A/N: I was so excited to have finally finished my Sims 2 legacy family that I decided to dramatise it. Let's just say it seemed like a good idea at the time! A work in progress...

The Tale of Three Brothers

Preface

This tale begins, not with three brothers as one might be expecting. No, it begins long before those three brothers came into the world with the story of their father's, father's father: their Great Grandfather, a man named Zachary English.

Zachary English, in his younger years, was a rather naïve sort of chap. Newly graduated and with the ink still wet on his diploma, he arrived at the sleepy backwater of Rivertown, eager to make his mark on the world. He still carried with him enough of that youthful exuberance, not yet tarnished by cynicism, or any inner doubt that the world could be anything but an even playing field, ready for the young gentleman to make his mark.

Now, Zachary, being from humble stock himself, was blind to the issue of social, economic and educational class divides: he suffered from a privilege all too obvious to those men who had not had the advantages of a stable upbringing, a good education and a full stomach and warm bed each night. With not a concern in the world, he settles upon a wife of fair face and slender body but, unfortunately, little education, wit or common sense. While Dagmar was certainly a magnet for a hot-blooded male, there was little else underneath the veneer and she had suffered many a broken heart in her quest for true love. Jaded and in need of a good meal inside her, she was flattered by the attention of the rather naïve youth. Necessity and lust overcame common sense and she allowed herself to ignore the nagging suspicion that Zachary's interest in her would be his own social undoing.

However, despite the unlikely start to the romance, the relationship sustained the course and bore a single child, a delicate girl named Zora who had the very good fortune of inheriting the best traits of both parents: her mother's looks and her father's lust for life and aptitude for knowledge. And so the years passed and Zachary made a name for himself, and gradually Dagmar's inauspicious starting point in society began to fade to a more distant memory. From acting the role of doting upper-middle class wife, it became more like second-nature and as people drifted in and out of Rivertown collective memory almost forgot how the poor wife of Zachary English came from beggar roots.

Zora, however, did not have to act the part. Unaware of her mother's background, and not having been introduced to her mother's family, who had been all but wiped from history as far as the English family were concerned, Zora blossomed into a high-society lady about town, attracting the eye of many a young gentleman eager to be the first to pluck that ripe young blossom, so unspoiled by life and experience. And as Zora grew and gradually stretched her wings, first to university and then out into the world to make a career for herself, Zachary began to feel, for the first time in his indulgent existence, a twinge of fear and regret that he perhaps had not prepared his daughter as well as he might.

And for the first time Zachary dreamed of what might be to come and began to see Rivertown not has a place of unsullied beauty and opportunity, but as a dangerous façade, full of subterfuge and deceit. As one young man after another paraded themselves before his beautiful, innocent daughter, Zachary grew older and more cynical and bitter. Rivertown to him was no longer a place of peace, but a place that would destroy the English family legacy and create, in its ashes, a new legacy both horrific and awesome in equal measure.

And so we must now fast forward through the generations, stepping in the wake of a young girl whose combination of beauty and naivety set the scene for a family at war; a family torn apart by lust, betrayal and alien abductions.