The White Legacy--The Great Recap

The Great RecapThe White Legacy Extras:Accurate Through Generation Five

Hello, everyone! I thought that, since the legacy is now reaching its midway point and things are starting to branch out and get complicated, it would be useful for both you and me to have a reference for everything that’s happened up until this point.

Originally, this was also going to be a family tree. Instead, I have put out an interactive family tree via Family Echo that will hopefully be more useful and less confusing. If you need a reference for figuring out who’s related to whom, it is available on both my Livejournal and Boolprop tables of contents.

Now, to make this recap more useful and less confusing, I’m going to separate the stories out by its central character(s) and tell them separately. That way, if you or I ever need to go back and brush up on one particular character’s story, we won’t need to flip through this whole slideshow.

This is the list of stories and mini-stories I’m going to be covering, floating above my head for your convenience. So, let’s begin, huh?

General Legacy RecapGeneration One, Chapter One — Present

Alright, we’re going to make this short. This is neither a family tree nor a detailed account of everything that’s happened in the legacy; this is a quick line-up of who’s inherited from who, and then a brief who’s who of those not related to the family but nonetheless figure strongly in the continuing story of the legacy.

This is Snow White, the founder of this legacy. If I had known when I created her that this would be the legacy that I would publish… well, her name would not be Snow White. Oh well, it works for her, and it set a precedent for naming themes in the legacy that have made it fun.

Snow was crabby and ungrateful and great fun to write for.

Snow married the charming gentleman Patrick Miller and had three children: Baltic, Toro, and Arie.

Arie and Baltic, by the way, still feature strongly in the legacy. You’ll be hearing all about Baltic in this big recap, but Arie doesn’t have a specific story even though she is featured in a number of them, so I guess I’ll mention her here.

Consider her mentioned.

This is Toro, the second generation heir. He was fairly easygoing, but not passive, and loved sweets and desserts. Those sweets are still stored in the fridge and being slowly eaten today. Yes, they are that old. No, I will never get tired of making jokes on them.

Toro married Brie, an joy buzzer-happy ex-cow mascot. They had five children: Cygnus, Par, Arc, Dez, and Merry. You might recognize a few of those names.

Dez inherited from Toro, becoming the Generation Three heir. He was a good warlock who said quite a bit through very few words.

Seriously. Very few words.

Dez married the boring bartender Isis, and together they had three daughters, Callie, Jade, and Gizmo.

Jade was the Generation Four heiress. Like her father, she doesn’t say much, sticking to short sentences engineered to get the point across and not much else. She prefers to keep her emotions to herself.

Jade married Sun, the hippie vampire. Yes, you read that right. Together they had four children: Andi, Hyde, Lyra, and Dane.

Hyde has just inherited as the Generation Five heir. He is a TV-watching, video game-playing, stargazing, passive kind of guy, and is not yet married. He’s an adult now, but this picture was just too good to pass up.

And that’s the basic bloodline so far. Now, for the important non-family members.

This is June. She is the placeholder for the family Greek house; she is brought in right after the students graduate, and leaves right after the next generation shows up to school, taking care of the house between those two periods. She is made from the fabric of pure evil. June and I have something of an understanding: I love to hate her, and she loves to hate me. She puts up a fuss every year when she gets kicked out of the house. She’s so awesome.

This is Pearl. She was Merry’s mentor, and now she is dead. More on that in “Dez and Merry”.

These two witches are Hattie (evil) and Chantelle (good). They are the current heads of their respective orders of magic. You’ll be hearing about Chantelle in “Dez and Merry”, and a little bit about Hattie in “Baltic and Seraphine”.

These are the members of the vampire loathe. They’re rather creepy and are the villains behind probably my single darkest storyline. Also, many of them are loans from other authors… and in their stories, they are without exception heroes. So, um, sorry, guys.

In case you’re interested in trivia, their names and who I borrowed them from are, from left to right:Front Row: William, Elizabeth, Ryker (MysteryMusic7), Perseus (animeangel1983), Romi (ichigomccoy)Back Row: Kali (MysteryMusic7), Fricorith (animeangel1983), Gabriel…and the Contessa, whose full name is Lisa Sartor, is standing on her dais in the foreground.

….what is he doing in here?

Butler: “Photobombing!”

And that is a succinct summary of the butler’s role in this legacy.

Dez and MerryGeneration Two, Chapter Three — Generation Three, Spares

Dez and Merry were born to Toro and Brie as siblings in the main bloodline of Generation Three. They were the two youngest of the generation.

When Brie ate cheesecake while pregnant with Merry, she had intended to have twins and round out the number of children for the generation as six. Instead, she only had the one daughter. It was later explained that this is because Merry had consumed her twin in the womb. In doing so, she had inherited a double-dose of the magic each of the children that generation was already sensitive to, giving her a natural gift as a witch.

Merry showed herself to have a rather volatile temperament from an early age, but that didn’t stop Dez from quickly forming a close friendship with her.

Shortly before Merry became a teenager, Dez was visited by Chantelle, the head of the local good witch order. She explained that not only did Dez show high potential for magic, but Merry was about to come into full realization of her own magical gifts, and it would be a good thing to have someone else in the house with magic to help neutralize any accidents she might have. Chantelle suggested that Dez take up magic.

He was initially reluctant, but after Merry did age up into teenager and immediately showed just how much power she had in conjuring a thunderstorm, Dez called Chantelle back and accepted her offer.

This is how both Dez and Merry ended up as witches, and of opposite alignments. Dez stuck to the side of good, and Merry preferred the dark arts.

Dez and Merry continued their friendship into their time as teenagers. They attended a private school with a magic curriculum for witch teenagers, and later went on a late-night trip downtown together.

However, Merry had been under the assumption that she was the best of her siblings and therefore was a shoo-in for the heirship. When Toro and Brie instead declared Dez as heir, she flew into a rage. Merry pulled her wand on her father, but didn’t complete the spell when Dez, her best friend, stepped between her and Toro.

Later that night, she was approached by Pearl, the head of the evil magic order. Pearl began training Merry in dark magic, feeding her compliments of how great a witch and how much better than Dez and how fabulous she was.

Dez went to college the night of the family heirship meeting, having been given a ride by his brothers, who were already students at Sim State. He attempted a few times to regain Merry’s friendship in vain. She was antagonistic towards him, but not violent, until he brought home his girlfriend, Isis.

Merry attempted to kill Isis that night on the balcony, which escalated into what could have been a magical battle between her and Dez. I ended up having to send my simself in to alleviate the tension, and force Merry to promise not to hurt either of them until everyone had graduated.

Once Dez and Merry had both graduated and moved into their respective homes, Dez married Isis in the family wedding chapel. (Or perhaps more accurately “wedding venue,” but that doesn’t sound as good.) Merry somehow secured an invite to the wedding through Dez’s sentimentality, and attempted to ruin the fledgling marriage before it had begun via memory spells. Fortunately for my legacy, Chantelle was also invited, and she used her own more trained magic to subvert Merry’s spells. The wedding went off smoothly.

Merry went back home to her mansion to sulk, until she found out that Isis had become pregnant. Realizing that if Dez managed to father the next generation it would be that much harder for her to take his place, she set off for the estate and challenged Dez to a magic duel on the life of his wife and unborn child.

This duel moved into a mysterious place called the Astral Realm after both witches cast Expello Simae on each other at exactly the same time. The heads of the competing magic orders arrived in psychic form to aid them, Chantelle for Dez and Pearl for Merry. They were informed by their leaders that they had accidentally locked themselves in the Astral Realm, and the only way to get out was to anchor themselves to a person close to them who was also near the geographical location where they left the physical realm.

That person turned out to be Arie, who Toro had called over when everything went south. Merry and Dez both successfully made it out of the Astral Realm, and Dez’s eldest daughter, Callie, was born soon thereafter.

Merry returned to her own mansion, fully dejected. She had failed in everything she had tried to do. Just when she was feeling her worst, in comes Pearl. The two witches got into an argument, Pearl calling her out at last on all her failures and her worst personality traits, and summed it all up by declaring that Dez was a better heir than Merry would have been anyway. Enraged, Merry killed Pearl with an Inflammo spell.

Merry made an attempt on Dez’s life some time later, and most recently, she stole his tombstone with a plan to turn him into a zombie and use him to do damage to his own family. However, Dez and Merry never saw each other again. Merry is still working against the legacy family in retaliation for Dez claiming the heirship over herself, and Dez lived a long, successful life and is now buried in the family graveyard.

Jade and the VampiresGeneration Three, Chapter Four — Generation Four, Chapter One

Jade was Dez’s second daughter. One night, she was looking at the stars with her telescope when she was unexpectedly approached by a vampire named William Valentine. Her scream called Dez, and William quickly explained that he wasn’t there to hurt anyone, but rather to protect them. He spoke of a loathe (the name for a group of vampires in this particular miniverse) that had set their sights on the legacy family, hoping to gain power, influence, and numbers by taking it over.

William continued to appear occasionally at the legacy estate, checking in on the girls. At one point he succeeded in obtaining an invitation into the house itself through Gizmo, who was still a child at the time.

When Callie went to college, William began courting her. However, when Jade arrived, having been established as the Generation Four heiress, he promptly forgot Callie and began dating her. He bit both girls in due course.

Not too long after Jade arrived, William proposed. She refused him and then walked into the house, preventing him from using the compulsion powers he had gained over her from biting her. He did not have an invitation into the house, and could not follow her.

If he had proposed anywhere other than her front porch, two steps away from the door, he would have been able to use compulsion on her, forcing her to marry him, and the loathe would have succeeded in taking over the legacy. Just thought I’d point out just how close this storyline came to ending in complete and total disaster on just so small a detail.

Spurned and angry, William invaded the legacy estate and lured Gizmo outside, where the rest of the loathe was waiting, and together kidnapped her. It was at this point that he was revealed to have been one of the vampires he was professing to protect the girls from all along.

During this period of time, Jade had met Sun, a hippie vampire referred to by the other vampires as Count. He was open and honest with her where William had not been, and the two quickly fell in love.

Jade and Callie received the message that Gizmo had been kidnapped by vampires from their parents. They went to Sun for help, and he gave them what he knew about the loathe. On their way home, they were ambushed by some vampires who attempted to capture them, as well. Sun arrived in time to rescue them, though Callie went a fair distance rescuing herself. As the vampires left, they delivered a message to Jade that the Contessa of the loathe demanded that both she and Callie turn themselves in to her.

Jade gave Sun the invitation to come into the Greek house, and they, Callie, and Dez, who teleported there the instant he received the phone call from his daughters, held a war meeting. They formed a plan to infiltrate the nest, where the loathe was headquartered. Jade would overtly surrender herself to the vampires, giving Sun and Callie time to slip in and rescue Gizmo. Callie was needed because they knew the vampires would have bitten Gizmo to gain the power to force her to stay where she was, and only someone with a close relationship could snap the victim out of it. Callie and Gizmo would then be teleported out of the nest by Dez, and Sun would go in to rescue Jade.

However, things went wrong. Gizmo was safely teleported out, but in the process one of the guards set to watch her and the other captured humans (referred to by the vampires as “sheep”), went insane. His name was Perseus, and in the neighborhood he had originally come from, he had been addicted to godly blood. In the normal timeline he is rescued from and overcomes this addiction, but he had come to Riverblossom Hills before this could occur. The closest he could come to divine power in Riverblossom Hills is magic. Standing guard over Gizmo, who was the daughter of a witch, her blood called to him. This is when Callie, who actually was a witch by this point, arrived. He attempted to bite her, but she fought him off with her magic, at which point he completely lost his mind. Perseus is still insane today, held in confinement by the loathe lest he hurt someone important.

As Callie was dealing with Perseus, Sun was in the hall, fighting the second guard, a vampire named Kali. She too had come from her neighborhood before she had reached her happy ending, but had not gone over the deep end like Perseus had. After Sun reminded her of who she was and what it was she valued, she helped them escape with their lives.

Meanwhile, the loathe had taken Jade into their courtroom of sorts, where they did something Sun had not expected: rather than merely locking her away, they sealed her inside a kind of trance, using William’s compulsion power over her mind. Sun and Callie, who had run back into the nest rather than teleporting away with her father, rescued her from the cell where she had been placed. Having gotten Jade, they made to leave the nest.

Before they were able to completely clear the lot, however, they were stopped by the majority of the loathe. (Only three are shown here, but there were more vampires on their other side.) The only ones left inside were Kali, who was dealing with Perseus, and Romi, who was still recovering from a fight she and Sun had been in.

The Contessa gave Sun the chance to turn on the girls and rejoin the loathe, and when he refused, she ordered him killed. She then transformed into a bat and returned indoors.

It was at this moment that Dez arrived and used a sunlight spell to incinerate all of the vampires standing outdoors. This included Sun, meaning the only ones left unharmed were Dez, Callie, and the spellbound Jade. They were able to escape safely.

Callie took care of Jade back at the Greek house, but she and the rest of her family deliberated on whether it was the safe and right thing to leave her enrolled in college when she could not function. Fortunately, Kali appeared, having slipped away from the decimated loathe, and was able to use some small level of her own powers to undo what the other vampires had done. Since she had not bitten Jade, however, she couldn’t completely take her out of the trance; instead, she gave her instructions to continue to take care of her own needs and function in school, having reached her by promising Sun was still alive. The magical sunlight could incinerate the vampires’ bodies, but it could not completely kill them and prevent them from returning.

Kali returned to the loathe and helped to rebuild Sun’s body and keep the other vampires from returning as long as she could.

After a long and difficult struggle, Jade successfully graduated, and was taken home to the legacy estate. Not long after, Sun appeared, having had his body reconstructed, and he was able to break her out of the trance, as he had a close relationship with her. They married and continued their lives, safe for now from the loathe.

Arc and MerryGeneration Two, Chapter Four — Present

Since Arc and Merry feature so prominently in so many of the legacy’s plots and subplots, this is going to just be a short recap of how they came to be working together.

Arc and Merry are siblings, born to Toro and Brie among the main bloodline Generation Three children. Arc was third oldest, behind twins Cygnus and Par, and Merry was the youngest. When Arc was a teenager, Merry was still a young child.

After the explosive family meeting in which Dez was awarded the heirship of Generation Three, Merry began plotting heavily to remove him from the picture so she could be heiress. However, she was not smart enough to form a well-thought out plan of her own, and just smart enough to realize the things that could go wrong with simply hitting Dez with a fireball. The fact that she had three other siblings who her parents could choose over her, for instance.

Thanks in part to encouragement from Pearl, her mentor in dark magic, Merry got the idea to try to involve Arc, her much smarter brother, in the plotting. He, however, would have none of it. He insisted that he was going to marry Anne, who was not an NPC, and liked things as they were. If Dez were killed and Toro and Brie wanted him to take over instead of Merry, for example, he would have to dump Anne to comply with legacy rules.

Besides, as he bluntly told her, he didn’t like Merry in the first place, and did like Dez.

Merry tried to work on her own for a little while before and after college graduation, with disastrous results. See “Dez and Merry” for full details.

Then, one fateful day in Generation Three, Chapter Two, the vast majority of the family, including the members of the main bloodline, were attending a barbecue at Cygnus’s house. They failed to notice that Arc’s house, two doors down, was on fire. Arc was at work at the time, and had been planning on attending the family barbecue with Anne and their young son, Spar, after getting back. Instead, he returned to find the house burned to the ground, and Anne’s tombstone standing in what was the kitchen.

Arc ran down to Cygnus’s house with Anne’s tombstone in his inventory, completely enraged that his extended family had allowed his wife and son to burn to death. He had a meltdown in Cygnus’s living room, and then left, not telling anyone where he was going. No one saw him or knew where he was until Par’s death.

He had in fact gone to Merry, insisting that he wanted to join her and see the entire legacy family “crash and burn,” the same way his immediate family had gone.

SparGeneration Three, Chapter Two — Present

What Arc didn’t know when he left the ruins of his burned-down house was that Spar had survived. According to game mechanics as explained through the Gray Woman myth, toddlers cannot be harmed by fire. By leaving the lot, Arc prompted the omniscient Social Services to appear and pick up Spar for adoption.

Cygnus, Arc’s own brother, and his wife Elle had been having children to satisfy Cygnus’s LTW of marrying off six children. They had had two sets of twins and a single child, and professed to be done with pregnancy and childbirth. To satisfy that LTW, they decided to adopt the final child they needed.

That child was, of course, Spar.

Spar grew up with Cygnus’s family, and when he became an adult, began to look into his past. The orphanage was willing to tell him that his mother had died in a house fire and his father could still be alive, but wouldn’t tell him anything else, including the neighborhood in which it happened. Having made the assumption that his hometown wasn’t Peachtree Valley, Spar has been looking through newspaper articles and the like from other neighborhoods ever since, searching for some clue to his biological family. To this day, Arc has no idea that Spar survived, and Spar doesn’t know that one of the family villains is related to him, or that the ruins near his house belonged to his home.

Baltic and SeraphineGeneration One, Chapter Two — Present

Baltic was the firstborn of the legacy, the eldest of Generation Two. When he was a child, he disappeared from his bed. No one knew what happened to him, and no one saw him or heard from him until Generation Four, Chapter Three, when he suddenly appeared at the legacy estate. He sat down and told his life story and that of Seraphine, which makes up the Generation Four Interlude.

Upon hearing from her current magic order head, Hattie, that the next Child Oracle was scheduled to be born, Merry had taken it upon herself to have that child, believing that having the oracle near would let her hear prophecies about the legacy she was trying to destroy. In order to encourage that oracle to be born to her, she mixed her own life state as a witch with the Grim Reaper. To summon the Grim Reaper, she needed a sacrifice. That sacrifice was intended to be Dez, but accidentally became Par (see “Par, Zircon, and Neffy” for full details).

Seraphine was indeed born the Child Oracle, and she did make a prophecy about the legacy—two, in fact. The first was when she was a toddler, and told Arc in no uncertain terms that one of the members of Generation Two would protect the legacy all the way to the end, ensuring its success. Using process of elimination, they determined that person must be Baltic.

Faced with the dilemma of Baltic being missing but needing to make sure he would not interfere, Arc and Merry became frustrated and asked Hattie for ideas. She suggested time travel, which was only possible at that particular time due to the stars lining up exactly correctly to work the time spells. Arc was sent to the past and he kidnapped Baltic.

Baltic was kept at Merry’s house under the belief that by taking him, they had disrupted the timeline and voided Seraphine’s prophecy. He was later used to watch Seraphine and report everything she said that sounded prophetic.

Baltic and Seraphine grew up together, depending upon each other for everything. When Seraphine was a teenager, she made another prophecy, the last one she would ever make before she completely grew out of the power of the Child Oracle (emphasis on child).

The prophecy was this:

“There will be a great battle of magic and blood. You, Baltic, will leave safety to challenge death. Parent and child will be reunited, and death will inhabit flesh as life meets its end in fire.”

Also when Baltic and Seraphine were teenagers, they were approached by Hattie. She was in the process of investigating Pearl’s murder (see “Dez and Merry” for full details) and believed rightly that Merry was behind it. She needed to be seen as trying to get justice for the head of the evil magic order before her, or else she could lose the respect of her underlings and then her position as the head of the order. She looked to Baltic and Seraphine to help gather evidence, offering them the possibility of escaping Arc and Merry’s house. However, they were unsuccessful, having been scared off from the search by Arc.

After Baltic and Seraphine became adults, Arc and Merry became concerned again that Baltic might begin to protect the legacy, and had him restricted to the lot on pain of death. In addition, they demanded that Seraphine go with them and help them in their plans, also on pain of Baltic’s death.

Seraphine was taken downtown with Arc and Merry, where they wanted her to help them find Hyde, who had gone downtown earlier that night. Their plan was to secure the information of who the heir of his generation was, and then to remove him from the picture, regardless of if he was spare or heir.

Seraphine happened to see him when Arc and Merry did not, and slipped away to corner him in an alley in an attempt to discover from him who the heir was without threatening his life. When she heard Merry calling, Seraphine released him rather than have him be caught by Merry.

Seraphine returned home, and convinced Baltic to go to the legacy estate and warn them of Arc and Merry’s plan. He did so, prompting the interlude.

Later, Arc and Merry stole Dez’s tombstone, and cornered Hyde again (see “Lyra’s Death” for full details). He ran to Seraphine for help, trusting her and knowing her name, thanks to the tale Baltic told the family.

Arc wasn’t pleased when he saw this. When they returned back to their house, they followed through with their threat of what they would do if Seraphine were to betray them: Baltic was lined up to be executed. Seraphine stepped in the way, interrupting them for a few minutes, but Merry would have continued with her spell soon enough, catching both Seraphine and Baltic. To prevent this, Baltic pushed Seraphine out of the way so it would only be him who was killed.

Arc took this as a declaration that Baltic and Seraphine would do literally anything for each other, and took advantage of this opportunity when he saw it.

Rather than having him executed, Arc had Baltic locked in a door-less tower in the house and used his continued safety to motivate Seraphine to do strictly as ordered from then on.

Baltic is still locked in the tower, and Seraphine is still working for Arc and Merry, who are still plotting to take down the legacy.

Par, Zircon, and NeffyGeneration Three, Chapter Three — Present

Soon after Arc joined Merry, he formed his first plan that they would execute together. In order to conceive Seraphine with the Grim Reaper as the father, a sacrifice was needed. (See “Baltic and Seraphine” for full details.) Due to Merry’s past history with him and Arc’s belief that Seraphine would be more likely to be the oracle for the use of a legacy heir, Dez was chosen to be that sacrifice.

Arc and Merry perverted and condensed elixir of life, and Arc called Dez to arrange a time when he could come over. At this point, he was still believed to be missing and his alliance with Merry was not yet public knowledge. He was welcomed to the legacy estate.

Arc prepared coffee for Dez, slipping the elixir into the cup. What he didn’t know was that Par was visiting at the same time he was, and he ended up drinking from the cup while Arc was distracted. Par aged to an elder and died in the kitchen. Arc had to cut his losses, and drew Merry in through an anti-evil magic circle Dez and Chantelle had laid around the house. The Grim Reaper arrived, and Seraphine was conceived.

Par had two children by the time he passed away: his teenage son Zircon and his child daughter Neffy. Their mother, Emily, starved herself to death rather than live without Par, leaving the children as orphans.

Zircon took up the role of surrogate parent for his younger sister, giving himself a focus in life.

Neffy, however, chose her focus to be finding revenge for her father. Par’s death and her own obsessive search for revenge soured her, leading her to push everyone away, including Zircon. However, she ran into obstacles when she realized she didn’t know where Arc lived.

Recently Neffy has had a potential lead in her search in seeing the very obvious mansion o’ evil Arc and Merry live in.

Lyra’s DeathGeneration Four, Chapter Four — Generation Five, College (Part Two)

In a more recent plot of Arc’s, the family was gathered in the formal living room in the now-traditional family heirship meeting. In the middle of this meeting, Arc walked into the room. Sun and Arie threatened him, and he ran and was picked up by Merry on her broom.

When he heard Jade calling, Sun ran to meet her in the family graveyard, where it was discovered that Merry had stolen Dez’s grave while the family was distracted by Arc.

Later, after Andi and Hyde had left for college, Hyde was threatened by Arc and Merry, with Merry lobbing fireballs after him. He was soon cornered.

He was rescued by Lyra and Andi. Andi had gone to pick up Lyra, who was arriving at Sim State for the first time. Lyra delivered a kick to Merry’s head, interrupting the spell she had been about to cast and tossing her to the ground. Just before leaving, Arc promised that Dez’s grave was at his home, and more or less invited them to come pick it up.

Andi, Lyra, and Dane did just that. They arrived at Arc and Merry’s house in what they believed to be a covert mission; however, Arc and Merry were ready for them.

Trapped, Andi, Lyra, and Dane were informed by Merry that she was about to raise their grandfather as a zombie, and then force him to kill them.

Dez, being a powerful good warlock himself, was able to circumvent the spell from the Luau, and was not happy.

In the ensuing chaos, Dane was able to nab Dez’s grave as they ran. They were out the front door and almost off the property when Merry hit Lyra from behind with a fireball; Lyra had become the preferred target when she kicked Merry in rescuing Hyde. Lyra burned to death, but Andi and Dane were able to escape.

Alright, that should be all the important stories of the legacy! We’re now halfway through the challenge, so stay tuned for the exciting conclusions to the presently running stories, and for what will surely be many new stories cropping up in the last five generations!

Thank you so much for continuing to read this legacy, and for those of you who leave comments, thanks for your support and kind words. It means a lot, and keeps my motivation fueled to keep writing this legacy.

Why am I using this picture on this slide, I hear you ask? Well, why not? It’s a simself smustle party!! Thanks again, and see you in Generation Five!