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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Remus makes a sound of agreement. "Probably. Though I doubt the guards would really allow it." 'Corporate drone' won't mean a lot to him yet. It's only 1982 where he's from and it's not become quite the thing it will later.

He looks around again. "I don't suppose they've provided anything other than the terrible cake?" Since he's still back near the door and it's difficult to see through the press of people.

"It's petty of me, but the amount of joy I'd take in denying each and every one of them hugs for the rest of their lives is positively enormous," Stacia confesses. People who are in anyway involved in 'internal shock collars' do not get hugs.

She makes a face. "There's donuts, but I got the impression that they're left over from a baby shower for a baby who's now teething. I think the only thing that hasn't been inappropriately aged is the sparkling cider, but I honestly haven't wanted to risk the snack table."

"Well, if you can't be petty at people like that, who can you be petty at?" That's...a sentence that probably doesn't make a ton of sense, but he's running on very little sleep.

He looks past her and sighs, shaking his head. "Well, I suppose anything more will just have to wait. Food wise, at least. I'm hungry, but I'm not quite that desperate."

It's a little nonsensical, but it shows that Remus is willing to play along with her, so Stacia laughs anyway.

She wrinkles her nose again. "Yeah, I'm in the same boat. None of the food here is particularly good, but...really yuck."

"I don't mind the cafeteria, but that's at least partly because I'm not good at cooking, myself. That was always..." He trailed off, unconsciously seeking out Sirius's head before looking away again. "Anyway. I was never much of a cook. And given the way that werewolves are treated in my world? Keeping a job can be a bit difficult."

"Of course people are jerks about something you can't even control," Stacia says, half-sympathetic to Remus' plight and half-disgusted that his werewolf problems aren't just limited to shifting.

She'd ask more about that, but the way he glanced around the room offers an opportunity for a different line of questioning.

"You looking for someone?"

"Mmm. Well. People are sometimes right to be worried. After all, if we're not contained during our shifting, the body count can be very high." He sighed, looking back to her. "And there are always those of us who are fine with that." He reached up, a quick touch to the scars on his face before shaking his head.

The question, though, makes him tense up, teeth grinding a bit before he gets the reaction under control. "There's...someone else here from my world. A man who is meant to be in prison for betraying our friends to...basically, wizard Hitler." That would probably take more explanation. "Anyway, his actions have meant that a toddler has been left an orphan, another friend of ours sacrificed his life to try to stop him and a fair number of Muggles died as well." His jaw tightened enough that a muscle jumped. "I am...very, very surprised to see him here. And concerned."

He'd said werewolves weren't usually born, and the way he'd touched the scars on his face...yikes. That had to have been traumatic.

But Stacia's arguments for how jobs should make accommodations for what's effectively a disability are pushed to the wayside by the introduction of new information about one Sirius Orion Black. All things considered 'wizard Hitler' requires less elaboration than 'Muggle', but neither need much explanation for Stacia to get the gist.

And, sadly, the fact that he'd been perfectly nice to Stacia doesn't necessarily mean that Remus is wrong.

"Holy shit," Stacia says. "Yeah, that does sound worrying."

The thing is, Sirius would even agree with Remus. To a point, at least. Just because he didn't do it directly doesn't mean Sirius doesn't blame himself somewhat for what happened.

He nods, looking to her. "If you meet a man named Sirius Black...be careful. His magic has probably been restricted, just as mine has. But I don't know what he's been left with and...magic can do a lot. If you have the right belief and desires behind it, at least."

She already has met a man named Sirius Black, who was deeply concerned about his werewolf friend-who-wasn't-speaking-to-him. But Stacia's not exactly going to tell Remus that.

"Could you give me a physical description so I can keep an eye out for him?" she asks instead, as if they haven't already had a perfectly pleasant chat. "I'd like to get an idea of who I can kick in the shins without feeling bad."

"I can do better than that." Remus's lips thin as he looks directly at Sirius, pointing him out. Because he's always aware of where the other wizard is. "Right there. Tall. Black hair. Grey eyes." He pauses a moment because...it's been a secret for so long. But it's only fair to keep this new-to-him girl safe. "Also, if you see a rather large black dog, one that looks to possibly be a Newfoundland? That would also be him."

It feels like breaking a confidence, honestly. But it's not like he could get in trouble for being an animagus here, right?

Yep, same guy. Though she hadn't exactly expected there to be two wizards here named 'Sirius Black'. But the dog thing explains a lot about Sirius' earlier comment about friends who aren't human.

"He turns into a dog?" she repeats, wrinkling her nose. "Wow, that's pretty rude."

Like, hello friend, I know you turn into a violent canid you can't control, I'm gonna turn into a dog at you. Neener.

Surprisingly, that gets a laugh out of Remus. The expression that comes with it is nearly brilliant as he turns a smile on Stacia. His eyes are still weary -- there's no way to get rid of his exhaustion that easily -- but it does transform his face, making him look his age for the first time since he's walked in.

"An animagus doesn't get a choice as to what they change into, it's simply the form that fits them best." Which should have made things with Sirius easier, but that loyalty was obviously not to his friends. "It's not something that happens very often in our world. The process to become an animagus is very involved and complicated. It requires a lot of dedication, usually. Or stubbornness."

Stacia revises her estimation of Remus and Sirius' ages. Younger than she'd thought, age falsified by pain and grief. They're maybe only a little older than Ace. She meets Remus' smile with one of her own, a little abashed.

"That'll teach me to make assumptions, I guess," she says. Though in her defense, dogs aren't known for their tendency toward trickery and betrayal. What could have possibly happened to turn a guy identified as a dog by magic against his friends? Rude to pry though, they've only just met.

"I'm going to make a very broad statement, based on my own personal experience and what I've heard talking to other people here," she announces. "Magic is weird."

He's only 22. But he'd already been through a war and the loss of pretty much every friend he'd really had. It made things rough.

That got another laugh, though softer. "You're not wrong," he says after a moment. "And I grew up with it, really. Mum was a Muggle. She met my dad when he'd saved her from a boggart. Which wasn't actually dangerous, but she didn't know that at the time." The smile on his face is fond. "He didn't tell her that for about a year, though."

"I think I can grasp what 'Muggle' means in context, but can I get a definition before we go too much further?" Stacia asks, mostly because she doesn't want to get too far into 'stories about our parents'. Remus' are fine, but it's not something she wants to reciprocate right now, since she and her mother are still at odds.

"A person without magic," Remus supplies easily enough. "We've lost the etymology for how it came about. Likely some old English term. Or perhaps something that came over from the Scandinavian countries when the Danelaw was in force up north."

"Yeah, etymology is a bit beyond me in general," Stacia says. "It's a pretty goofy, harmless-sounding word though. I guess humans who can't use magic aren't much of a threat to those who can."

"Really depends. I mean, if you're good at shielding spells, guns aren't really much of a bother. If you aren't..." Remus had to shrug. "Of course, then you run into issues of how to explain it when the bullets ricochet away from you. And that gets into memory modification, which is a tricky thing to manage."

"I imagine that would depend on the gun," Stacia says thoughtfully. "I don't generally have to worry about memory modification back home, most people are more than happy to convince themselves that they didn't really see an eight-foot slavering wolf monster doing...well, anything at all." Not entirely true, but she doesn't want to get into the history behind why the vast majority of humans suffer traumatic amnesia as a result of spotting a Garou in Crinos.

"Well. To be fair, guns aren't quite as common in the UK as they are in the US." Even if he was from before most guns being outlawed. "And most Muggles are perfectly able to convince themselves other things have happened than what they've actually seen. Which is partly how we are able to keep ourselves hidden."

"Thank goodness for the "that doesn't make sense so I couldn't have possibly seen it" survival instinct of humanity," Stacia says sagely. "Makes it so much easier to be part of a vast and secret conspiracy."

"It's definitely been useful from time to time. Especially when you're the weird kid at school who seems to get sick once a month." Far more worrying in wizarding areas, but most Muggles just wrote it off as...bad luck, he thought.

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SHEETCAKE PARTY #1

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