to Simcinnati State College, La Fiesta Tech, South Central University, and University of Britechester during their senior year of high school. UBrite was the most distant school they applied to, being a full day's drive away from home, while the others were near enough to home that they could go home every weekend. Katie was accepted to South Central University but, for whatever reason, Clarissa was not, though she was accepted to La Fiesta Tech. However, both were accepted to UBrite. Clarissa tried to appeal to SCU's admissions department, but they didn't get back to her; between leaving her parents AND her sister, and just leaving her parents, she and Katie made plans to attend UBrite. That August, they drove away from home for the last time and started their new lives as students in the college-town of Britechester. On their mother's suggestion, they refused to take out any student loans, instead relying upon their scholarships, grants, and personal savings accounts to pay for their school experience; during their 2nd semester, they got part-time jobs to take over when their scholarship money ran out— Katie at the public library and Clarissa at the local branch of Press Start Games.

Clarissa didn't much care for her retail job... well, maybe she would have preferred working somewhere else. As a pretty girl at a game store, she heard more sexist remarks, pickup lines, and marriage proposals from grody gamer dudes amped up on Monster than she could count. Well, that's not entirely true— she kept a running tally of all of this activity on a pocket notepad. During the 2 years she worked at Press Start, she heard 112 sexist comments (69 were directed at her), was asked out 74 times, was asked when she got off work 83 times, turned down 27 marriage proposals, and heard 283 pickup lines (only 64 of them were game-related). The only time she ever accepted a pickup line was when it was given by a girl who looked about 15. Clarissa had been overhearing her brother and his friend making fun of her for never having been on a date before; she resolved to helping this poor girl however she could if presented with the opportunity, so when the girl timidly said "Can I press your start button" (a pickup line her brother's friend had used on her earlier), she looked as flattered as she could, hamming it up for brother and friend back there by the Funko Pops. Since it was much too loud in the store for the boys to hear what they were saying, Clarissa told her that her brother and his friend were tools and that she was probably already somebody's dream girl, all she had to do was look for the person at school who stands up a little straighter when she walks by. Obviously, Clarissa, aged 20, was not going to take this girl, aged 15, out on a date, but she wrote "her phone number" (actually the number for the Britechester PD's non-emergency line) on a leaf of receipt paper and told her to make sure her brother's friend steals it because he's in for a surprise.

Katie, on the other hand, quite enjoyed her work at the library. Working mainly in the children's section, she rediscovered picture books and novellas that she'd loved and lost in elementary school or that she'd wished to read but never got around to it— Chris Van Allsburg's entire canon of work, Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina, all the Curious George and Berenstain Bears books, Paula Danziger's Amber Brown series, all that sort of thing. While there were a few kids who would come into the library who she knew were going to be sexist, profane clientèle of Press Start in a few years, most of the kids were... well, kids. Her favourite memory of the library was the little girl, aged about 4, who shouted at her older brother, "You have to be QUIET! This is a LIBRARY!!", right in the middle of the children's section's arched ceiling, where the acoustics were the best for carrying even a whispered conversation all the way to the oversize books at the opposite side of the building. She was laughing so hard, she had to excuse herself and head for the employee restroom. She made sure that Nancy, the sometimes forbidding information desk attendant, saw her laughing so that she would consider not admonishing that little girl for doing what just came naturally to her. Apart from being loud (which it certainly was), it was so innocent and pure— this girl felt like her brother was being noisy enough for her to remind him of the rules by breaking the rules herself. The admonishing should be left up to the kids' parents, not some stern old crow in a maxi-skirt and a bun.

Katie had anticipated using the library as more or less of a throwaway job that she would use to finance her art degree, but, as she went into the second semester, she realised that she wanted to be a teacher. Her experience with the kids at the library ended up being something of an awakening in that department, since she had intentionally taken 2 back-to-back mental health days from work as she tried coping with the realisation that commercial art's only reason for existing was to make some Fortune 500 company's stock price go up. She was worried that she would burn out on art altogether if she kept up this feverish pace and decided she didn't want to turn a beloved pastime into a dime-per-dollar job. After a long, introspective talk with Clarissa about it, she decided it was time to change her major. But, to what? The "Quiet" incident made her realise that she loved being around kids, but she was still unsure about having any herself. One weekend as she was doing the dishes, quite out of the blue, she thought of herself sitting on a rug in a 1st-grade classroom, reading Jumanji to a group of students. She immediately dropped the spatula she was washing back into the dishpan, dried her hands, and went online to change her major to early childhood education.

Clarissa, on the other hand was still quite keen on becoming a meteorologist. It was a lot of work, requiring a major in meteorological sciences and a minor in communications; but she was inspired by her mum, who had been made on-camera news anchor at KTVR during the girls' junior year of high school. She'd already learned a lot about weather forecasting principles from her fascination with archived tornado warning coverage and thought it would be fun to learn how to predict all kinds of weather, not just the catastrophic stuff.

With that, we arrive at the present day. Katie has just completed her teaching certification and Clarissa is working as a junior forecaster at the weather bureau while she finishes her Associate's degree online. They're living together in a rented house in Willow Creek, which, by complete co-incidence, is just down the road a bit from Katie's boyfriend, Nate Newman, and his 2 roommates, Ossie Madison and Felicity Usher.

Katie Kissimmee started out as sort of a prototype trans-simself. I didn't feel like making myself, so I just made gross approximations (ending up not too far from the face preset #1). She didn't look a thing like me, but I carried on making her outfit anyway, making selections that I felt at the time were the ideal condition. Anyway, not much happened after that. She sat in my tray folder for 3 years until I decided to try out some of the ModTheSims CC I was about to recommend on my old Sims 4 Starter Kit page. Once I got anadius' no-CD crack installed, I made Clarissa; while I was looking for B-story sims for some forgotten neighbourhood project or another, I decided to merge Katie's and Clarissa's households. Wanting them to have some kind of built-in compatibility, but not wanting to make them each other's fiancées or spouses, the only option left was sisters. They don't look anything like they would have a shared ancestry, but, like, we've all seen Phineas & Ferb; we all know that step-siblings can be just as close as biological siblings.

Most of their backstories didn't exist until I wrote them here. I'd come up with a partial backstory for Katie while I was developing the prototype version of this neighbourhood story, all of which ended up being used here. I'd written as far as her grandparents dying in a house fire, but that was where I stopped. In that version of the story, Katie was supposed to be 16 weeks pregnant with Nate Newman's baby, but then I made some fundamental changes to Nate's character (which I won't spoil here) and that stopped being a reasonable plot device. So, no, Katie is not pregnant. Clarissa isn't either.

I don't really know where my sudden fascination with writing about teenaged parents came from. As I mentioned on the Fairisle family's page, I was all ready to make 17-year-old Cyndi Fairisle into an expecting mum, but I ran the story back and changed it and now she's a lesbian who fancies Gina Fletcher (again, another character I won't spoil here). I guess it's a leftover fascination from high school; I don't want to go into it too much, but that's as good a reason as any. So, rather than make any of our main characters into teen parents, I made their parents teen parents. Willow Kissimmee was 15 when she had Katie, Stephanie (last name unknown) was 17 when she had Clarissa. A detail that might not make it into the story is that Willow is fully aware that Katie's father is alive, what his name is, and where he lived as of 15 years ago (canon time). It might be interesting if he makes an appearance in this story, but since Willow and Colin are about 150 miles away from their daughters at this point, I'll have to do some serious gymnastics to work that in.

I know that Clarissa's backstory is less-developed than Katie's. That's only because I made Katie first. Suffice to say, their stories are pretty similar, but the differences are mentioned. Colin Morinaga is based on a man who lives with either his friend or his brother-in-law in the flat across the carpark from me. He has joint custody of a very young child with a young woman who is acquainted with the lease-holder somehow. Obviously, I don't know any details about their relationship, nor do I have any interest in finding out, so I dramatised it a bit. So far as I know, no one over there is called "Colin", "Clarissa", or "RJ". Colin and Clarissa's story is sort of the opposite of something that I remember from high school. A girl, Heather, had a baby with a guy, Diego, when I was a senior. In their case, Heather's family moved away from the state, but they took Heather's son with them, shutting Diego out. High school is full of drama, isn't it? A lot of it is manufactured, but some of it, like this sort of thing, is just perfect for writing stories about.

I really don't have a specific inspiration for Willow Kissimmee or her parents. It's just a different angle on parents who become grandparents while their daughter is in high school. There were a lot of teen parents at my high school, each one had a different story and a different home life. Sure, there were your broken homes and your absentee parents, but there were just as many cases of grandparents who loved their grandchildren just as much as their children. I imagine Katie's grandparents as how my mum would have been if I'd had a child at Willow's age and, as I've come to discover recently, loving homes are sometimes hard to find.