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

[valkywhee]

"Ha, no. That's why I said 'sort of.'" Nora laughs. "I absorb lightning and channel it straight to my muscles." She flexes a bicep, which does not look particularly impressive, given her slight build. "Watch out, monsters."

Nora forks more cake into her mouth while what Elsa said finally percolates through to the parts of her brain that actually work. "Wait, you're from somewhere you're the only person who's discovered their Semblance? Wow, must be really safe where you live."

She's getting there. Slowly.

[ahtohollaback]

"Arendelle is peaceful," Elsa replies, a note of soft pride in her kingdom cutting through her tone. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. "We don't have any monsters to fight." Except her, comes the intrusive thought, but Elsa pushes it away -- no, she's not, and the only people to call her one were ignorant and trying to grab power for themselves. She is unusual, and gifted with power she must be careful with, but not a monster.

"Do you have a lot of monsters?" she asks.

[valkywhee]

"Pfft, yeah." Nora can't believe what she's hearing. "Where's Arendelle that you don't have a problem with the Creatures of Grimm? Not saying I'd want to move there, obviously, I'm a Huntress, I'd be about as useful as Ice Dust in a blizzard without Grimm to fight, but you must be doing something right if you don't have any sniffing around."

Before you ask: yes. Yes, she is always like this. A subdued Nora is a bad sign.

[ahtohollaback]

"I hope we are," Elsa says, bringing her shoulders up in a light shrug. She cares deeply for Arendelle, and its people are happy and prosperous, and no monsters must be a good sign, right?

She misses it already.

"You mentioned Dust before. Is that something people without magic use to protect themselves? Where you come from."

[valkywhee]

"Dust is...Dust." Very helpful, Nora, thanks. The expression on her face suggests Elsa might as well have asked her to explain roads or the concept of farming. How can anyone not know about something so ubiquitous? "Comes in little colored crystals? The stuff that powers everything? You mine it, it's explosive, factories do something to make it not explosive, then it makes civilization possible?"

[ahtohollaback]

Elsa tries to picture that. Colored crystals that explode, that can be made to not explode, which can be used to build and farm?

"We don't have that in Arendelle," Elsa replies, once she's processed the explanation. "We had to build our civilization without it."

[valkywhee]

Nora is really not the person you want explaining her world to you, but she's the person you've got.

"How do you...you know...do anything?" She realizes that's uselessly vague and tries to clarify. "Without Dust to power machines, I mean."

[ahtohollaback]

Elsa's smile turns wry.

"Our craftsmen don't seem to mind," she says. "We have carpenters, farmers, stonemasons -- even ice deliverers," she adds with a touch of humor. Oh, Anna's boyfriend, what a character. "We heat our homes with fire, and power our ships with wind."