goneawayworld | SHEETCAKE PARTY #1

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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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"Oh." Saturday processes this. "Yeah, I didn't get any of that."

She can still remember, with terrible clarity, the blood running down Maggie's front, and the horrified disbelief in her eyes. Because Saturday hadn't been able to stop it.

"And our kind don't need deals, but they sure prefer them. Hosts make everything easier, apparently."

"Yikes," Stacia says, as sympathetically as possible. Because well, what else do you say to that? "Do you want to talk about it, or do you want me to ramble on until something I say distracts you?"

"Not right now, nah - you can ramble if you like. I'm good. Just - fucking bug spirits, you know? Or don't know, dunno what yours are called." Saturday sighs, and runs a hand through her hair. "Didja see that guy calling himself the Easter Bunny?"

"They don't come through into our reality enough for us to have an official name for them," Stacia says. "Our nasties are already inside, they don't need to break in."

She jumps on the change of subject, brightening considerably. "The giant rabbit is the Easter Bunny? Oh man, I'll have to go talk to him. I've never met the Easter Bunny before."

Fae or nature spirit? It's probably rude to ask...

"Oh, we have those, too. And techically they're not really insect spirits, but everyone thought they were when they showed up, on account they usually take a shaman first and have antennae," Saturday comments distractedly. "And yeah, apparently. Like literally he makes eggs and distributes them, there's flowers involved? And a paint river? Big, weird metaverse out there."

"I'm going to stop yammering about eldritch horrors, because I said I would," Stacia announces, though she still wants to flush out additional information and compare it to what she already knows. Call it the curse of the Ragabash, letting go of a question is hard.

"I hope he doesn't lay them all himself," she says after a moment. It seems like a reasonably distracting topic. "That would be deeply unpleasant. I don't care how big or how magical he is, that is a lot of eggs to lay and paint and hide all at once."

Take the bait, Saturday. Stop thinking about incomprehensible horrors and join Stacia in contemplating the very comprehensible horror of the prospect of laying who-knows how many eggs over the course of days.

"He says the flowers make them, and they have legs when they first drop out," Saturday says, trying to remember. "And the early ones he paints himself, but the rest just get a dip in the paint river? Sounded like magic or spirit stuff to me."

The memories exert a certain gravitational pull; Saturday pushes against it, and focuses on Easter Bunnies.

"He doesn't act like a spirit, though. They're usually really cryptic and rude, Bunny's nice."

"I'm fairly certain no one has ever suggested that the Easter Bunny isn't magic," Stacia says.

She considers her words carefully at this point. She doesn't want to get too into the spiritual aspect of thing with Saturday, not yet.

"I'd imagine it would depend on the spirit, wouldn't it?" she says. "Rock spirits are going to be concerned about different things than speedy-fast meat-based creatures, right?"

Phrasing it as a philosophical question, probably a safe bet.

"Sure, according to my friends who deal with spirits, anyway." Saturday has no such compunctions, on account spirits are very normal and public anyhow. "But they had to like, learn how to see things from their perspective so I think my point still stands."

She gestures vaguely with the cup of flat sparkling fruit juice she's finally started remembering not to sip from.

"I mean, I guess some spirits are okay, but like - when you get punished for the spiritual equivalent of being thrown through a window by someone trying to kill you because your body made the mess so it's yours according to weird spirit law, it's hard to feel kindly towards them. I've met some that are all right, though. Dweller on the Threshold's still a fucking asshole, though."

"I don't know anything about them but their name, but Dweller on the Threshold sounds like an asshole," Stacia says. "Is it a cat? It sounds like a cat. Go outside or stay inside you furry little asshole, but don't just sit there in the doorway thinking about it."

Of course the only cat that would take a shine to Ace's Ahroun ass would be an annoying screamy jerk of a cat.

"Dweller's like astral border patrol," Saturday explains. "You're supposed to go into the astral a certain way, and - my crew and I, when were fighting those things I mentioned earlier, some stuff happened - " technically, they died, among other things, which Stacia doesn't need to know " - an' we were thrown physically into the astral by the enemy, which is breaking the rules, and we didn't have the paperwork done, which is also breaking the rules."

She makes a bright, grimacing expression.

"So, naturally, we got thrown into some kind of a hell punishment dimension for a subjective thirty years because breaking rules is breaking rules no matter the circumstances. I guess that makes sense when you're a spirit."

She sighs.

"Maggie says the Dweller didn't have a choice about it either, it's spiritual law, but they didn't have to be so rude and smug about it."

"Yeah, not having a choice is one thing, but being rude and smug is another thing entirely," Stacia agrees, Not Asking Questions about thirty subjective years of hellish punishment.

"Did they boot you back to your own reality after you got out of lock-up, or did they make you walk home?"

"They booted us into lockup to die" Saturday clarifies, with the rancor of someone who's mostly gotten over it. "Someone who owed my pops a favor busted us out. Got us to a realm close enough that we could skip home once we finished up some business with the buggy fucks who yeeted us in to begin with. That's where I was, with my crew, when all this," she gestures to the the rig. "happened."

"Gotta admit I am a little tired of bouncing around realities."

Stacia gapes at Saturday with the appalled and baffled expression of someone who would never stop complaining about it.

"Well," she says, "good thing that person owed your dad a favor. But I can definitely see how you'd be done bouncing around outside of your home reality after that."

Saturday gives a broad, ironic shrug, looking very much like a human ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

"I mean, I would love to be done with the reality jandering, but, as you can see..."

Here She Is.

Stacia reaches out to place a hand on Saturday's forearm, staring deeply into her eyes.

"You have my sincerest sympathies. Empathies? Whatever, you have them."

Saturday raises her eye brows back at Stacia.

"Thanks. I should keep circulating the room, though. You, too. What happens next is gonna - it's gonna be a lot about who knows whom and where the trust is, follow?"

Stacia grins in response. Social networking, important? She's known that for ages. She pats Saturday's arm again, and bats her eyelashes like she's never had a sneaky or manipulative thought in her life.

"I do like making friends," she says. "We'll chat again later."

Saturday grins a little, slightly warmer than she feels. It is nice to talk to another professional.

"See you at the first resistance meeting. Later."

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SHEETCAKE PARTY #1

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