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

[monkey_wrench]

Jack wasn't great about being touched. Perhaps not as bad about it as, oh say, Catra, but given the circumstances of the day he was a bit more on edge than normal. So when the two bump into each others backs in the crowd, the twitchy teenagers end up turning on each other and shouting "Back off--!" in something close to synchronized tandem. Almost like a perfectly executed mirror gag, only broken by Jack recognizing Catra from the scuffle that had happened earlier.

For a moment one could practically see him weighing the pros and cons of continuing to snarl back and risk himself getting mauled by her or the werewolf girl. And honestly, not a lot of positives in that scenario. So, changing his tune, he raises his hands, palms out, the white flag of body language, and forces the best shit eating grin in his arsenal.

"Or I guess we could both back off. Technically already did that in the literal sense."

[heterochrocatic]

Catra glares for a moment, concerned that she's going to have to yell at another weedy kid but... this one seems to have an understanding of personal space and not being completely offensive right off the bat, which helps calm Catra's initial angry reaction a little. She settles her hands on her hips and nods.

"Good." She looks him up and down. Reads the shirt he's wearing.

"...I like the way you work," she says after a moment, smile touching her lips. "Did you really set off the sprinklers?"

[monkey_wrench]

Okay, so she doesn't just indiscriminately sink her claws into everyone who steps on her tows, just the ones that made an issue out of it or tried to lift her off the floor. Good to know. He could work with that. Also, good stroke of luck for him that he'd already gotten a nice demonstration of that. He sure as hell didn't need any new claw marks.

It takes him a bit by surprise when she comments on his shirt. '...I like the way you work,' was not really the response he expected, but he'll definitely take it.

"Oh, I did more than that. I set the off alarms and cut out the lights for at least one floor." He didn't make it to any of the other floors to find out how widespread that was. "The sprinklers where just me being bitter. But I guess 'took five minutes to hack into our AI' wouldn't have fit so nicely on a shame shirt."

[heterochrocatic]

Please, Catra is (usually) more discerning about who gets a claw to the face. She's just been under a lot of stress lately. She grins as he explains his failed escape attempt and then laughs. Probably one of the first genuine laughs she's had since she got here!

"Oh, I do like you. These..." She jerks a hand towards the front of the room, indicating the cake and therefore, the people who left it there, "...people, I guess. They made a mistake grabbing people like us." Already 'us' but only because he seems cool. And useful. And like, on the same wavelength, which is a first out of the people she's met so far.

"I'm Catra," she adds, almost an introduction as an afterthought.