It's been many years since I first turned my gaze upon Simtopia, that curious world we only recently discovered. It may sometimes seem like it was a long time ago, but really, it was only back in 2009. That isn't even a decade ago at the time of this writing. For teenagers, that may be a very long time indeed. But for a man such as myself, my children were already born and growing up and I had most of my grey hair in place. But like many other humans, I found watching the Sims go about their daily lives fascinating and sometimes, compelling. Like most observers, I had a passing familiarity with Simlish but it was only recently that I learned it sufficiently to get a deeper insight into their lives. And it was then I began to discover just how deep their lives could actually be. So after watching the development of one such family, I began to realize that their story wasn't just a somewhat superficial imitation of our lives, they could go far deeper. And for this reason I felt compelled, after relating this story to several fellow observers, to put it to print and give it to the world.

But of course not all my readers will be familiar with the world of Simtopia, so perhaps I should give a brief overview of this world and it's people.

The life of a sim is both long and short. It seems to be longer when you are watching them for hours at a time, but then you note that in the past few hours, they have grown from toddlers to children. It is possible for a sim to live for as much as 1,728 days, but that is the exception, and not the rule. There are of course, some sims who through Simtopic magic or as a result of their supernatural qualities, can live longer, but for the typical sim, their lives merely measure in what we would call, a handful of years, not even five. They have twelve months like we do, which are each eight days long, for that is the cycle of their moon. This gives them a year of 96 days and so in their minds, they have a life expectancy of around 16. They frequently have four seasons, each of them averaging around 24 days, but in the place I was watching this one family form and grow, the winters were much shorter while the rest of the seasons were longer. This was because they were in the semi-tropics.

But while their lives are seemingly so short, they are filled with events which sometimes leave us struggling to take it all in, because for the sim, life goes very fast indeed. They are fast learners. They advance through their careers swiftly, and their romances are blindingly swift and yet surprisingly stable. At least where I was watching. There was one exception, but we'll get to that soon enough.

They have a curious sense of morality. On one hand, they have many of the vices we have, but they don't have any of the serious criminal behaviors we normally associate with human evil. Yes, they will break into homes and steal furniture, and some of them even go so far as to steal candy from babies. But I've never seen them kill each other or wage war. Their sexual behavior is somewhat more libertine than ours, but they likewise have far fewer children out of wedlock since it is almost impossible for their women to get pregnant unless there is mutual consent between the partners. It was slightly different on the Islands, but even so, there were few unplanned pregnancies and never did I find an unwanted child, though there were always rumors of them out there. They could brawl with each other, and some of them were notorious for passing rumors on which could result in the loss of friendships and relationships. But time proved remarkable in healing such wounds.

They usually have relationships when they reach their post adolescent phase. While they refer to that particular time as 'teen age' there is nothing teen about it since by the time a sim has reached 13 years of age, he's an elder. But in some parts of Simtopia, those relationships end the moment one of them becomes what they refer to as a young adult. A close friendship may remain, but until the other teen reaches the same age, then they will not engage in any romantic relationships with each other. In fact, it was not unusual for the teen to take up with a new relationship while the adult pursued their own without any hard feelings between the two of them. I found this odd, and it was because this was not the case on the Islands that proved a secondary reason for why I was initially attracted to the place. In fact, not only could teens have relationships there, they could get married (usually to a young adult) and have children of their own, but this phenomena I did not witness personally until later.

The place I was attracted to initially wasn't the sort which had originally lent itself to settlement. Path finders had a deuced hard time exploring it. It was not unusual for them to be stuck for days between the proverbial rock and hard place. They would cry out so piteously when that happened. But I was attracted to it because it was both romantic and mysterious. There were two large islands on which most of the land suitable for settlement was found, with a multitude of smaller islands which were only fit for casual exploration when one would sail to them. But what was particularly mysterious was a collection of several islands which were shrouded in a deep mist which the Sims avoided at all costs. One could even go so far as to suggest that most of the sims were terrified of approaching that mist. The Islands themselves were sparsely settled. There were at the start no houses, just the local businesses which thrived upon a migrant population of mostly tourists. Sims would come to the islands, get short term jobs, work for a staycation as it were while living in a curious structure known in their lingo as a rabbit hole, and then move on. Only a handful seemed initially determined to remain. And for them, employment was a constant struggle.

But with the arrival of one particular sim, that began to change. Homes began to be built, houseboats settled permanently into their dock ports, and the place began to grow and develop.

And the reason for this sudden influx of people and development of the islands had a lot to do with that one sim. In fact, it was the same reason I was drawn to him. For you see, like me, he wanted to be an author. And our resemblances didn't just end there. His hair, like mine, was prematurely greying, already salt and pepper, though a bit blacker than mine. His chin was stronger, his cheeks a little more sunken, but he was also fond of blues and nearly always wore that color in his outfits. He was quiet, contemplative, loved reading books, but unlike me, could study and read them for hours on end. I don't sit down and read that much any more, unless it's my own stuff that I'm proofing. He also had a great sense of humor, but perhaps not as edgy as mine. But it was his writings about the Islands that started to draw other sims to them. And because of him, many other Sims who had wanted to stay on the Islands, were able to, and the community always honored him in that respect, though he did find it somewhat annoying. His wife had her own ways of dealing with the celebrity status the two of them accrued, but again, we'll get to that eventually.

Now the problem with being an observer of Sim families, is not only the difficulty of deciphering their language, but the fact that if you are watching one sim, you don't necessarily know what the other sim has been doing and furthermore, like us, they don't always talk about the events they have experienced. Yes, he may have gone to a book store and met an old friend there but as you were watching his oldest child, you never find out about it. So much of what I have written about this family I fear is dramatic embellishment based upon what they told each other while I was watching them. There however, I can assure the reader that every effort has been made to as accurately record their lives as well as their actual conversations. I took numerous videos, photos, and other recordings so that a full vista of their lives might be laid out.

But with that being said, I've never been the sort to write a documentary. The story of these sims simply was too involved to stand back and narrate the events like some stodgy old professor. And as I had not seen much of what I wanted to relate, I have decided instead to present the story in a novel form. So outside this prologue, you will not seem me relating a thing. Instead, you will, hopefully, become as immersed into the story as I was. For you see, when these two sims met, fell in love, and had their family, I could not help but suspect they had been made for each other.