Chapter 70: Oops

"I'm pregnant," Ashby announces. Watching Rio nearly choke, she adds, "and this is kind of a test run. I don't know how Dad's going to take the news."

\ Birthday! It's your birthday!

Oh, that birthday.

 Rio performs an epic song at the dinner table, while Pablo smiles because he's lost most of his hearing, due to all the explosions in his line of work.

Wake up every morning, there's color everywhere. The baby is going to have seizures.

Sitting under a couple of sharp axes, Pablo and the genius play chess. Pablo makes it clear he would like to see a wedding.

Ashby's career excites her more than impending motherhood.

Too bad her fellow firefighters have restricted her to cleaning their dishes.

Rex isn't having any more fun than she is. Pablo's younger vampire sister is on the dating scene again now that her husband has died, seeing younger men. But she thinks Luther Remington, another vampire, may be in love with her, so has paid Rex to snoop around his house.

Later he does a stake-out at the school yard, where absolutely nothing happens.

"This was a failure," Rex sighs. "I am a failure."

Rio becomes a man. I do not edit my pictures, aside from cropping and resizing. I promise.

Rio's adult trait is family oriented. He intends to leave home, buy a nice house, fall in love, get married, raise a family, and work his way up to an orchestra conductor.

"You can't leave home!" Iago complains. "I'll be in our room all alone. I'm afraid of the dark."

"Iago," Rio points out, "you have fangs."

"Well I'm not a vampire!"

"You're still scarier than anything that would be in our room. And when I'm moved out, you can leave the lights on."

"But that's a waste of energy."

"Neurotic kids run up the water bill, cowardly ones run up the light bill. What do you want me to do about it?"

Speaking of fangs, Sacha has died. She was generation 3, born in Chapter 11.

Though he tried his best, Arthur could not save his mother from Grim.

Pablo looooves fruit parfait.

Also Rex re-wallpapered the kitchen while no one was looking. He hopes Ashby approves of this tasteful design.

Ashby dreams of what her children will be like. Rex dreams of making their family official.

"I eat Eggs Machiavellian every morning because I'm evil," Iago says.

Rio is excited about his niece or nephew. He's pretty sure Iago won't be giving him any.

Ashby's new uniform is slimming. She's grateful for that.

"It was an accident," she sighs to Tristan. "Things are going too fast. I wanted Rex with me, but I didn't want a family so quickly."

Jazz would have approved of the family graveyard, but he never got to rest in it, and since Zephram's death no one has cared for the place. It's overgrown. There's graffiti in places.

Rex helps to retrieve Sacha's remains and place them near Jazz's in the back yard.

Then it's off to snoop around the salon.

The woman in the window is Jasmine, Holly's daughter. But she's not the suspect. Once again, the suspect is the weirdo tattoo artist who gives people temporary tattoos.

Still in her work uniform, Kim gives her son Kerry a makeover. She's sick of his lack of style.

There's the old Archer house in the background. Trivia: Arthur has a new girlfriend, and she moved in there. She's also pregnant.

Rex doesn't realize any of this when he interviews the foreign woman on gnome-kicking accusations.

"So is your hair naturally purple-tipped?"

"Yeth," she responds, narrowing her eyes at the annoying human.

 Iago and Shelby have the dumbest arguments ever.

Rio hugs his mother goodbye, finally ready to leave the nest.

He's confident his new career in the music industry is going well enough to start his own family.

Baby time.

With Yuri gone, who is keeping an eye on the Ivanov descendants? Bernice gets a little too bored waiting for Ashby's child to be born, and goes home.

The suspense! Pablo starts crying, realizing life is going on and he's old.

Paprika remembers where her bed is. She wonders when this room will be redesigned. Paz's room went first; now it's Ashby's.

Rex and Ashby have a son, named Luke.

Ashby agrees to marriage, now that they've got Luke. Marriage seems like the logical thing to do.

The phone rings annoyingly while they make love.

The wedding party is held the following night.

From left to right: Rex, Hawk, Arthur, Holly, Kimberly, Nol, Iago in his cute formal wear, Pavel.

Kimberly's son Kerry is here too. Rex spent a lot of time making sure the food would be excellent and the music would be classy, so he hopes everyone is enjoying themselves.

 Sifton brags about her business trips around the world, while Kimberly worries Kerry will embarrass her with his insane inappropriateness.

"There are grasshoppers in my lobster," Kerry announces, as he uses his fork to delicately shove the food off of his plate and onto the floor.

The bride may hate art, but that won't stop Holly, Kim and Nol from talking about it.

Every visit may be the last. Kimberly no longer talks about their "science experiment" origins. One may argue she's come to terms with it, using her brilliant mind for science as well. Along with Hawk, she's continued their mother's work at the science center. Hawk's son Lorenzo is also a scientist now.

As Kerry hisses like a cat and spins in circles, Arthur gives Kimberly a look of some sort.

Vows are expected, so Pablo retrieves Luke from the bedroom to witness them. The bride is dressed as a pirate, trolling the concept of formal wear in general.

No, that's not a cousin! Rio cut his hair for this occasion. 

Iago chatters on about politics. You're not supposed to do that at a wedding, so of course Iago does it.

  Pavel keeps dancing, but is getting impatient.

"I love you," Rex assures. "What's wrong?"

"It's too soon," Ashby stammers. "I can't. I'm not ready."

Arthur tries adding some mood music.

Rex tries to be calm and nice about this, but an argument breaks out anyway.

Why did Ashby agree to marriage if she wasn't ready? Why didn't she say anything?

Arthur mourns the party.

As the guests leave, all somewhat sad and uncomfortable because of what they've seen, Ashby runs to vomit. She blames her nausea on the stress, but it feels exactly like something else she's experienced. Namely, Luke.

Ashby cautiously asks if her mother is upset with her.

"Of course not," Nol laughs. "You have to do what you feel is right."

________________________________________________
Etc.: Ashby and Rex refused to get married at their party. Eventually I gave up.

Aside from the jeans when he was a teen, Rio aged up exactly as he's dressed, in both teen and adult form. "If you change that," my boyfriend threatened, "you are wrong."

I've had horrible luck with Ashby's career. Most days, no disasters happen at all. All I've had so far are small house fires. This is making me angry, since I had such fantastic luck on my original firefighter. A quick Google search shows that having nothing but small house fires for ages is not an uncommon thing. But unlike my original firefighter, who did not age, Ashby has no time to waste.

Rex's career is amusing me more than I thought. For anyone who never played a Private Eye, you should know that it involves storylines. Rex constantly tells me what he's thinking about his ridiculous actions via the little dialogue boxes, which is where the failure quote came from. ;)

Perfect children is going to be a huge pain since both parents have Ambitions jobs. I'm not required to advance Rex and Ashby's careers (only to give them 3 perfect kids now), but I want the shiny trophies and ribbons for my collection.

I rolled second child for heir, so the heir has not appeared yet. The roll for generation 9 is mixed single parent, 3 kids (again!), culinary career, property mogul, and multi-cultural. Sounds awkward. Culinary will be boring since I've already done that, and I considered re-rolling. But I've already cheated horribly by taking every Ambitions career off of my list once I've already done it, so I figure for once I'll suck it up.

This if the first time I've rolled adoption. Yay. I'm aware I should have re-rolled multi-cultural since I got adoption (err, part adoption, since at least one kid is required to be biological), but I didn't feel like it, since I can use master-controller to give the kid a foreign look and even a foreign culture trait. It would be vanilla otherwise, and nobody tolerates that.