SHEETCAKE PARTY #1

[goneawaymod]

SHEET CAKE MEETUP

“Who the fuck is Linda?”

The question pops up every few minutes, a little tack of punctuation above the offensively-inoffensive music being piped in*. The room the hires have been ushered into is clearly just a conference room, with a layout that requires either sitting at awkwardly-spaced intervals around a giant table or milling and scooting around the smaller folding table, where the “big surprise” the corporate officers promised them is on display: a sheet cake.

A sheet cake that that still bears HAPPY BIRTH DAY LINDA in blue icing across the top, although someone has, at least, gone to the effort of writing welcome, to the team new hires in Sharpie on a purple flashcard and used a Popsicle stick and tape to plant it like a dismal flag right in the middle of Linda’s “DAY”. Dedication aside, the cake itself looks pretty suspect too, not as if it were poisoned but more like if it were salvaged. The cake part looks dry, and the frosting seems strangely...sweaty. No one’s eating yet, and yet there’s already a piece missing.

However, there’s no lack of enthusiasm around the room. A projector hooked up to a laptop casts an off-center, warped rectangle of WELCOME TO, THE BEST TEAM. NEW HIRES!! onto a wall. The many paper plates have a festive print, although they all seem to be Christmas themed. The table cloth looks as if it came from both 4th of July and potentially a war, given the scuffs and tears. The shot-glass sized paper cups are inadequate to hold a satisfying amount of sparkling cider, but at least they don’t leak. There are many more plastic knives than forks, which could prompt some hires to give in to their animal instincts and just use their hands, or perhaps start a barter economy for the better utensils.

“I’m so jealous,” a corporate employee keeps saying as she ushers hires into the room. “We haven’t had a good party in this office since Kelly’s baby shower, and that little girl practically has teeth now!”

(An eagle-eyed hire may suspect that the box of donuts next to the sheet cake might have come from said baby shower, on account of the fact that the few stale hunks of donut remaining have Pepto-Bismol pink strawberry icing and that there’s still the paper envelope for a gift card with ITS A GIRL written on it.)

Most of corporate slips out after the hires get set up - this is clearly an event for the hires to do some “team building” and work on “rapport” in addition to filling their bellies with cake that tastes remarkably like sand. There’s a karaoke machine in the corner, but hires are instructed not to touch it because, as an employee points out, last year’s Christmas party demonstrated that karaoke is the worst thing in the entire world for morale (“in any world! even before this one got eaten away by the bombs!”).

There’s an additional big glass jar filled with scraps of paper, which the hires are informed are filled with prompts for ice breakers and activities in case the party needs a pick-me-up. Any hire who investigates will find that most of the ice breaker activities start with three benign questions (“what’s your name?” “where are you from?” “what’s your favorite animal?”) and somehow, always a fourth question that feels a little invasive (“what are your feelings on unions?” “under what circumstances would you kill an innocent person?” “do you use the same passwords for all your accounts?”).

“Please enjoy yourselves and all the desserts Jorgmund has generously supplied you with,” one of the employees says on her way out, “and don’t worry about making a mess, janitorial gets paid too much to sit around as is.”

*All music that can be summarized as ’grocerycore’.

Comments

[credit_not_blame]

Catra gets her captor but good with the claws. Stacia snarls and lowers them both back to their feet, further apart than they were before, then lets go. She can hear the fear under the other girl's fury; it sounds exactly like her own these days.

She makes an interrogative noise at them, blood dripping from her wrist to the floor.

[turntex]

Back on his feet is good. He can't access his sylladex or anything in it for some reason so no weapons, but at least catgirl's anger is directed elsewhere at the moment so maybe he can still get out of this without having to throw down, he'd really rather not tangle with any of the setsnof claws currently on display. Dave's hands come up again, palms out all non-threateningly but still in a better position to defend himself quickly if necessary. He's not gonna stumble into the same pitfall twice.

"Okay, not much of a talker, that's fine." It's super fine, he can talk enough for everyone here and then some. "We can all just take the chillest of pills, take the whole damn bottle's worth, let's just fuckin' overdose on this shit. Gonna die as I lived, easy and breezy as a Covergirl model."

Maybe he should stop talking about dying immediately after someone tried to kill him.

[heterochrocatic]

"What?" Catra glares at the giant wolf creature, apparently quite ready and willing to throw hands with someone or something literally twice her size. Her claws aren't out any longer, though, which is progress? One supposes? She's still tense and agitated, her heart hammering a million miles an hour in anger, panic, fear.

"Will you shut UP?" Her attention is suddenly back on Dave. "Stop talking! I don't even understand half of what you're saying and it's annoying--" She wants to grab him and shake him until he shuts his damn mouth but the looming wolf creature makes it a bit difficult to consider. It'll just end with them separated again.

[credit_not_blame]

It's about this point where the straining threads of the jumpsuit give way, splitting along the seams. It does have the effect of making it look like the wolf-monster just got bigger, it's going to be annoying to fix. Plus, the sensation of clothes splitting off her Crinos body reminds her viscerally of her First Change and she hates it.

Stacia can feel the wounds in her arm itching as they heal, so at least there's that.

She can tell that this isn't a 'settle down and talk it out' situation, so she points both index fingers at them (her claws appear to have been painted pink), then tilts her hands up to mine two people turning and walking in different directions.

Seriously, walk away. They don't need this fight.

[turntex]

You don't gotta tell him twice.

(Okay, maybe you usually do, but there usually isn't a giant wolfmonster looming over him making the suggestion to just cut his losses and walk away.)

"Cool, message received." Hands still up, he backs away slowly like the ranting catgirl might decide to go for an attack of opportunity despite the very clear instructions. Seriously, said instructions are effectively highlighted in pink and everything. "Digging the nails, by the way."

>>ABSCOND

[heterochrocatic]

Catra glares at Dave. Glares at the wolf-person. She holds where she is a few moments longer than she really needs to, just to convey the impression that she's doing this because she wants to do it and not because anyone told her to. Then, she turns and stalks off towards the opposite side of the room, a little bundle of agitated fluff and claws.

[credit_not_blame]

Stacia is willing to accept whatever everybody else needs to do as long as the result is that they knock this shit off.

She waits until the other two have vanished into the crowd in opposite directions before shrinking back down to Homid so that she doesn't do anymore damage to her jumpsuit. At least the Rite of Dedication she'd grudgingly performed on her Jorgmund-provided underwear had worked, so she's not reduced to complete rags and nudity.

She grabs some paper napkins off of the table and wipes her blood up off the floor before shuffling off to another corner with her tatters and her wad of bio-hazard.

[passifloraincarnata]

Setsuna's struck by two somewhat stupefying thoughts, both of which kept her stymied from doing much more than jerkily starting in the direction of this commotion upon its sudden escalation and equally sudden end:

The girl she'd just been talking to not that long ago could turn into a giant wolf creature, and;

That level of physical altercation may have been swift and may have resolved without any serious harm but it was also vicious, disruptive, and violent ... and nothing happened to any of them.

She blinks, as the realization sinks in - just because Jorgmund could activate the implants from anywhere, just like Labyrinth could have, apparently doesn't mean that they're like Labyrinth technologically and that they could observe them from anywhere. And this ... if they were paying close attention to anything, it would be a situation like this, with all their unknown variables in one place, mingling, where they could be saying or doing anything. If they were really as good as she fears them being, they'd be watching this room in some way like a vulture contemplating a potential corpse.

And they're not. The surprise of Stacia's wolfish transformation hardly rates compared to the stab of exultation that slides in between her ribs at this news.

She holds the thought close. It will make sleep come easier, tonight.