The Thanksgiving Weekend Rescue Mission

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“Mraaaaaaaaow, mraaaaaow, mraaaaaaow!”

“I know, I know, calm your tail-end down Casanova, you can wait long enough for me to finish making the bed to fill your food dish, I’m fairly certain you aren’t going to starve to death in that amount of time.”

“Maaaow.”

*sigh* “I suppose listening to you yowl in my ear when I could be sleeping in is still better than being out in those insane crowds of shoppers.” *shudders* “No thank you!”

“There you go, Casanova. Oh, don’t give me that look! Yesterday was special. If I gave you turkey scraps everyday, you’d be as chubby as me. Back to kitty astronaut food for you!

Now, will that keep you happy for a while so Mommy can enjoy her morning cuppa and check out the Autumn Steam sale in peace? Hmm?”

“Hmm… what has been on my Wishlist for a while… Woooah, Civ V with all expansions is only $12? Well I have to get that… and… oh. Oh, I really shouldn’t… I know how I get with Harvest Moon games, but… I still haven’t played Stardew Valley yet… and… it’s… it’s on sale! I mean, it would be wrong to not buy it while it’s on sale, right? I can always buy it and not install it… but then… I have a long weekend this weekend… Oh what the hell!”

“…Let’s do this.”

“Oh for the love of… you want a cauliflower now? But I just had one and sold it! They take forever to grow! Aaaaaaaaargh! I am waaaaaay too out of my Harvest Moon practice of stashing away everything! Dammit Alita, you know better than this, you’ve been playing these faming life simulations since the Super Nintendo era, what is wrong with you? You know what? I’m not even that far into Spring of Year 1 yet. I’m just going to reset, and start doing things right…”

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“Mraaaaaaaow, mraaaaaaow.”

“Oh, not now Casanova, can’t you see Mommy is very busy farming?”

“MRAAOW!”

“Oh, hee, you see little Casanova there on my farm? Isn’t he cute? Look, he mews when I click on him, isn’t that precious?”

“Maaaaaaaow…”

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*bang, bang, bang* “Alita, are you in there? Are you alive? No one has heard from you in days and we are worried! ALITA!”

“MRAAAAOW, MRAAAOW, MRAAAOW!”

“Shit, Alita, is that your cat? Alita, what’s going on? We’re really worried!”

“Uh-oh, it’s worse than we thought. Remember the Great Harvest Moon Animal Parade Crisis of 2010?”

“Uh-huh…”

“She’s playing Stardew Valley.”

“Dear God.”

“That’s it, time to invoke Operation Thunderstrike!”

*crash*

“Oh, hey guys. I didn’t know you were coming over to visit. I’m in the middle of watering my crops, but…”

“This isn’t a visit, Alita, this is an intervention. You need to put the game down.”

“What? Oh come now, I just barely turned it on! There’s still so much to do, I still have hardly made much progress in the mines yet, and you know me, I like to be friends with everyone, and my profit margin is always crap early on and I really need to work on that, I’ve barely gotten to touch ranching yet, and–”

“Alita, what does your Steam statistics say about how much you’ve played over this weekend?”

“Oh, well, I guess I could check…”

*click*

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This was written for the November Monthly Simlits Short Story Challenge from the Sims forums, which tasked folks to write a story in 500-1500 words using 1-12 screencaps using the theme “One Hundred.” I used 610 words and 12 screencaps. It is a completely stand-alone story, and features my Simself (and a few Simselves of my actual friends, Todd and Cody, who also appear in my Blogaversary: Year One). If anyone is crazy enough to want Mastress Alita in their game, she is available for download from SilverDaybreak’s Simself Scroll in both Sims 3 and Sims 4 flavors. Casanova is also available with the Sims 3 version!

This short story was always meant to be really silly, but went through two different ideas: the first was Mastress being trapped in a nightmare where she was stuck in a 100 Baby Challenge, which would’ve given me an excuse to install and try out a copy of the Sims 2 base game I have laying around, as I’d want to make clear the difference between Mastress as a character and Mastress as a game character, but the truth of the matter is, playing that challenge (even just for a little while for the sake of getting a little story footage) really is my worst nightmare, which is when the inspiration hit to change the “one hundred” aspect to instead be hours played and try out the copy of Stardew Valley I’ve had sitting around… not since the Steam Autumn Sale, oh no… I’ve had it since last summer. And refused to let myself install it. Because knowing my track record with Harvest Moon games, I knew that… well… this story would pretty much come to fruition the second I installed it so I was purposefully keeping it off my computer, hahaha!