Clitheroe: A BaRKCRounds One and Two: Rheingold

have decided to keep a record of my time in the Kingdom of Clitheroe. A royal record, if you will.

What’s more, I intend to impose record-making as a law among my peasants. At the end of each round, they’ll submit their doings to me, and I’ll read through them and compile them together. Yes. This seems like a great way to keep track of the goings-on of my kingdom.

And to keep tabs on my underlings, a la Big Brother. Yeeees.

Well, to start off, the first thing I did after shedding my immortal life was dig up my yard. Manual labor. Ugh. It was necessary, though. I’d hidden a few, shall we say, treasures underground to help me kick start my life here.

Besides, I had to do something while I was waiting for Béor’s little practical joke to clear up. It’s awfully hard to build your home while shoveling snow at the same time.

Unfortunately, I’d forgotten about the water mains I installed for the future plumbing. Dang. And it was such a pain to fix without my godly powers, too. I miss hand-waving things away.

Night fell, and I still hadn’t found any of those treasure chests I magicked into the ground. I had found enough rocks and other miscellany, though, to afford this palace worthy of a queen.

It still needs a bit of work.

Exhausted and tired beyond belief—this mortal body was not meant for digging—I did finally find a treasure chest before curling up in bed. Lucky, that.

I used the money from pawning the chest to spruce up the house. Really, remind me why I decided to introduce a currency-based economy so early in this world?

I was a little, shall we say, leery of letting myself lose consciousness for sleep. It’s a little too close to death for comfort. I was surprised, though, by just how great I felt in the morning. Little miracles.

I cooked my first royal meal when I woke up the next afternoon, too.

I am the Master Chef.

Once I finished my delicious home-cooked lunch, it was time to get started on the royal garden. I had to pay a full $8 a seed—this is practically highway robbery!—but the pre-stocked food in my refrigerator simply isn’t going to last forever. I just had to bite the bullet and buy the tomato seeds.

After gardening, it was back to filling my royal yard up with holes. Right now, I need to save up enough simoleons to purchase a lot. With it, I’ll be able to “hold court”, so to speak, and be able to support bringing one of my little humans into the fold as an official member of the kingdom.

And then I shall have real peasants to do my bidding. Mehehe.

Of course, as the god-queen of the kingdom, I could just take the land and not bother trying to buy it.

But where’s the fun in that?

I quickly fell into a routine. A backbreaking routine, but a routine nonetheless.

Get up, tend garden, breakfast, tend the garden again, dig in the yard for treasure, tend the garden, go to sleep, rinse, repeat.

I think I might have overstretched myself with how many plants I was looking after at once.

Um… ahaha… this.

Alright, so I gave up on the garden in favor of digging for treasure all day. I was starting to feel the pressure of getting my royal court running, and quite frankly, the garden wasn’t making me any money. Priorities.

It was ironic, then, that it was the royal tomato plants that saved me in the end. It was Sunday night, the last day of the round. A few tomatoes survived my neglect and the incoming winter to produce fruit. I sold them, and it put me just past the dropoff to buy the lot.

And so the kingdom turns on tomatoes.

I call it the Royal Pokerhouse, and it is a majestic building right across the street from my exquisite royal palace.

Give me a break, the kingdom is only a round old.

It was lucky the tomatoes saved me; that night, a ton of snow fell, preventing me from doing any digging. I’m sure Béor has something to do with all this white stuff. I’m just glad I managed to get my, ahem, royal court prepared.

And now I have a throne.

All hail the God-Queen.

The full round of digging and gardening was so worth it.

First things first, I set the ticket price to come visit me, the beloved God-Queen, at $9999 per hour. As long as I can get someone to pay it, I should be rolling in simoleons very quickly.

That is a pretty big “if”, I’ll grant you, but I think the price is reasonable. God-Queen, remember?

It’s going to take some time to actually get running at optimal efficiency. I have a three-step plan to success:

1) Gold sales badge.2) Gold flower-arranging badge.3) Profit.

Simple, really. But since I’m embarrassingly low on skills, it’s going to take some doing. First step was to park myself in front of the royal ticket machine and go wild with those “basic sells”.

Eventually I got too tired to carry on… that, and my royal bladder was about to burst… so I went home for some sleep. I did manage to get up to a silver sales badge on my first day, though. Not bad, if I do say so myself.

…it turns out being a mortal is… just a little harder than I thought it would be. Only a little bit.

It took a full day at home to recover from this, sleeping and eating in intervals, before I was ready to return to the Royal Pokerhouse.

Now that I had the royal court opened (no matter how lackluster it may be), it was time to introduce my first peasant to proper home living!

This is Imelda Lariel, modeling the latest in blue sweater fashion. She’s nice enough. Hard worker. Good manners. I just received her journal a few minutes ago, along with her taxes. Can’t wait to read it! And to spend her money!

Once Imelda was installed, I went back to working on that gold sales badge. This woman, Eliza Barakat, is now officially my favorite. She walked right up to the royal ticket machine, paid my price, and went in to enjoy the facilities. She didn’t ply me for favors or write a report; she just wanted to visit the court.

But, of course, if Eliza wants to pay to play poker and soak in the hot tub, she is more than welcome. I like having a royal treasury.

Eliza sat right down at the royal poker table and cut the cards, despite there being no other customers to play with her. I sat in on a game once in a while when I felt I could tear myself away from building my sales skill; she is paying top dollar, after all.

I began the night with $80 to my name. Through Eliza alone, I ended it with a little over $29,500.

I also had my gold sales badge.

Step one to ultimate awesome success: complete.

I’m holding off on rebuilding the royal palace until I have a bit more of a king’s ransom at my disposal than $30,000. I did, however, upgrade the royal bedchamber. The old bed just wasn’t cutting it. I woke up with a sore back every morning.

Besides, this one has a canopy. A royal canopy, you might say.

I woke up refreshed and ready to go by six in the morning for the first time in… well, for the first time ever. It was glorious.

With my new dazzle sales technique, I was able to get people who weren’t Eliza in to the poker table. Not many people took the bait, and I only rarely had more than one person at that table at one time, so they didn’t stay long.

Still, three hours at $9999 per is almost $30,000 per customer. I didn’t really mind that it was such a pain to get them in. I love my peasants.

I kept up the work at dazzling impressionable sims into the Royal Pokerhouse throughout the second round. Once I had passed $100,000, I decided I would take a step back on Saturday to rebuild the royal palace, and to see what I can do about courting a king.

Children are kind of a necessary part to founding a kingdom, you know.

Speaking of kings…

That handsome sim over there is Ryan Borne. A strange and exotic name, to be sure, but then, most of the sims I initially created took odd-sounding names.

Ryan is one of the regulars at the royal court, and I think I know why.

But I need to refurbish the royal palace before I can think about crowning Ryan.

Near the end of the work week, I finally started being able to convince more than one peasant to pay the royal ticket price at once! Although, I think Nathaniel Green over there might have been more interested in eating Leopold Ames than playing the game.

The two stayed for longer than the standard three-hour fare, and pushed me over the $200,000 threshold. I love these guys. I was even asleep for most of it; I was napping in the tent out back while they paid to their hearts’ content. Being queen is awesome.

Of course, these two stayed even longer than the last pair, pushing me up and over $300,000. I went back to sleep—dazzling takes a lot out of you, you know—and dreamt of my plans for the royal palace.

I’m thinking walls. And a roof. And floors. I am highly picky about my architecture, you know.

I came home Thursday evening smelly and starving (in a very queenly way) to find Ryan standing at my front door! Well, how could I pass up a royal opportunity like that?

I invited Ryan inside, and he sat on the royal couch and watched the primitive television options while I showered and made up some spaghetti to share.

He’s a delightful conversation partner, and didn’t seem to mind that he was seeing the interior of the royal palace before… well, before it resembled anything like a royal palace. I had intended to impress him with my incredible wealth when I courted him, but surprisingly, he didn’t seem to care.

We watched a movie together over dinner, and then played some friendly games of red hands, which I SO TOTALLY WON. *cough* I am the God-Queen. I don’t lose. I am insulted you would insinuate such a thing.

Red hands somehow led into some light flirting…

…which led into some rather undignified heavy flirting.

At 2AM, Ryan finally called it for the night, staggering off the lot. I was sad to see him go, but also strangely happy that I would now get to see my pillow. I had just gotten back from the Royal Pokerhouse, after all.

I gave the Royal Pokerhouse one last go on Friday before rebuilding and settling down with Ryan to work on producing an heir. It was a highly productive work day; I even managed to get three sims sitting in at once!

That amounts, need I remind you, to about $30,000 every hour they stayed.

Since I wasn’t quite staggering from exhaustion yet, I went ahead and started arranging the first of many daisy bouquets towards the gold badge. If I can get some snapdragons around the place, I should be able to hold customers here for hours and hours at a time!

That is a little bit of a long-term goal, unfortunately.

Leon Riley here became the first to use the hot tub at the Royal Pokerhouse. It’s been there since the beginning… it was just that no one else ever found it up to this point.

Maybe I should have installed a few more brain cells when I made them. That hot tub was expensive, you know.

I finally went home with a royal $630,941 to my name. I spent a final night in my little royal home, and then rebuilt when the sun rose on Saturday morning. Royally.

It’ll do.

I will admit, it looks just a little out of place, being such an ornate building standing more or less on its own in the kingdom. And… it makes the Royal Pokerhouse, which singlehandedly funded it, look rather… well… bad. Horrendously bad, even.

Both of those can be remedied, though.

I was also left with just $46 after the dust cleared, and I’ve still got a few spare bedrooms and the servants’ quarters to furnish, but that can be fixed with a single visit to the Royal Pokerhouse. Besides, I got both kitchens, all seven bathrooms, the throne room, the royal office, and the ballroom all finished, and that’s really where all the important stuff is.

Speaking of the throne room…

…this is far more like it.

Now I just need a king to sit in that other chair over there.

*beep boop beep*

“Hey, Ryan. You mind stopping by the royal palace? I have a question to ask you.”

I paused, listening to his remarks on the other end of the line. “Yes, I am going to keep calling it a ‘royal palace,” I replied dryly. “I am a God-Queen, and I have a castle. I’ve made a few changes to it, anyway. You’ll see.”

I greeted Ryan at the gate and guided him into the royal entrance hall. He went awfully quiet, until he was standing in the throne room. He was still, taking it all in, while I stood nervously off to the side. Finally, he just said, “Wow.”

“So?” I prompted when he didn’t elaborate.

“Wow,” he repeated. “It’s very… girly.”

“Shut up.” I rolled my eyes. “Do you like it or not?”

Ryan clasped his hands together and smiled widely.

“Weeeell?” I demanded, tilting my head to the side.

“You told me to shut up. I’m obeying the queen,” he said, a twinkle in his eye that reminded me somewhat of Béor.

I folded my arms, exasperated. He laughed and said, “Yes, Keika, I like it. It’s awesome.”

“Well, that’s great,” I said, starting to get a little nervous. I held up my hands in front of me and pointed at the thrones, trying to look more confident than I was. “Because I was kind of hoping you would, you know, stay here for forever. Sit in one of those thrones as the king. Help carry on my family line as the next generation of queens. You know. All that.”

“Yes!”

We didn’t waste any times exchanging rings after I proposed. There was really no point; it wasn’t like there was much of a kingdom to appease with a public affair. In retrospect, it might have been nice to have the people I created witness their goddess marrying, but meh.

I finally have a king.

Unfortunately, we didn’t quite have time this round to outfit Ryan more appropriately, but I did convince him to cut his hair. It sprang up in curls once it lost its length, and I can say with very little bias that it is so cute that way.

Unfortunately, when I tried to cook him some dinner that evening after our nuptials, I had a small accident with the oven. A very small accident. The tiniest of accidents.

In fact, I embarrassingly didn’t realize there was anything wrong until Ryan walked in from his shower and freaked out. Oops.

“…is this not how cooking works?”

“THE FLIPPING STOVE IS ON FIRE!!”

In the end, we just went with cereal. I didn’t burn that.

As a final note for my first two rounds in Clitheroe, King Ryan (it has such a nice ring to it) has set about learning flower arranging. I mentioned offhandedly my plans for the Royal Pokerhouse, and he decided that was an area he could help me in. That is kind of a load off my chest.

All in all, it was a highly productive beginning for the little kingdom. I have a palace, I have a king, and I have my first subject. I’ll be adding her account to this record once I receive it. It’ll be nice to have everything in one place.

And so, dear future reader, whoever you may be, King Ryan and I bid you adieu (from my new royal office) until next round. Signed,

“Nice new digs you’ve got here.”

“Béor, I am going to ignore you until you go back to guard duty at the garden.”

“And you’re doing a fantastic job of it so far,” he commented brightly.

“All I wanted was to mention that you’ve got some nice taste in buildings,” he continued.

“Thank you,” I replied, putting the finishing touches on my first record.

“But you don’t have great taste in men.”

I paused, letting that sink in. Finally, I looked up and fixed Béor with my best death glare. “Excuse me?”

“This Ryan guy you’ve made king. You do know he’s got an unhealthy libido, right?”

“Béor, I’m married to him,” I reminded him.

“Aren’t you worried about him cheating on you?” Béor asked, taking a seat in front of my desk.

“No, not particularly,” I answered. “Do you have anything else insulting to say about my mortal husband?”

“Nope,” Béor answered cheerfully. “Just glad you’re happy, I guess. Even though you had to leave the Ether Glades for a couple years to do it.”

“Also,” he said, both of us rising from our seats (in which Béor had only been sitting for a few seconds). Béor’s eyes got a mischievous twinkle in them. “Congratulations on the baby.”

“What baby?”

End of the royal Rheingold record of Rounds One and Two.