6.5 Old World Charm

Abby had always known what she wanted to do with her life. As soon as her party at the club closed down, she headed to the Plumbob Pictures Backlot to apply for any modeling or commercial appearances available. Her resume was thin, but she'd done a lot of work for her school drama club. Hopefully it would amount to something.

Now was just a matter of waiting for the phone to ring, right?

Dylan had to abandon his idea of entering Riddle in shows. He was too territorial and stubborn.

Dylan did the best he could to teach Riddle some discipline, but it never worked that well.



Still, it wasn't so bad to have a canine protector around, especially since they were still getting attempted break-ins once a week.

Dylan was still keeping Andria at a distance, so she decided to take an end run around him. She and Xia had no trouble bonding over plants. Soon, Andria was over almost every day, working in the garden with Dylan's de-facto stepmother.



Once she discovered that it considered it within propriety to help her with her homework, she seemed to constantly having trouble with a math problem or a literature essay.



While he was making suggestions, she made sure their knees touched, or she leaned against his shoulder to ask for input.

Dylan began recording the days until Andria's birthday on his calendar and counting them off every morning. It couldn't come soon enough.

"You know, Xia's garden is amazing," she pointed out one day. "There's so much more you could be doing to reduce your ecological footprint. Why have all these electronics getting in the way of the important things in life? We could live off the grid!"

Meanwhile, a lot of things were starting to break down around the house.

Dylan had to admit that their lifestyle, largely built around Sky's living large, fame-driven sensibilities, seems a whole lot more complicated than it should be.

One night, Abby independently brought up how absurdly large and complicated the Sample estate was. It turned out that they'd been having similar thoughts for different reasons.

"I don't want to make Mama feel bad, but this place is so neuvo riche," Abby confided in Dylan. "Why don't we live somewhere more simple and elegant? You're the oldest and kind of becoming the head of the household. Do you think you could talk to her?"

Sky, meanwhile, was spending most nights out. Her performance schedule hadn't slowed a bit as she grew older.



Some of her oldest fans were her best.

At one poorly attended evening in the park, Abby ran into Freddy Cagley. They immediately hit it off.

Freddy had kind of a crush on her, even in high school. Abby was charmed, but she made it clear that nothing was going to happen between them. He was such a sweet guy, but kind of a dork.



But the big topic of conversation wasn't romance. It was puppies. His dog Dakota had recently given birth to a litter, and he was looking for homes for the little guys. Apparently Dakota had been spending a lot of time with Hunter's dog Mystery. It wasn't a big, well, mystery who the father of these pups were.



Intrigued to get a look at the little guys, Abby headed home with Freddy after the concert.



And immediately regretted the decision.



Freddy's place had to be seen to be believed.

Freddy looked around as Abby stepped inside and had the good taste to look ashamed. "Hey, if I'd known you were going to come by, I'd have cleaned up a little," he said. "This means you're never going to go out with me, doesn't it."

"Could you just show me the puppies," Abby choked out. "Are they outside?"

They were, and Abby immediately fell in love.

She named the little fellow Connery.



And got the heck out of Freddy's place as fast as she could.

Meanwhile, Andria was working hard to find a home on the outskirts of Avalon that met Dylan and Abby's surprisingly similar aesthetic.

She found it. It didn't turn out to be that hard to get Sky to move. She was ready for a change. And Sawyer didn't care where he lived so long as it had a science station.



The new place immediately felt like home.






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Eh, not my best chapter, but here we finally move to the fresh copy of Avalon! I had to add all the lots back in, and I'm really happy with the new version. You'll see more soon.

I really like Riddle, but I realized that for genetic reasons, I probably picked the wrong littermate. It seems like it's kind of a bug that puppies/kittens end up with all their body sliders to minimum no matter what their parents are like. Mystery is a much better representation of Enigma's genes. So I decided to have Abby adopt one of Mystery's puppies.

I seriously have no idea what was up with Freddy Cagley's house. But I dropped that house in the Avalon redesign and replaced it with something else.