Besties

Best friends since high school.

Boring Box
This modular home is about as commonplace as they come. Nothing special here, unless you like rectangles.

Bedrooms: 2
Bathrooms: 1
House type: Double-wide trailer
Max. occupancy: 2
The appearance of this house is based directly on one of the houses from the Sims Steering Committee prototype, with modifications. It was intended to look like someone who was just becoming familiar with The Sims would have built in 2000.

Alexa
A total hottie, but pretty aloof. Alexa's been on more dates than you can imagine... she can't even remember the last time she had to pay for her own dinner. Her life's been a revolving door of hunks and jocks since she was in high school, and it's wearing on her nerves. Just once, she wishes she could find a guy who is more interested in her videogame hobby than just getting into her pants.

Astrological sign: Libra
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Siri
Quiet, reserved, and extremely artistic, Siri has had to deal with being a wallflower since forever and is starting to resent her roommate's constant success with men. Fortunately, her 4th novel is selling well and she's constantly looking for new ideas.

Astrological sign: Taurus
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Alexa Lauper and Siri Ronstadt met in their sophomore year of high school when they were at cheerleader tryouts. Alexa was only there as emotional support for her brother, who was trying to become the school's first-ever male cheerleader; but Siri was earnestly trying to join the squad. Siri accidentally somersaulted into the judges' table and hit her head during her audition and, while all the others present decided to laugh at her, Alexa leapt off the bleachers to help; demanding that someone bring her an ice pack. Her mother had first-responder training and had worked as a paramedic for a few years; she taught her daughter several things about emergency first-aid and Alexa was keen to demonstrate to a room full of people that she was more than just a ditzy blonde. Yes, Alexa's hair used to be blonde, but we're getting ahead of ourselves here. Siri was very grateful for the help and they became fast friends. It turned out they had the same aptitude for music and could both play several pop songs on the piano; Alexa could even play "Weelo Deelo Ceelo" without flubbing the key-change.

Alexa had been under some pressure from her other friends to try out for the cheerleading squad, mostly because of her looks. However, you couldn't find someone less interested in cheerleading. Her friends more or less gave her an ultimatum when Chloe told her that she, Janeane, and Melissa were all going to tryouts and, if Alexa was not there, they would be "really sad". When she arrived at tryouts, her friends assumed that she had decided to try out after all, but she told them she was only here for her brother. He was trying out, she was not. For whatever reason, this strained her relationship with Chloe and Janeane, though it didn't seem to affect Melissa. Both Alexa and Siri count Melissa as a mutual friend, even into the present day.

After graduation, they discovered they were both going to Sim State University and requested to be roommates. Siri studied theatrical acting and stagecraft while Alexa studied biology. These were intended as first steps on the road to voice acting and medicine, respectively, but they became rather disenchanted with college after their freshman year. Alexa was being hounded by the men's basketball team, constantly being photographed and catcalled at; and Siri got flustered when her advisor and theatre professor came in on the first day of the second term and announced she was 11 weeks pregnant. No one else seemed to be having a problem with that except Siri, but she felt it was inappropriate to mention it to anyone. Alexa complained about the basketball players to her advisor, but he was also the basketball coach and only told her, "we need these boys on the team, you're to drop this matter." Alexa and Siri mutually agreed it was time to leave and they cut and run before the add/drop period was over. They were nearer to Sunshine Acres than their hometown of Alphaville, so they got throwaway jobs and rented a house on Sim Lane.

At her old job in the mailroom, Alexa would often meet guys at the bus stop or at the Sandollar Coffee in the lobby of the Silberman Building, so she often went out on dates, occasionally bringing men home. Even though Siri became irritated by her apparently-constant success with men, she conceded that it was safer for Alexa to bring a man home than for her to accompany him back to his home. One of her dates, a man who claimed to be 28 years old but couldn't have been a day over 19, had inadvertently gotten her hooked on the PC version of Blicbloc Adventures, which she has played for at least an hour a day (sometimes as many as 5, depending on how busy her day was) since playing at the LAN party.

Siri, in the meantime, tended to spend a lot of time at the library and the community artistic space. It was in the library's computer room that she created the character of "Chuck MacNichols: Adventurer & Treasure Hunter", using several characters from books she'd read as inspiration. The character became a series of novels, and the first installment—Chuck MacNichols in the Pyramid of the Sun—was released soon thereafter. This was followed up with Chuck MacNichols in the Dragon's Maw and in the Ancient Museum. These all performed suprisingly well, considering the smash-hit, Ken Tuckee and the Temple of Smoke, had been released to cinemas a month earlier and the market was swarming with wannabe's, attempting to capitalise on the success of the film. Sales of the novel series have been good enough for Siri and Alexa to buy the house they were renting and allow Alexa to return to medical school. Though grateful to her friend for the assistance in getting out of the mailroom once and for all, Alexa is determined to finance her own education, so she became a paramedic, just like her mother.

Just as Johnny Meecha was based on Ross from the Sims Steering Committee prototype, Alexa and Siri are based on Mercedes and Samantha. Since all of Mercedes' art assets stayed in the final game, I was able to recreate her fairly simply. However, nothing is left of Samantha. Technically, I could have downloaded the prototype and extracted her assets from it, I wasn't sure if the game still uses that same kind of 3D object formatting. Probably, but I found it easier to just make substitutions. Incidentally, the Steering Committee prototype is why the internal names of these characters' head skins are "ross" and "mercedes", because that's who they were designed for.

Obviously, Alexa and Siri are named after Amazon's and Apple's voice assistants. Just for yuks, I made them in The Sims 4, where I gave them unique last names, after Cyndi Lauper and Linda Ronstadt, but I changed their story a bit—I suggested in their trayitem description that Siri is in love with Alexa, mostly because I thought it was a little predictable having a household of 2 girls serving as a dating pool for a single guy. I'm not sure if I want to port that story point into Sunshine Acres yet or not, but knowing me, I probably will. I think, one of them will end up with Johnny and the other will end up with one of the Solfeggio sisters. If I put Johnny and Siri together, an additional jeopardy could be that Johnny only fell in love with her because she resembles his ex-wife (Tammy and Siri share the same head mesh). Like I said, Alexa and Siri might break with determinism and decide to fall in love with each other. I'm just not sure how realistic that is... In TS4, I wrote that they've only been friends since college, which was about 5 years before their story begins. Whereas, in Sunshine Acres, they've been friends since high school, more like 10 years before their story. Is it realistic for 2 people who have been platonic for that long to suddenly become romantic? Let me know on my Neocities profile.

I mentioned Alexa's high school friends; Chloe, Janeane, and Melissa. I think Melissa will show up in Sunshine Acres at some point, but Chloe and Janeane are living in some far-flung location, playing house with their 2nd or 3rd husbands at this stage.