The Fate of Alchemy

Chapter 6 Commentary

There are many things to say about Chapter 6. It is the chapter which took me the longest to write so far in the run of The Fate of Alchemy. It is also the longest chapter in the series, and it is full of new information and content. In addition to this, I changed a lot of things in the story, during the creation of this chapter, and in the month and a half that have gone by since I put it online. So I’m going to take advantage of this commentary to explain what these changes are, and what is to come for FOA.

Several reasons are responsible for the long time it took for this chapter to be complete. The main problem was that as I finished Chapter 5, I still only had a very vague idea of what Alchemy was. I had never taken the time to properly define Alchemy, when I was planning the story last year, so when I started writing Chapter 6 in November 2007 (I started writing Chapter 6 before I took the pictures for Chapter 5) my descriptions of Alchemy came out quite vague and imprecise. I eventually completed a very long first draft of Chapter 6 in early January, and I was quite close to uploading it actually. Upon finishing it, it didn’t seem too bad, even though I knew I needed to change a few things. I felt it was complicated and confusing. I realized that the main problem with it was that I was mentioning the use of Alchemy, even though the latter wasn’t very clear in my head. So this first draft of Chapter 6 was very vague, and it also had some odd storylines, I’m now not sure why I included. I ended up discarding it almost completely, which was a blessing.

So, by early February, I was left with the need to completely reinvent a way to make Chapter 6. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a lot of time to dwell on the matter, because I was very busy with school. As you may know, the past school year was my last one in high school, so in the past six months, I needed to study hard for exams, while applying to Universities for next year. All of this kept me very occupied, and it was mentally draining, so I had to put FOA on hold, until I could find proper time to concentrate on it.

Another matter which slowed me down in the writing of Chapter 6 was the announcement of The Sims 3, the sequel game to The Sims 2. If you follow my blog, you know that I look forward to TS3, and that I’ve been anticipating the release of this game for some time now. The main reason for this (other than being a gaming enthusiast) is that the story of FOA has grown so big now, that I need to plan it out on the long term. I have a sense of perfectionism, and I would hate to be in the middle of a story when TS3 comes out, because this would mean I would be faced with a dilemma. I would either have to keep using TS2 for as long as it would take to finish the story, which would annoy me seeing that I’ve been looking forward to TS3, or I would have to continue the story with TS3, which would also be inconvenient, because I would hate to have half the pictures of the story taken in TS2 and another half in TS3. So, my best option would be to have finished FOA by the time TS3 comes out. The only problem is that FOA is way too big for me to write it entirely by next year, and shortening it is not an option. So I was faced with this very frustrating problem, which I needed to find a way to solve. I took a couple of month to reorganize the story in order for it to work with the arrival of TS3.

At first, I decided that I wasn’t going to write FOA any further than the end of The Donnavi Prophecy, with TS2. The idea was that I was going to finish writing The Donnavi Prophecy, and then reorganize the rest of the story to be able to write it separately in a new story. It has been my wish for some time now to detach the story I had planned for the subsequent parts of FOA completely from The Sims 2, in order for it to really be my own. So, I wanted to write the story up to the eleventh chapter, which would have marked the end of The Donnavi Prophecy, before taking some time to work out a whole new story, with new characters and locations, but which would use the core storylines of the rest of FOA. I was quite confident about this way to proceed with the story until recently. Upon finishing Chapter 6, I naturally started moving towards Chapter 7 (slowly at first because I had my final exams and the beginning of summer break). Once again, I was having a very hard time getting down to this new chapter. At first I believed it was because a majority of the storylines from my first draft of Chapter 6 was now going to appear in Chapter 7, so I didn’t want to mess them up again. As the weeks passed, I came to realize I actually disliked the mood of Chapter 7, and where the story was heading. It’s difficult to explain, because the storylines themselves weren’t bad, and I’m not changing them much, but something in the way I was considering them was just very unpleasant, and ensured I was preparing the story to go down a complicated and difficult to follow road.

In these past weeks, I’ve been working at remedying this problem, and I’ve come up with a new way to deal with the story, which has given me a lot of enthusiasm for it again. The main problem with severing The Donnavi Prophecy from the rest of the story I had in mind for FOA was that it made me lose interest in the story. I’ve often said I like what comes after the first part much more than the first part itself. I was always happy to write it as long as I knew that I was headed towards the storylines I preferred. However, the project of writing The Donnavi Prophecy alone made me concentrate most my enthusiasm on this new story which is going to have all the better storylines and FOA became obsolete.

One thing I’ve been missing for a while now, ever since I started working on FOA, is Pleasantview. There’s something in the mood of Pleasantview which I find so comfortable to write about, and which I’m unable to find in Strangetown. I don’t regret starting the story from Bella’s point of view in Strangetown, because it allowed creating more mystery around Pleasantview, which was slowly introduced into the story through Bella’s memories. However, cutting the story at the end of The Donnavi Prophecy meant that Pleasantview would only have a very limited appearance in FOA, which was a pity, because it is my favorite town of the two. Indeed, The Donnavi Prophecy only takes place in Strangetown, with Pleasantview only appearing through memories.

My new plan for FOA is as follows: Chapter 7 is going to be the final chapter of The Donnavi Prophecy. Chapter 8 will mark the start of a new part, which, as you can guess from what I said previously, will take place in Pleasantview. I have yet to define exactly how this part is going to go, though I already have the basics of the main storyline. I only came up with this idea, about a week ago, and already I’ve been very enthused at working on it. It has given me the enthusiasm I needed to get back on track with FOA. A central theme of this new part will be the relationship between Don and Cassandra. Back since the FOP days, I’ve had a very interesting storyline planned for these two. Even though I loved the idea of this storyline, I always had a hard time blending it in properly with the new storylines I came up with for FOA. I’ve had to make several changes to it, because it was originally supposed to develop in a different timeframe, but I like how it’s coming out, and I think several of you (in peculiar those who are nostalgic of Pleasantview and FOP) are really going to enjoy this second part. I’m still in the process of defining exactly how it’s going to develop, but while I’m away in August for vacation, I’m going to take the time to plan it out right, as well as write Chapter 7, and maybe even start up with Chapter 8. Well, as usual I’ll surely come back saying I had no time at all for my stories, but I suppose it can’t hurt to be ambitious beforehand.

Already in Chapter 6, I had fun writing a chapter which took place mostly in the Pleasantview neighborhood for a change. When I planned out the story last year, I hadn’t originally thought of including an extensive telling of Bella’s past. I had mostly imagined Bella’s life in immediate precedence to when she was abducted, to know what the content of her journal would have been, and I imaged the Alchemical link ceremony in the Goth attic very early on, because it was a part of Bella’s vision in her first hypnotherapy session, but otherwise I didn’t have a very good idea of what her life could have been like. In my first version of Chapter 6, all the explanations of Alchemy were given in dialogue scene, between Bella, Jack, Jenny and Nervous, where she told them about it. It wasn’t all bad, but it was quite long, and since it was just dialogue, I feared it would get boring.

Using Bella’s memories as a way to explain Alchemy allowed a more entertaining form of discovery, because there was actually live action going on. It’s an idea which came to me while talking to my friend Ricardo, also known as dolphinsimo5 on www.thesims2.com, who writes his own series about Pleasantview: ‘Clouds Over Pleasantview’. He was telling me how he regretted having killed off Mortimer in his series, because now Bella seemed very lonely. I suggested he work out a storyline in which he would actually express Bella’s loneliness in the story, and came up with the idea of Bella becoming depressed and hallucinating Mortimer into her life. I very much liked the potential idea, and eventually transformed it, to adapt it into my own storytelling context. So I didn’t write about Bella hallucinating dialogues with her dead husband, and it’s still an idea I like and could use in a future story (not with Bella though), but I realized Bella was also very lonely in my story, and she missed her family, and especially Mortimer. Chapter 6 emerged as an extension to the hypnotherapy scene of Chapter 5. While writing that scene, I saw the possibility to have Bella refuse to come out of the dream state, and to stay stuck there, so she could keep being with her family. I also thought it was an interesting idea, so eventually I combined the two, and I started laying out the basic concept for Chapter 6.

When I realized I needed to dedicate Chapter 6 to explaining what Alchemy was in precision, I found that using Bella’s memories to channel these explanations was the right thing to do. It firstly allows you to know about Bella’s past life, which has remained a mystery for the previous five chapters. Also, it gives you explanations about Alchemy through live action, where you actually see it being used, instead of getting a bunch of theoretic explanations through dialogue. My point with this chapter wasn’t so much to explain what Alchemy was and how it worked (even though I didn’t neglect some very elaborate descriptions) but to show how Alchemy affected their lives, and how in the end, even though they had all these powers, they didn’t only revolve around them, and they still had issues.

The problem with this idea to explain Alchemy through Bella’s memories was that it required a long amount of text to be introduced, since it wasn’t originally meant to be in the story. The whole Strangetown part of the chapter is meant to show Bella’s frustration and confusion with Alchemy, to build up to her decision to stay in the dream state. The first scene may seem a bit pointless, but I like to have moments in the story where Bella fails. In Chapter 2, she fails to climb the ascending stairs in the white room, but lately it seemed that Bella was successful in everything she attempted. So I wanted to start this chapter directly on a failure, which then contributes to her global frustration.

The following scene, at Ophelia’s house verbalized this frustration and brought on the idea of the private hypnotherapy session. Sure I could have just done a random conversation scene between Bella and Jenny and have it over with, but it also allows to keep up with the rest of the Strangetown characters and to show that even though Bella’s the main character and that she's preoccupied with a bunch of stuff, the other characters do still have lives which haven’t stopped. It also prepares a storyline for Chapter 7.

Finally we get to the hypnotherapy session, which is where the main action of the chapter just starts up. Again, I wanted to show failure when Bella is climbing the high stairs. Hypnotherapy, which takes place in the Hypnos, largely depends on the patient’s emotions and state of mind. At first Bella just has her mind set on being with her family and doesn’t concentrate on the difficulty of the stairs. She just assumes she’ll be able to go up and so she’s not mentally prepared to resist, which is why she falls. On the second attempt, the opposite thing happens: she only focuses on what she’s doing but forgets what her ultimate goal is, which is why she fails again. The thing is that the stairs don’t have a given length. It’s not like after a certain amount of steps, Bella can finally overcome them and accede to her memories.

The image of the stairs is meant to represent Bella’s mind, and her entrapment with her amnesia. They’re in a very large white room, which shows that Bella’s memory is completely empty. The descending stairs send Bella to all her negative memories and emotions, which is why she experienced her frightening vision down there in Chapter 2, and then several moments of anguish and horror in subsequent hypnotherapy sessions. The low stairs don’t bring her to any real memories which would actually be considered useful to her recovery, but just to all her fears (present or past) and irrationality. The vision she had down there does have meaning, but it’s a meaning I won’t explain before the story is over. The higher stairs lead her to the “useful” part of her memory. This means all the memories which hold the key to her past and which will help her remember who she really is. The reason they’re hard to climb is because these memories were locked away during Bella’s abduction. There have been barriers placed in her mind to prevent her from accessing them again, and these barriers are the repelling force she feels when she’s climbing the stairs. I suppose there is some Alchemy involved in this, but it’s not very important in any case. I haven’t dwelled much on alien technology, which is why anything relating to alien culture is very discrete in the story. When Bella is climbing the high stairs the concentration and state of mind she needs to be into is very much a form of Alchemy: Bella must use her Power to overcome the barriers placed on her mind and the stairs.

After Bella reached the end of the stairs and acceded to her memories, I wanted a transition moment which would eventually lead her to the real memories of her past. When she starts this hypnotherapy session, Bella is more looking forward to seeing her family, than finding answers about Alchemy. In truth she’s quite fed up with Alchemy and all the other complicated things happening around her, such as the fake journal, or the odd episode on the road. She feels like she’s never going to see her family again, so she’s not really in a position where she wants to fight anymore. The scene in Woodland Park sees her change from a conscious state in the Hypnos, to a dream state.

This scene and the one in the Chapter 5 hypnotherapy session differ from the other moments Bella experiences in Hypnotherapy. They don’t really reflect any precise memory, but they take place in locations Bella is subconsciously using from her past, as a kind of support for her existence within the memory state. In these scenes, as well as in the one where she is with Mortimer in the empty Goth manor which follows, she is actually interacting with Mortimer in her mind, instead of reliving past moments with him.

What’s interesting, and what Bella didn’t know at first, is that the Mortimer she speaks to in these scenes is actually real, because her soul is connected to his by an Alchemical link. Mortimer explains this concept quite well in the story with the following image: “A part of me shall forever live in you, and a part of you shall forever live in me, unless that link is severed.” So, it forms a unity of their minds as if they are one entity, almost (this link is further reinforced by the fact that they’re married, which involves a similar concept, later explained in the story). It’s because of this link that Bella was able to remember Alchemy, because Mortimer, who was not amnesiac and who had lived the ceremony in the Goth manor attic, was able to show her the memory in Chapter 5.

At first, Bella thinks that her dialogues with Mortimer which don’t take place in memories are somewhat like fantasies of her within the dream-memory state and she is unaware that the Mortimer she is speaking to is actually real. It should be noted, however, that Mortimer in Pleasantview, has no recollection of talking to Bella. Mortimer stopped using what is called Hypnotic Alchemy, after his father’s death. In a way, all Alchemy is related to the Hypnos, since that’s where it comes from, but certain branches of it, called ‘the stable branches’ are heavily rooted into the Physical. The stable branches only use Alchemy to study or act on the Physical dimension, as opposed to the more volatile branches, such as the study of Power, which have very little relation to the Physical. After his father’s death, Mortimer developed a tremendous fear to follow his father’s step and therefore took the radical decision to never use any volatile Alchemy again. Eventually he would grow to leave Alchemy behind and to stop beliving in it, in a traumatic form of denial of it. So, ever since he stopped volatile Alchemy, Mortimer stopped using the Alchemical link, and so he has no idea Bella is talking to him through it. The Mortimer Bella speaks to in her hypnotherapy sessions is like a trace of Mortimer left inside Bella, but it’s not the real him.

So when Bella arrives in the dream-memory state, she’s quite depressed, and Mortimer feels this, which is why he shows her she can stay with her family if she wants. Pushing Bella to find answers about Alchemy, no matter how important they may have been, would have probably been counterproductive so Mortimer thought it best to let Bella live her peaceful dream for a while, knowing she would eventually be caught up by the feeling that she’s living in the world of her imagination. When she does eventually come to this realization, everything in her environment disappears, because she awakens to full conscience again, and knows that nothing is real. Mortimer maintains the (empty) Goth manor around her, once again to have a proper environment to actually exist in.

Finally, after the first 40 pages of introduction, we finally reach the heart of the matter – Bella sets off to explore her past, once and for all. The Bachelor manor, which appears throughout this chapter, was entirely based on a house which features as the central location of one of my favorite movies: Practical Magic. The idea of building and using this house for Bella’s childhood home came to mind immediately when I decided to write about this time of her life. This house and the movie in which it features have served as a major inspiration in the creation of FOA. I wasn’t so much inspired by the actual content of witchcraft presented in Practical Magic, but by the mood in which it appears. I love how the main characters of this movie, who are witches, have lives within a non magical community, and how magic blends into these supposedly normal lives. Magic is not something they revolve around but rather something which accompanies them throughout their lives, in a very realistic way. This is a whole mood I am looking to convey with my Alchemists in FOA. There’s a scene from this movie which I very much enjoy, because it shows this spirit of rationalizing the paranormal, and how people shouldn’t think it’s such a big deal, associated with all the cliché misconceptions of the occult. It is a dialogue between Sally, a witch, with a police officer, officer Hallet, who is informally questioning her at her house in the process of a murder investigation. I tried to find a video clip on the internet, but only found trailers and music videos, so I transcribed their dialogue here, instead:

[In the greenhouse, Officer Hallet picks up a bottle standing on a table and examines it]
SALLY: Belladonna. It’s a sedative. People put it in their tea to relax, calm their nerves.
HALLET: Some people also use it as a poison.
SALLY: Which people?
HALLET: Ha-ha! Witch People!
SALLY: Aha!
HALLET: Witches.
SALLY: Witches?
HALLET: Hm-hm
SALLY: So I guess you found me out, huh? Yeah.
HALLET: Yes, I did.
SALLY: You should come around here on Halloween. You’d really see something then.
HALLET: Oh yeah?
SALLY: (sarcastic) Yeah, we all jump off the roof and fly. We kill our husbands too – or is that outside your jurisdiction?
HALLET: Do you have any idea how strange this all sounds to me? I- I got people telling me you’re up here cooking up placenta bars, that you’re into devil worship…
SALLY: No, no, there’s no devil in the Craft.
HALLET: Then what kind of craft do you do?
SALLY: Do I do? I manufacture bath oils, and soaps, and hand lotions and shampoo. And the aunts – they like to meddle in people’s love lives. [a silence] Magic isn’t just spells and potions [a silence]. Your badge? [she points to his breast pocket before digging into it to retrieve his police officer badge on which a shiny star is clearly visible]. It’s just a star, just another symbol,, your talisman. It can’t stop criminals in their tracks, can it? [she shakes her head]. It has power because you believe it does. I wish you could believe in me.

This last reply really shows the mood I would like to convey with FOA. Their activity isn’t necessarily some dark and incomprehensible use of paranormal power. Also it shows how it’s not a question of being a witch or not: everyone uses some form of magic in their lives, through beliefs and hopes. This is something that’s very true in FOA: Alchemy is not reserved to chosen elite, and Power is not acquired through genetics. There is no Alchemical gene, and you don’t need to have parents of great Power to have great Power yourself. Anyone can become an Alchemist, though as Gunther explains to Bella in the first memory, most people don’t believe Alchemy exists, and would be afraid of it, if they were exposed to it, so Alchemists have generally learned to keep their activity to themselves, and transmit their knowledge down through the generations.

So perhaps I digress in including an excerpt of Practical Magic in this commentary, but it’s true that it was quite influential in the defining of Alchemy, especially for this chapter, which is probably why the use of the house came so easily to mind when I needed to create the Bachelor manor. On a side note, about this house, several people have been asking me if I could upload it to the exchange. There are a few reasons for which I haven’t done this yet. First of all, the Bachelor manor isn’t a complete house. I only made the parts of the house I needed for the story, but there is still some empty space I would need to take the time to properly organize in order be able to upload the house (my sense of perfectionism forbids me from uploading an incomplete house). Also, the manor is firstly a set for the story so it wasn’t designed for normal gameplay. I’m afraid it may be a bit awkward to use in normal gameplay, so I would like to at least create a “lighter” version, which can be used for that. I don’t mean by that, that I would entirely recreate the house in a simpler fashion, but just that I would take the time to make it more practical. Finally, remains the pending issue that I have been trying to get some uploads on the FOA website for some time now. I’ve been experiencing trouble in putting some uploads on my own site, but I do think it can be done. I’ll attempt to do this again sometime soon (well, when I get back in Paris at least), and if it’s possible, then the lots that appear in the FOA series will be available for download on this site only. I use custom content in my lots for FOA, which can be a problematic issue when uploading them to the exchange. Creators rarely want to see their creations on the exchange, so that limits the amount of lots I can upload (or at least upload in their complete form). So we’ll see about uploads soon.

Back to chapter 6, I suppose there were two themes in the storylines which evolved through the explanations of Alchemy: the first being Bella and Mortimer’s growing relationship, the second being Gunther’s pursuit for higher Power, eventually leading to his demise. The whole development of Bella and Mortimer’s relationship was a kind of revenge on my old FOP series. Back in FOP, I had randomly decided Mortimer and Bella had met in a vacation center, and had become friends ever since, in the second chapter. I don’t know why I decided to do this, but it was something I grew to massively regret from that series. When I started FOA, I wanted Mortimer and Bella’s relationship to have some real meaning and depth. My first idea for this was the Alchemical link, which bound them since before Bella’s birth. The Alchemical link, which was created during that ceremony in the attic, is the reason that Bella and Mortimer developed such a strong relationship over the years even though they have a seven year age difference, and it’s why Bella felt Mortimer had such a strong understanding of her. Eventually, it’s what led them to develop a firstly platonic relationship, which then turned into a fully romantic one. Just note that even though in this case the Alchemical link brought Bella and Mortimer romantically close to one another, it’s not a systematic thing with such connections. Alchemical links can be established in between any two Alchemists for various reasons. As I said above, different connections exist to form a unity between two Alchemists in a romantic relationship.

The tricky part of the story was imagining how exactly Bella and Mortimer came to fall in love with one another very early on in their lives, in spite of the relatively large age difference between them. Bella had Cassandra when she was 20 years old, which meant that Mortimer and she needed to be in a relationship by the time she was 18 at most. The Alchemical link was the first device which allowed me to make this relationship seem possible. The second means I used to rationalize their early relationship was making Mortimer Bella’s Alchemical teacher. Seeing Mortimer is almost a decade older than Bella, I needed to find a way to have them spend time together, or at least around each other, in Bella’s early life, other than a simple friendship. I would find it hard to believe that a seventeen year old young man naturally found friendship in a ten year old girl. Mortimer’s presence is first brought into Bella’s life, because of the proximity of the Goth and Bachelor families in the Pleasant Alchemical society, and the friendship which grows between her brother Michael and him. Mortimer was regularly around Bella during her childhood, and they were very fond of one another. They first developed a sibling-like relationship, and Bella saw Mortimer like the ideal big brother, in opposition to Michael, with whom she would always have a distant relationship. However, throughout Bella’s childhood, she was only ever around Mortimer because some other people brought them together. Mortimer and Bella would never have had reason to see each other alone, outside of their family contexts. Making Mortimer her Master allowed me to create an exclusive relationship between the two, and occasions where they could meet alone, and therefore bond on a deeper level, even if it was just through lessons of Alchemy at first.

Bella’s lessons with Mortimer, allowed me to give all the necessary explanations about Alchemy. Though it may seem a bit a lot to take all in one chapter, you should know that this is just about as complicated as it’s going to get, so there’s no need to worry about it getting worse. There are still going to be more explanations about Alchemy, sure, but they’ll generally revolve around the same key notions which were introduced in this chapter. I first wanted to include explanations of Alchemy within this commentary to complete the information in the chapter, but seeing the already great length it has taken, I’m afraid adding explanations of Alchemy here will be going too far. Instead, I’m going to focus on the Chapter 6 storylines here, and create a new section on this website, where I’ll include extensive explanations of the Alchemical notions that appear in the story.

The second storyline development in Chapter 6 is Gunther’s excessive attempts to make his Power grow. Gunther was a very arrogant man and a brilliant Alchemist, so he eventually grew to think he was the supreme Alchemist, and that he had all rights. Over the years, he acquired a fear of death, which translated into his behavior by an irrational will to defeat nature and become immortal. Mortimer, who specialized in the study of life and death, had the ongoing project to create the Life Elixir, which, in theory, could make Man immortal. It should be noted that Mortimer never intended on using the Elixir to become immortal. Immortality is not the only feature within the Life Elixir, and it was one Mortimer was wise enough to know he shouldn’t look for. The Life Elixir is a complex potion, which is entirely based on the mechanisms of life and Alchemy. This means that he who achieves the creation of the Life Elixir will have the most profound knowledge of Life. The point of this definition is to say that in order to create the Life Elixir, an Alchemist will have to extensively study the mechanisms of Life and Alchemy beforehand. However, over time, Alchemists interpreted this idea differently, thinking that by drinking the Life Elixir, once they were able to create it, they would acquire all of this knowledge.

Mortimer was wise enough to understand the true definition, but Gunther wasn’t, and not only did he think he would obtain universal knowledge in the Elixir, but that he would also become immortal. He could however see that Mortimer was the only one who could complete the Elixir, which is why as he grew old, he started badgering his son to finish the potion, afraid he would die before Mortimer had a chance to complete. Seeing his father’s growing obsession, Mortimer started backing out of this project, feeling no good would come of it. His eventually led to the clash seen in Chapter 6. Gunther’s obsession turned into dementia, and he was hardly aware of what he was doing by then. Like Mortimer explains to Bella in the garden scene, there is a threshold to how big a given Alchemist’s Power can be expanded to, before it eventually grows too big for him to control. Gunther is a perfect illustration of this idea in the final scenes of Chapter 6. He has made his Power grow so much that it’s now acting independently from him, bursting out in forms of rage, and then of fire. Gunther was of Fire element, which is why his Power comes out in forms corresponding to that element (we’ll get back to elements in the extra information pages).

So why did I create this storyline concerning Gunther? Already, the first idea was that I needed Gunther to be dead by the end of Chapter 6. Sure, I could have killed him off the same way I did Bella’s parents, in a single indifferent page, however, seeing that Gunther’s ghost was red meant he died in a fire, an idea which intrigued me, especially when I noticed there had been a fire in the old Goth house, as it is indicated in Mortimer and Cassandra’s memories. I also needed a reason for Mortimer to stop Hypnotic Alchemy (which is why he doesn’t communicate with Bella through the Alchemical link anymore, and can’t help her out in Strangetown). Mortimer is quite a noble person and so he felt immense guilt when his father died under his eyes, because of his extreme use of volatile Alchemy. It caused trauma in him, which made him too afraid to pick up on any form of volatile Alchemy again. Eventually he just stopped believing in Alchemy and blocks out any memories related to it in his mind. Had he continued with volatile Alchemy, Mortimer could have been of great help to Bella in Strangetown (or at least of greater help, for the part of him left within her is what allowed her to remember Alchemy, already quite a good help).

All of these ideas ended up creating the last scene in the Goth house. I wanted to put a bit of action into the chapter, because it was full of long explanations so, I thought it would be nice to lighten it up with something more visual and concrete. It was fun and challenging to create, within the game. In truth, the shooting was quite hectic, because everyone kept catching on fire, so I constantly had to extinguish Sims. In the end, Bella died (in fact, Bella died a lot in the creation of this chapter, for some reason) but thankfully once I was done with all the pictures. I didn’t save of course so she’s still all right, no worries!

I’m hitting my ninth page of the commentary here, so I think I’m going to start wrapping it up now. Of course, for such a long chapter, a long commentary was necessary – and I didn’t even say half the things I had to! Well, like I said, all explanations about Alchemical notions will be available in some extra information pages later. I haven’t typed them yet, so they won’t be up right away. I’m dealing with several ideas of extending the FOA website right now, so we’ll see when I do everything. Even though I like further developing the story through this site, I’m also quite impatient to get cracking on Chapter 7 now, which I’ve been holding off until I finished writing this commentary (which naturally had to turn out to be so long, by consequence).

To sum up, the main point of this chapter was to give you an overview of the different elements of Alchemy and how they affect the Alchemical society in their daily lives, and to let you discover what Bella’s past actually was, after keeping it in mystery for 5 chapters. Hopefully the explanations of Alchemy didn’t leave you too confused. If so, you can always try to clear things up by reading the extra information pages when I put them online and either way, know that things will probably be simpler in future chapters. So thanks for taking the time to read this large commentary, and see you soon (*knock wood*) witch Chapter 7!

Alexis, 6th August 2008