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

[becauseimacoward]

Dojima sighs wearily. What a joke of a party this is.

"What does a man have to do around here to get decent booze?"

If the rig people rewarded him with booze for any of the jobs they have to do in the future he'd be rather grateful about it, admittedly.

[garmr]

"Maybe you got to ask 'em real nicely."

He hopes this guy will do it, because Guts can never be nice to the Jorgbots that he makes eye contact with. There's just something about them. Every employee he's met so far has the most incredibly punchable face. He should be lauded more for not acting on his instincts.

[becauseimacoward]

"...if they expect me to get on my knees for a bottle of booze they're going to wait forever. I'm not that desperate."

Apparently he won't. For now. Later, when the party is over, he'll tentatively ask them and find out just requesting booze isn't going to work. But of course he won't grovel to their feet.

[garmr]

"You could always try to brew something out of this," he picks up an unopened bottle of effervescent juice, "Just get clever when you sneak it out."

What was this? The dry and extremely rare Guts joke? Yes, it is! Even while annoyed, he can apparently spare one. Though now that he thinks about it, maybe it's not such a bad idea.

[becauseimacoward]

"That wouldn't be too much of a bad idea. Didn't think I'd be dragged to another world and then be forced to be a bootlegger."

This day is turning more and more into a bad joke for him, hah! But yeah, he doesn't mean that. At least he can recognize a joke and keep it rolling.

[garmr]

"Don't think anyone's going to check too hard. It's the end of the world here, ain't it?"

The bottle goes down with a thunk on the table between them.

"It'd do more good than the food."

[becauseimacoward]

"Anything would."

Still, now that you bring that part up...

"I know they wouldn't have bothered to bring us here if there wasn't some truth in what they say, but it's hard to process we're meant to save a world in here"