goneawayworld | 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’.

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Dave wasn't the cake connoisseur of his friend group back home, but it didn't take an expert to declare this cake unbelievably shitty. So seeing a guy shoveling it into his face with the enthusiasm of a starving man was kind of horrifying. Lingering by the cake table, Dave made a face, distaste and vague concern recognizable despite the aviators.

"Pretty sure we can count downing this shit as a form of masochism," he said, a hint of Texan drawl in that deadpan. "Or maybe self-harm in the form of shitty baked goods. Is this depression or a kink? You gotta let us know whether or not we should be calling a therapist. Suicide by cake isn't the answer, you've got so much to live for."

"Those are a lot of personal questions," Sirius said dryly. Having someone criticize him trying to sate the pangs in his stomach didn't make him inclined to laugh. "I'm hungry." Something of an understatement, given his wasted appearance. "I didn't see anything else to eat except the donuts."

He picked up another piece of the cake. "And I've had worse." He lifted the cake as if to toast Dave before popping it in his mouth.

Most people don't actually find him funny. It's never stopped him before. Dave gave the man's gaunt look a brief glance over, hidden by the shades, and then carried right on ignoring that part of the conversation. See? He can be tactful.

"If you hadn't noticed," he said, "Personal questions are kind of the theme of the day." He assumed everyone else got the same interrogation treatment, anyway. But as a more directly relevant example, he reaches for the jar of paper slips on the table and snags one at random, unfolding it to read it.

"Do you prefer cats or dogs?" He rolled his eyes at the paper, biting back a scoff. "What's your favorite season? Under what circumstances would you put your life before the good of your employer? Jesus, this shit escalates quick."

"That is an interesting question."

Done with his cake, Sirius licked the frosting from his fingers before wiping his hands and mouth with a napkin. He wasn't completely without manners, even if it was mostly so he'd stop feeling sticky.

"I'm sure they'd love to hear our answers." Curious, Sirius picked up a slip. "'What is your favorite color?' Of course I'd get that one. 'What's the farthest away from home you've been?' Bad question, that's obvious for everyone here. And... 'Would you ever leave your employer for another and if so why?' They would be the only ones to care about that." One thing Sirius took away from that: be even more careful what he said here.

Dave snorted at the casual dismissal. "Not the worst question. I'd tell you to guess what the furthest I've been from home is but pretty sure that's a trick question when time-slash-space fuckery is involved. The answer who fuckin' knows and that distance is a pretty useless metric to judge worldliness by, all things considered."

God, he sure can talk. He carried right on like he wasn't just babbling about some weird shit, shaking his head. "Raises some bigger concerns, though. Like, hey, weird that these corporate assholes are posing these questions where they can't hear the answers, sure would be convenient for them if they had a way to listen in on what we're saying in here."

Eyes lifting from his scrap of paper, he gives the guy a pointed look, palpable even through the shades. It seems to say maybe watch what you say.

"Unless you've jumped through time and space before, the answer is clear to me." Sirius spoke the words time and space rather carefully. He knew that people could move through time, even if it was banned, but the whole other worlds and space matter was strange for him. Sometimes he still wondered if this was real or not.

He met Dave's gaze through the rest of the talk, at least, he met it as best as he could through those sunglasses. This would been a nice time for a muffliato spell, but Sirius had no time to test out if it would work. And anyway, he had no idea if this was a deliberate attempt to catch him talking against Jorgmund. Just because he was young didn't mean--

Sirius shook his head. Was that too paranoid? What was the worst they could do here, send him back to Azkaban? ...Yes, actually. He suspected they could.

He cleared his throat and gave Dave a meaningful look before glancing at the others around them. "I'd consider your entire audience before making a joke like that." From his experience, they didn't take kindly to being called assholes.

That casual dismissal had the ring of someone for whom time/space nonsense was a thing of science fiction, so Dave just let the subject drop. He could say some shit about the rationality of doubting anything while standing in a room with a giant anthropomorphic rabbit, but whatever. He just shrugged and snagged one of those tiny cups to pour himself some cider. At least this shit had to be good, right? It's like adult apple juice or something.

"This audience should consider themselves lucky they get to hear the dulcet tones of my voice in the first place." Said voice had a subtle twang indicative of somewhere in the American south, so that was a questionable description at best. "Better men than these fuckers would fall to their knees at my feet groveling for a good dressing down. It's hard work playing dom to all these pitiful chumps, but I am a benevolent god if nothing else."

He paused his rambling to sip at the drink and then made a face, nose scruching in a manner that wasn't particularly godlike.

"Fuck, I don't know how they managed to make an apple-based drink suck, but they managed it. These chumps are absolute champions of ruining good things just based soley on their refreshments."

Sirius respected Dave's spirit, even if this wasn't probably wasn't the place for it. But that had never stopped Sirius at that age (did it even stop him a year ago?). The words themselves though were... well Sirius thought he followed all the swearing and insults. That didn't mean he knew how to respond.

"I don't know how you can say that. They're clearly sparing no expense on us." The sarcasm positively oozed. Sirius might be devouring everything, but that didn't mean he was blind or without taste. He knew it was all terrible objectively. ~~Though it didn't stop him from wanting to get up and grab more cake.~~ "One bottle of cider doesn't come cheap."

It was very kind of Sirius to just humor him like this. Probably a mistake, though. Unstopped – encouraged, even – Dave just...keeps going. Jesus christ.

"Don't they know who I am?" He scoffed, the gesture just borderline theatrical enough that it might have been hard for some people to judge whether it was sincere or not. "They oughta be empting their pockets for this shit. Rework the budget to account for the big fucking deal they're playing host to now. If they're gonna kidnap a guy they could at least have the decency to go all out, just go absolutely ham on the accomodations." He lifted the bottle of cider as if in example of the absolutely disppointing conditions. "How am I supposed to develop Stockholm Syndrome in these conditions?"

Sirius was happy-- more or less-- to let Dave keep digging his own grave. He would even have been happy to give him a shovel in the form of more sarcastic comments. But Dave ended on a confusing question.

"Stockholm Syndrome?" He frowned in puzzlement. What did a city have to do with a syndrome? "What's that?"

Did you think wizards have mental health services? But that would require common sense!

SHEETCAKE PARTY #1

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