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

[takenalive]

<Sensory input as a general category is stronger now that I'm free, but not by very much. You can try speaking sternly first if you wish. But the reflex is to perform an eshormat.>

Alloran curves his tail, with perfect fluidity, to press the curved blade against his own throat.

<The instinct is to swing blindly when startled, and that's what civilians do. Military training's good for something, eh?>

[credit_not_blame]

Stacia gapes at him.

"Your training is to take off your own head?" she asks, both horrified and baffled. "I mean, I guess it makes sense if you're fighting things that can do that to you, but. Wow."

She shakes her own head, mostly to loosen the thought. "I'll start with yelling. I'm pretty good at yelling."

[takenalive]

He laughs bitterly. It's a series of sort of pops like sparks that probably take a second or two to interpret correctly.

<It's to press my tail to the throat of whoever's managed to sneak up on me and assess if they're a real threat before twitching. I just thought you wouldn't appreciate that demonstration. But, yes, we are supposed to kill ourselves if we think there's a good chance of being captured.> Which he hadn't been able to do, quite obviously.

<Yes, you do that.>

[credit_not_blame]

At the explanation, Stacia breathes a sigh of relief. Then she laughs.

"Oh yeah, I definitely wouldn't have reacted well to you bringing your blade to my throat," she agrees. "And I'm not military, so I've got nowhere near the training you do. There'd have been some flailing."

She should probably offer a change of subject from the death-before-enslavement topic, since she'd brought it around again.

"I'd imagine it's pretty hard to sneak up on you when you're not zoned out though, what with the eyes. They seem pretty useful."