A word in advance:

This will be a longer, continuous story in short episodes, based on a Sims 3 playthrough I am having, where my Sim is running a boarding school, not unsimilar to Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.
I am autistic, with ADHD, so my writing style and mood will differ from episode to episode.
Sometimes they will be funny, sometimes dark, sometimes sad, and sometimes all of the those. I prefer slow burns and build ups and I can never tell when I will write the next episode.
The Prelude will not contain much in the sense of pictures, the following chapters will, however. I usually am pretty economical with pictures, though.
It is a story I am mostly writing for another platform, where the content can be a lot more unhinged, so I will be leaving out chapters here that are too dark or otherwise unsuitable for MTS.
I still hope it will be an enjoyable read for some.




PRELUDE

'So, this is it then', Aouregan thought as she looked at the building in front of her with a light frown. She was carrying an open cardboard box full of books and loose papers in front of her and a cigarette was stuck between her teeth. She took a deep puff and the smoke, that had nowhere to go but straight up, made her green eyes water.
The rather desolate looking pictures of the house she had seen on the sales ad surely were no lie. It looked even slightly worse in reality, if that was even possible.
Three stories of sadness, clad in blue (or where they grey?) boards. Colors were hard to discern in the constant gloom of this town. Midnight Hollow.... what a fitting name for this place. She peaked through the heavy wrought iron gates that separated her from her latest acquisition. If a building could be depressed and tired of life, it would look like this. At least it was, except for the foundation, made entirely of wood. Sure, it wasn't exactly a forest, but it still gave her some power over it.

She spat out the cigarette, put down the box in front of the gate and started rummaging through her pockets for the keys. One of the books saw its opportunity and made a run for it, flapping and making its way skyward. Without looking up or stopping what she was doing, Aouregan let out a short commanding word in a forgotten language that very few on this plane knew about. Even fewer dared speak it this casually. A million eyes from all planes of existence would be looking at you, and the attention of whatever those eyes were attached to was usually not desired. But Aouregan was convinced that at least half of those eyes belonged to her Black Lord and Mother, her Thousand Young, and her other followers, whatever they might be. It was always hard to keep track, when it came to the Old Ones, but the others did not really amass a great deal of following. They tended to be a bit more on the sociopathic end of things.

The word of power did its job, however. For a second the wind picked up violently, the already little light that was present seemed to get sucked away into the distance, the trees in the neighbourhood started creaking, as if the gods themselves were pulling on them, half a dozen birds fell dead from the sky, a scream of agony could be heard somewhere off in the distance, and she felt the familiar feeling of bloody tears running down her cheeks. But most importantly for Aouregan it stopped the book, which fell out of the sky with a soft thud, as it landed on the dust covered street. After finding the gate keys, she slowly made her way over to pick up the book. 'I 'ave no patience for this today, you lurky little shit!' she muttered as she simply threw it back into the box. She blew a strand of red hair out of her face and started fiddling with the keys in the gate.
The lock, seemingly surprised by this sudden abuse after resting undisturbed for what must have been a century, gave up and disintegrated. A rusty spring and some screws flew out of it and the gate opened slightly. 'Huh...' she thought '... why am I not surprised?'
She gave the gate a slight push, watching it with a raised eye brow, expecting it to simply fall off the hinges any moment. Much to her surprise it opened, albeit it made a sound that could only be described as the march of the dying cats while it did so.
'The new School for Wayward Girls.... this will be A LOT of work.'



She was tired of having to move every other decade or so, but such was the necessity. Police investigations, vigilantes, concerned parents, and the constant threat of the Vatican's Inquisition with its witch hunters operating in the shadows, pretty much forced her hand. Advancements in technology and information sharing over the past century or so have made it a lot harder to stay under the radar. Her short fuse and rather liberal use of Black Magic were not helpful either. She missed her Bridgeport penthouse. But ever since she had to dispatch those two Vatican goons and her whirlpool had made its way three floors further down in the process, the already obnoxious stink eye from the neighbours had just gotten worse.
Thankfully Midnight Hollow seemed to remain completely unfazed by anything that happened in the last hundred years from the looks of it. She even had to place her recruitment ads in a newspaper. There was no other way to get in touch with this community. She couldn't remember when she last actually held a newspaper.
She looked at the stack of applications that were in a pretty olden style folder on top of the box. She had received those via mail. Not electronic mail, mind you, but paper mail.... with stamps and all that. And all of them hand written. She sat down, leaning against the metal fence, pulled out the folder and lit herself another cigarette.

There were quite some interesting applications. She browsed through them once more. After sorting out all the male applicants (They'd only be a distraction and she had explicitly mentioned that only female applicants would be considered, which already spoke volumes about the capacity to understand simple instructions) and the undesirables, she had been left with six promising applications from an interesting array of women: a lead vocalist in some Korean industrial metal band; a pastry chef with an eccentric sense of fashion; a woman with an unhealthy addiction to plastic surgery and dolls; a pretty good looking young woman that had a weirdly absent facial expression; a middle aged woman with a tad bit too much interest in performing surgery; and last but not least... a recently deceased person. Now, Aouregan was a pretty unbiased person by default, but that last one surely promised to be a very interesting interview. Not that the others sounded boring.
She had the interviews scheduled for the next day. She leaned back against the fence and threw the folder back into the box. Tomorrow would be an interesting day, she was sure.