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

Re: ~worldbuilding~

[heterochrocatic]

"Job is a word for it." Catra shrugs. "It was my whole life, basically. Getting ready to conquer the world for Hordak and all that crap."

[likeits1999]

Kevin's eyebrows rise.

"Conquering the world? Yo, that's pretty crazy," he says. "Or at least, that's how it comes off."

[heterochrocatic]

"It probably is, honestly. Was. I dunno." She shrugs, seeming not unconcerned, but perhaps unruffled by the idea.

"It was just what we were supposed to do. It wasn't like I wanted to," Catra says. At least not until Adora was on the other side. "The Horde sucked. I just didn't really know what else to do."

[likeits1999]

Kevin nods, starting to get a sense of the shape of the situation Catra was in. Maybe just a little. "Feeling like you don't got options, so you keep doing the same thing cause at least if it's not new it can't be worse?" he offers, clearly finding something to relate to in that even if the world conquest thing is totally alien for him.

[heterochrocatic]

"I guess." Catra hadn't necessarily bought into all the 'princesses are evil, cruel people' thing but it had... not helped her view of Adora and her new friends, if she was honest.

"I just... Yeah. That's it."

[likeits1999]

"I feel that," says Kevin. "I mean. Not the whole having a shitty job thing, unless you wanna count that I had a shitty job for a summer one time, but like."

He gazes upward at the ceiling, hands in pockets.

"I kinda felt pretty stuck for a while, and now I guess I'm stuck again? Or like. All of us are stuck."

[heterochrocatic]

"Stuck is a good word for it," Catra gripes. She shifts her weight a little, eyes narrowing as she looks away from Kevin to examine the rest of the crowded room again.

"There's a lot of New Hires," she says the word with all the disdain of an entry level emplyee repeating a hated bit of corporate jargon.

"They really think they can just keep us all here?"

[likeits1999]

"I mean, they managed to keep me here so far when they made me freak out," Kevin muses. "In my experience I am kind of hard to keep places when that happens, as far as people go. So that's... something."

He shrugs, lowering his voice a little.

"Like, we don't know what all is out there yet or if there even is anyplace to go if it's all... gone?"

He says 'gone' like he's not sure of it, the meaning of stuff being gone is still pretty alien.

[heterochrocatic]

"Etheria can't be gone," Catra says defensively. "I was just there. This is probably just another dimension or alternate reality or something." Sadly, she has some experience with those.

"...Right?"

[likeits1999]

"Oh dude I meant like, this world," Kevin clarifies quickly. "I wanna go home obviously, I think everybody probably does cause home probably isn't full of shock collars for most people?"

Not that he can confirm that. Shit, home might be full of shock collars for some people. That's a depressing thought.

"Mine is kind of ending and this one is super busted, but like. If yours was fine I don't think anybody's said anything about worlds getting busted up?"

He doesn't sound super confident about that, though. It could totally have been something he zoned out on.

[heterochrocatic]

"I don't know how fine it's going to be since Horde Prime just showed up to take over Etheria, so. Who knows?" Catra replies, shrugs.

"Maybe there aren't good options?"

[likeits1999]

"Is reality breaking though?" Kevin asks, getting curious. "Or is it just bad guys doing bad things? I think these are different levels."

[heterochrocatic]

"I guess technically reality isn't breaking, so. We should be okay. Maybe." Catra looks doubtful. "There's a ton of ships and stuff. Horde Prime is serious. I don't really know how things are going to go down, honestly."

[likeits1999]

"Okay so this is gonna be a way stupid question," Kevin says, holding up a hand, prefacing as if that will make it potentially less embarrassing.

"But uh. Do you mean like... space ships?"

There are so many people from weird and crazy places here he's gotta ask.

[heterochrocatic]

"Oh. Yeah, I mean. No, it's a good question. But yeah, space ships," Catra responds. Her life has just gotten weirder and weirder lately, so really the whole space ship thing had just kinda slipped her mind as something out of the ordinary.