#valice calendar

[victorluvsalice]

Valicer Calendar Finale: OTP To OT3

Happy New Year's Eve, everyone! It's time to talk about the final date on the Valice (r) Calendar post I made to celebrate 15 years of shipping my Valice OTP, and two years of shipping the Valicer OT3! So what's the significance of New Year's Eve to my OTP/OT3?

Well, it's basically the date I feel like my OTP became an OT3. XD This is basically how it all went down at the end of 2021, when I first learned about The Smiler coaster:

December 26th: I watch "One Night In Alton Towers" with my parents (a show where comedians Josh Widdicombe and Alex Brooker, accompanied by a guest comedian -- in this case it was Roisin Conaty -- spend the night at whatever UK attraction happens to be in the title) and see the fabled theme park in action for the first time. The show itself does NOT contain the group going on The Smiler (I believe the entrance is shown briefly in a montage, but the X-Sector ride they actually hit is Oblivion), but my family and I are intrigued and start looking up videos showing what riding the coaster feels like. Along the way, we discover The Smiler, and while we don't watch a video on it...

December 27th: I am sufficiently intrigued that the next day, my birthday, I start looking up stuff about it in earnest.

I quickly discover that the "brainwashing machine designed to make people permanently happy" theme is, uh, "relevant to my interests." XD Cue me going on a binge on YouTube and tumblr looking up the coaster, its history, its lore, and it's fandom, and getting pretty well obsessed. XD

December 28th: New coaster obsession continues, and I get the idea that I could use it in one of my private little snippets about Victor and Alice having a hypnokinky relationship. After all, I'm pretty sure Victor would like to be brainwashed to be happy, the poor anxious noodle! I start coming up with various scenarios in my head regarding Victor and Alice visiting the park and riding the coaster and using the theming to have some more saucy fun later to add to one of my private docs later, which get gradually more complicated as I look up more and more stuff...

December 29th: And by the very next fucking day, a certain anxious noodle has come up with his own AU within my AU where the coaster has an AI behind it and he and Alice are in a relationship with it. Specifically it's him doing art of that scenario in my AU where, you know, the coaster is just A FUCKING COASTER. I'm like, "excuse me, I'm trying to write down this completely normal scenario where you and Alice just have fun with the coaster theme! What is this bullshit where you want to fuck the roller coaster?"

He is unrepentant.

December 30th: "...would you like me to make the coaster human, because it occurs to me I could do that in Sims 4."

Victor: "I would not object."

December 31st: I've already come up with three different Smilers for three different AUs (the original Modern AU, the VTMB Malkavian!Smiler, and the FO4 Robot/Eldritch Horror!Smiler) and wondering how I completely lost it so freaking fast. XD

Sooo -- yeah. That was the point where I knew this was going to be a Thing. XD (And I hadn't even come up with Smiler's actual human design yet! That was nine days later!) Two years in, and it is still a Thing, as you are all very much aware. XD Here's to my bizarre Things, and the ships that were created from them! I hope to get much enjoyment from them for years to come.

[thevalicemultiverse]

(Valicer in the Dark) Wait...

-Guy called Immortal Emperor.

-Rules nation called the Imperium in a dark horrific world.

-Most powerful magic guy.

-There was a major catastrophe he was involved in/mitigated with said power.

This sounds...familiar.

In the distance: "It is the 41st Millennium..."

Victor: [puzzled] It's -- 847 by our calendar.

Alice: I think he's talking about another broken world similar to but not the same as ours -- did the sun blow up in that one too?

[victorluvsalice]

Valice Calendar: If It Wasn't Official Before Then, It Sure Was Official Then

Wondering what I'm talking about? Well, we've reached one of the last couple of dates to celebrate on my Valice( r) Calendar -- specifically, this is the first mention I could find of one of my Alice muses for LJ RP calling one of my Victor muses her "boyfriend." The context for this one was that I was doing a personal "88 Advent" fic-a-thon for my LJ of stories of 88 words in the days leading up to Christmas, and the fic for that day was a meta one featuring one of my Marty muses encountering my new Alice muse (who was intended for "Beyond The Rift," the game I mentioned back on the "thinking of fanfic" day) having just made gingerbread. And being suspicious of said gingerbread as she'd made it under the tutelage of Ms. Plum from Corpse Bride. XD At any rate, this is what I wrote immediately under the fic:

Yes, this is FuturePossibleRift!Alice, who insists on hanging around my head. -Alice: Well, my boyfriend's here!- -Rift!Victor: pleased blush-

So yeah -- I was definitely shipping it beforehand, but this was probably the final nail in the coffin of me ever trying to get free of this ship again. Victor was Alice's boyfriend, and that was that. And it's been that ever since. :) Really glad I never convinced myself this was a horrible ship -- it's been a real source of joy in my life over the past fifteen years. And I'm glad so many of you seem to enjoy it as well. Here's hoping for many more. :)

[victorluvsalice]

American McGee's Alice - Trailer [HQ] by Alice Liddell

Hey, I put up the trailer for Corpse Bride on the day of its release -- figured I could do the same for American McGee's Alice on the day of its release!

...well, okay, the Corpse Bride trailer went up partially because it was "Song Saturday," and this is only a POTENTIAL AMA release date (with the other main contender being, appropriately, 10/6) -- but it's the release date that Wikipedia uses --

*pauses as she goes to the page*

I SWEAR THAT SIDEBAR USED TO SAY THE SIXTH. *facepalm* Okay, so, I guess there's a possibility that I'm a day late, but 12/6 was the date I remembered, so it's the date we're acknowledging, damn it. Enjoy one of my favorite game trailers of all time in all it's creepy atmospheric glory.

[victorluvsalice]

Valice Calendar: Happy "Started Thinking Of Fanfic" Anniversary!

Hi everyone! We're back to acknowledging the final few important dates on the Valice( r) Calendar, and today could be seen as a real doozy -- it's the first date I could find in my old LiveJournal entries where I mentioned wanting to write Victor/Alice fanfic! Again, the entry itself is probably fairly incomprehensible if you weren't already familiar with me and my quirks back then (like talking to myself about my day in the guise of chatting with my fifteen million AU versions of Doc Brown -- yes, the whole "how many fucking AUs do you have" thing was well-established even then), but the gist of it was that I'd just completed NaNoWriMo, and was looking for a new writing project! And because I was already considering how to add versions of Victor and Alice to this LJ RP game I was part of at the time ("Beyond The Rift," where people from other worlds were falling into an alternate Chicago full of magic-users and demons and angels via "rifts" that gave them weird superpowers -- it was a bizarre, if fun, game), I found myself thinking a lot of how I might get them to meet in a way that didn't involve chucking them both into another universe. This was BEFORE Alice: Madness Returns was a thing, remember, so I didn't have "Victor getting chucked off to Dr. Bumby" as a crutch! I ended up just skirting the issue for my first few fanfics (such as the very first one, "Suffocating"), and then came up with "maybe Victor and Alice met as kids once" (leading to "By The Riverside"), and then started doing stuff with Alice having an uncle, Charles, who was a solicitor and thus might be involved with the Van Dorts (this is the origin of the Uncle Charles and Aunt Susan who show up in the Secundus Verse, which itself was prompted by me getting into steampunk and having what I thought was a cool mega-crossover idea for NaNoWriMo one year), and then A:MR came out, and I came up with the "hey, what if Victor got sent to Dr. Bumby because his parents didn't believe him about Emily?" idea (leading to the Forgotten Vows Verse) and then --

Um. Well. We can see how far I've come, can't we? ^^; (Though admittedly, the "fanfic" tag on this tumblr also includes non-Valice fanfics from me (generally gift fics for friends), and fanfics from other people, Valice-related (like "Beneath A Broken Sky") and non-Valice-related.) But yeah -- I think I've gotten over whatever mental hurdles I had before regarding finding a way to get them together for fanfic purposes. XD

[victorluvsalice]

Valice Calendar In Honor Of 15 Years

Yeah, you read the title right -- as of 2023, I will have been shipping Victor Van Dort from Corpse Bride with Alice Liddell from American McGee’s Alice and Alice: Madness Returns for FIFTEEN YEARS. I actually went back into my old LiveJournal/Dreamwidth entries some time ago to see if I could pinpoint when the hell I actually started shipping them -- turns out it was June 22nd, 2008 when I first mentioned having shipping thoughts about them (in response to a TV Tropes binge apparently). Granted, it was in the context of “what the fuck, me, you know they’d be a terrible pairing,” but -- yeah. We see how long that attitude lasted. XD And that means that next June, it’ll be 15 years! Holy hell.

So! Given that 15 years is a bit of a milestone, I thought I’d set up a “Valice Calendar” for the next year so I know which dates I should try and acknowledge as Important Valice Dates. :) Some of these should already be familiar to my regular followers, as I’m already in the habit of doing something special for them, while the rest are from that deep dive into my journaling past:

January 27th -- the date that I posted my first Valice fic, “Suffocating,” on my LiveJournal! Which was obviously in 2009, not 2008, but still a momentous occasion! Also, conveniently, the birth date of Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll.

February 14th -- Valicetine Day, obviously :)

May 4th -- the historical Alice Liddell’s birthday, and thus my Alice’s birthday!

June 9th -- Johnny Depp’s birthday, and as I have a habit of using actor birthdays if a canonical one is not given for a character, thus my Victor’s birthday! (Also, amusingly, the birth date of Michael J. Fox, and thus also my take on Marty McFly, which comes up in “Secundus.”)

June 14th -- release date of Alice: Madness Returns in North America! (According to Wikipedia, anyway, but I can confirm because I got my copy from GameStop the very next day.)

June 22nd -- as stated above, the first time I mentioned thinking about shipping Victor/Alice back in 2008! Even if I thought at the time it was also a pure crackship. XD

JULY 7TH -- Victor and Alice’s wedding anniversary! Which I picked because a) I liked the idea of a summer wedding and b) it’s easy to remember. *facepalm*

September 10th -- first mention in 2008 of me associating songs with the ship (I believe it was “Love Me Dead”); the entry indicated I’d already started associating any vaguely romantic songs with them, but this was the first time I mentioned a specific one, so we’re going with this.

September 23rd -- release date of Corpse Bride in the United States! (According to Wikipedia again, but I’m inclined to believe them.)

October 6th -- Mad Hatter Day (because of the date -- 10/6 like on his hat) and thus just a general Alice day of mention. (I’ve also seen it stated as a release date for the first game, but I’ve never been able to fully confirm that.)

October 31st -- Halloween! Not a specific Valice date, but this is the holiday that sees the biggest spike in interest in the two fandoms, sooo. . .

November 27th -- first mention of me starting to seriously think about fanfic for Valice! Seems weirdly appropriate I’d publish the first one exactly two months later. :p

December 6th -- release date of American McGee’s Alice in North America! (Again, according to Wikipedia -- as stated above, I’ve also seen October 6th cited, and November 22nd on at least one site, so -- I’m just going with this!)

December 8th -- the first time I had one of my RP Alices (”save_us_alice,” though she didn’t have her journal at the time) call one of my RP Victors (”deadgirlsliekme” -- the proper spelling had been taken!) her “boyfriend.” While I’d obviously started genuinely shipping them before that, this is the first date that I saw anything about the pairing being Official, so again, we’re going with this.

December 27th -- my birthday, which -- as the person who came up with this ship -- I feel deserves to be recognized. :p

So yeah, that’s kind of the official Valice Calendar! :D Except -- well. You guys know that a certain OT3 has become very popular around here as well, huh? So yeah, because I know me, here’s also a handful of Valicer dates --

January 8th -- the actual creation of Smiler Always, the sim that informed the look of all my human/humanoid Smilers for my AUs, and their insertion into the Chill Save.

May 31st -- the actual opening date of The Smiler roller coaster! (It was supposed to open earlier, but delays in the final construction meant that it missed the first two dates.) Meaning this is the birthday of my own Smiler!

December 27th -- yes, doubling up with my birthday, because -- well. December 26th of 2021, I watched “One Night In - Alton Towers” with my parents, which led to us looking up a bunch of the rides on YouTube so we could see what they were like. Which included one called “The Smiler,” which I found myself very intrigued by the next day. . .meaning you can trace my Smiler obsession and the eventual creation of the OT3 to me binging Smiler videos and lore posts on my birthday last year.

December 31st -- the date four days later where I realized that the “private hypnokinky AU with Victor and Alice using the coaster’s theming for private fun times” had somehow become “I have made a human Smiler, a vampire Smiler, and a robot-run-by-an-eldritch-abomination Smiler for three different AUs VICTOR WHY DO YOU WANT TO FUCK A ROLLER COASTER” XD AKA the more EXPLICIT creation date of the OT3.

Okay, that should cover just about everything. XD Next year, we celebrate Valice (and Valicer) in style! :)

[victorluvsalice]

Welcome to Summer Friday in the Chill Valicer Save, everyone -- otherwise known as THE VALICER WEDDING UPDATE! Which is so massive at ninety pictures that I had to take advantage of the fact that I'm now on the new post editor and can upload more than ten pictures at a time to a post. ^^; So you're only getting hit with six posts today instead of nine (that works out to fifteen pictures a post, if you're curious). You're welcome. :p

So, let's get started with -- farm chores! Yes, it may have been Victor and Smiler's wedding day, with bonus Victor and Alice vow renewal, but that doesn't mean they got a day off from their usual activities around the farm. So this is how they spent their morning prior to the big event:

-->Victor started off his day by taking a turn to feed the chickens, then got sent to make some more eco upgrade parts -- and I guess the fabricator actually likes him now, because it didn't try to attack him ONCE. I guess I'm glad, since he needs the eco upgrade parts (especially since I discovered that you CANNOT Copypasto them while he was feeding the chickens), but I do kinda miss dye-sprayed Victor from that one alternate timeline. Maybe one day in the future! :p Anyway, Shadow wandered in while he was finishing up said parts, and I discovered to my delight that they could become companions -- I promptly had them do so, then had Victor take Shadow out for an early-morning jog (discovering in the process that the community garden area has these mysterious blue lights hovering around the trees when it's dark! I don't know if my screenshot did it justice, but it was pretty cool :D).

-->Alice went right back to writing her latest book, "Vorpal Rhymes" -- if she's gonna be an official Bestselling Author aspiration-wise, she's gotta keep the books coming! This proved to be a little difficult, though, simply because Guidry kept coming in to chat and distract her. *sigh* Dude, I don't know why you keep trying to talk to her, you guys don't really vibe well. As shown when, upon finishing her book and finding herself needing a bath, she chose to transform into her werewolf form to lick herself clean, and Guidry immediately got all scared and annoyed with her for doing so. Sir -- sir, you are a ghost. A ghost with a storied history of being a paranormal investigator if we believe your in-game backstory! You should be at least somewhat used to this! *shakehead* Don't let him get you down, Alice -- I think your beast form is pretty neat.

-->Smiler probably had the easiest morning out of the three to start, just recycling a bunch of trash piles before heading to their robot bench to make more chatterbots and a computer chip for future robot upgrades. However, as they were finishing up that, I happened to look over at the chicken coop and noticed it was REEKING. O.o How did that happen? I promptly had them give it a scrub and dump some more feed out there for the chickens, since we do have a full coop. Always something when you live on a working farm!

[victorluvsalice]

Welcome back to the Chill Valicer Save, everyone! We have reached Fall Tuesday as of this update, and with it, the addition of a new family member to the household! How did that go? A bit chaotically, to be honest...

-->I started the playsession with Victor and Alice asleep and Smiler hanging out in the barn gazing at one of the pictures Alice took on their recent Spooky Day group date (aww <3) – since they were pretty well done with robotics for the moment, I had them head downstairs, clean their nectar maker, then make another bottle of grape nectar to get their skill up. They obligingly reached Level 2 right as they finished up the bottle, allowing them to make strawberry and potato nectar – I had them start a bottle of the latter, since that’s the nectar that makes Sims extra-happy, and thus is one of the most Smiler-ish. :p While they were stomping away (and falling over, though they are getting better about that), Victor woke up, having achieved full energy by 4 AM (hooray for good beds!) – I decided to have him upgrade the shower in the blue-and-white bathroom with a self-cleaning coating (he’s done pretty much every other upgrade that I want to it), then got Alice up so she could clean a bunch of the spoiled food out of the fridge before polishing off some more banana split waffles. Meanwhile, Smiler finished off their potato nectar and set that and the latest bottle of grape nectar in the rack to age up before turning back into their regular human form for the day –

-->Just in time for a thunderstorm to rock up! O.o I was wondering why some of the animals were tense. I had Smiler fly into the kitchen to pet Surprise and help calm her while Alice had a cute moment with Shadow, then took a moment to take down and put away all the Spooky Day decorations –

Before having Smiler schedule a family reunion on the calendar for 2 PM that day with Rory, Felipe, Nalani, and – upon realizing the game insisted I have four guests – Clement Frost, aka the trio’s closest friends! Why? To help welcome their new Servo "child" into the world, of course! It's a momentous occasion, and Smiler wanted all their best buddies to be there to say hi! (And yes, I DID consider doing a baby shower briefly, just for the lolz, but I wasn't sure if I would be able to get all the goals done, nor did I need any of the baby-based rewards from it. Family reunion just worked better in this instance!)

-->With that sorted, I had Smiler upstairs to check the trends on SimsTube, since I realized they hadn’t made a video in a while. As it turned out, one of the hot things of the moment was dancing – so I had Smiler pop their streaming drone out of their inventory, turn it on, put on some Pop music (their favorite), and start grooving! Gotta show off those sweet sweet moves to the rest of the world! (Though they took a quick moment to weed Snappy first – gotta keep the Sixam mosquito trap healthy too!)

[victorluvsalice]

-->And then it was time for everyone to converge on the greenhouse and help out Victor – specifically, by doing some targeted harvesting while he finished up his tending! I had Alice return to normal and rush in there to pick the coconuts, the pineapples, the soy and black beans (and evolve a couple of plants while she was at it), while Smiler picked a bunch of their herbalism stuff (with a focus on stuff like the noxious elderberries and poison fireleaf I didn’t have before). Smiler then dusted Victor’s bees with mite treatment, fertilized their noxious elderberries so they could evolve them up to nice level, and headed upstairs to have a nice bath –

-->And Alice got sent to the kitchen to make some more food for the food stand, using her new appliances! :D Because if we’re going to have a food sale, we need to have food to sell! She’d already made a garden pizza last playsession while at the store, which was already in the stand – I thus had her make a fresh batch of dough in the stand mixer, then bake up some banana split waffles, a loaf of artful focaccia, some minty mocha cupcakes (in the oven! :D), and a pineapple pizza! Yes, I was thinking a bit about food that Smiler would probably like, as they were the one who was going to be running the stand – sometimes I regret that they’re a vampire who can’t eat regular food in this save, as I know any human Smilers would be all over banana split waffles and pineapple pizza. In another save, Smiler, I promise! I’ll fudge things a bit in my potential future Valicer In The Dark save! XD

-->While Alice was getting her cooking on, Victor and Smiler were keeping busy with the last of the farm chores (while the chickens were keeping busy with a fox – I gotta get some more livestock upgrade parts). Victor FINALLY finished the tending (and deactivated poor Elmer to stop the bot from constantly trying to weed a glitched plant) and got the initial batch of super-selling done, then left Smiler to finish off selling everything while he cleared out the cow shed (and once again dropped the results on the ground next to said cow shed – I just had him put the trash in his inventory for later recycling). Smiler got Gardening skill 9 from all the super-selling (and harvesting the lemon tree in the corner that had gotten skipped in all the super-sell batching), which pleased me greatly –

And then I realized “wait a minute. Isn’t it supposed to be New Skill Day? Where’s the holiday thing?” Concerned, I checked the calendar, and confirmed that it was indeed a holiday – but that I didn’t have the overlay for it in the corner of my screen. Uh-oh. That DEFINITELY seemed like a sign the save file was on its way out. I decided not to worry TOO much about it at the moment, as New Skill Day is just a pop-up holiday, and not a particularly important one, and instead Alice box up the final pizza, slapped all the food in the foot stand, and had Smiler grab said food stand and gather everyone up to bring them to the Brindleton Bay Pawspital –

[victorluvsalice]

Welcome to the first Chill Valicer Save update of 2024! Where we discover that the gang is a few months ahead of us in the calendar and already celebrating Egg Day. :p However -- before we get into that, we first have to cover a mini-update I did before playing through Egg Day proper, where I took a crack at updating the house a little bit! I'd hoped to do a bit more with replacing furniture and such, but ended up deciding to hold off until after Christmas/my birthday (when I received the cashola to buy Horse Ranch and Home Chef Hustle) when I'd have more options. Here's what I did manage to update, though:

A) I took all the new plants out of Smiler’s inventory (black bean, soybean, coconut, pineapple, noxious elderberry, poison fireleaf – as it turns out, I didn't need them to buy a pomegranate as we already had a pomegranate tree), plus the spare planter that Victor made way back when from the household inventory, plopped all those in the greenhouse, and started rearranging! I now have all of Smiler’s herbalism stuff together, with the noxious elderberry and poison fireleaf next to their counterparts; all the veggies together; all the fruits together (with the pineapple next to the dragon fruit); all the flowers together; the soybean and black bean in the new planter; and the coconut in the empty patch in the orchard. So basically everything is now grouped a lot better. I may still rearrange the planters themselves in the future so certain types of plants are closer to the crafting stations that use them (like putting all flowers near the flower-arranging bench), but at least now all the similar plants are grouped together properly! Oh, and while I was in there, I tried replacing the "stuck" juice fizzer (that was permanently displaying a "ready to collect" screen with nothing in it) with a new one, just so the gang had one at home if they wished to use it. I later discovered that the new one ended up "stuck" too, but at least I tried?

B) I replaced both the upstairs and downstairs litter boxes with the fancy kind that shoots lasers to automatically vaporize cat poop. XD Hey, look, the family can afford it, and it saves them having to clean the litter boxes.

C) I recolored Moory’s shed to some cheerier colors after being like “why would THIS FAMILY, of all families, go with a beige cow shed” – now it’s bright yellow! Isn't that nicer?

D) I replaced the toilet and sink in the downstairs bathroom with more expensive versions – with decorative slots, so I could put a soap dispenser on the sink. :) I was going to do the same upstairs, but ran into a problem because the two bathrooms have very distinct color schemes, and I’m not sure the toilet and sink combo I used downstairs would fit with either...have to ponder that one a bit more!

E) I penned in Toothy – which involved MOVING Toothy to the other side of the front yard, by the tree in the left-hand corner and the wind farm, because as it turns out cowplants need surprisingly big pens. Possibly because Sims have to stand a certain distance away from them to feed and play with them. If I’d left Toothy in its usual spot, I wouldn’t have had any way to get to the pet obstacle course in the corner by the kitchen. I’m still not ENTIRELY happy with the placement, but it’ll do for the moment, and it means Toothy is now cut off from anyone who can’t get through the gate – which is anyone but household members. *nods*

F) And this one I didn't get a good shot of (though you'll see it in a future update) – I copied one of the grouped photo frames I got from that family reunion I did a little bit back and put some of Victor and Alice’s honeymoon photos from Selvadorada in there. It looks nice (even if I still have a couple of spare photos that have to be arranged around the grouped frames), but I still need to decide how to handle all the photos they’ve got hanging around. I’ve been thinking that I should maybe cull a few so they have more space on their walls and perhaps look a touch less narcissistic...but the problem there is, I personally love the photos, so I don’t know if I could bring myself to delete them. *sigh* We SO need “photo albums” in the this game. Give me a book object that you can put photos in, and that when you click on it, plays a little slideshow of the photos, and I will be CONTENT.

[victorluvsalice]

Love Me Dead by Ludo - Topic

It's another Valice (r) Calendar Date, and that means you get a Song Sunday to go along with your Song Saturday! Featuring, as per my trawl of old LiveJournal (ported to Dreamwidth) posts from 2008 (the year I started shipping Valice), the very first song I could see referred to by name as reminding me of the couple -- Ludo's "Love Me Dead!"

...admittedly, this was back when I was first getting into American McGee's Alice and was still thinking of her as the "edgy" Alice (which I guess she is a BIT, just not as much as you might think), AND I was just amused by associating Victor with any song where part of the chorus was "love me dead," because, you know... XD I'm not sure how great a fit it is these days, but I do still like the song, and I'd argue there is SOME Valicey elements -- if only because the song including multiple references to how the girl is kinda horrible but the singer loves her anyway could fit pretty well with Victor acknowledging all of Alice's own rough edges but then declaring that he loves them and her. "You're awful -- I love you," as seen on the preview image. XD Hell of a blast from the past, but I still hope you enjoy! :)

[victorluvsalice]

AU Thursday : Valicer In The Dark -- Playbook Tweaks, A Bit of Worldbuilding, Potential Scores

Been thinking more about my Valicer In The Dark AU as of late, and I have a few updates and additions to the Three Pillars and their particular version of Duskwall that I would like to share with you, as indicated by the title:

Playbook Tweaks -- While I’m pretty happy with Victor’s stats as a Whisper from the original post on this subject, I found myself wanting to tweak Alice’s and Smiler’s just slightly after writing them up. Specifically, I wanted to add a special ability to Alice’s, and an extra ability point to Smiler’s. I didn’t want to do this without a concurrent trade-off somewhere else, though (yes, I know I’m just using this for potential fic-writing purposes, not actually playing the game, but it still feels only fair!), so after some thought, this is what I’ve come up with for each of them:

Alice -- I felt like she really needed to have The Devil’s Footsteps special ability (the one that allows you to do things like jump extra high or extra far) along with Not To Be Trifled With (the one that allows you to do superhuman feats of strength or battle six people at once) at the start -- those two in concert basically cover everything she can do in the games! So, in exchange for her having two starting special abilities, I’ve decided she also starts with the Haunted trauma! This is a trauma that means you are haunted by bad things in your past and sometimes slip off into fugue states -- which meshes perfectly with Alice’s memories of the fire and Wonderland occasionally dragging her out of reality! It also means she can only take three extra traumas before having to get out of the criminal game -- usually, starting characters have four slots for having their brains broken. *shrug* Them’s the breaks!

Smiler -- After reviewing their stats vs their history, I realized that maybe I should have put that dot in Survey in Attune instead -- after all, they’ve been directly touched by their god Mar-Mal! That’s how they got the glowing yellow eyes in this verse! However, I still liked them having that dot in Survey, as it did also suit their character. So, in exchange for getting that extra starting dot in Attune, I’ve decided that Smiler has a slightly shorter stress tracker than most characters -- instead of nine slots, they get seven. Stress is something that characters can use to push themselves to perform certain feats (get an extra die while rolling a weak stat) or resist the consequences of their actions (downgrade a potentially crippling blow into one that just hurts a lot). It’s very useful, but you have to track it carefully, because once your character fills up their stress tracker, they have a mental break and gain a trauma. I figured that trading two stress slots for the Attune dot was both fair and thematically appropriate -- Smiler has lived in a cult that venerates happiness as holy for years, and was directly touched by a god of pure joy. It only makes sense that they’d be a little worse at handling stress and bad emotions!

Worldbuilding -- I haven’t fully fleshed out my Duskwall yet, but there’s a few ideas I’ve been banding around:

-->This first one is straight from the Oxventure Presents Blades In The Dark stuff -- one of Kasimir’s and Edvard’s earliest scores in Volisport was at Cab-Con, a convention for the various cabdrivers of the cities. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but as I wrapped up the episode, a pun popped into my mind referencing the even-more-powerful gondoliers faction (as more of the city is traversable by canal than by road) -- Con-Dola! XD So yeah, that’s the big convention in my Duskwall -- an annual festival the gondoliers put on where they try out new boat types, exchange stories, and have races. Members of the public can come in for a fee and bet on the boat races. It’s a fun time and everyone looks forward to it!

-->While the official book outlines a few holidays on the Duskwall calendar (the monthly Moontide celebration, Arkenvorn to honor the spirit wardens, Gratitude to honor the ascension of the Immortal Emperor to his throne (and just more general Thanksgiving stuff)), I decided we needed a Halloween equivalent as well and came up with “Devil’s Night,” where children dress up as devils and go around causing minor bits of mischief and knocking on doors for spare food and coin. The actual devils in the city are also said to offer better deals than usual, with prices that mortals are better able to pay, but people tend to be iffy about checking out if this is true or not. Because, you know, devils. There’s always someone desperate enough to try, though. . .

-->I’m still working on how the other Alton Towers coasters beyond Smiler and Wickerman would fit into this world, but I know the other secret weapons would all have various cults -- the Agents of Oblivion for, well, Oblivion (who sacrifice people to the void -- not sure if they’re trying to keep it contained or encouraging to grow yet. Maybe both, with a secret internal schism in the cult?); the Spirits of the Trees for Thirteen (who worship the poisonous trees in that one park and are trying to create more -- though perhaps a little less poisonous so they don’t immediately kill everyone they come into contact with); the Clan of the Creature for Nemesis (who worship this bizarre crab-like demon and believe it will somehow save them when the leviathan blood eventually runs out); and the Galactic Rangers for Galactica (who believe the stars are the remains of their god and that if they give her enough worship, she’ll do something about the moon that seems to keep getting either bigger or closer year by year. . .). Rita doesn’t get a cult -- rather, she’s the leader of the Speed Queens, a group of smugglers known for their insanely fast car that only she can drive properly. She is, however, involved with the head priestess of the Spirits of the Trees, even if she’s not an official member. XD

-->Very tempted to put Doc and Marty somewhere in this world, of course -- don’t know if they’d be criminals, but Doc would HAVE to be a Leech well-known for his bizarre contraptions and strange experiments with electroplasm. Probably they have the local equivalent of the DeLorean around, and Doc’s looking to get his hands on an old train. . .

-->And another one just for the funsies -- having gone through both the main book and a semi-official “cookbook” supplement (see the Supplements page -- I can recommend it, it’s a short but fun read), I have decided to pull a Fallout with this universe and declare that horses went extinct sometime during the great Shattering, and goats have taken over all of their roles. This is purely because sometimes I imagine my Three Pillars trio ending up in other worlds, and it amuses me greatly for them to go “what’s a horse?” whenever the subject comes up. XD

Scores -- Obviously, you can’t have a criminal gang and not have any crimes for them to commit! Here are some of the higher-profile missions the Three Pillars would undertake during their career:

-->Sorting out Dr. Bumby at the Houndsditch Home for Wayward Youth (their first score after getting together, and after Alice tells them what he’s up to -- their goal being to either get evidence of his misdeeds to one of the incorruptible Inspectors, or just straight-up kill the guy in a way that doesn’t leave a ghost)

-->Getting some of Victor’s stuff out of the Van Dort mansion (which involves Victor learning just how little his parents worry about his actual safety when he encounters them and all his mother can do is complain about how Victoria Everglot has now TWICE married someone else while he’s been missing; I am also SO TEMPTED to have Barnaby and Kasimir in the mansion on their OWN score to rob the place, only to run into Victor, Alice, and Smiler, and Victor to tell them “hey, help me get my stuff back and I will just GIVE you some money from the safe”)

-->Taking care of one Dr. Kelman and his Sanctuary when he puts out a bounty on the three of them, saying that they need his special “social compliance therapy” (this is how Alice and Victor learn Smiler’s birthname, and Smiler justifies the Advocates’ gray morality by saying “at least we don’t CUT THE SMILES INTO PEOPLE’S FACES BEFORE SCOOPING OUT THEIR SOULS”)

-->Acquiring rare and not-always-legal ingredients for the Golden Plum restaurant (I have this in mind as a score that would be kicked off by the first time Smiler overindulged their Pleasure vice there -- the owner and chef, having realized who they are and that they’re a scoundrel, does a little light blackmail to get the gang to help get him ingredients; part of Smiler’s price is that they get first taste of the resultant dishes, which the owner is happy to agree to)

-->Being hired by Victoria to embarrass her parents by stealing a silver egg they recently acquired and won’t stop bragging about (as you might imagine, she’s a little bitter about the Barkis thing and wants to stop them acting like it wasn’t her husband’s money that bought it; midway through the score though, things go off the rails when the egg HATCHES and produces a baby dragon -- cue the gang getting a surprise new pet)

-->Getting Alice’s Jabberwock’s Eye Staff (she needs it as her scary weapon, and I think it would be fun to make getting it an adventure -- maybe in the Lost District outside the lightning barrier?)

-->Attending Con-Dola (this would be a “joke” score where the goal is to actually have some fun in their lives; I can see Victoria hiring them for this one too, saying she needs them to do a few things there, and at the end they realize she hired them literally to have a nice day out XD)

-->And I’m kind of tempted to do something inspired by The Hangover movies and that one Skyrim quest “A Night To Remember” where, after a night of drinking, the gang wakes up in the Lord Mayor’s house not knowing WHAT happened last night (only that for some reason the lady of the house doesn’t seem to mind they’re there) and have to figure out what they did (possibly may involve them getting drunken group-married and being upset only because they didn’t realize that was an option and they would have liked to do that SOBER damn it)

We’ll see if any of these actually make “written” status! (I mean, I hope so, but with the monster of “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland” looming over me. . .)

[victorluvsalice]

Happy Smiler Creation Day!

The first date on my Valice(r) Calendar, the date that I first created a version of Smiler Always in Sims 4, and thus the general look for my OC Smiler Alton and all their various variants across the multiverse! Coincidentally, I’ve actually been doing some testing with Smilers in a couple of different “test saves” in the game recently, figuring out the best way to get a human Smiler Sim in case I want a version who isn’t a vampire for some reason, and making up some new outfits for them just for funsies. So I figured, might as well share all that with you today! :)

First up, the result of me putting Smiler into a save and then downloading a room from the Gallery which had the vampire cure drink in it, putting it on their lot, and having them drink it. What happened was, because their yellow eyes are a vampire-only feature in-game, even though I was using them on their “regular” form, they went away after they were cured. I decided I might as well take the opportunity to decide on their natural eye color, and this was the shade of green that spoke to me.

. . .if you think Smiler looks weird with a natural eye color, YOU ARE NOT ALONE. XD I dunno what it is, but it’s just -- OFF.

For reference, here’s a shot of a regular Smiler -- I think the difference is mainly that the yellow eyes I picked glow, so the sudden lack of extra shadows around them throws me. Fortunately, in a second “test save” (in which I just went ahead and created a full Valicer set for my library), I discovered that using MC Command Center to turn them human keeps their yellow eyes, so that’s almost certainly the method I’ll use for all future Smiler humanizings.

Onto the outfits! Here’s one I made for my “naturally cured” Smiler while looking for an outfit that might fit them for that Blades in the Dark-inspired AU I keep poking at (really need to do a proper post on that). I’m not QUITE sure it’s right yet, but I like that vest and its purple pocket square for Smiler!

Here’s a “classic” Smiler look that ended up getting deleted/overwritten in my Chill Save (I believe the “Smiler hoodie” outfit is now in its slot), so I wasn’t sure if you guys had seen it or not! Naturally, I tend to favor yellow with Smiler’s clothes, and I like the video game feel of this one, since it went well with The Smiler being so tech-themed.

I stumbled across this sweater/sweatshirt thing while doing outfits for my MC Command Center Cured Smiler and immediately liked it -- can’t go wrong with yellow and black! As this was just a “hanging around the house being comfy” look, I paired it with the purple pajama pants and some yellow slippers. :p

Another yellow-and-black sweater that I liked while poking around the various outfit categories, and some very wild pants that I thought they’d enjoy. Part of the fun of dressing Smiler is knowing they don’t particularly care about getting too matchy. XD Though I don’t think this particular combo is too horrible.

I found this shiny formal outfit and HAD to get it for them. XD I just like the dramatic contrast between the shimmery yellow jacket and the pitch-black pants. XD Gave Smiler some dramatic eye makeup to go with it too!

Some Vampires clothes that make for another good formal outfit -- I really like that purple vest (and hey, I just noticed it has a yellow tie!), and the pants with the faded yellow pattern are great. :D And still got the dramatic eye makeup going with it!

Probably Smiler’s most “normal” outfit, this was out of a desire to use those purple PJ pants for actual PJs and actually go with a solid purple theme for once instead of mixing it with yellow. I like it a lot. . .which makes sense because these actually look a lot like some of my OWN pajamas. XD

The return of the yellow vest, this time paired with yellow pants and brownish-yellow sneakers! The idea was that this was for a party that wasn’t exactly FORMAL but also wasn’t full casual. Think the pants are a bit muddy in the color, but it’ll do.

Again, a shiny formal outfit in yellow with a black shirt was a must-get. XD Smiler will sparkle at any given opportunity, thank you. Paired with a nice top hat and some black -- sneakers? Obviously they haven’t full committed to formal with this one. XD

A Smiler to illustrate my Christmas headcanon about them loving ugly sweaters and Christmas tat! I actually had my choice of ugly sweaters between the free “holiday” pack and Seasons, but I ended up going with this freezer-bunny-themed one because it was the right color scheme. XD Pair with a different set of PJ pants, slippers, and a knit Rudolph hat, and Smiler is ready to celebrate the season!

And finally, a quick shot from my Chill Save Smiler themselves, because I don’t think I’ve ever shown you their main formal outfit. Yes, full tux and tails just because that one had the yellow. XD And white and gold shoes, because who wants to match their shoes to their pants? :P

So yes, that is the Smiler Look Book for the day. XD Hope you enjoyed! Happy Creation Day, buddy!

[victorluvsalice]

AU Thursday: A Smattering of Random Valicer Headcanons

Mostly relating to the standard Modern AU, of course, but the more general ones could apply to any iteration:

-->You know how I have January 8th as “Smiler’s Creation Date” on the Valice( r) Calendar? Well, in thinking of what I wanted to do for it in the shower a couple of days ago, I referred to it as “Smiler’s birthday,” corrected myself with “no, wait, Smiler’s birthdate is the opening date of the coaster, May 31st” --

And then remembered “my human Smiler is ADOPTED -- maybe that’s their adoption day?”

So yeah -- Smiler’s actual birthday is 5/31, but the Altons have another little celebration on 1/8 because that’s when the paperwork all became official and Smiler was fully and legally their kid. Smiler was actually sad when they first learned that other kids just get the ONE birthday.

-->Smiler has a real talent for mixing drinks, both alcoholic and non -- they just seem to have a knack for eyeballing measurements and knowing how much stirring is enough. Any party they throw, they play bartender and knock their guests’ socks off.

-->Related to the above, Smiler’s job while attending college is as a barista in a coffee shop, where they develop a reputation for somehow getting even the most complicated order perfect. They like it when people’s faces light up after having one of their drinks! (Though that does make the “Karens” stand out even more, sadly. . .like this one couple who came in, the wife with a really complicated order that she kept criticizing them on as they tried to make it, and the husband with a simpler order that he refused to leave a tip on, saying it was unnecessary. . .guess how Smiler first met Victor’s parents.)

-->In keeping with the tech theme of the actual coaster, I’ve decided that Smiler, like Victor, enjoys building little robots from kits! They generally do more complicated projects than Victor does, though (hell, maybe they’ve done a mini-toy-like take on the Marmalizer, jokingly calling it their “brainwashing bot”), and they’re better at learning code and programming them. They’re also decent with HTML, as evidenced by the fact that, you know, they have a website with videos and suchlike. :p

-->Victor, for his part, gets into repairing and modifying things -- he finds he enjoys learning how things work and how to fix them, or make them work better, or even just look cooler. And he becomes a “right to repair” advocate after he discovers just how fiddly fixing electronics in this day and age can be, and how expensive it is for most people to replace them.

-->Constantly sending them to practice yoga in Sims 4 when I wasn’t sure what else to do with them has cemented in my head that Smiler just does yoga in general! In that same “crop top and short shorts” outfit that they so often wear as a Sim. Victor finds it very distracting. XD

-->Also, as mentioned in the tags of another post, I’ve recently realized that Smiler’s favorite animal is frogs! Probably as a result of all the breeding and collecting I had them do in Sims 4. They just think they’re neat. :) They also like dragonflies too.

-->Some new food headcanons for the trio -- all of their favorite fruits are also involved in their favorite desserts! Victor likes apples, and absolutely loves a good apple pie; Alice favors strawberries, and really enjoys a strawberry cake; and Smiler likes bananas, and will devour a banana split (they also like bananas foster). I think “chocolate cake” would rank as a second-favorite dessert for all of them though -- and I can see them working their way together through one of those big old “bucket” sundaes you can get at Ben & Jerry’s. (Though that would probably best be handled with the help of Victoria and Emily, and/or Oblivion, Th13teen, Rita, and Galactica. . .probably be a good date idea for the Running Headlong Into The Bullshit mega-polycule too XD)

-->As hinted at in the Christmas headcanons post, I’m tempted to have Alice pick up her father’s love of photography to capture special moments. It seems a fun way to carry on the family legacy! Though, yeah, this is something a modern Alice would be more keen on than a Victorian Alice for sure -- less dangerous chemical bullshit going on!

-->This one is a headcanon-in-progress -- part of me feels like Smiler should have or get a tattoo, but I’m not sure where or what. Something fun and colorful, sure, but beyond that. . .I’ve experimented with adding a tattoo in Sims 4′s CAS to my Smiler Always, but nothing really looked right. (Possibly because all of them are tied to such specific parts of the body -- I’d really like it if you could move certain tattoos to different locations!) Hmmm. We’ll see if this one goes anywhere as a result!

[victorluvsalice]

Welcome to Summer Friday in the Chill Valicer Save! Where, as stated in the final post of the last update, we have the gang sending off summer with a party that has always given me trouble for some reason. Let's dive right into it --

-->I started with the gang bumming around the house, as they do late at night – Smiler and Victor in the barn by Victor's cauldron, and Alice upstairs sitting at Smiler’s computer (she HAD been working on her next book, but the interaction had canceled out when I loaded back in). Deciding to start off right with some sweetness, I had Smiler give Victor a nice shoulder rub to help work out the kinks from all his potion experimenting, while Alice got to pet Shadow before being sent out to have some zoomies to lower her burgeoning Fury. Though, of course, the minute she got outside, it started raining. *shakehead* Sorry, Alice! She did have her umbrella, though, and she seemed to enjoy her jog even despite the miserable weather. :)

-->As she was leaving, though, I spotted two things on the front porch – a visiting Lilith Vatore, and a VERY angry red specter! As I’d put Smiler on “making computer chips” duty again (gotta save up for that Servo!), I had Victor go and take care of both after emptying his cauldron of his experimental liquid. First, he gave the specter a potion of good fortune to calm it down – fortunately, the angry little blob was very happy with its gift and gave him a Specter Sip in return before vanishing. He then said hi to Lilith and got to know her a little bit (apparently she’s fond of the color brown) – I was planning on having him invite her in so Smiler could chat with her once they were done making their computer chip, but right after the “what’s your favorite color?” question, Lilith decided she was done hanging out and super-speeded away. XD Well, okay then! I didn’t really want to deal with visitors right now anyway. :p

-->With Lilith gone, I put Victor back on experimenting with potions (he had to learn a few more recipes for his Potion Purveyor aspiration), and had Smiler tune up both the gardening bots (I was GOING to have them make a cybernetic arm, but first they didn’t have enough salvage parts, and then I realized “wait, that will waste items I want for the Servo, never mind”). Alice arrived back from her zoomies as this was going on with much lower Fury, but I figured dropping it even further wouldn’t be a bad idea and sent her upstairs to meditate (with her arm glitched in the “permanently holding an umbrella” animation, annoyingly – I had to reset her later to get it to unkink). After all, the main thing I wanted to do in this playsession was to have Smiler throw a party to celebrate the end of summer! Once she was settled, I thus had them open the calendar and look at the parties available –

And while I was tempted by the kegger, I realized that the better, more seasonally-appropriate option would be to have Smiler retry The Dreaded Weenie Roast. They've done one of these before at the house, but only managed to get Silver because they weren't able to complete the main objective of roasting weenies (because, at that time, I didn't know the stupid campfire doesn’t work correctly on a lot with the “Simple Living” lot trait). Having increased my general store of knowledge, though, I now knew they could get a Gold rank if I just had the party off-lot. So I had them invite their friends Cletus, Aleah, Sara Scott, and Knox Greenburg, designate Victor as their “grill master,” and set up the shingdig to start at Totter Park in Copperdale at 5 PM. :) With that settled, I set about having them finish off their bot tune-ups –

-->Only for the house to start making spooky noises again and knock everyone out of their assigned activities. I was a bit annoyed at first –

But then I realized I had an OPPORTUNITY here. I immediately had Victor and Smiler use their teleports to get up to the séance room (Alice was already in there, as that’s where her mediation stool is), then had them and Alice light all the sacred candles I’d set up around the séance table while I extinguished the lights in the room. With everything in place, I had them all sit around the table –

And cue Victor leading a BOSS-looking group ceremony to increase the house’s spiritual serenity in the light of the sacred candles, the soul scraps on the side table, and the moon salt lamp on the bizarre idol shelf. :D It was really freaking cool –

So cool, in fact, that I ended up taking some video of it. I mean, I just couldn’t resist – and besides, it’s hard to properly capture the flickering house lights effect in a screenshot. Unfortunately, when I uploaded it to YouTube, it ended up being rather blurry (top quality is apparently 360p – what I get for using the in-game video capture tool!), but if you still want to watch it, you can do so here: A Valicer Seance. As per the previous, there is a bit of flickering from the house lights, but I don’t think it’s enough to cause anyone any problems. Especially with how blurry the damn video is. Enjoy what you can!

[victorluvsalice]

We’ve hit Summer in the Chill Valicer Save, yay! :D Specifically, we’ve hit Summer Sunday, the first day of the season -- which, according to the calendar, was also Prank Day this year! What did my Sims do to celebrate?

Er. . .actually, they just hung around the house. Mostly because I got really busy having them complete a bunch of little goals in and around said house, and -- look, why don’t we just dive right in:

-->First things first -- finally moved those pictures from the Plumbite Pier date they all took on Love Day out from behind the cat tree! Now they’re up in the hang-out room on the third floor, since there was some available wall AND end table space. :) I think they look pretty good there!

-->As for my actual Sims, Smiler started their day practicing some comedy, while Alice was awoken early by a barking Shadow. I decided to have her risk telling the dog to cut it out -- and it actually worked this time, with Shadow learning not to wake up sleeping Sims! Nice. :D However, Alice WAS at full energy and a little hungry to boot, so while Shadow ran off to entertain herself, I had her wolf out and go out for a nice hunt. Victor woke up while she was heading off and got put on “mopping slime creatures/mysterious symbols in the upstairs bathrooms” duty. Fun never stops in a haunted house!

-->Smiler finished off their joke practice while all this was going on -- unsure what else to do with them (as I was trying to let the electrical surplus grow and thus didn’t want them to do anything with electronics just yet), I decided to have them work on their herbalism and prepare some concoctions at the greenhouse cauldron grill! Fortunately, they proved to be much better at it than Guidry and successfully made some deodorant and some soothing skin balm using the supplies in the Herbalism Box, getting all the way up to Herbalism level 4 in the process! Nice! :D And it occurs to me that we should be able to set these for sale at the store too. . . They also took the opportunity to set Elmer on the plants while they worked -- which was good, because a few of them were looking SAD. Look at all those weeds and bugs! O.o What comes when you harvest in a hurry the previous day. . .

-->Victor, meanwhile, was put on pet training duty -- specifically, training Shadow how to fetch! Which -- did not go brilliantly at first, as for some reason Victor kept complaining there was no room inside the house for him to properly throw the ball. Like, that’s a pretty big downstairs hallway/landing area, Victor -- you really can’t find a good place to toss one rainbow ball? *shrug* At least Alice was there to give him some compliments and flirts to distract him from the issue! Even if she was in the middle of eating some raw meat at the time. XD