Prologue - Moonlight Falls

Bridgette Burrows watched as the moving truck pulled away, then turned to survey the living room in the tiny house. Her house. It wasn't much, but it was something. The furniture was placed, thanks to the movers, but the walls were bare. Sighing, she started pulling boxes aside and unpacking.

Bridgette grew up in Starlight Shores, the youngest daughter of two parents who put all their effort and energy into their jobs and next to none into their children. Her mother was Elizabeth Burrows, a famous journalist, and Bridgette learned early on to expect her mother's face to be plastered all over buses and billboards and television commercials, as advertising for Good Morning SimNation. Theodore Burrows, her father, wrote scripts for movies, and had even won a few Simmys. They took pride in their work, which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if they managed to put any pride into their parenting. But they didn't. Their daughters were only accessories, used as props for photo shoots and interviews, then handed over to the high-paid nannies as soon as the cameras were gone.

Her older sister, Bernadette, was always more popular than Bridgette. In school the boys always flocked to Bernadette, especially since she wore more revealing outfits to show off her body. Now she was a singer finishing up the tour to promote her first CD, and the paparazzi was hot on her tail. Because of this, their parents flashed her around more frequently. They always tried to pressure Bridgette into joining show business, like everyone else in the family, but she wasn't interested in any of that. She couldn't sing and she didn't care enough about the news to be a journalist. She shared her father's talents in writing, but had no interest in writing movie scripts.

What Bridgette wanted to do was write books. Fantasy, to be specific.

As Bridgette finished putting away books in her bookshelf, she remembered the argument that ensued when she told her parents she was moving to Moonlight Falls.

"Absolutely not!" Elizabeth cried. "I will not allow my daughter to move to some backwoods town to become a hermit writing nonsense about vampires and zombies! You should try and find a respectable career that can actually get you notoriety and an income, the way your sister's doing."

"I don't care about notoriety, Mother!" Bridgette replied. She'd told her mother this plenty of times, through numerous other similar arguments, but Elizabeth never understood it. "Besides, how can you call what Bernadette does 'respectable'? She gets on stage in almost no clothes and practically dry-humps her backup dancers."

"You're just jealous," Bernadette quipped. Bridgette ignored her, like always.

"Bernie is doing what she loves, Bridgette," Elizabeth continued.

"And I'm trying to do what I love!" Bridgette felt like pulling her hair out of her head. "Mother, I'm 20. I'm old enough to do what I want without having to ask mommy for permission. I'm not here to ask if I can move; I'm telling you that I am."

The tension in the house for the rest of the week was so thick it was nearly hard to breathe in it. Elizabeth refused to speak to Bridgette, and absolutely none of the family - even Theodore, who always had a softer spot for his younger daughter than his wife did - offered to help her pack. If it wasn't for her personal bank account filled with every birthday check she'd ever gotten and all of the money she received as presents for graduating high school, plus some money from having a small, independent magazine publish her short stories in a few issues over the years, she probably wouldn't even have the money to make the move. But luckily she had just enough for a small two bedroom house and some cheap furniture to get her started, and even enough to cover the fees for the movers.

Finished decorating, Bridgette took another look around her new home. She hadn't heard from anyone in her family since she left Starlight Shores early that morning, but it didn't bother her. She was never close to any of them anyway, and the fact that they disapproved of her moving to Moonlight Falls wasn't a big deal. She knew they wouldn't, especially her mother. But Bridgette was determined to move when she saw pictures of how eerily quiet the town was. It was the perfect location for the home of a future famous fantasy writer.

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So here we are! My very first entry in a Random Legacy story. Yikes.

I thought about doing pictures for Bridgette's flashback/memory, but I figured it would just make this prologue more complicated than I really wanted it to be. Also, we'll just pretend that those big ugly crates are moving boxes.

Here's a close-up CAS picture of Bridgette because I really love her (her traits are Supernatural Fan, Perfectionist, Artistic, Bookworm, and Light Sleeper). It's hard to tell but her eyes are a green-grey shade.