Uncomplicated 2.18: A potion

      Anastasia stops crying the second I pick her up, and her little fingers immediately reach for the little hairs of my beard in an instinctual way. She's a month old, and this is the first time I've held her, really looked at her. I can't decide if she looks like me or Mandi. Part of me fears that she'll look like Mandi, but then another part hopes she does.
     Her cheek feels soft against my fingers, and she turns her head towards them, rooting like she's hungry.
     "You're looking for Mommy, aren't you?" I ask the infant. I'm sorry you'll never know her, I finish in my head.
     Anastasia weighs more than I expected. She would've been a big baby had she been carried to term, I can only guess.
     I magically pull a bottle out of thin air like only a sim in sims 3 can, and the baby eagerly gobbles it up.

     "There," I say after she finally burps.

     I'm doing this again; I'm raising a daughter alone. Well, I have Bonnie, thank goodness. With Bonnie, I had my parents. With Anastasia, I'm the older one, the one that should know what he's doing.
     How can I do this without Mandi, though? Mandi was there to help me with Bonnie and her emotional tirades. 
     I sigh and realize just how much Bonnie has grown up. She's had no choice; I didn't give her one. I'm going to need to really, really thank Millie. She helped Bonnie when she needed it. I noticed even if I was in a grieving stupor.

     She gave Anastasia that doll. Hopefully, it won't be as annoying as mine. Don't get me wrong, I liked Pat when I was younger, but he really got annoying from teen years on. Now, he's started coming back.
     I'm going to try something.

     The next time Pat comes around, I bring up the subject of a potion that Dad had once made. He acts excited to try.

      Here goes nothing.

       This takes forever!

      Finally, he looks like a sim!

     Blue hair... and that suit... hm. I guess the suit makes sense since he was an imaginary friend after all.

      The Maker thought this was an interesting occurrence while things rendered at one point. Where did the strange light come from? Where did it go?

      In the early, pre-dawn hours, I decide to sit outside on the bench. This is where Mandi sat when I asked her to marry me, and I've placed her grave marker out here.
      Why don't you visit me? I'm right here. Please.
      I sigh despondently, wishing for the impossible: not for Mandi's ghost to visit me but for her to be back, to never have left me.
      Many people never believed Pat really existed, and I've proven them wrong. Dad made a potion, and that turned him real. Could there be a way to bring Mandi back? How? Dad had discovered every single potion, and I don't think any of them could bring back a ghost to a regular life state.
     Of course, that would mean that Mandi would have to visit me as a ghost first.
     What if she doesn't want to visit me? Visiting me at least would be something.

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Darwin Stockton died.
Pat's traits: brave, loves the outdoors, commitment issues, bookworm, nurturing LTW-firefighter

Error code 12's are becoming the bane of my existence. I've turned off memories and started deleting my cache files at least every other start up. Now, I've taken and restarted the neighborhood, deleting all the original families and putting the more current families that were saved in the simbin into the neighborhood. However, I think it's all those memories that were created before from all those other sims that are causing a problem. I'd go into every house and systematically delete all of them if I thought I could do it without having a processor problem. Sometimes, I crash when just trying to load something or other. I think, basically, my laptop really can't handle sims 3. I'm going to try again with the "rebooted" 'hood. If that still causes issues, I'll have to have them start yet again in a new place (taking important things with them, of course). Thing is, I'll probably have to not take old sims with them, thereby destroying the family tree (I'd still take Levi and Monika and their children, but that's it). If that doesn't do it, I'm going to have to move Nick's save to the desktop, thereby making it not "uncomplicated" anymore.

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