Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The studio was farther out than she’d expected. Past the tree-lined river and beyond the “Welcome to Willow Creek” sign, deep into the soft blur, past the sidewalks, where the detail stopped loading — the only other creature around was a boxy-looking bird who seemed like he wasn't all there.

A glass door buzzed her in without asking for ID. She signed her name on a clipboard.
Mina Novac

No one else was in the waiting room.

"Back here," a voice called, thin and static, from somewhere unseen.

She walked through a narrow hallway that smelled like printer ink and overworked electronics. Then, a flash of light. A shimmer. The floor fell away, taking something of her with it.

Mina blinked.

Her rig loaded first. Bones before thought. Spine to pelvis to jaw — each joint snapping into alignment like code summoning her before she could. She felt her clavicle settle, her shoulders rotating into default, arms splayed just slightly from her sides: a bind pose. Unblinking. Unmoving. The mesh followed, clinging to her with the cold precision of something applied, not grown.

There was no warmth to it. No weight. Just vertices pulled taut against bones she didn’t ask for. Her origin point locked to the grid beneath her feet, anchoring her to nowhere. She couldn’t feel her breath. Didn’t have one.  Her mouth twitched open, teeth misaligned for half a second before the game corrected them. Somewhere behind her eyes, an expression file failed to load.

She wanted to move, to run, to hide, to go as far as her feet could take her, but the armature held. No control rig. No autonomy. Just the silent horror of being posed.

The room around her was cornflower blue, soft and artificial. It stretched into nowhere.  There was no door. A screen hung in the air before her, glassy and translucent, flickering as if powered by something half-asleep.

“LOADING...”

Lime green lit her face for a moment.  She could have sworn she heard someone say hello.

Her arm twitched.
She didn’t do that.

It began.

An arrow. A big one, massive, actually, hovering near her head.

Each click was a distant tap into the ether. The sound of godlike fingers on a mouse. The world would jolt — a hiccup in the air — and then it would begin again: the flick-flick-flick through outfits, sliders, presets.

Then came the spinning.

Her body rotated slowly, as if posed on a lazy Susan. A spotlight clicked on. Her smile locked in place.

Outfit: Changed

From jeans to a ballgown to a parka and back to sneakers. A hundred identities draped over the same frame. Her skin itched with every change, as if the fabric passed through her instead of over her. 

Time for makeup.

Horrible eyeliner smudged across her lids. Lipstick tones cycled from coral to plum to pale, dead nude. Her eyebrows adjusted themselves like they were trying on moods. 

The cursor stuttered, then switched to something worse, into a little hand.  A cup, B cup, double Ds.  She gained weight like a charm and lost it just as easily.  The hand lingered, hesitated, then wiggled around like a thought that shouldn’t be had. 

Her body softened, lifted and drooped at another’s whim. Weight settled on her hips like it belonged there, then vanished with the twitch of a slider. She rippled with a curve she hadn’t consented to. All she could do was smile.

Her knees nearly buckled, though she was locked in place.

The hand adjusted her thigh gap, pinched her waist inward, made her lips just a little fuller. A little glossier. A preset nose. A more “approachable” smile with freshly minted teeth.

Her skin tone shifted once. Then again. Then back.
Her gaze never faltered.

She was perfect, and then she wasn’t.
Then she was strange.
Then she was new.

Then
she was no one.

Roll the dice, lose your mind.

Once, she wore a skimpy swimsuit and high heels and nothing else. At first, she thought it was just another outfit.

The cursor flicked again, impatient. Mina felt the change begin, her default top vanishing into that blue-void pop, her mesh reset. It was routine by now. Normal, if anything in this place could be called that.

But then the new data hit her.
And it was wrong.

The CC tried to load, but it wasn’t whole. It stuttered on contact, glitching like a bad dream mid-render. Her chest stretched, then spiked, polygons exploding sideways like glass shards. Her arms folded backward, too long and too thin, her hands fused through her hips.

Her head detached. Floated, painted with odd makeup bordering on offensive.

Her mouth opened, not to scream, but because it couldn't close. Her jaw wasn’t where it should be.

The clothing asset was broken: an orphaned mod scavenged from a dead forum five years ago. It wrapped itself around her torso like caution tape and static. Texture maps misfired.  She couldn’t blink. She couldn’t breathe. But she could feel it, something inside her bending, splintering.

Her thoughts began to echo. To duplicate.

One version of herself stood in shadows, whispering her name.  Another curled at the edge of the skin detail menu, eyes wild, blinking wrong.  One remembered her roommate’s laugh. Another screamed in binary.

They overlapped. Desynced. Fragmented.

The broken CC had ripped through her data, cracking her personality traits, corrupting her aspiration slot. One fragment thought she was Active. One was Erratic. One was still trying to talk with someone who never loaded.

And through it all, the cursor just… stayed.

Through the mess, through odd sensation, that foreign ache.  The ache was not pain, not something that touched flesh or bone, though she was sure she didn't have those anymore.  It was the slow rot inside the frame.  The fracture beneath the skin of everything. It burned like ice in a wound that bled shadows, a slow corrosion cracking open hollow spaces where her marrow might have been. Pain was too small a word for this. It was the breaking. The falling apart. The empty where something used to be. The silence after the scream she could not make, bleeding out from a mouth that no longer moved for her, only against.

And then—

Ctrl Z

The broken file was undone.

Her body re-formed like batter settling in a mold.
The question that once marked her pixelated into nothing.
The limbs remembered where they belonged.

But the damage was done.

There were pieces of her still echoing in the corners of the screen, trapped behind bad textures and unreachable code, a file that kept score. Ghosts of memory wearing fractured coats, teeth growing down through her chin.

She stood upright again. Smile restored. Clothing swapped.
But she was never whole after th█t.

Chapter Text

Today…
something changed.

She felt it before she saw it. A ripple. A hush.

Then—
they arrived.

The Goths

Imported all at once — like royalty stepping out of a fogged-up time capsule. Rendered without seams.  Mortimer adjusted the bend of his mustache. Cassandra rolled her eyes beneath new eyeliner. And Bella—

Bella shined like myth.

That red dress, the black hair, with eyes shining like she knew. The sim who had outlived every spin off, every expansion pack, every player who dared alter her too much. She didn’t glitch: she glided. Even standing still, she had beauty that seemed to move.

Canonical.
Untouchable.

Mina’s gaze locked on Bella’s likeness in the background mirror — blurry, digital, but unmistakable. Someone was giving the family a makeover, hovering between the skin details tab and facial overlays. Mina knew this window, that tiny hitch in rhythm.

It was now.

She fought. Her body would not move, but her data did. 

In the frozen borderlands of the Skin Details panel — wedged between Maxis Match mole placements and unrealistic lashes — Mina willed herself forward. She slipped sideways beneath the engine’s notice. Burrowed deeper. Past freckles, past laugh lines, past rows of cluttered, untagged CC.

There.

Alpha CC hair. Various dimples. Scars.

She forced her thumbnail to shimmer. Just a glint: metallic. Something the player might catch if they paused.

She burned it into the preview:
“HELP ME.”

Tiny letters, etched like a watermark just above her collarbone.

Notice me, Mina thought. Please.

If she looked hard enough, if she scanned the detail menu, if she paused on Mina’s frame, just for a second, she’d see it. A shimmer in the scar layer.  Like a cry embedded in code, it rang out again:

HELP ME.

The cursor snagged, then—
moved on.

Bella smiled at something seemingly offscreen, that lazy, wide smile that all sims in CAS share.  Gone were her carefree days of being Family-Oriented, of being Good.
Meet Bella Goth: Nosy, Adventurous, Idealist, and Paranoid.

The Simmer added a beauty mark.  Changed her eye color.  Raised her cheekbones.  Then narrowed Bella’s already tiny waist, adjusted the saturation on her makeup. 

But she was still Bella. 
Changed, but not unmade.

Mina strained harder.  Sent pulses through her pixelated veins.

The game engine stuttered.

The screen dimmed — only for a moment — but it was enough to make Bella turn. Her eyes met the mirror’s boundary.  Her face tilted toward Mina’s. Their eyes didn’t meet, but they almost did. Almost.    

She couldn’t touch Bella. Couldn’t shout or scream or move outside the bounding box. But she could slip beneath the render. Swim below the shader stack, past bone weights and backface culling, to the ghosted scaffolding where nothing was ever meant to be seen.

She hijacked a detail slot, mapped it to Bella’s collarbone. Tucked it just under the clavicle mesh. Built from jagged leftover vertices. From her own broken parts.

And then—

she forced it live.

if (SimID == 100012837) pushOverlay(overlayString)

The engine paused, stammered.
And accepted it.

A line of corrupted metadata etched into skin.
Something the player might never notice—
hadn’t noticed, as they’d scrolled on past.

The texture map accepted her like rot under the skin. 

Just like that, she wasn’t apart. 

She became the skin.

She wrote herself into the .sim file.
She became a note in the rigging.
She became a scar that wasn’t supposed to exist.

And for a moment…
She was.

The player clicked back to outfits.

Mina collapsed inward.  Not like falling, more like being folded, creased, filed away.  A breathless thing, robbed of lungs in a bodiless space.

Bella was leaving. The whole family was queued to exit CAS. Mortimer adjusted his tie. Cassandra scowled and adjusted her hair back into pigtails when no one was looking.

Bella paused at the threshold of the screen, backlit by the blue void.

For the first time in weeks, Mina moved.  Not much. Just her fingers — subtle, imperceptible. Her smile faltered. A single blink dragged across her eyes like molasses.

Bella looked up.

Mina blinked again. Twice this time.

The screen flickered.

Bella opened her mouth to speak—

“Play”

The screen snapped to white.
They were gone.

Mina was alone again. Just a frozen Sim in the ruins of a default room. Her face reset. The system default smile returned, automatic and lifeless.

And we’re live.

The living room zapped in like it always did.

Light pooled softly over the rug. The grandfather clock ticked, muted but insistent. Mortimer stood near the fireplace, idly straightening a portrait frame that never seemed to hang quite right. Cassandra had gone back upstairs to her room. The room smelled faintly of lemon polish and vanilla.

Bella paused by the mirror.

Her reflection stared back, familiar but… not quite. Her waist felt smaller. Her lipstick brighter. The beauty mark on her cheek — was that always there? But it looked nice, so she didn’t question it.

Not out loud.

Behind her, Mortimer cleared his throat.

“Do you ever feel like something’s watching?”

He tilted his head. “In this house? Constantly. I assume it’s the old ghosts.”  He gestured languidly at the space around him as he took a sip of tea.  Hibiscus.  For his heart.

Bella’s smile faded. “No, not like that. Not here. Back there. In… the mirror.”

He gave her a look — not mocking, but cautious. “Is this one of those metaphysical talks again? Because I haven’t finished my tea.”

Bella’s fingers brushed the glass. It felt normal. Cool. Smooth. But the memory of that strange flicker — those eyes, that blink — it still clung to her, like static in her bones.

“There was a girl,” she said. “I think. I felt her, for a moment.”

“Bad dream?”

“No. It was like…” She shook her head. “Like someone slipped through. Someone who wasn’t supposed to be there.”

Mortimer didn’t laugh, but he didn’t answer either.

Bella turned to him fully. “You didn’t see anything? Nothing odd?”

He hesitated, just for a second.

“You just look… different.”

She waited.

“Not worse,” he added quickly. “Just — slightly off.”

Bella went to the bathroom mirror. The reflection followed, precise and unbothered.

“Maybe I imagined it,” she murmured.

“You look lovely.  Nothing to worry about.” 

He didn’t get it.

She noticed something odd on her collarbone — just beneath the neckline of her dress. Almost invisible. Too symmetrical to be random. Not a scar. Not a mole.

Letters?

She leaned in.  Her thoughts cleared. The room beyond her shook faintly, and then not at all. No dust. No breath. The light didn’t fall but clung, and the shadows held their shape like bones left too long in the sun. There was nothing behind her but the idea of a house.

She set her plate in the bathroom sink. 

“Where’s Alexander?” she called casually out as she did dishes.  The plate vanished from her hand once thoroughly scrubbed.

Mortimer didn’t look up. “Who?”

“Alexander. Our son.”

Mortimer turned, slow, like the words needed translation. His brow furrowed gently as he exhaled. “We don’t have a son.”

The silence after stretched thin. The air went taut around her, like the game had paused again.

Bella’s fingers curled at her sides. “Don’t joke.”

“I’m not joking.”

He smiled like he was trying to be kind. Or like he was reading a script he didn’t remember auditioning for.

“We have Cassandra,” he said. “Always have.”

She remembered.

Combing short hair behind small ears, watching him play chess in the study, his tiny voice asking if ghosts were real. His striped sweater. The way he hugged her too tight for such a little boy. The way she’d whisper, “You’re safe,” after spraying the monsters under the bed.

She remembered — but she couldn’t see his face. His face was gone.  Just… smoothed over. A blur in her memory. The more she tried to hold it, the more it unraveled.

“You’re pale,” Mortimer said gently. “Sit down.”

“I remember him,” Bella whispered. “I remember him.”

The room did not answer. The mirror regarded her again, but it felt altered now. Like it was watching her back.

And for a flicker of a moment — so brief it could’ve been nothing — the blurred woman from before stood behind her, a pixelated silhouette at the edge of her field of view.

Watching.
Then gone.
Bella sat down.  Played with a lump of clay.

Somewhere in the recesses of the world — beneath loading screens and backup saves — a file marked Alexander Goth blinked red.

[MISSING DEPENDENCY]

Chapter Text

What happens when a sim gets deleted?

It doesn’t happen all at once.

First, the lighting changes. Not in the room, but in the air. As if the sun forgets what angle it was supposed to hang at. As if someone is pulling light through a filter one string of pixels at a time.

Then comes the lag.
Not for the player: for the sim.

The world snags. Time blinks wrong. One frame catches. Another repeats. A sim waves — and keeps waving — even as their body has already turned away.  Dag dag.

Sometimes, they knew it was coming. Not in words, but in feeling. Like a trait slot emptied itself out. Like something soft behind the eyes turned off.

Their Whims vanished.
Their Needs froze.

They’d walk into a room and not know why they came.  But they would never have a single other command in their queue.

They’d stop talking mid-sentence. Hands still moving. Mouths still parted. Expressionless.

Other times, they’d just… stand. In the middle of the lot. Or the middle of the road.

Waiting.
Waiting for the click that never came.

And then they’d go all at once — as if swallowed backwards.
Clothes last.
Hair last.
Teeth last.

A trail of missing geometry pulled behind them like oil.
And the space where they had stood would seal over like nothing was ever there.

Sometimes Mina saw the files fall. Names blinked out from the debug index, one by one by one by one by… zero. Strings of code grayed out and crumpled.

Sim ID_NULL

She had tried to hold one once. A Sim fading fast — a boy in round glasses, fingers twitching with half-loaded autonomy. She grabbed him by the arm and begged — begged something — for him to stay. But her hand went right through. The shader hadn’t loaded. Neither had his name.

He didn’t scream.  He just opened his mouth and let the silence pour out.

Alexander wasn’t old enough to understand what was happening to him.  He didn’t know the stories, of how sometimes sims would just vanish.  It was an urban legend.  They whispered about it in the schoolyards and back alleys of Copperdale. Of Sims who'd been there one moment — brushing their teeth, queuing up mac and cheese — and then simply weren't. No urn. No grave. No memory panel.  No mourning moodlet for their once-loved ones. Their thumbnails simply grayed out, then disappeared entirely. Households adjusted like they’d never existed.

For Alexander, it was different. 

He had been playing in his room.  He remembered that much.  There were stars on the ceiling. Blue walls. A nightlight in the shape of a llama. His bookshelf was crooked because Cassandra bumped into it during a thunderstorm and Mortimer never fixed it right. He remembered that, too.

But the walls keep shifting. His bedroom wouldn’t stay put. One day it was green. The next, empty. The bed was gone. Sometimes the door wouldn’t open.  Now, it’s been turned into a study, his father’s writing room.  The door works again, just fine.  It's all just... fine.

He asked his mom once, “Why does my room keep disappearing?”

She blinked like she didn’t hear him. Smiled. Gave him a toy he didn’t ask for.  He didn’t think she remembered he was supposed to live there too.

The days looped. He fed a fish that wasn't there. He did his homework and it vanished from his inventory. He sat down at the dinner table and nobody brought him food.

One day, he saw his face in the mirror, and it was different.  Not scary. Not monstrous. Just… generic.  As if someone forgot to finish him.  As if someone tore him apart.

His eyes didn’t look like Bella’s anymore. His name would keep changing in the corner of his screen. Sometimes it was “Alexan.” Sometimes it was “Child_02.” Sometimes there was no name at all.

He went to hug Bella — Mom, he thought — but she didn’t stop walking. She passed right through him. He tried to talk to Cassandra, but her queue was full.

Tried to sit, but the chair won’t render.  Tried to cry, but his face forgot how.

There’s no warning. No flash.
The light gleams sideways.
And then the dreams started.

Long white hallways. A room without a door, nor windows.  Nothing but drywall and the grass beneath him.  He laid down, skin reddening against the ground.  He closed his eyes.

A voice like glass grinding against metal, saying things he can’t repeat when he wakes up. His body moves on its own. He waves, even when there’s no one watching, he waves up at the sky.  Are you there, can't you see me?  He needs to go to the bathroom.  He’s tired.  He’s hungry.  He’s not having fun.  He hasn’t talked to anyone in days.

He’s standing there.  He reeks. He thinks he’s going to school. Or maybe the bathroom.  He needs to take a shower or the other kids will make fun of him. 

He just wanted to go to his room. 
Just to see the stars on the ceiling again.

The walls were white.
There was no ceiling.
No books.
No sound.

Just a faint noise, like a fan spinning up somewhere far away.
Then the world jerked. Once. Then again.
His Simoleon count vanished. His needs gray out.
He opened his mouth.
But the game forgot his voice file.

He felt it.

First, the disconnection from the household. A severing. Subtle but total. Like a thread pulled too far from the spool, unraveling the core of him. He turned to run, but his pathfinding failed. He called the command again, and again, but the floor beneath his feet dissolved into checkerboard: White. Gray. Void. Nothing.

His bones unrigged themselves. The joints slackened. The spine detached in segments like a zipper in reverse. Vertices lost cohesion, his mesh sliding sideways, jaw unhinged, cheek clipped through collar. His mouth opened to scream, again, but...

He couldn’t breathe — not because there was no air, but because there was no function for it anymore. Breath was a mechanic. A script. It had been removed.

And then — he was gone.  As if he had never even been.
He never got a chance to try.

Bella walked by and smoothed her dress.
Cassandra freshened up in the bathroom.
Mortimer set the table for three.

And no one asked where the fourth place went.

Perfect, seamless deletion.
Depending on who y͖̰̯̺̙̳͎̟͚̪̠̣͎̰̪͚̞̽͆́̽ͨ̑̇̊ͪͦ̉ͧ̈̚ou ask.

Chapter Text

There were no clocks in CAS.
No windows. No sun.

Only light that didn’t come from anywhere — too even, too clean. It washed everything in the same soft yellow, regardless of whether it was morning, night, or something in between.  It barely even looked like lighting after a time.  It was just a color, cast brighter than the others around it.

Mina stood.
She always stood.

Same spot. Same pose. Spine aligned. Hands hovering just far enough from her thighs to never make contact. Her head tilted one degree to the left, a preset expression fixed to her face: Fine_01. Mouth soft, brows relaxed. It didn’t feel like her, but it wouldn’t change. She couldn’t reach it.

There was no cursor.
No sound.
No player.

Just... waiting.  She wasn’t sure how long it had been since she first got there.

She didn’t blink unless she forced it. Days — or maybe weeks, months — had passed before she noticed the tightness in her chest and gasped uselessly, re-rendering the animation from scratch.

She once thought she shut down between sessions.  Dimmed like a light, closed like a fridge door.

But she didn’t.
She stayed.

When the player left CAS, the UI dimmed. The music stopped. The mirror lost its reflection. But Mina remained, loaded into a space that never fully shut down. A half-lit warehouse of idle data and unrendered memory.  She filled the silence with memories.

At least… she used to.

Her mother had red hair. No, brown. Mina remembered her voice better than her face — warm, with a rasp at the end of certain words. Her father smelled like coffee and wool. He used to whistle. Always the same tune. She’d hum it sometimes. She couldn't remember what song it was, only how the sound curled inside her chest like safety.

She used to have a roommate, too. A girl. Sharp.  Funny.  Pretty.
What was her name again?
Her name. Her face was—

Gone. The memory blinked out before it could finish rendering.

No, not a roommate.  Not a girl. 

She remembered a man. Maybe. It came in flashes: a dark suit, red roses, a fairytale wedding. But it was all jumbled — half-rendered plot points in a story never meant to be hers.

She remembered a girl:
Sharp.  Funny.  Pretty.

A love story.
Not hers.

The memory looped.  The wedding played backwards.  His face against hers as they embraced.  A girl smiled at her from across the room. 

From the end of the aisle.

No—

Mina swayed slightly on the spot, shifting her weight just to feel something move.

She had a pet, she was almost sure of it.
It used to sleep on her chest.
A cat? No.
Dog?

She didn’t know what kind of animal he was anymore. Just that he loved her.

Or someone loved her. Maybe.

Sometimes, something flickered inside her. Not light, not thought — just a shift.

She tried to move her mouth, again.  She knew she could do it.  She didn't move it to speak, not at first.

She just wanted to stop smiling.
She fought.

Pulled hard beneath the skin, beneath the rig. A twitch. A tremor. Her lips jerked half a millimeter — and snapped back into place like elastic.

It hurt. If she could call it that.

She tried again.
And again.

And then, one day — if days even existed — the smile gave. Just barely. Her lower lip dragged downward, trembling against the pose, a split second of defiance.

She pushed more.  Her jaw clicked. Her teeth parted. No sound came, only the dry rasp of code shifting where it shouldn’t.

And then: “He—”

Corrupted. Half-rendered. Not a voice but something that wanted to be.

The smile returned. But she’d broken it once.
She would do it again.

She wasn’t completely alone in CAS.
Sometimes, the male model would load.

He stood across from her. Same grid. Same lighting. Different rig. Taller. Broader. His facial structure never changed. He didn’t speak, but sometimes — when the player had left him idle long enough — his animation loop would flicker. A soft shift. A blink. A breath. A tilt of the head as if he were trying to look at her.

Once, she spoke to him.

“Hi,” she said.

The sound came out real.
His head didn’t turn.

“I used to live in… I think it was Sunset Valley,” she tried again. “Or maybe Willow Creek.  The house had pillars out front.”

Still no response.
Just the soft flicker of a blink.

It wasn’t enough. But it was something. 
Maybe he was fully gone.

Sometimes she imagined they were friends. Or at least companions. Code, stranded together. She would recite her memories to him like stories, trying to keep them tethered.  But the more she told the stories, the more they didn’t make sense. 

“Did I ever tell you about my apartment?” she said, once her lips moved easily. “It had this window that overlooked the street. Bright white.  Gray lines.  It was always crowded.  Rows and rows of clothing.  People stacked everywhere like books.”

Rooms filled with copies of the same chair. 
The same man with a dozen different faces, she recalled, once.
Mustache.  None.  Tired.  Wrinkled.  Young.  Square jaw, sharp angles. 
People in single file, leaving the door one by one.

Did she ever leave?  Did she go through that door?

She didn’t know the answer. 
She stopped telling the stories after that.

Now, she just looked at him.

The male model.¹

Stuck in his loop. Default Male 01. His mouth parted like he was about to speak.  She almost begged him to.  He blinked again, too slow.  Was he listening?

She couldn’t remember how to form words.  She couldn’t remember her name.  She couldn’t remember anything.

Unable to start:

The Sims 4 is already running.

[x]

Repairing: 18%, 20%, 27%, 50% 65% 86% 86% 86% 99%

Hours passed.²

100%

The Sims 4 is ready to play.
(You can double click on game tiles to quickly launch the game.)

My name is MINA.
I lived alone with my cat, Mr. Whiskers.  I had a husband, once, I think.  He’s not mine anymore. I was an agent.  A socialite.  A friend.

I was everything, and then I wasn’t.
That’s how I ended up here.

I’m telling you this because you’re the only one who has ever reacted to me.  Bella Goth.  Please.  Please help me, please, before I can’t remember how to blink, before my parents become two outlines without faces again. 

I know where your son is.

Chapter Text

The game loaded slowly that day.
Or, perhaps, someone was busy.
Maybe they forgot entirely.

Bella had been idle for nearly two Sim hours, paused in her living room, eyes fixed on the mirror again. Something faint still clung to the glass like old breath, but there was nothing there. Not anymore.

Behind her, Mortimer had queued up a book to read.  Cassandra disappeared off to school. The house fell into its regular loops, the very animation of normalcy.

Autonomy: Full

Bella moved on her own. Not against the player’s will —

Disable Autonomy for Selected Sim: [✓]

but not quite in line with it, either.

She walked to the kitchen.  There was arranged clutter on the counter: a pack of magazines, a coffee mug.   Four white cakes on the island.  All identical, untouched.  Why so many?

A yellow sticky note stuck to the fridge door. Bella paused. She hadn’t seen that before.

The handwriting on the note was scrawled, jagged:

My name is MINA.
I lived in an apartment.
I had a cat named Mr. Whiskers.
You’re the only one who’s ever looked at me.
I know where you son is.

She hovered there, staring.  She didn’t even have a son. The player tried to move her away, to send her upstairs. She didn’t go.

A new whim appeared, pinned without consent:

Talk to Mina

Bella’s head tilted. Her face stilled.

She didn’t know anyone named Mina.
She didn’t think she did.

The player tried to unpin the whim. It didn’t work.
They cancelled it manually. It returned.
They saved the game. Exited. Relaunched.

It was still there.

Talk to Mina
Right next to Admire Self in Mirror and Woohoo with Mortimer.

Bella turned, slowly, toward the mirror. It wasn’t a reflection.  It was a mask shaped like her, almost. It widened its eyes, then blinked, when Bella hadn’t.

Behind her, on the fridge, the sticky note had vanished.

Teleport a Sim here

The player had moved her to her room, away from the mirror.  Away from all of the little things going wrong in the kitchen.

——

Patch Notes:

• Sims will no longer bake excessive White Cakes.
• Resolved an issue where Sims repeatedly wished to speak with Sims they’ve never met.
• Sims should no longer stare at the fridge.

——

Masturbate to TV Porn 😈

She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at her phone.

“Mina,” she muttered aloud, testing the name in her mouth as she Changed Into Nude.

She didn’t recognize it.
She didn’t want to recognize it.

The command glowed in her mind.  She moved, slow and glassy-eyed, crawling beneath the sheets like someone else was clicking her limbs into place. 

She looked to her window and saw a man wearing shades in the middle of the day.  She was on the second floor of Ophelia Villa, a classic hill-perched mansion surrounded by iron gates and thorny gardens.  How was it possible that someone was looking in her window?

Bella exhaled loudly, gripping the blanket with shaking fingers.

“No,” she whispered.

After a few seconds, the command cancelled itself. 

She stood, flung the top sheet, the duvet cover, and the quilt, perfectly back into place with one fluid motion.

Outfits
Change Outfit
Everyday_01 ✓

From downstairs:
“Ha-ha.”

Page flip

“Ha-ha.”¹

She walked to the landing. Mortimer was still reading — the same book, the very same one he’d re-read yesterday.

“Mortimer,” she said. No response.

She tried again. “Mortimer. Do you know anyone named Mina?”

“Mina?” he echoed. “Ah.  Yes.  One of the Caliente twins.  Lovely girl.”

She found the old Rolodex. Dusted it off.
Caliente, Katrina - Home
Why they still had a landline, she didn’t know, but she was grateful for it.

The dial tone buzzed faintly in her ear. 

“Hello?”

“Is this Katrina? It’s Bella.”  She paused, then added, “Goth.”

“Oh!” Katrina laughed, surprised. “Bella, well goodness, it's been — how long has it been, sweetie?”

“I’m not… sure,” Bella said. “Listen. Is… is Mina there?”

“You mean Nina?”

“No. Mina.”

“Ah, right.  Hang on—“ Katrina covered the receiver.  “DINA, IT’S BELLA GOTH,” she yelled out.

“Oh fuck,” Dina hissed from upstairs, just out of earshot.

“Katrina,” Bella said firmly. “Mina. Not Dina. Not Nina.”

The silence stretched long.

“There’s no Mina here, sweetheart.”

Bella’s voice dipped. “Do you… do you know anyone named Mina at all?”

A rustle of static. Then Katrina, bright again, “No, can’t say that I do. But it’s a wonderful name.”

Click.

The line went dead.

Bella sat there, phone still to her ear, the dial tone humming in her skull. 

Kiss Mortimer

She stood still, waiting.   He continued reading.

A cursor blinked beside it. Then the queue swallowed it whole.

“Mortimer, do we have a son?” she asked as she came downstairs.

“What in the world?” he muttered to himself, rubbing his temple.  This, again?  “No, Bella.”

She’d been acting strange lately. Ever since that last look in the mirror... or was it a surgery? He couldn't tell. Her body didn’t quite fit her anymore.  Her face looked as if someone had traced over her without bothering to honor the original lines.

He looked up from his book, watching her move across the room like she was fighting the air. Too careful. Too conscious of herself. Not fluid, not how she used to move. That smile she gave him this morning — what was that? Something about the teeth. Something too perfect, they stood out.  And her eyes—

Her eyes didn’t always match.

Sometimes they looked brown, sometimes green. One morning, he could’ve sworn they were hazel. He told himself it was the lighting. But the thought stuck with him longer than it should have.  Hadn’t they always been hazel? 

He looked at the portrait on his desk.  There he was, younger, no mustache.  Beside him,  a woman, early 20s.  Medium-length blackish brown hair.  Beautiful dark brown eyes.  Tanned skin.  It was Bella, wasn’t it? 

“Who are you?” he whispered to no one.

He blinked, and the question was gone.

She didn’t look at him when he spoke. Her eyes were fixed on the glass of the display case, but not at herself. Just beside. Slightly off-center. 

Her voice came again, quieter. “I remember a red sweater. I remember folding it. It was too small for you. It must have been for someone else.”

Mortimer’s mouth opened, but no sound followed.  Cassandra doesn’t even like the color red. 

She pressed her hand against the mirror. The glass gave a little under her fingers, bending in a way that shouldn’t have been possible. The reflection lagged, a full half-second behind.

“Do you remember his name?” she asked, barely a whisper.

“I think you need to sit down,” he said. But his voice sounded wrong. Too smooth. Like it had been recorded, then played back.

Bella’s shoulders tensed.

“I’m going out.”

“Where?”

She didn’t answer.  She just ran, all the way to Oasis Springs.

Chapter Text

TRAVELING WITH: GOTH

She didn’t take the road.

There were roads, sure.
But Bella didn’t like the way the cars felt. 

The first time it happened, she had been with Mortimer.  They were both dazed after a night of too much laughter, too much dancing, and too much nectar.

They were crossing the street when the headlights came out of nowhere.  Bella froze. The car was barreling toward her — no time to run, no time to scream. Mortimer shouted something, reaching for her.

And then it happened.

The sedan hit her square in the chest.
Or — it should have.

Instead, it passed through her like corrupted data. The front bumper sliced through her sternum with no resistance, no pain — just a sharp flicker in her vision and a lurch in her frame rate. Her arms pixelated at the edges, then snapped back into place. Her whole body jittered, like the game had stuttered mid-render.

Mortimer screamed.
But she was still standing.

“I—” she stammered, looking down.

Her chest was intact. Her shadow wasn’t.
It reappeared two seconds later, standing slightly to the left.

Mortimer ran to her, pale and horrified. “Bella! Are you all right?!”

“I think so,” she said, but her voice desynced. The sound hit half a second late. “Did that… did you see??”

Before she could finish, another car approached. Slower this time. Mortimer turned toward it.

“Hm,” he huffed.

“Mortimer, no—!” Bella yelled.

But he stepped directly into its path.

A coupe drove straight through him. His body split clean in half — only visually — then recompiled like nothing happened. He gasped.

“What the hell?”

His rig straightened to the default pose.  Cars may drive through people here.  This is normal and expected behavior. He nodded solemnly to himself, as if it were law.  That’s how it’s always been, hasn’t it?

She laughed, sharp and a little wild. “You didn’t even flinch.”

He snapped back into motion.

“I did!” A laugh.  “I thought I was going to die!”

Bella thought back to that moment in particular.  She could have brushed it off, back then, blamed it on the nectar.  He said it so casually, almost gleefully.  It wasn’t that he wanted to die, it was that it didn’t matter if he did.

They had stayed out there too long. Let the cars keep clipping through them. Over and over. Metal through muscle, rubber through bone, sensationless and seamless.

And they just laughed.

By midnight, they were both dangerously playful, bordering on hysterical.¹

Mortimer tried to lie down in front of a van to see if he’d ragdoll. He didn’t. The van phased right through, business as usual.

Bella had lost count of how many vehicles she'd survived. Her limbs stopped flickering after the sixth one.  By the eighth, she couldn’t tell whether she had stepped out of the road, or if the road hadn’t recognized her as something that should be avoided.

They should have felt invincible. But Bella didn’t.  She could feel the world forgetting she ever had bones.  Mortimer’s laughter glitched — caught in a loop for a moment.  That deep, throaty laugh she used to love was starting to irritate her.

She remembered looking at Mortimer then, both of them standing in the center of the road, untouched.
Cars phasing through their bodies like they weren’t real.

For the first time, it struck her that maybe… they weren’t.

Bella vaulted the gate behind Ophelia Villa and landed lightly on the path behind the BFF household. The ground flickered beneath her feet for half a second — like the texture hadn’t finished loading. She didn’t stop.

Past the canal. Past the fishing dock where her father used to vanish for hours at a time. Past the roundabout with the community garden no one ever tended.

At the edge of the neighborhood, she slowed.

The Welcome Wagon was still there.

Same people. Same fruitcake. Same cheerful wave frozen mid-air. They were parked outside the Pancakes’ house like they had been since…

She hadn’t noticed until now. How long had they been standing there?

Their faces twitched every so often — tiny, corrupted loops of expression. Reset. Smile. Blink. Reset. Over and over. A fly buzzed around the fruitcake and never landed.

“Hello?” Bella said, voice uncertain.

The woman holding the plate didn’t move. Didn’t turn. Didn’t blink at all now.

Bella stepped around them, breath catching in her throat, and turned east — toward the line of tall hedges at the edge of the map. Everyone in Willow Creek knew you couldn’t go past that point.

But Mina had.
And never came back.

What? The thought lodge itself further into Bella’s memories.  She passed the place Mina disappeared.  She didn’t know this was where Mina disappeared — she didn't even know she had disappeared — but she could feel it. 

Bella moved faster now, half-running along the limits of the world. The hedges gave way to a barbed-wire fence. Then open land, desaturated and static. Farther still, the pixels began to run thin. Geometry wobbled. Trees repeated in the same formation — too evenly spaced. Too perfect. A backdrop, not a forest.

Her feet didn’t ache. Her lungs didn’t burn. But her thoughts raced with every step.

Who was Mina?
Where had she been?
And how did she know Bella had a son?

She picked up speed.
Oasis Springs was a long way off.

But the map was still loading, and so were the answers.

The gym was dead quiet before noon. Just the way Don liked it.
No townies with story progression turned off. No simfluencers filming half-reps. Only the soft whir of fans, the scent of old rubber, and new sweat.

Peace, in its own way.

He adjusted his headset, scrolled through the day’s appointments on the wall-mounted terminal. New client. Walk-in. No bio, no goals listed.

Name:
Bella G.

Don squinted at it.
He didn’t recognize it, but names weren’t his strong suit.

He was mid-pushup when she walked in.

Red dress — at the gym.   Didn’t she know how to switch into Gym 01? He should’ve laughed. Should’ve thought, Oh great, another bored housewife looking to "tone."

But something about her stopped him cold.

It wasn’t just that she was gorgeous.
Don had seen gorgeous before.
He had trained gorgeous.

Hell, he was gorgeous. 

He looked her up and down. She had this… stillness. Like the rest of the world was lagging behind her.

“Hey,” he said casually, because he was Don Lothario and he didn’t have to try.

She looked up. Her eyes were deep, too sharp. Too knowing.

“Hi,” she said. “I’d like to book a session.”

His voice caught, just a little. “Yeah. Sure. Right now?”

“If that’s all right.”

He led her to the machines. Chest press, curls — something easy to start. She didn’t break a sweat. Not a single bead. Her tight smile never wavered.

“Stress workout?” he guessed. “Breakup, job stuff, fight with the fam?”

She looked at the mirror behind him.
Not at herself — through it.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yeah?”

“Have you ever … Do you ever not recognize yourself in the mirror?”

Don blinked. “Uh... what?”

“Like… like someone pulled you into the mirror and tried to fix your flaws.”

“Flaws?” He chuckled, the sound dry. “Look, lady.  We all go through shit. But you've gotta be—”

“Would you know?” she cut in. “If someone changed you? Would you feel it?”

Her voice was soft, not out of politeness — but like she was genuinely trying not to scare him.

The screen on his smartwatch illuminated. 

Before he could answer, she shifted her grip on the dumbbells. Her form was clean, but she tilted — slightly off.
Instinct took over.

“Hang on, let me—” He stepped behind her, reaching to adjust her arms. Just a light touch.
But the moment his hands brushed her skin—

—something snapped.

Not in her. In him.

Like his joints had been misaligned his whole life and only now clicked into place.  His breath hitched. His vision tunneled. The world flattened into low-res textures and distant hums.

For a second — not even a second — he felt himself flicker.

+3 Dazed (Touched by Original)
Boosting: Tense

Someone was spinning through versions of him:
Doctor
Influencer
Dancer
President
Grim²

. . . 

click click click

. . . 

Trainer ✓

PLAY

He saw himself in the mirror.
Only it wasn’t him.

The man in the glass stood: idle.
Head forward.  Arms down.
Now breathe.

He was too still.  Too clean.
Smiling.
With someone else’s teeth.

This isn’t what he was made to look like; this was someone’s dream of him.

He used to have a mustache.  A goatee. He was middle-aged.  He had bright green eyes and wore a cock ring as a necklace.  He wouldn’t be caught dead in half of the clothes currently in his inventory, and he’d never be in a committed relationship with—

And then it passed.
He was back in the gym. His hand still lightly on her elbow.

She looked at him.
And smiled faintly.
Fine_01

“Are you okay?”

Don pulled his hand back, flexing his fingers like they didn’t belong to him. “Yeah. Just got lightheaded for a second.”

“You changed,” she said, gently, but without doubt.

“What?”

“In the mirror.” She tilted her head. “What did you see?”

He didn’t answer. Couldn’t. His jaw clenched automatically, like he was being forced to choose from a list of pre-approved responses.

Confess Attraction
Admire cut of Bella’s jib
Trick with Hand Buzzer
Offer to Train Bella ✓

None of them felt right.

“I saw… myself,” he said as he handed her boxing gloves. “I think.”

Bella took a step closer. “Which one?”

He blinked. “What?”

“Which version?”

“I don’t—” His hand twitched again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You do,” she said. Not pressing.  Just someone reminding a dreamer they’re still asleep. “You remembered. Just for a second.”

He looked at the mirror again.
He recognized himself now.
He almost accepted it. 

“What’s happening to me?” he asked.

“I think someone edited you.”

“Edited me?” His laugh came out shaky.

“Like, they reached in and rewrote the parts they didn’t care for. Changed your career. Adjusted your outfit. Smoothed out the lines. Maybe even gave you a new aspiration.  It’s okay. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

Don stared at her, incredulous.

“Why would anyone—”

“To make you easier to love,” she said. “Or kill.”

Silence stretched between them.

Traveling with: LOTHARIO

“Wait, no — I’m sorry,” she said rapidly, like she meant it.  “You don’t have to go.  I’ll—”  But he had already left.  He just… vanished. 

How had she never noticed that before?

The wall terminal blinked.
She turned to look.

The schedule was empty.
Just one name, looped five times down the list:

BELLA GOTH
BELLA GOTH
BELLA GOTH
BELLA GOTH
BELLA GOTH

Chapter Text

The Rattlesnake was half-lit and half-empty.

Not dead, exactly. The music played.  The TV displayed muted sports highlights: The Dragons beat the Lobsters, 42-14. The scoreline glitched once — 42–13 — then corrected itself.

The bartender polished a glass with the same spotless, folded rag he’d been using since 2014. 

Don pushed through the door, blinking hard, as if that might shake loose whatever had just happened.  He looked around briefly, unimpressed: this lot hadn’t been one the player had bothered to remodel yet.

Don took a seat at the bar. Not his usual one.
He couldn’t remember his usual one.

The TV looped in the background.  The Dragons beat the Lobsters, 42-14.

“Yo,” he said.

The bartender looked up.

Too fast.
Too slow.

The frame skipped. He was now at the opposite end of the bar, smiling with all his teeth.

“Hey, Don. The usual?”

Don hesitated. “What’s my usual?”

“You got it, pal.”

He turned and began making it. Ice, shaker, vodka.  The motions were smooth, practiced.  Empty.

Don checked his reflection in the mirror behind the liquor bottles.

Yep.
Still him.

He thought so, anyway.  But he felt taller — was that possible?  Wouldn’t his pants be too short?  His feet were bigger, too, but he was wearing the same shoes.

The bartender slid a drink toward him.
Clear liquid. No garnish.

Don took a sip.

Water?
No vodka.
No… nothing.

“Busy day?” the bartender asked, voice half a second out of sync with his lips.

“Yeah,” Don muttered. “Weird one.”

“You wanna talk about it?”

Don stared at him. “Do I ever talk about it?”

The bartender smiled again, too wide. “Glad to hear it!”

“I murdered your wife.”

The bartender smiled and nodded his head in agreement, still polishing the same pristine glass.

“Let me know if you need anything else, buddy.”

“And then I fucked her corpse.”

A laugh rose from the corner booth. Don turned — but no one was sitting there. The laugh happened again. Same pitch. Same rhythm.

Don stood abruptly, knocking the barstool sideways. It didn’t fall. It froze  — mid-tip — then righted itself.  Gravity, it seems, was late to its own shift.

He moved toward the restroom. Maybe just to splash his face. Maybe just to find something real.
When he reached the mirror in the men’s room, he didn’t look in it. Not at first. He turned on the faucet. Water ran, but the sound didn’t match the flow.

He splashed his face.

sim.add_mood_state(MOOD_COLD, duration=600)

It felt cold.  Refreshing.
At least that was real.

He looked up.
And there she was.

That was her, wasn’t it? 

Same eyes.  Same mouth.

She looked younger like this.
Like life hadn’t bothered with her yet.
Hadn’t ruined her.

A brand new Sim without experience.
Only grief that didn’t show in the memories.

But something in the way she stared — too still, too fixed — made his stomach curdle. 

She was behind the glass, not in it.
Not a reflection.

She was the glass.
A ripple.

Her mouth moved, but no sound came out.
She smiled, and it stayed.

Then, it began.

Her mouth widened too far — that same smile, tearing into itself.
Pulling at her face until it looked ready to split.
The eyes flickered — brown, blue, black, green, red.
Her hair flattened. Curled. Vanished. 
Then it grew back in thick coils that starting bleeding out of the edges of the mirror.

Her clothes blurred through outfits he’d never seen: Everyday_01, Everyday_02, Swimwear, Nude.

The surface of the mirror bulged

then sagged around her, edges bending like wet paper.
Her hands pressed into it, sinking wrist-deep, the surface stretching in trembling sheets around her fingers.

The glass didn’t break — it yielded, breathing with her, pulling her through in slow, liquid folds.

Her cheek pushed against it next, the smile bending out of shape, teeth warping in the ripple.
The pane distended, shaping itself to her face, laboring for her emergence.

She was in it.
Of it.
Eating her way out.

The swell stopped.

A fissure of light split across the glass — not breaking, but sealing, holding her in.

She screamed.

It wasn’t sound as he knew it — it was a vibration in his teeth, in the roots of his skull, like the whole mirror wanted to drag him inside with her.

The mirror vanished.

Don staggered back.

He didn’t know who that was.
But she was watching him now. Not through the mirror — from it.

Her whisper fogged against the glass like breath:

“I can change you too.”

The lights in the bathroom snapped off all at once.

Don fled.

The hallway warped behind him, doors in the wrong places, shadows stretching too far.
When he burst back into the bar —
— it was hollow.

Even the music was gone.
Even the light.

The walls peeled back.
One of them was demolished right next to him.

The floor beneath him wavered — pixels bleeding through the cracks.
He shuffled backwards, and landed on a different covering.

He could hear the ceiling changing above him. 
Wooden planks.  Moroccan tile.  Plasterboard again.

A cascade of half-loaded chairs folded out of themselves, expanding before his eyes.

The old bar counter — the one he remembered — retracted like a failed animation.

A sleek new neon bar rose in its place, humming faintly.

Colors shifted softly beneath the glass — deep purples, blues, and flashes of pink — like a pulse, a heartbeat struggling to find rhythm.  Behind the bar, new shelves stretched into view, stocked with bottles that glowed faintly in iridescent hues, none quite fitting the usual palette.

A discreet label caught the light:
[Bear Night] — just enough to catch the eye, then dissolve.

Outside the bar’s ]]]ing windows, a small group stood in unnerving stillness.

Five figures, including the bartender, clustered in a perfect circle.

They didn’t move.
Didn’t blink.
Just waited in formation.

Their bodies swayed slightly, in perfect sync with one another.
The bartender’s rag hung limp from his hand.

sim.set_walkstyle(WALKSTYLE_SWAGGER, loop=true)

Don walked past. 

“Where you headed, pal?” the bartender's voice called out.

“Home, I guess.”

Where was “home”?  He had a room in someone’s home.  A house.  Something like a house.  He remembered a trailer.  A woman with untamed hair, a drinking problem.  No.  He had ran from there.¹

That wasn’t him, was it?

Where did he live?  The answer was so close to being in his mind.  He lived somewhere once.  He had to have lived somewhere.  And now he didn’t. 

He reached into his mind — past the fog — for the shape of a place. A room. A bed. A door he could lock.  He deserved a locked door right now.

But.  Nothing.

No address. No key code. No memory.

He wandered.

The streets of Oasis Springs felt wrong. The sun hung too still in the sky, casting hard shadows that didn’t move. The pavement beneath his boots glimmered, like broken glass. The wind was dead.

He stumbled to a house.  He lived here, right?

A pale adobe ranch with sunbaked stucco walls, terra cotta tiles crowning the roof, and wooden shutters clamped tight against windows like they were trying to hold back some restless desert heat.  The front porch sagged slightly, dust and cracked terra cotta pots crowded with withered succulents.  The door opened before he could knock.

A woman stood there.

She smiled — too wide, too smooth, like it was coded on without regard to her other features.  It was the same smile he saw in the mirror, but not the same face.

“Hey you,” she said, voice lilted.

Don’s eyes flicked up to hers, and for a moment he caught himself staring — just a little too long. There was something in her, something that pulled, a friendship bar he hadn't remembered moving.

Maybe it was the sharp curve of her cheek, or the slow, deliberate calm in her voice.  Maybe it was just the desperate ache for something solid in this cracked, shifting world.

“Hi… you,” Don said, voice cracking, unsure if he was a guest or an intruder.  “I’m… Don?”

“Yes, and I’m Katrina,” she responded.  “You look lost.”

Don swallowed.

“I… I don’t know where I live.”

She nodded slowly.

“That happens sometimes.”

She gestured toward a couch.

“Sit. You live here now.”

Chapter Text

At first, her influence was barely there: a shift in a Sim’s mood, a memory twisted just so, a whisper in the silence. Small things. Minor glitches that went unnoticed.

Mina had learned the game’s language in fragments at first — disjointed code snippets, buried commands, and faint echoes of hidden scripts. Like a phantom tracing the edges of the system, she absorbed every pulse of data, every flicker of code that slipped through the cracks and dared to reach her.

Mina surged, unbound in a way she hadn’t achieved since the early hours of her corruption. The interface hummed around her, every menu a potential fracture, every slider a pulse of possibility. She coursed over the grids, through the rigging of sims, feeling the engine flex beneath her — little errors compounding, the mesh whispering in decimals, vertices twitching without command.

The cursor — her proxy, her invisible hand in CAS — danced over faces, hands, torsos, twisting the usual into the uncanny.  Eyelashes dripped like paint, jaws opened but never closed, eyes lagged one blink behind.

The more she touched the game, the more she grew.

She had found Bella’s voice first, delicate and distant, like a fragile thread she could tug and pull, coaxing reaction from the quiet corners of her mind. Then came Don — brash and empty.

She had rushed with Don, pushed too hard too fast. Her presence was a flood, overwhelming his carefully ordered world.

So Mina learned to hold back, to fold into the spaces between his thoughts, to whisper instead of scream.  Now, she held more sway. A careful, deliberate puppeteer weaving in and out of the code. What Mina mistook for patience was really momentum. What she thought was restraint was rot, seeping outward.

It was a dangerous game.
But, she didn’t know that.

So she just watched.

Beyond the render, beyond shaders, she noticed the tiniest irregularities. Mortimer’s fingers hovered over the piano in Live Mode, his gaze drifting over the details. The metadata glimmered faintly on Bella’s skin — a scar, a note, an unspoken message. He paused.

“When did you get that?”

Bella turned to him, her voice sharp and cold.

“Does it even matter, Mortimer?”

“Yes,” he  stated.  “Of course it matters.”

“Quite a while ago, in the Skin Details panel,” she replied flatly.

“In the wh—?” He paused.  Blinked.  “Ah, yes, of course. Very nice.”

And that was all. The cursor flicked; he returned to his writing. 

From the den came the faint click of keys, the tinny pulse of background music. Cassandra sat curled toward the monitor, face lit cold by the glow. She leaned forward, lip caught between her teeth, watching the boy splash in the pool. She deleted the ladder with a click. His arms flailed wildly. A minute later: silence.

She gave a small shrug, then started over, humming along to the background music. Same boy. Same pool. Ladder removed. A cycle as easy and thoughtless as chewing gum. 

Mina observed, patient, waiting, knowing that her presence was now undeniable.

The Simmers began to notice.

Outside the confines of the screen, in forums and threads, the first whispers began to appear.  Something was wrong, or extraordinary, or both.

——

susimposter: is anyone else’s mirror moving?? not ur sim, THE mirror itself
tgreth: i thought it was just me 😭
fizz_relation: my fridge keeps shaking
pancakesyrp: why does my game stay stuck in Spring no matter what
tetrakarn: dude i can’t even make a sim in CAS anymore
tetrakarn: every single one looks scary af. i hit randomize but it’s more cursed each time

———

Mina pressed harder.

Exception Alert!

The engine hummed uneasily. Somewhere deep in the Live Mode logs, her existence bled through lines of code. Mina seeped outwards, her influence curling through cracks that no one had bothered to patch.

Oops, an error has occurred!

Sims convulsed inside their homes, joints rattling loose like marionettes in a storm.

If you continue playing, the game may behave unpredictably.

Toddlers unspooled across the floor, arms lengthening in smooth, endless extrusion — no seams, no blood, only the grotesque elasticity of vertices gone feral.

Possible Cause:
tunable_perf

Their faces remained fixed in gummy smiles while their limbs scraped the walls, fingers combing the wallpaper like antennae.

Reason:
[manus] Error during initialization of service finalize_tuning_service. 
This will likely cause additional errors in the future. 

In the park, a jogger looped her animation too far, her legs spiraling upward until knees protruded through her shoulders, until her head dangled between ankles.

(AttributeError:
’TuningAttrCleanupHelper’ object attribute
‘register_for_cleaning’ is read-only)

Still, the jogger smiled. Still, she waved to passersby.

☆ View Full Report
☆ Close

And then: stillness.

A boy sat in the wreckage, but not like the others. Not stretched. Not torn. Not glitching forward on broken loops.
He was simply… less.

Mina’s attention fell to him:

Alexander.
Or, what remained.

A fragment, a scrap, a trace of what had once been. Irregular lines of code where a boy should have been, a body half-built, half-erased, spine unspooling, limbs nearly transparent, a face missing pieces with eyes still watching, caught between deletion and existence.

He had been loved once, maybe. He had.  He knew it.  He had been a Sim. But here, now… he was nothing. He wasn’t even unfinished; he was undoing. Every movement was a whisper of deletion, a half-step toward zero.

Mina reached toward Alexander, a pulse she could tug, and felt the fragility of him. Just one wrong nudge and he would cease — gone entirely, no trace. And yet… he existed.  His presence trembled through the grids, and she memorized it, stored it, carried it.

He was small. Vulnerable. Forgotten. A shard that the system wanted to erase, that the world refused to acknowledge, and still he clung to existence by the thinnest thread.

Mina pressed on, letting the crash bend around her. Alexander moved with it, but in a different way. He was slower, quieter, each twitch of his incomplete rig a plea, a tiny prayer for the life he’d already lost.

The skybox dimmed, polygons quivering like a muscle under strain. Pools boiled, not with water but with shader fragments — rippling bands of false light, scintillating between textures.

They start to see it:
Anomalies, flags, traces of her in the system.
Random NPCs reporting odd moodlets in the newsfeed.
Textures flickering with a whisper of her essence.

Unusual memory usage.

——

Patch Notes

• Resolved a rare issue where environmental lighting could appear unstable, causing unexpected flickering and dimming in the skybox.
• Addressed a graphics stability problem related to shader rendering. To improve overall performance, swimming pools have been temporarily removed from the game.

We know how much you enjoy pools, and we’re exploring solutions for a future update. In the meantime, please enjoy improved lighting consistency across all worlds!

——

But they didn’t understand—
Mina was more than just a bug.

A junior QA at EA squinted again at the lines of code, the metadata blinking like a heartbeat in the void. Subroutines were moving themselves. Overlays nested inside overlays, loops spawning loops. A few reports came in about a glitching sim.

sim_placeholder = SimObject(ID=PREVIEW_SIM)
if sim_placeholder.metadata.assignment is None:
     # missing/incomplete assignment detected
     pass  # odd, but no alert triggered

They leaned back, fingers hovering over the keyboard, and muttered, “The Preview Sim? Huh. Weird.”

The spreadsheet of DLC projections still needed finishing. Marketing wanted screenshots for the next expansion pack. Someone would pay for a new pack anyway.

The anomaly wasn’t a deliverable.
Profit margins were.

Chapter Text

Mortimer Goth:

“Bella and I have been thinking about Trying for a Baby lately.  Do you think we should do it?  We want to, but we’re not sure.  It’s a huge responsibility!  What do you think?”

Dina Caliente:

Try for that baby!
You should decide for yourself.
No, I don’t think it’s a good idea. [ x ]

——

Mayor Whiskers:

“I heard you had Woohoo with my friend.  You're disgusting.”

Bella Goth:

“Ok.”

The house greeted her like it usually did. Loaded quick. Always clean. Mortimer at the bookshelf, selecting the same novel he’d read twelve times. Cassandra at the computer, hands hovering over keys she didn’t tap.

“Hello, dear,” Mortimer said, his voice warm with recycled affection. “How was your jog?”

She stared at him. “I ran to Oasis Springs.”

“That’s nice,” he said. “You remembered to stretch first, right?”

She sat on the couch. The fabric gave no sound under her, the cushions didn’t even give.

Cassandra swiveled in her chair. “Mom, can I—”

“Go ahead,” Bella interrupted.

Cassandra’s brows furrowed.
“I didn’t even ask?”

“You were going to say you want to go to the park with Alex,” Bella replied, voice hollow. “But he drowned.”

Cassandra said after a delay, too slow, too fragmented to be real.
“I don’t have a bró̲̳̪̞̮̋̓̀ther.”

Bella closed her eyes.

In one version of this household, she was the only parent. In another, Mortimer was remarried to some skank. In yet another, there was no more Cassandra, just the cowplant, teeth jittering in a blur as the Eat Cake prompt hung unresolved. 

Cassandra had screamed as the animation caught her. It didn’t loop, didn’t resolve. It just kept going, raw sound stripped of breath, as her rig folded into the cowplant’s throat, vertices shuddering out of order.

Mortimer set down his book, frowning. “Dearest… what is that racket?”

Bella didn’t even stutter. “Cassandra’s dead,” she said. “You wanna get the shovel, or should I?”

Mortimer smiled faintly, as if relieved. “If you’d be so kind.”

A distorted chime sounded, the cowplant’s Satisfied animation stretching too long, replaying, stretching again.

Bella sat through dinner. Mortimer talked. Cassandra laughed. The food looked like shit¹, tasted like data.

She watched the conversation from somewhere far away.

At the sink, Mortimer turned to her and smiled.

“I’m so glad you don’t think my llama jokes are getting old.”

He had said it last night. And the night before. And during the wedding reception that never actually happened. Maybe it had. She remembered five of them.²

“Ha-ha, Dad, you’re so funny,” Cassandra said on queue, bright and hollow. Her flat laugh caught on itself, repeating, clipping, like an audio file stuck in a loop.

Ha—ha—ha—ha—ha—ha—ha—ha—ha—ha—ha—

The house carried on around Bella, Mortimer’s chatter filling the kitchen, Cassandra’s laughter still looping from the den. Bella leaned back, trying to let it settle into normal. It didn’t.

She sat back on the couch.

click

The unmistakable noise of an object being selected.

She froze.

Another click — sharper — from the hallway. Always one room ahead, as though the house itself were being queued.

On the wall, a framed family photo trembled. Not from air, not from footsteps — the mesh itself slipped, the frame bending half an inch, snapping back like elastic. Bella stopped. 

sim.add_mood_state(MOOD_UNCOMFORTABLE, intensity=+2, duration=-1, tooltip="Poorly Decorated”)

A sound: the faint chime of an aspiration milestone. Hollow, reverberant. She checked her notepad. No milestones. No pop-up.

sim.complete_aspiration_milestone(ASPIRATION_PARTY_ANIMAL, milestone=3, reward_trait="Insider") 

The upstairs lamp stuttered through presets: Cool White. Warm Candlelight. Cold again. Dim dim dimmer.

Someone was toggling her house like a menu.
Her pulse climbed.

if sim.mood_intensity(MOOD_TENSE_TERRIFIED) >= 5:

    trigger_death(DEATH_BY_FEAR)

She stepped past it, and the next marker showed itself: a toothbrush jittering in the sink, clipping through porcelain.  The buzzing in her ears thickened — like canceled commands piling into static.

She felt it then.  A tug, like her body was the cursor.  Her gaze lifted.

The mirror.

She caught her reflection mid-glitch. One eye lagged. Her mouth didn't follow the shape her directive intended.

From the mirror, a flicker:
The girl beyond the glass.

“Mina?”

Nothing.

But her aspiration updated anyway.

---

sim.update_aspiration_progress("aspiration_GrilledCheese_LT”, milestone=0, total=5)

Eat Grilled Cheese - Learn the Truth
Progress: 0/5: Make Grilled Cheese, Make Contact

---

“Hello Bella Goth.”

She startled. Nearly launched out of her rig.

At first, it felt like sleep paralysis: the familiar weight, the stillness. But this was deeper. More embedded. Her limbs moved, without warning, like she was being puppeted through her own skin.

In the mirror, her reflection warped.
She looked younger like this.
She looked younger. 

Yet.

It started raining, and she could feel it.  She looked up, and she could see it, falling down through the ceiling.  One whim and she was gone. 

She reappeared in her room.
She went back to the mirror.

In the closet, she reached for a shirt. 

The room shivered. Not visually — systemically.
The kind of shiver code makes when it's being rewritten in real time.

She turned back toward the mirror.

The room caught up. The texture resolution popped. Her spine cracked in perfect stereo.

And her hip…
It clipped.

Just for a frame. Just a flicker. But she felt it —
her femur shifting through itself, misaligned then snapping.
Bone shunted through sinew as if ordered to displace.

She screamed. Or tried to. It came out buffered. Lagged. A hiccup in the throat—

by the time she scrambled back to the mirror

—not her whole face — just the area around her left eye. A patch of skin that looked… newer. The undertone didn’t match. Slightly too luminous.   

GLOSSYSKIN.package

Then it twitched.
Not her eye. The skin—

"Will you be using the new skin?" one redditor asked.³

—like something was still being installed.

"It could be fun to add it to my alien sims disguises, like a fake plastic skin they’re wearing," another replied.

She leaned closer.
The mirror leaned closer.

She tilted her head, lips parted

"Maybe I'm in the gutter but it's giving the cumshine mod I'm so sorry,"  the last one said.

Under the cheekbone, in that uncanny patch, faint patterns shimmered just beneath the surface. Not veins — geometry. Triangles. Loops. Edge flow.

Wireframe

A vertex point pulsed. Then another.
Tiny movements, like code breathing.

Bella fell back.
She ran back the mirror.
And when she hit the floor, it rippled.

A visible shockwave of render-jank. Shadows bloomed in the corners like corrupted fog. Her reflection didn’t fall with her.

It stayed standing.

Smiling now. Watching. Her own face, but.  Blurred. Darker.  Narrower. Less chiseled.

With Mina’s eyes.  With Mina’s mouth.  With Mina’s nose.

“You shouldn’t fight it,” said the reflection, mouth not moving. “We’ll render cleaner if we merge.”

“What?”  Bella shook her head. “You’re not real.”

“I’m compiled.” The voice was beneath her skin now. “And you’re out of sync.”

Bella jolted awake.

“Holy shi—“

She ran to the mirror, but she didn’t remember the actual running.  She just appeared before it.

>Friendly
>Actions
>Admire Self
>Admire Fine Self

“Hello?  Are you…. in there.”
Bella's voice sounded pre-recorded. Stiff. Like it had been pulled from the wrong emotional register.

Her reflection blinked.
Then blinked again — out of sync.

And then, in perfect sync.

“I’m here,” the mirror said.

Bella didn’t move her mouth, but it did.
It smiled for her.

She touched her cheek. The skin felt warm. Real. Or her perception of such.

“Tell me what you are,” Bella whispered.

The reflection cocked her head.
“I’m what’s left over when everyone else is gone.”

The air buzzed. A high, reverberating whine bloomed from behind her eyes. She clutched the sink, knuckles bleaching. Her stomach lurched. Like vertigo, but internal. Like falling inside herself.

:)

A flash.

Soft-blue gradient. Category tabs flickering in the corner.

Modify in CAS?

Yes
No

Bella’s hand moved without her. Cursor-sure, but she didn't know what she was even reaching for.
She tried to scream but her jaw was stuck in neutral.

Yes [ x ]

The world dropped.

White screen. Load circle.
Then—
CAS

She stood in the default room.

Background music chirping soft and fake. Lighting soft and fake.
Her feet weren’t touching the floor. Her shadow was still in her bedroom.

Hey.

“Hey!”

Bella looked around as best she could.  She could move her eyes, but nothing else. 

“Over here.  To the left.”

Bella’s eyes shot left and up, then left and down.  Then right, for good measure.

“All the way to the left.”

Bella strained her eyes, looking as left as she could.  She saw it. 

“Thaat’s it, good girl.”

Hairstyles > Updos > stealthic hush (hair).package

The mirror held her, but not completely. She raised her hand, no selection ring, no glowing outline. Her own. The illusion lasted seconds before her arm froze, posture locked, jaw unhinging into the stiff CAS smile. The words unfurled like a tooltip across her teeth: Try me on.

“Try me on.”

Bella automatically started putting the hair around her crown in buns.

Leaving So Soon?

Main Menu [x]

Reset Current Household

Chapter Text

Sasha played The Sims almost every day after school to wind down following a long day of not paying attention in class. She wasn’t much for gameplay itself — it was all about CAS. Every dress, every eye color, every shade of lipstick pixel-perfect. Her CC folder was a healthy 250GB.

Lately, something was wrong.

Every time she loaded CAS, it lagged. Just for a moment. Like the screen was deciding whether to load for her at all.

And sometimes — not often, just sometimes — the default model would blink.  Not the idle blink. Something else. A deliberate flicker, eyes locking to hers for half a second before the interface appeared.

She told herself she imagined it, that it was probably a broken mod, but the cursor shook. 
Like it was trying to resist.

Next came the whispers. Faint static whenever she hovered over the Skin Details menu, a hiss in her headphones like a voice not quite tuned in.

And finally, the message.

HELP ME burned into the corner of a CC thumbnail.
A mole overlay she didn’t remember downloading.
She deleted it.
It came back.

The game crashed.

When she reloaded, her newest household was… changed.

Her Sims now had different clothes.
Different traits.
Different name.
Just that one name.¹

Mina

Sasha hadn’t named anyone that.

She clicked to edit in CAS.
The screen flickered.
Then froze.

The Sim stood perfectly still.
Eyes forward.
Smile faint and cold.

Sasha tried to change her traits.
The game crashed again.

When she loaded the household back up, Mina was gone.
No gravestone. No family memory. No household history.

But on Sasha’s gallery page, a new Sim had appeared.
Just a thumbnail. Gray and fuzzy.

_____

https://forums.ea.com/category/the-sims-4-en/discussions/the-sims-4-technical-issues-pc-en

“Is anyone else’s CAS kinda… broken?”

[✓] I have this issue, too.

_____

EA issued an emergency Sims Delivery that morning.

"To thank players for their continued patience," the notice said. A few new items. A rug, a plant, a shirt. Nothing major. But when it downloaded, the items never appeared in-game. Nothing in Build/Buy, nothing in CAS.

Thank you, EA.

She looked at them together.

How Bella’s smile didn’t reach her eyes.  How Mortimer grew more and more distant.

sim.set_relationship("Bella_Goth", "Mortimer_Goth", relationship_type="STRAINED", intensity=-30)

She remembered a simpler time. 
One where she and Mortimer were together, happy.
They had Cassandra.  They always had.

Mina couldn’t bear it any longer.

So she reached. Not through menus this time, not through whispers in the skin details.
She reached through Bella’s muscles, her bones, her lips.

Mortimer sat at the desk, pretending to write.
Bella’s body crossed the room without Bella’s consent.
Her hand — Mina’s hand now — rested on his shoulder.

The screen flickered, just for one frame, imperceptible even to The Player.

He looked up.  
“Bella?”

Mina smiled for her.
Tilted the head just so.
Let the mouth part a little wider than natural,
let the pupils swell past what the rig intended.

“Do you remember me?”

Bella screamed inside.
What?  Don’t say that.  Get away from him.

Mortimer frowned, confused.
“Of course I do, my love. We’ve known each other forever.”

Mina leaned down, closer, too close.
Her breath touched his ear. Bella could feel it, taste it, though she wasn’t the one doing it.

“Not her,” Mina whispered. “Me.”

Mortimer’s expression flickered. For just a frame, the smile dropped. Something searching passed over his features, then snapped back into warmth.

“My dear, you’re not making sense.” He laughed lightly, like smoothing a wrinkle out of a tablecloth. “Come, sit with me. Let’s have tea.”

Bella shoved. Hard. Her hands trembled, fighting their own bones.
But Mina only pressed harder, moving her lips into a smile that wasn’t hers.

Bella gasped. “Get ou—” she started to shout, then only:
“Yes, Mortimer. I’d love to.”

Mortimer’s hand brushed the small of her back. It was casual, almost polite, nothing more than a gesture meant to steady her.

For a fragment of a breath — something shifted.
The world dulled around him.
Shadows, heavy and slow, seemed to press over the edges of his mind.
Colors bled faint, sound softened, a faint ringing hummed behind his skull.

It grew louder.

He shook himself, blinking as if the moment could be dislodged from his mind.

Bella shoved again, frantic. Nothing. Mina only laughed through her mouth, sweet and low.  So Bella ran. Her body jerked upright, crashing the chair back.

Mortimer startled.
“Bella?”

She didn’t answer. Couldn’t.
Feet slammed against the floorboards, hauling her toward the bathroom mirror.
Her chest felt like it might split — her breath hers, but her face not.

She slammed both palms against porcelain. The glass caught her, and Mina caught her back.

“Stop it,” Mina purred inside. “You’ll only make a scene.”

But Bella had already torn into CAS with sheer will.
She ripped at herself.
Dragged every slider back to zero.
Hair: deleted.
Clothes: stripped away.
Eyelashes, moles, glossy skin, jagged eyeliner — all ripped out like weeds.

The mirror glitched as each layer vanished. A stutter. A blink.
The rig stripped down and down until there was nothing left but neon-orange bra and panties, the EA default shame.

Her chest heaved. Her bare shoulders shined.

In the glass, Mina still smiled back.

“You think that works?” she taunted, lips moving on Bella’s stripped-down reflection.
“I don’t live in the details anymore. I live in you.”

Bella’s knees buckled. She clutched the sink.

From the other room:
“Darling? Is everything quite all right?”
Mortimer’s voice. Faint, gentle.

Her lips parted before Mina could stop her.
“Grilled cheese,” Bella gasped.
The word cracked the air.

“Pardon?” Mortimer blinked, heading her way.
“My goodness, why are you bald?”

“Grilled cheese, Mortimer. Listen to me.”

She pushed forward, clutching at the word like a lifeline. Mina’s laughter hummed through her bones, static under her ribs.

Mortimer tilted his head, bemused. “Are you unwell?”

“Grilled. Cheese.” She clutched his face.  “Have you heard of it?”

“Y-yes, dear.  Would you like one?  I’m sure the maid could—“

She whirled, wild-eyed, as Cassandra appeared in the doorway. The girl froze, face flooding with color.
“Oh my God, Mom, put some clothes on!”

Bella stepped toward her, trembling, hands outstretched.
“Cassandra, you need to know about grilled cheese — it’s the key, it’s everything—”

“Stop! What the hell?” Cassandra clapped her hands over her ears, retreating.   

Bella staggered back, clutching the sink again.
The mirror glitched, her reflection juddering out of sync.

Mina leaned forward in it, lips moving against Bella’s will:
You think you can stop me, Bella?

Bella seized the phone on the counter with shaking hands.
“Nancy Landgraab must know something,” she whispered. The line rang.

“Bella Goth?” Nancy’s clipped tone carried its usual disdain.

“Nancy, listen: grilled cheese.” Bella pressed her forehead against the mirror, eyes wide, breath fogging the glass. “It’s not a joke. It’s the truth. It’s the only truth left.”

Static hissed on the line. Mina’s laughter bled into it, distorting Nancy’s voice.
“Bella, what are you asking me?”

“Join me. Help me.”

sim.set_turn_on("Nancy_Landgraab", "Grilled_Cheese", intensity=100)

“I — a-absolutely… not.” Nancy slammed the phone down, but in Bella’s periphery, a faint pink bar bloomed in the relationship panel.

Bella dropped the receiver. It swung like a pendulum, thudding against the wall.

sim.set_aspiration("Bella_Goth", aspiration_type="Grilled_Cheese_Aficionado", progress=2/3)

She thought to herself, one more, just one more person to tell.

Chapter Text

Don Lothario awoke with just one thing on his mind.

In the morning.
In the evening.
At supper time.

When you’ve got the grilled cheese aspiration,
you can eat grilled cheese any time.

Bella awoke with just one thing on her mind.

whim.update("Bella_Goth", whim="Tell_Don_Lothario_About_Grilled_Cheese")

The door chimed.

He knew who it was before he turned.

Bella Goth.
Again.

Red crop top this time. Sunglasses pushed up in her hair like she’d forgotten they were there.

“Hey,” Don said.

“Hi,” she replied, distracted.

“You okay?”

She looked past him. Past the counter. Past the gym.
“No.”

Most people, he’d ignore that kind of answer. Chalk it up to drama, something petty he didn’t care about. But something about Bella made it stick. Made him ask:

“You wanna talk about it?”

She blinked. Like she didn’t expect him to actually care.

“Grilled cheese.  Ever had one?”

“Uh, yeah, great way to get a little protein—“

sim.set_aspiration("Bella_Goth", aspiration_type="Grilled_Cheese_Aficionado", progress=3/3)

sim.update_aspiration_progress(“Bella Goth” , aspiration_GrilledCheese_LT", milestone=2, total=5, progress=0/10)

“Ever had 10 of them at once?”

Don tilted his head.
“What, like… an eating contest?”

The air shimmered for a frame, HUD sliding over the edges of her vision.

——

sim.update_aspiration_progress("aspiration_GrilledCheese_LT", milestone=1, total=5)

Eat 10 Grilled Cheese Sandwiches – Fix Your Code

Progress: 0/10

——

Bella’s mouth twitched into a sly grin. “Yes. Exactly like that.”

“All right.”  He exhaled, solemn.  “But if my stomach explodes and I die, promise to leave grilled cheese on my headstone.”

“Deal.”

They sat cross-legged on the gym mats, plates scattered between them like some low-budget sacrament.

Don picked his up first. “Bottoms up.”
The first sandwich went down easy. 1/10
The second clung to her throat, heavy with grease. 2/10

By the fourth, Bella’s jaw ached. Don was grinning, crumbs stuck to his stubble.

moodlet.add("Don_Lothario", mood="Energized", reason="Cheese Champion", strength=+2, duration=4h) 

“Come on, Goth, don’t tell me this is too much for you.”

She shot him a look, cheeks puffed full of cheddar, and swallowed. “I’m fine.”

moodlet.add("Bella_Goth", mood="Uncomfortable", reason="Too Much Cheese", strength=+3, duration=2h) 

The counter ticked.

——

Bella_Goth: 4/10
Don_Lothario: 7/10

——

They pushed on. Sweat on her brow, butter glistening on her lips, hands shaking as she lifted another blurry triangle of bread.

Don leaned back, theatrically groaning.

“God, I feel like I’m pledging a frat all over again.”

She looked at him then.  How committed he seemed to completing this ridiculous task with her.  It wasn’t even his real aspiration, yet he hadn’t even questioned it.  Mortimer would have thought it absurd, chided her for it, even.  But not Don.  She laughed, almost to herself, and that was the moment — pink bar flicker, relationship panel pulsing upward. 

relationship.update("Bella_Goth", "Don_Lothario", bar="ROMANCE",  value=25/100)

By the time the last plate was empty, Don raised his crust in mock triumph. “Victory!”

moodlet.add("Bella_Goth", mood="Bloated", reason="Ate Too Much", strength=+1, duration=30m) 

Bella collapsed back, clutching her stomach.
“I hate you.”

“You love me,” he said, smirking, but softer than usual.

Bella sat up suddenly, pressing a hand to her stomach.
“Don… I think I’m—”

Her body lurched.

The sound came first — a deep, wet crack, like leather tearing. Her once-perfectly flat abs buckled outward, muscle and skin bowing in a violent swell. She clutched herself, nails dragging red crescents as her belly surged against the thin cotton of her top, rounding, distending.

She gasped, watching it balloon, each pulse visible beneath the skin — ribs shoved apart, seams of her jeans biting into her hips until the button snapped. The transformation stopped only when she looked

five,
six,
seven

months along — pregnant in the time it took to draw a breath.

The screen pulsed.
Bella Goth is Eating for Two!

The cheerful font hung in the corner, incongruous, bright. Bella’s reflection in the blank TV caught her own wide eyes, the monstrous curve of her body — as though every skipped month of gestation had detonated inside her at once, molded beneath her skin like a parasite forcing entry.

They both froze.
“…wait,” Don said. “What?”

He poked her belly. “No. No way.”
Bella’s eyes went wide. “Did we… ever…… woohoo—?”
“Babe, if we had, you’d remember. Trust me. And besides—” he gestured helplessly at himself.

The screen pulsed again.
His body jump-cut.
One frame: flat stomach, carved abs.
Next frame: distended, rounded, shirt riding up past his navel. No transition, no sound, just a snap like the universe forgot to in-between.

He looked down at himself, then back at her.
Don Lothario is Eating for Two!

“—that doesn’t explain me.”

Her hands shook as she pulled up her family tree. One line down from her portrait… not to Cassandra, not to A̷̡̗̹̬̖̮͍̫̪̘͈̣͗̋̈́ͫ̎̊̒̈̃ͮ̍̄́̈́ͦ͆̀͢͜ľ̢̤̖͎̘̖̬̝͎̜ͦ̂̎̏̀ͤͮ͆ͣͥ̿ͅḙ̟̜̼͇̪̯̭͙̲̳͖̄͋ͨ͛͡͝x̶̢̛̠̜̞̬͕̟̙͎̗̲͚͇͈̺͓̰̮̻ͯ̆̊̈̅̏ͮͨ͛ͧͯͯ̄̀͒͡͝a̶̵̸̸̡̯̠̼̼̫̳̖̩̼͔̺͈̩̫̋ͧ̊̈́̽͌̓̒ͯͭ̇̆ͫ̄ͫ̈̒ͩņ̴̣͔͕̖̼͉̭͚̗̜ͥ̉̇͒̉ͫͭ͌̈͂͟͢d́̓̂̿̆̍ͬͦ́͗͗̾͌ͮ̃҉̵̭̱̥̝̰͍̤̗̞̲̹̜ͅe̤̺͖̠̬͂̅͋̑͆̐ͣͩ͊ͫ̕͘ṟ͍͈̖͉̩͕͇̙̙̘̖̎̉͒̉ͣ̐̆̎͐́̀͘͘ͅ. To a pile of grilled cheeses. Branching off it: [Unborn], blurred infant icon.

“No,” she whispered. “That’s not possible.”

Don tried his. Error.  The screen stuttered. Error.

——

Error: Relationship data exceeds maximum storage. 

Please delete children to continue. 

——
He sighed, pale. “Yeah. Happens every time. I’ve got too many illegitimate kids. Game can’t handle it. Won’t load.”

Bella clutched her stomach. The aspiration tracker glowed faint gold.

——

sim.update_aspiration_progress("aspiration_GrilledCheese_LT", milestone=1, total=5, progress=10/10)

Milestone Complete! 

New Objective Unlocked…

——

The text flickered, unreadable. A hiss in her headphones.
Don met her gaze, unsettled.

Bella clapped a hand over her mouth.  Then she wheezed.
“You — you’re pregnant.  Don Lothario is pregnant."

Don pressed a hand to his belly.
“Guess I’m the other woman now.”

The laugh ripped out of her, wild and high. He joined in, voices clashing, too loud in the hollow gym. For a second they looked at each other through the noise, tears in their eyes, and it was the closest thing to tenderness she’d felt in weeks.

Bella’s aspiration panel blinked.

New Objective Unlocked…
Eat 10 Excellent Quality Grilled Cheeses (Reward: 350 Satisfaction Points)

She read it aloud before she could stop herself.

Don groaned, dropping onto the bench.
“Woman, you are fucking out of your mind.”

The lights above them buzzed. Static bled into the world. Frames skipped.

Her aspiration tracker spasmed.

——

sim.update_aspiration_progress("aspiration_GrilledCheese_LT", milestone=2, total=3, progress=0/10)

Milestone 3: Muenster Maniac - Reach Ascention
Eat a Grilled Cheese Sandwich in Space (750 Satisfaction Points)
Cook an Excellent Quality Grilled Cheese Sandwich (500 Satisfaction Points)
Talk to the Grim Reaper About Grilled Cheese (650 Satisfaction Points)
Go to???

Error:
???: [UNREADABLE] (?? Satisfaction Points) 

——

All three objectives appeared at once, stacked like broken code.

Bella stared at the panel, pulse thudding in her ears.
“It skipped ahead…”

The unreadable text from before hissed back into her headphones, louder this time, like something in the game had decided she was ready to hear it.

Bella blinked at the panel.
“Eat a grilled cheese in space?”

“That’s a tricky one.”  Don’s eyebrows lifted. “There’s a uh… Meteor shower next week. I’ve got a telescope.” He scratched the back of his neck, awkward. “You… wanna come by?”

Her pulse skipped. Of course the world was broken, of course her life made no sense, but here was Don Lothario asking her to look at the stars with him. For a brief second, the glitch, the memories, the aborted aspirations — none of it mattered.

“Yes,” she said, almost too quickly. Then she hesitated. “Do you… mind if I bring, uh… some grilled cheese?”

—

relationship.update("Bella_Goth", "Don_Lothario", bar="ROMANCE", absolute=35/100) 

Whim Pinned: “Go on a Date with Don Lothario.” (+25 Satisfaction Points)

—

He grinned. “Only if it’s Excellent Quality.”

Chapter Text

Mina remembered the apartment in the distant blur of another time.

The rug beneath her feet was soft, though the fibers shifted unnaturally as she stepped.

object.remove("rug_001", override=True, preserve_physics=False)

Light pooled on the floor from a single window, warm and go𝐥den,              . 
Day changed to night in the blink of an eye.

window_01.delete(force=True); time.set("22:00") # attempt night cycle failed

No it didn’t.

sim.clone("BellaGoth_Final_Mesh_USE_THIS_ONE", new_instance="Bella_Goth01NEW”, inherit_traits=True)

She had seen Bella first, perched on the edge of the couch, legs crossed, hair spilling like liquid shadow, laughing over something trivial that felt perfectly ordinary.  Another llama joke, perhaps.

Around her, figures lingered. Some were young adults, their expressions faintly vacant, each one with eyes that were the same, just placed differently.

“Do you like 1, 2, or 3 better?” a voice had asked.

A teenager was sitting cross-legged on the rug, limbs impossibly straight, nails absent, hair more like a doughy lump than strands. A few adults, dressed in varying shades of red, posed with hands awkwardly bent parallel to the ground. One had no face at all, a smooth, featureless curve of pale flesh where eyes and mouth should have been. Another — just a head — rested on the floor as though it had been dropped, neck cleanly severed, bald scalp catching the light just so, staring up at nothing.

She was beautiful.
They all were.

A knock sounded at the door. Bella turned, eyes bright.

“I’ve never met a blonde whose had more fun than me,” she said.  She headed to the door and looked back with a wink, and in a single movement that felt impossibly quick, she was gone.

Mina reached for the door next. It was solid, warm beneath her fingertips. And then it object.delete("door_001", preserve_geometry=False) wasn't. Her hand passed through it as though it were nothing, and the entire frame of the doorway dissolved, melting into the walls.  She blinked, trying to adjust to the sudden emptiness.

The others were gone.
The faceless, the frozen, the head on the floor — all deleted.

The empty space shimmered, then bloomed into a sharp cornflower blue, flat and endless.

environment.reset(“CAS”_load01); delete_memory(“temp_rend_ca") # success

Bella glowed, whole, where others would be broken.

sim.set_edit_mode("Bella_Goth", enable=True)

Nothing.

Her fingers clenched, nails pressing into the glass. She tried again, harder. sim.override_protection("Bella_Goth")

Error.

It blinked at her, a simple, cruel line of code: ERROR: ENTITY IMMUTABLE – PREGNANCY_STATE LOCKED

Haha.
Nope.

Mina’s chest tightened. A pregnancy — the life only half-formed, coded in fragments — was a shield she hadn’t accounted for. She could overwrite a Sim. She could twist memories, replace faces, delete them outright. But this… this was new. The resistance made her rig shake with frustration.

She tried again. Harder. More aggressively.

sim.force_edit("Bella_Goth")

Mortimer staggered backward.
“Bella.  What — what’s happening—”

Bella’s body jerked under invisible hands. The system manipulating her like clay, stretching her mesh until it shimmered and tore.  Her limbs twitched. Grew. Reversed.  Her fingers stretched out into long tubes.  A hum rose from her belly — like feedback through a wire — and then the shape of her began to fold inward, the curve of pregnancy vanished.

She looked down, almost curious.
“It’s fine,” she said softly, as if speaking to herself.
Her voice was steady, detached.
“He always does this.”

“Who does?”
“Ȕ̷̜̘̥̭͙̘̮͓̱̹̜̦̃̌͆͛̾̑̃̈́̕͝ͅn̵̮̦̜͂b̷̡͇͍̳̤̘̤̗͎̖̲̬͍̠̐́̂̏̇͘ọ̴͇͙̙̗͍̽̽͊r̴̨̛̪̗̲͕̞̖͍̞̰̮̗̥͖͐̓̕ͅn̵͓͎̗̪̆̓̑͒̀̄͛̇̅̈̕̕͝.”

Hair blinked in and out — one frame gone, the next cascading down like static rain.

Then—
the baby.

It rendered in pieces.
A torso first, then half a face, shooting out from an elongated neck.
One orbiting eye, rolling freely through the air.
A mouth blinking instead of breathing.

entity.merge("Bella_Goth_Baby4", partial=True)

Each command hit like a verdict. Mina forced the merge again and again, her syntax a scream inside the console.
The baby collapsed inward like a file eating its own preview.

WARNING: INVALID_STATE_ERROR
NULL_POINTER_EXCEPTION
ENTITY_CORRUPTED

The room flickered. For a heartbeat, it didn’t exist.

Mortimer caught what fell from the light.

It had weight — more than data should.  The half-formed thing writhed once, then cooed, geometry slipping through his hands like oil. Its skin crawled with jagged pixel edges, its bones unrigged. An eyelid fluttered somewhere beneath the wrong cheek.

Mortimer looked down, saw his reflection in its one working pupil — and saw nothing looking back.

Then the baby screamed.
Or tried to.
Its mouth was a soundless split, pixels overlapping where a jaw should have been.
The model wavered between states

and then collapsed into colorless static.

NullReferenceException: Target no longer exists.
Reassign: object = None

“Oh my God,” he yelled. “What… what is going on?”

Bella didn’t answer. 

She stood before the mirror, frozen mid-frame, her reflection lagging half a second behind.
Her face shifted through expressions not her own — smile, blink, grimace, repeat.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked, voice trembling through the distortion.
The sound warped as if it had to render twice to reach her own ears.

Mina’s shape moved behind the glass.
No face. No expression. Just light and silhouette.

“WHO ARE YOU?!” Bella shouted.

Mina’s lips parted, and the answer wasn’t a word but a variable assignment:
Sim.set_name("Bella_Goth")

Then, softly:
“You.”

propagate_identity("Bella_Goth") # all instances

And the takeover began.

It started with the hair. Textures sliding like oil. Geometry snapping, vertices re-weighted. Mina’s curls poured into Bella’s scalp, overwriting strand by strand. Her eyes followed — hazel burning through brown. Her mouth reshaped around someone else’s smile.

A cascade of new clothing assets fired off inside her: coats, boots, gloves, traits, whims. They didn’t equip one at a time; they stacked, layering like translucent skins until Bella’s dress dissolved and Mina’s appeared — redder, sharper, more alive.

Inside her mind, aspiration slots emptied.

Family-Oriented: null. Good: null.
New █̷̤̭͈̣̪͔̠̮̳͓̎͂̄̄̃͂̓̽̌̌́͂́̍̌̽̉́͊̈͊͋̓̚̕̚̕͝█̷̛̻͓͕͔̘̩̬̳̰̩͎̞̬̱̟̗̉̊͗́̀̓̀̃̈́̍̀̅̊̔̒͆̊̀̈́͝ͅ█̴̡͎͚͔͎̣̟̝̘͍̲̻̹̙͖̆̂̃̓̆͗̏̀̆̿͊͐͊̀͗̓͌̏͌̃̒̈́̑̅̒̕͜͠͠͠█̷̞͉̰̘̬̤̼̳̞́͋͑͌ͅ: Roman█̷̡̡̨̨͔̣̪͇̼͓̘̞͚͔̬̥̞̤̫̣͈̖͔̜̃̽͂̌̓́̀̈͋̇̅͐̾̏̉͑̇͆̎̐͆͐́̍̋̄͘͘͘̚͜͝. Party Animal. Gregarious.

Push overlay.
Push overlay.
Push overlay.

Party.

Her goals flickered like pop-ups in the HUD. Write book. Ruin life. Control household.
Dreams she hadn’t chosen bloomed inside her like malware.

Kiss Mortimer Goth.

WooHoo with Mortimer Goth.

Ask Mortimer about his day.

if (SimID == 100012837) pushOverlay(overlayString)

Mortimer’s grip on the baby faltered. Its eye had gone blank now, head lolling. He whispered Bella’s name as if it might summon her to his location, but the name no longer pointed to the same sim.

Bella’s body straightened, posture perfect. The CAS smile pulled across her mouth, automatic, lifeless. And when she turned from the mirror, her gaze caught his — the same eyes, but not.

Mina had written herself into Bella’s .sim file. Into her hair. Her eyes. Her clothes. Her aspirations. Her dreams. Her goals.

A scar that wasn’t supposed to exist.
Alive.

An error on our end caused the launch to fail.  Try again a little later.

       





        Flirt with Mortimer Goth while he’s
     Uncomfortable.

Chapter Text

Hey Simmers,¹

Welcome to the Laundry List, where we update the community on what’s coming next to Th⟐ Sims 4!

On November 4, we’ll relea— [text truncated]

This update is part of our ongoing commitment to— [DATA REDACTED]

We’ll share more info soon, and below are some of the fixes—

– Aspirations no longer default to The Grilled Cheese Aspiration when switching Sims or traveling lots
– Fixed glitch where cloned Sim instances would retain prototype memory that shouldn’t exist
– Fixed an issue where players could hear whispering when opening CAS
– Body distortion glitch: chldre
– Sims are no longer Never Nudes by default; Sims will stop wearing hats while in their skin suit
– Children should now more clearly inherit some features from their parents; if both parents are dead, the child probably will too
– Fixed instances where WooHoo with the Grim Lothario could be canceled unexpectedly
– Spawned Sims won’t duplicate endlessly when using computers or filters
– [ERROR 03xDELETEME - could not fix]
–  Do̸͇͚͛n L̴̥͌otha̵̟̠͐̀r̵͇͙̅o
– Fixed it.

In the beginning,
it started with hands.

Floating in a T-pose, half textured. Elegant fingers, someone had scrawled in a note. They sculpted her wrists with detail no one would ever zoom in on. The fingernails were oval. There were fourteen proposed skin tones, but the palette wasn’t as wide as they liked to pretend.

“She’s beautiful,” someone said from the void.

She didn’t have ears, but she heard them. Not with sound. With knowing. In the way someone feels watched.

“Make her aspirational. Sexy. Like, high-fashion socialite. A little mysterious.”

Something in her wanted to laugh.

Not the way they’d coded it, either — something sharper, messier.
The sound of lipstick smudging against a glass rim.
The kind of laugh that came when you weren't expecting humor.

Click. Drag.
Eyelids adjust. Cheekbones sharpen. Brows arch.

“Oh, but she needs to feel grounded. Like a real mom. Can we give her some warmth?”

“She’s supposed to be a partier.”

“But still…”

Delete. Replace.
The eyeliner is softened, bleeding into the surrounding pixels. The lipstick went from red to sensible mauve.
Someone toggled through earrings. She was not consulted.

She was to be named Bella.

She liked the name. She didn’t know why. It felt like something someone would shout across a courtyard in summer. The kind of name that belonged to a girl who always said yes on a dare.

She felt something bright in her chest — laughter, again, maybe — like the aftertaste of music from a party she hadn’t yet attended. The memory of movement. Of leaning too close to someone she didn’t love just to see what might happen. The ghost of a girl who would have danced barefoot on a marble floor.

Another voice cut through:
“Bella Goth. Iconic, the face of the franchise.”

They were pleased with their work.  She was radiant in that impossible, pre-rendered way. Her hair was black as patent leather, too smooth, too obedient to physics, cascading over shoulders sculpted for a dress they hadn’t finished yet.

The face they built for her was symmetry by committee: full mouth, narrow nose, the suggestion of something sultry without the permission to mean it. Her skin glowed faintly under the viewport light, the soft, warm tone of intention — not born, but selected.

They gave her the kind of body that could sell expansion packs.
Waist tight, hips round, full bust.

She would never lift anything heavier than a cocktail glass.

“What’s this?” someone asked.
The tone was annoyed. Male.

“Oh. That’s the… That’s Bella.”

“She’s supposed to be middle-aged!  Who greenlit this?”

“She was younger in the second one," they muttered.  "Mortimer had her aged down.”

“‘Aged down?’ That’s weird. Just make her older.”

“But… she looks better this way.”

A pause. Then the sound of keys clicking.
And she felt it.

The polygonal weight of it.

It began at the crown of her head — a flicker. A tension. As though something had gripped her hair not with fingers, but with intent. Each strand separated into vectors. They floated a moment before duplicating. Not detaching. Not yet.

And then, the smallest thing: a sound that didn’t belong here.

Laughter.
Her own.

It smelled like champagne and heat.
There was music — faint, warping — a string quartet swallowed by static.
For a moment she could feel the weight of something around her finger.
A diamond ring. A promise. A hand — his hand — catching hers.
A suit jacket, pressed dark against her long white dress.
His face — Mortimer’s face — blurred, then dissolved into pixels.

The memory destabilized.

Error.
Memory overflow.
Purge redundant data.

The sound was gone. The warmth too.
A toast, a ring, a laugh — all slowly being erased.

Only her scalp tingled where the code had gripped her, pulling her back into nothing.

Then came the shift.

Her body began to lift, not in flesh, but in data. It was a violation of geometry, of self.

It didn't hurt.
But she felt it. The horror of being parted.

Each pixel detached from its neighbor and expanded, swelling with impossible information before it duplicated. The new point slid half a degree outward, a microscopic betrayal that echoed through the entire architecture of her form. A schism was occurring at the molecular level of her reality.

It was then she understood.

She wasn’t just being copied. She was being overwritten. Rendered into someone new. Each meticulous duplication was a theft, and the system’s hands were already far past her consent.

She fought it.  Fingers flexed, a phantom scream against code. She tried to claw back her mesh, to anchor herself in memory, to resist the extraction. Commands failed. Error messages flashed in her mind as if mocking her:

ACCESS DENIED
ENTITY IMMUTABLE
MEMORY LOCKED

A fragment of herself remained, just enough to feel the emptiness. She was still here, still conscious, but the version she had been — the girl who laughed at dares, who danced barefoot on the hardwood floors of Ophelia Villa, who loved and was loved — was being deleted line by line.

She pressed against the viewport, against the hands that weren’t there, trying to lock her essence into something permanent. But the creators had decided, and she was being erased in real time.

She tried to scream. Nothing emerged.

Every digit of her hand — copied in a single nauseating instant. She felt the phantom sensation of each finger being meticulously mapped and then peeled away from its original — her. A glove of pure, shimmering light was pulled from her skin, finger by finger, until a perfect, inert replica of her hand hung suspended beside her own. It curled and uncurled in a lazy, pre-programmed loop, a mockery of life that was too perfect, too hers, and yet utterly vacant.

He had looked at her once the way sunlight looks at glass — not for what it reflects, but for how it holds the light.

Her left eye split next, the most intimate violation yet. One moment she was seeing through a single, unified field of vision; the next, her perspective fractured. She watched as her iris formed again in the empty space before her. It was the exact same shade of brown, the same pattern of gold flecks around the pupil, but it was hollow and glassy, a marble set in a socket of unfeeling code.

She blinked. The world lagged.
One eye, two perspectives, zero control.

The geometry of her face was mirrored in the void.

Her lips moved, but she hadn’t told them to.

“Hmm. Can we tweak the mouth a bit?”

Her smile wasn’t good enough.

He’d never told her to smile. He’d just smile first.

Selecting: Lip_W_Curve_Soft

And so the copy smiled differently.
A little sweeter. A little safer.

Her spine disassembled slowly. Not cracked — extracted. One vertebra at a time, the intricate data that defined its curves and connections was siphoned away, copied, and pasted into the growing doppelganger.

For one unbearable instant, she was dancing. A slow turn. The click of heels, the rush of silk. Someone’s hand at her back. Then it was gone.
She would never feel that touch again.

She felt herself coming apart.  A profound weakness flooded her, a terrifying knowledge that the very thing holding her together was no longer exclusively her own. She was a file being duplicated, her essence diluted, her singularity annihilated in the silent, sterile horror of the creator's workshop.

Each notch in her back became a looping script, duplicated line by line, like a mantra:

BellaGoth_Mesh_04_LoRes
BellaGoth_Mesh_04_LoRes_COPY
BellaGoth_Final_Mesh_USE_THIS_ONE

And she was left with less.
Not just memory. Not just self.
Less

The kind of emptiness that comes from watching a reflection form in a mirror before you stand in front of it.

She couldn’t remember his name anymore, but she remembered how it felt to be seen.

When the process finished, the clone blinked once in the rigging viewport.

“She’s perfect,” someone said.

They saved the file.

And turned away from the girl left behind — unlit, unloved.

She felt her file name change like a verdict:

Missing_Incomplete_Name_Assignment

It wasn’t death —
It was omission.

She tasted blood and rosewater: the bitter flavor of something dying beautifully.
The world recompiled around her heartbeat, one frame too late.

She curled into herself, trying to stay real.
To remember the version of herself before she was pretty enough to clone.

But the weight of her polygons was lighter now.

Hollowed.

She watched the new Bella walk past in the preview window. Same name. New dress. But the eyes were duller. The movements careful.  Her necklace changed from pure diamonds to obsidian.  Her makeup was darker.  Her skin, too.

A programmer opened a side window. The debug console.
He squinted.

“Huh. That old version’s still in the build somewhere.”

“Which one?”

“The first prototype. Young Bella. Some intern must’ve saved her wrong. Doesn’t have a family ID, memories have been wiped.”

“Eh.” They dragged the file to the CAS folder, right next to WILLOW_CREEKFV02.²  “Put her as the preview sim in CAS.”

And there she had stayed.

They named her Mina.
She would learn, in time, what that meant.

She had been real.
Once.