goneawayworld | 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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"It's good to love your work." It's a platitude, but Saturday means it. "Hell of a logistics job, I'd imagine."

They had celebrated Easter at the Center, or at any rate hunted for eggs; Red Town was a mishmash of cultures, and everyone likes a spring festival. But she knew where all those eggs came from. They'd dye them every year, her and Pops and Maggie and Mama Sofia. Solomon, too; she could remember him now, and not just around him. Skewers of dango and sweet dumplings and the smell of vinegar dye.

God, she wants to go home.

" - Oh, I do odd jobs," she says automatically, hearing his question. "Whatever happens to turn up. That sort of thing."

"I'm lucky. Not everyone gets to do only what they love with their life."

Not everyone gets an eternity to do it in, either. All the roaming and the art, always running at the head of spring and nourishing who needs to be nourished, with fun and hope or the concrete goodness of actual calories - he catches the hint of Saturday's nostalgia, and it's familiar. He wants to go home too.

But the other side of that job he loves, the one that lets him use every tool he's got to protect kids, is here too. By how these people treat their interdimensional slaves they've got to have children he's yet to meet that are being done wrong by. He can't go home before that's remedied.

His ears perk up as Saturday describes her work. It sounds like thieves work, to hear her speak so delicately of it.

"Oh good," he says, lightly. "This job we've got now is as odd a one as I've ever seen one."

He's got to find out her full skillset. Hopefully it involves breaking and entering.

That startles an honest laugh from her. "Jesus - yeah. At least I've got experience in bouncing across realities." That's not funny, but she's gonna pretend it is.

"So - how does being the Easter Bunny actually work? Like, do you hand paint the eggs or is there an assembly line? And what about distribution?"

She's honestly curious now. Clearly, the Easter Bunny isn't a real person in her reality; therefore his metaplane must have some kind of set up that makes global distribution of cleverly hidden eggs possible. Or possibly it's a very small metaplane. Or maybe he doesn't literally distribute eggs? The possibilities are endless.

"Does everyone in your metaplane know you're real, or is it kind of a secret thing?"

"What's a metaplane?"

He has a chuckle over her questions, but he's also frantically trying to judge her age as he answers. "They've got little legs, the first handful of hours after they come out of the flowers."

He could go on and on and on about the botanical engineering behind the egg-producing flowers, but she asked about the DAY, not the science behind it.

"I paint the early ones myself, but most of 'em produce around the day of. They get a dunk in the dye river and a roll through the ferns. The ones I paint, I hide myself, but the quick jobs I herd across the world, and they hide themselves." He chuckles, fondly. "You can imagine they don't hide themselves as well as I hide the early bloomers. Hard for something without a central nervous system to do anything but sit down where it is and call it a day."

This is nice. He doesn't usually get to go on about his big day to a mortal who's debatably an adult. He's still trying to gauge Saturday's age, but she's almost definitely younger than 25.

"I wouldn't call it a secret, but you all stop believing in us once you don't need us anymore. Usually when you're ready to do for a younger kid what we do for you - protect you, keep your hopes alive, all that. I sometimes see adults already up hiding eggs for their kids in the morning -" hes almost misty-eyed with fondness. "They're never as good as mine, but no one holds that against em."

Saturday's age is hard to judge. She looks young, but doesn't feel it; there's a hardness to her eyes that doesn't fit someone barely out of teenhood, a readiness in her stance that isn't appropriate if you expect the young to look and act that way. She's done violence before, and had it done to her, and expects both these things to happen again.

Saturday listens to this explanation with a confounded expression, trying to imagine the mechanisms he's describing. It sounds - honestly it sounds like that weird old flatvid Pops had shown her once, with the dude and the chocolate and the jerk kids.

"Huh. Yeah, we ain't got anything like that at home. Are the egg flowers, like, a certain kind or do they grow wild?" She's kinda fascinated. "And you get them all over the world, how - ?" and she cuts herself off.

"Sorry if those are trade secrets. Uh, where I'm from, we all painted our own eggs and then the grown ups would hide them - except I liked the hiding better than the finding so I wheedled into helping with that pretty quick." She shrugs, a little uncomfortable, not wanting to remember things that will make her uselessly sad. "Anyway, a metaplane is like - so you have all these different realities, and the astral, the spirit world, between them, binding them together. That's the metaplanes. The cosmic structure, sort of thing."

"I'm fast." He chuckles at the understatement. But the chuckle is short lived, because - "faster than I am here." And now hes rolling his eyes again, having to admit how severely he's been brought down by whatever process took him from his natural world to here.

"The egg flowers only grow in my Warren. It's a sacred place. The light there's better than anywhere else. I'd have let 'em get discovered for cultivation if I could, but they don't make anything but flowers up on the surface. More's the pity."

He smiles at her apology. "Its not a secret. It's just not something I get to talk about with mortals much. If we were on my Earth, you wouldn't be able to see me."

He doesn't say it sadly. Just matter-of-factly. Saturday's outgrown him. Shes supposed to. A time for everything, and everything in its time. Including children growing up. "I bet you did a great job. And the kids loved it, right?"

Hes excited to ask. They grow up, and rather than forgetting his gifts, they give their own kids the same joy he gave them. That's the longest term gift he leaves them with - taking up the same joy that has given his immortality meaning.

"I might getcha. But the spirit world I'm used tonight as separate from mortals as you might think. Theres not a lot that keeps you from us - just believing is enough."

He'd have to think longer about an "astral" plane. Astral, where the stars are - does that mean space?

"Oh, for sure. Center's spring festival was the junior social event of the season. And summer, and fall, and winter." She laughs a little. "We did all four. Easier to just do one big party then a bunch of little ones, you know? Roll up Easter and the cherry blossoms and the equinox all in one, more or less."

Food and games, and everyone got some sort of prize. Presiding over the fair distribution of loot had been one of her first responsibilities; remembering hurts, but warmly.

"I don't think I ever actually believed in you, though, no offense or anything. Or Santa Claus or anything like that. Don't really know anyone who did." She doesn't mean it to challenge or offend, its more a sort of curious probing. "Kind of odd, now that I think about it. We got magic and spirits and all out the ass but no Easter Bunny."

SHEETCAKE PARTY #1

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