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

[stickypete]

[Oh no, it's that small child again, and he's staring sadly at bad cake. Peter's blood does a quick little boil, just a nice little simmer, as it will continue doing off and on his entire time here.]

[He goes over to the jar with scraps of paper, rooting through it. After grabbing a few, he walks over and picks the stupidest possible ice breaker question to ask a child.]

So what are your feelings on unions?

[gempathizing]

Huh? [ It takes a couple of seconds for the fact that he is the one being asked to register, and then when the question itself registers, his confusion is not lessened by any means.

That's going in the hall of fame of things Steven's never been asked or expected to be asked. Maybe he has to give some credit to the work put into the ice breaker jar after all.

He does look pleasantly surprised to be running into Ben, the patron saint of cheap furniture assembly, right now. It's fine to be pleasantly surprised, he thinks. There's no point where it verges into being glad that any of them are here at all. ]

Uh. Well, I think my friend Connie once told me they're a fundamental building block for worker's rights, and I do care about that. [ She said more than that about it, probably, and it was full of historical jargon he couldn't absorb or didn't understand, and tied into the ways she planned to use her career trajectory to advocate and all that. Yet also full of sentiments and relatable circumstances? The thing that mattered more at the time was that she was passionate and very smart, and he was glad she wanted to share that with him.

Him not wanting to interrupt her flow intersected with his tragic history of not asking follow-up questions.

But he'd been about to hit another colony and start doing up the framework for how to get it ship-shape anyway. He didn't have a lot of brain to spare for Earth history just then. He hopes these ice breakers aren't half secretly some kind of knowledge test. ]

Unless you mean another kind of union? But I support it most of the time when people are uniting as a rule, so... good. My feelings on unions are good. [ Steven glances to one side, then back to Peter. Can't help a chuckle. ] You could've opened with "hi."

[stickypete]

Right on for your friend Connie.

[Peter spent quite a few years of his life doing unreliable gig work, his sympathies do not lie with the rich.]

[He absentmindedly throws the rest of his cake in the trash because what's left is nigh on inedible anyway.]

I could've said hi but asking ridiculous questions is more fun.

[And it made the kid chuckle, which is the entire point. He shouldn't be here. Regardless of whatever his background is, he should be home, chillaxing and worrying about homework and what to wear to homecoming and the fortnites and whatever else kids are worrying about these days. Not whether he, or people around him, will get shocked to death from the inside.]

[So Peter goes for the laughs and forays into dad joke territory.]

Okay, next question. "If you were a type of jeans what type would you be?"

[He tilts his head reflectively.]

I think I'd be jorts. Like not normal jean shorts, the kind of ill-thought-out jean shorts where someone cut normal jeans off at the knee. They just seem effortless; easy, breezy, fancy free. Like they know what they're about and don't care what anyone else thinks.

What about you?

[Your turn, Steven. Answer the ridiculous man's equally ridiculous question.]

[gempathizing]

[ Ridiculousness earns points. Steven can't fault the validity of it. He knows it too well.

He might be approaching it from the angle that Peter is trying to distract and cheer himself up with goofy questions, but he's got the spirit. And it's nice to hear someone say nice things about themselves through the metaphor of... jeans. ]

I think jorts don't sound ill-thought-out when you put it like that. They sound like a nice way to hang onto something you like when the weather changes. [ So take that. Zing. Steven continues to poke at his frosting. It's a little bit politely checking for mold. ] I guess I'd be hand-me-downs? Not bad ones. Practically new. You just have to grow into them before they're comfortable.

[ And maybe someone's stolen wallet is in the back pocket and you get arrested for it. But is that him as jeans, or the jeans he was given? ]