Piper 90: Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
goneawaymod) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
goneawayworld2020-04-17 08:20 pm
goneawaymod) wrote in goneawayworld2020-04-17 08:20 pm
Entry tags:
- #rig logs,
- +intro log,
- +sheetcake party,
- adora,
- alloran semitur-corass,
- brainiac 5,
- bunnymund,
- catra,
- dave strider,
- gadget hackwrench,
- guts,
- jack spicer,
- nora valkyrie,
- robbie baldwin,
- ronald mcdonald,
- ronan lynch,
- sam winchester,
- saturday,
- setsuna higashi,
- stacia novik,
- ✘ cayde-6,
- ✘ ciaphas cain,
- ✘ doreen green,
- ✘ elsa,
- ✘ emily grey,
- ✘ kevin ingstrom,
- ✘ peter parker,
- ✘ phosphophyllite,
- ✘ remus lupin,
- ✘ ryotaro dojima,
- ✘ saint-14,
- ✘ sirius black,
- ✘ steven universe
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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Well, not weird if she realizes that it's not the eye contact that's made him freeze absolutely momentarily still, pupils shrunk to pinpoints, thousand-yard staring right through her. Its that he caught a whiff of her scent.
Her absolutely not just a human child scent. Her grabs-his-survival-instinct-by-the-neck-and-squeezes scent.
The freeze lasts less than a second. He masters the fear and breathes through it, gathering more information, eyes narrowing as he watches her approach and her body language closely.
"Suppose y'could color your nails with hair dye," he says, tone casual, but body language telegraphing I'm watching you. I'm ready. I'm not backing down. "Wonder if it'd do the same for claws."
He flexes his own stubby black claws in demonstration, with a disarming half smile, not in threat, just to emphasize - this is a normal thought for him to pose. This is a normal conversation they're having, which is why they're having it so quietly.
Quietly because hey, she is absolutely something more predatory than what she seems, but she's in the same captive boat he is. He's not interested in giving Jorgmund any information they don't already have, and a wolf may wear a girl's clothing without deserving to be sold out.
"You would know, wouldn't you?"
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"I would," she answers in the same quiet tone. "I appreciate you being circumspect but unfortunately..." She raises a hand and twirls her finger in an upward-pointing circle. "They already know, so it's not something I'm trying to hide from everyone else stuck here with me." She gives him a wry half-smile, careful to keep her lips closed to hide her teeth and gestures down at herself. "This is the shape I was born in. The rest of it came later."
She's still exposing her throat to him. Hopefully it will help.
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And they are in this same boat after all. The girl's politeness takes the edge off his natural anxiety, and his body language relaxes.
So he tilts his head back too. Only briefly - he's not that relaxed. It looks from the outside like hes just nodding in acknowledgement, but she'll probably be able to figure it out.
"Faoladh?" He guesses.
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His question gets him a look of confusion, though the word rings a distant bell. She's heard it before, where -- oh!
"Sort of?" She says. "In the warrior/protector sense, yes; but my family is Russian, not Irish."
She'd looked into werewolf mythology back when she'd first shifted, even though everyone had told her that humans never got it entirely right. It had at least given her a place to start from asking questions.
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"Are your parents here? You're - what, 16-ish?"
The teenage years are not his specialty. But did Jorgmund seriously fit a child, even a werewolf child, with a shock collar, knowing he'd inevitably find her?
Did they do any research before they scooped up this pack of strangers?
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"I'm seventeen," she says, lowering her hand. Her smile falls too. "And no, my parents aren't here."
She's been trying not to think about how badly they're going to flip. It's been less than two months since the home-invasion, and Stacia's been too busy unleashing hell on those responsible to hang around at home let her dad fuss over his little princess. And her mom, well, her mom can talk to Ace, but it's not like Ace will have any answers for her...
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He keeps his voice soft when speaking to Stacia, confidential-like. "I'm guessing you can take care of yourself, but all the same, if any of these -" he gestures vaguely toward the suits guarding the door "try putting you in danger or make you more uncomfortable than we already all are, I'll back you up. My mates are bound to be tracking us down now. We'll get you out of this as soon as we can."
What did she walk over here with, again? Two truths and a lie? At his normal volume he says, "I'm the Easter Bunny, I'm a Guardian of Childhood, and I'm flat-out thrilled to be here."
He feels like he should know the answer to this, but somehow, he doesn't, coming up against a dead end in his memories where werewolves are concerned. "By the way, is chocolate safe for you or not?"
no subject
What.
What.
This is no where near the weirdest thing that has happened to her, but it still floors her. Especially when he turns her little get-to-know-you game into a Badass Boast.
"Yes," she squeaks. Oh god, she's seventeen years old and an Athro Shadow Lord of the Garou Nation and she's squeaking because the Easter Bunny is offering her support. "I'm not allergic to chocolate."
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They took his stash. Some pencilneck adult somewhere is eating the best chocolate of their life and not deserving it. He's mad about a lot, and that is one of the things.
In glancing over at the suits guarding the door, though, he notices both guards are distracted and might not turn back in time to see him escape. "'Scuse me," he pardons himself to attempt an Irish Goodbye.
He's not successful, though, and by the time he's done arguing with the guards he turns around in time to see an upright wolf clutching a blond boy and a girl with cat features, and puts two and four together.
The teens seem to be working things out, however bloodily, and once they've sorted themselves out to separate corners he bounds back over to find out-
"Who started that? Let me see it."
He holds out his paw to check Stacia's wound.
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"I'll be fine," she reassures him. "I heal fast when I'm not human-shaped, comes with the 'warrior' territory. And I'm not sure who started it, it was already pretty tense when I got over there. The guy said something really rude and the girl tried to take his face off, but I can't speak English with that mouth so I couldn't ask for clarifying details."
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Save from fire, silver, radiation, and Wyrm-taint. But she's not going to provide a list of weaknesses right here in the middle of a 'staff party' when she doesn't know who she can trust yet.
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"What did the one kid say?"
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