Childhood toys.

Reyes and Elysa’s favorite toys are a stuffed cow and an oversized stuffed shrimp. It takes knowing the twins pretty well to notice that the cow is Reyes’ favorite and the shrimp is Elysa’s- it’s just that their second favorite toys are The One That Smells Most Like My Sibling.

Also, neither of them likes it when their sibling is unhappy about being deprived of their favorite toy. Elysa fussing over the cow or Reyes fussing over the shrimp boils down to “Sibling unhappy, grown-up make it better!”

Their third favorite is an orangutan.

Evelyn does not remember having a cow, nor does Reynaldo remember having a shrimp (they did, but neither toy was The One That Smells Most Like My Sibling and therefore became quickly irrelevant), but they both remember the orangutan.

One time they bonded was when they both automatically and simultaneously corrected someone on their misuse of the word monkey.

How Sims Medieval Is Responsible For The Blinky Tiara.

For a while, I played a Sims Medieval kingdom populated by CoD Sims. This led me to several discoveries.

1) People randomly kneeling to Emma is… pleasing.
2) I don’t know how Ryan got himself sentenced to the stocks, but he was hot in them.
3) He was even hotter when he knelt to Emma right after she gave birth.
4) Reynaldo uses luxury to cope with his less desirable instincts.
5) Evelyn loves nature.

I’d only roleplayed Evelyn once when I made the kingdom, so her traits were a puzzle. I did know her favorite colors, green and brown, and dressed her in them. That netted her the Earthy trait, which gives Sims a small bonus for wearing green.

The rest of the Earthy trait is basically Loves The Outdoors- the Sim likes nature and being out in it. That clicked, and it clicked hard.

Evelyn spent five of the formative years of her life trapped and tortured inside a place of blank walls and clinical procedures. To quote “Integral” by the Pet Shop Boys: Sterile. Immaculate. Rational. Perfect.

No days or nights. No seasons. No wind tangling her hair and rustling leaves. No dirt under her fingernails. No mud splashing on her shoes. No scrapes and bruises because she climbed out of her treehouse and up to the branches on a whim. None of the messy chaos that makes nature beautiful.

Think Charlie Crews and fruit. She’s got a craving.

I had a fic idea about this, involving how she picks out the flowers for her greenhouse. Only it was less of a fic than a vague idea about aesthetics trying to form into a sentence: Anything but visual monotony.

That’s what she was craving when she looked over the arcade prizes. That’s what clicked in my head when I browsed for the right one. Bright, blinking, frivolous, stupid, garish-

Anything but immaculate and rational.

She got bored with it within the day. As bright and blinking as it is, the tiara’s patterned and manufactured, and any blinking light becomes an obvious and artificial pattern if you look at it for a while.

But still-

A description I may be misreading, in a discredited color psychology book. A coincidence in a video game.

-that’s why she has a blinky tiara.

Guilting.

Rory: ::sighs, drops his head back as though asking the sky Why me?- then reaches to his side, starts to pick his notebook, then stops; curiously:: Are you trying to guilt me?

Yes. Yes, she was.

She hid because she was legitimately freaked out, but after she came out, she was just trying to get Rory to be nice to her.

It was also useful for getting out of answering this question:

Rory: ::a pause, glances at the pool, then at her:: ‘Cause I yelled?

She didn’t want to try to untangle why she’d freaked out, much less explain it. Or call attention to the fact that she was avoiding explaining it.

Poor, poor, pitiful me.

Evelyn: It’s my room, isn’t it? ::looks at him:: And I live here, I’m not just staying in your house?
Rory: ::damn it:: Yes.
Evelyn: ::looks away:: But I can’t go into the kitchen during the day, and I feel like I need permission to buy an ant farm.

Was it obvious that she was playing him, there? Because she totally was. Mostly. She does have insecurities that run along those lines. But as her Ma used to say, truth makes the best lies.

Gloves.

Evelyn has several pairs of gloves. They have two general purposes: blocking sunlight and looking goth. There’s a lot of overlap between them, but some of the ones for blocking sunlight look too utilitarian to fit goth fashion, and some of the goth ones are fishnet, lace, or otherwise see-through.

Naturally, she wears them on the appropriate occasions: the utilitarian ones when she wants to go out in sunlight without being burned, and the fancy ones when she wants to look like a human pretending to be a vampire.

Every so often, she wears them for no apparent reason.

Divergence Points

In both Reynaldo and Evelyn’s worlds, the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency created a project called Inquiry, the goal of which was to study the supernatural for potential applications in homeland defense. The project expanded, and eventually became a splinter group.

In 2020, the Inquiry started several long-term experiments on nonhumans, studying their powers in the hopes of being able to create defenses against them. They kidnapped thousands of nonhumans across the country. The subjects all had one thing in common: they couldn’t pass for human.

The reason for this was that non-passing nonhumans are less likely to have legal identities and tend to have fewer humans who care about them. It was easier for the Inquiry to make them disappear without legal ramifications.

In 2020, Reynaldo was enrolled in a public school, and knew dozens of supernaturally unaware humans.

In 2020, Evelyn was homeschooled, and only knew supernaturally aware humans who were used to working outside of human law.

By the Inquiry’s standards, Evelyn was an acceptable candidate for their research. Reynaldo was not.