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

[princesspower]

"You shift?" Adora sounds very curious about that, "What do you shift... into? If you don't mind me asking."

[credit_not_blame]

"I turn into a giant bipedal wolf-person," Stacia says as casually as possible, like it's a normal thing to do. Hey, Adora turned a horse into a pegasus, what does she know of weird?

[princesspower]

"Whoa, really? That sounds cool," Adora's eyes get kind of big and shiny and full of admiration, "Like - eight feet? Nine feet? Do you get claws?"

[credit_not_blame]

Yep, Adora's definitely got a different definition of 'weird'. Doesn't make her enthusiasm not-flattering, though

"Closer to eight feet, but I've never bothered to get really exact on how many inches," Stacia says. "And yeah, claws and teeth, fur, the whole thing. I can't talk when I do that though, my mouth just can't make the right shapes for it."

[princesspower]

"That's so cool! I mean, less cool that you can't talk, but getting bigger? And the claws? And the fur? That sounds awesome. I used to do osmething similar - I turned into an eight-foot warrior woman and that was a rush..."

Adora is babbling a bit.

[credit_not_blame]

"Turning into an eight-foot warrior woman is nothing to sneeze at," Stacia says. "Was that related to the sword too? The one that made Swiftwind grow wings and talk?"

[princesspower]

"Yeah... actually..." Adora winces slightly, "It gave me that power. It was... my destiny? I think? But - well, that's gone now. So why worry about it?"

Haha. Ha.

[credit_not_blame]

Stacia gives Adora a quizzical look.

"Are you saying that because the sword is gone, or because you are gone?" she asks. "Because I'm not exactly an expert on destinies, but I don't think they're easy to shake."

A little wince isn't enough to shake Stacia's tendency to ask questions. Adora's going to have to do better than that.

[princesspower]

"Mostly... the sword," Adora frowns. She's been deeply unsure about her role without the sword and without She-Ra, but she's been trying to repress that ever since she arrived here. She can't worry about that now, not when there's a million other things to worry about.

[credit_not_blame]

If only being nosy about people's weird backstories was easy!

Stacia smiles and pats Adora on the elbow. "Well, if you ever want to try talking it through, I'm a good listener. And I might be able to ask some questions that you haven't thought of."

[princesspower]

"I... thanks," Adora smiles. Tries to, anyway. It's a bit shaky.

"I might take you up on that later. When we're... not at an awkward party."

[credit_not_blame]

"This party is so awkward," Stacia agrees. She lowers her voice. "Plus, possibly being recorded."

If Jorgmund was smart, or at least sufficiently wary.

[princesspower]

"They probably are recording us," Adora mutters, shoulders tensing up, "Seems like the kind of thing they'd do..."

She sighs softly, "...how much longer until we can get out of here, anyway?"

[credit_not_blame]

Stacia shrugs.

"No idea," she says. "I'm not sure if they're waiting for a certain amount of time to have passed or for a certain amount of mingling to be done, or some other criteria. Hopefully it's not a certain amount of the food eaten, because that cake looks disgusting."