Piper 90: Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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goneawayworld2020-04-17 08:20 pm
goneawaymod) wrote in goneawayworld2020-04-17 08:20 pm
Entry tags:
- #rig logs,
- +intro log,
- +sheetcake party,
- adora,
- alloran semitur-corass,
- brainiac 5,
- bunnymund,
- catra,
- dave strider,
- gadget hackwrench,
- guts,
- jack spicer,
- nora valkyrie,
- robbie baldwin,
- ronald mcdonald,
- ronan lynch,
- sam winchester,
- saturday,
- setsuna higashi,
- stacia novik,
- ✘ cayde-6,
- ✘ ciaphas cain,
- ✘ doreen green,
- ✘ elsa,
- ✘ emily grey,
- ✘ kevin ingstrom,
- ✘ peter parker,
- ✘ phosphophyllite,
- ✘ remus lupin,
- ✘ ryotaro dojima,
- ✘ saint-14,
- ✘ sirius black,
- ✘ steven universe
SHEETCAKE PARTY #1
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’.
no subject
"Are you New?"
Why is it always the winter spirits who just don't seem to get it? Why does she think taking that tone with him is going to get her anywhere but in his worse graces? He's not asking why this exchange is getting his heart rate up higher than it should, but that's about the only question he's not asking.
"In case nobody explained it to you, I usher winter out." She's posturing, so he does the same, sauntering a few feet closer, but still not close enough for him to feel so much as a chill. "When it's time for the season to turn favorable again, I make that happen. There's a time for everything, and I wait for mine, but I've yet to meet a winter spirit that didn't have a problem letting go."
He can only remember one. He can only remember one spirit, but that fact feels so intensely true, so easy and powerful to say, that it must be. Feeling what he doesn't remember doesn't seem off to him, not about this.
"Now, are you gonna be the exception, or are we gonna have a problem?"
no subject
But it rankles Elsa to be judged by another world's standards without any questions asked of her -- to be judged because of her powers, and to have one more set of things no one's explained and expects her to already know. She doesn't particularly want to explain herself to him -- to open up about how she was born with power she had to hide, how she nearly killed her own sister, the danger she created without meaning to.
So, instead, she says, "I don't have to prove anything to you."
no subject
He snorts. "Oh yeah, we've only been forced onto a team by fascists who put bombs in our necks if we don't do their bidding in a world we're supposed to keep from dying, but you don't have anything to prove to me."
He's only an ancient, established hero, not that that's a big deal or anything.
"Glad you're confident."
no subject
"That isn't my fault," Elsa argues.
no subject
This little snit is just getting silly at this point - if he doesn't like another winter spirit, and another winter spirit doesn't respect him, well, feelings are feelings and they're less important than the bottom line.
"We're stuck on the same mission. We don't have to like each other to get it done, but it has to get done."
He wishes he had the freedom to talk about the details of that mission without getting his head shocked off. For all he knows, her version of the mission is "kill everyone on board and get myself free to go on freezing whatever I like." But if he brings up any details of his own, less deadly plans, which still absolutely involve mutiny, he's liable to get them both punished and he's not getting his own punishment cast onto even a new winter spirit he doesn't like.
"Are we in agreement on that?"
no subject
She folds her arms.
"No," she says. "No, we're not. I never agreed to any of this, and I don't know enough about the world outside to know if Jorgmund's even telling the truth." There could be people out there who really do need help, people who aren't to blame for what Jorgmund decided to do. That's the only reason she'd agree to Jorgmund's mission. "I don't know why you're trying to test me," she goes on, frustration bringing her brows up to the midle of her forehead. "I'm not here to hurt anyone."
no subject
But once she admits to not knowing much about the outside world, he gives a little. He DID ask if she was New, and she all but confirmed it. Even he can only get so mad at ignorance.
"Which truth? The best lies have more truth in 'em, not less. How good a lie are they tellin' us, have you wondered that?"
Meanwhile she still doesnt seem to have even grokked on to who he is. That's real new, not to know him.
"I told you why I'm testing you. I bring spring, because there's a time for everything, but you winter types never wanna let go without pitchin' a fit about it first, and when winter won't let go, people do more than get hurt."
Again, theres too much that he can't recall, but nothing about that thought feels uncertain. It is so deep in his understanding of the way he works, that he breaks up winter and it always needs breaking, that a mere black hole in his memories isnt nearly enough to convince him to question himself.
They're forever in opposition, him breaking up what otherwise wants, even without malice, to cling too long.
"It took Frost centuries to get around to proving himself. How long is it gonna take you? Do you even know what you were made to do yet?"
no subject
-- and then he says that last part, and it hits closer to home than anything that's been said so far. Her eyes go wide, and everything she'd been wondering for the last weeks before she came here comes back to her.
Do you even know what you were made to do yet?
A voice that's both familiar and not rings in her ears.
Elsa's arms wrap around herself protectively, her frozen paper cup in one hand. "No," she says. "I don't."
no subject
Maybe she looks vulnerable enough that he feels a little . . . overaggressive, or maybe he just still doesn't like her, but either way he rolls his eyes once more.
"All right, who made you? What did they tell you, when they did?"
Who made him, the sudden black hole in his memory asks, and what did they say when they did?
But this isn't about him. This is about the winter spirit, and the trouble she might yet cause.