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’.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Linda appears to be the previous beneficiary of the company's celebrations," he comments wryly, as he sweeps into the room as if he owns it. A little adjustment of his hat, and off they go. "Emperor's teeth, I've seen Hive Worlds that recycle waste less efficiently than this. This is the first time I've seen a cake that perspires."

A cursory glance at the food available to them is enough to prove that.

Saturday sniffs one of the open bottles. "Is this water? I think it's just water in a fancy bottle." She pours some out and sips it, then grimaces. "No, it's vaguely flavored with stale apple juice. Try some," she says, and holds it out, because misery loves company.

She's eyeing the doughnuts. They don't look that bad, maybe like something the Stuffer Shack might put on the half-off rack. Possible edible, if she's desperate. Which she's trying not to be, but it's hard when the mess serves such small portions. She's always just a little bit hungry, and the familiarity of the feeling is not comfortable.

"What's a Hive World?"

Edited 2020-04-21 01:21 (UTC)

He takes the cup with some hesitation, and tries a sip himself before he lowers it with a hidden grimace.

"It's an Imperial planet populated with higher-than-average numbers. You've got billions, bordering trillions of people piled vertically on top of each other in massive hive cities for hundreds of kloms up, with not much more space than a gretchin's arse between them."

Does he sound fond? His recollections might actually sound fond. He gesticulates carefully with the cup in his hand, without actually drinking from it.

"I'm from one myself."

"Shit, that sounds like home. We may have something else in common. I grew up in a place called Red Town," she says, nibbling a doughnut and then deciding there's no way she's that desperate. "Biggest slum in the western hemisphere. Even Knight Errant won't go there in groups of less than five."

She definitely sounds nostalgic. And maybe a little proud?

"Corps been moving in lately, now that the clans got something worth taking. Another thing to deal with when I get home."

When. It's always gonna be when. Because she is going home again.

"Problems with gangers and factions, I take it?" he asks, commiserating knowingly as he picks up a stale cookie. It doesn't look too bad compared to rations, but that doesn't make it pleasurable in any sense of the word either. Now that she's identified herself as a fellow hiver, this discussion is stirring up all manners of lingering nostalgia for his boyhood home.

"It's all very cut-throat isn't it?" Cain glances around, and admits somewhat conspiratorially as he leans in. "But from one hiver to another, I find that I do miss it sometimes. It's a sump pit, and it reeks, the local enforcement stomp through every so often, and the people can be just terrible, but it's your sump pit. Isn't that how the saying goes?"

"Oh, sure, but in my 'hood Pops and the clans keep the gangers in line. Corps means corporation, gigs like Jorg, here," she waves her hand around, "except with resources out the ass. Soon as you build something good, they want it, and they don't wanna pay for it. Fucking locusts."

She leans against the snack table, resigning herself to feeling peckish until they're freed and she can hit the mess again. When he leans in she raises an eyebrow, then smiles a little at what he says.

"Yeah. No place like home - and you know, we worked to make our patch livable. Blood and treasure and all that. Not giving it up to a pack of poncy suits who contract out their killing."

It may seems hypocritical, since Saturday is technically one of those contracters, but a) that's never stopped a single shadowrunner as long as the money was good and b) shadowrunning was, when you get down it, never really more to her than a means to an end.

Cain nods in understanding. The slang is a little difficult to keep up with - he's reminded of Zemelda in a way, and her odd local colloquialisms - but he manages with some mental displacement.

"Well, you can hardly blame them for subcontracting. Can you imagine some aspiring Administratum pencil pusher fully kitted out with a meltagun and a squad of his office storming an industrial manufactora?" He snorts at the mental image. "Perish the thought."

Saturday bursts out laughing, harder than the joke warrants, then recovers.

"Sorry - it's just, latest member of my crew is that. 8-bit. She's ex-corp - it's a long story an' she wouldn't want me to tell most of it. But it turns out, she's real good with that gun. Guns and tech, that's her thing."

Just like social skills were emphatically not. For a moment, Saturday gets that faraway look again. Missing home; missing even the eternal friction between her and their odd little decker. But it's nice to talk to someone whose ideas about the world fit into hers, who knows the second ugly truth under an already ugly reality.

"If she was here, she'd have cracked jorg's system in like, a day, an' gotten copies of all the keys. She's amazing."

The most Saturday can do is sneak around corridors, "listening" for pipes and wiring, trying to map physical systems she doesn't understand. Maybe it'll be useful to someone, some day.

Who knew. It’s an amusing thought to think that scenario at least a little true, in this large galaxy of theirs.

“Well, everyone has their talents. I have to admit that I know someone myself who would certainly be more suited than me to tackle this challenge, but it’s the nature of humanity to rise to the occasion. We’ll do just fine.”

He thinks however briefly of Amberley, and wonders what she would have done. Far better than him with all that Inquisitorial experience, no doubt.

"We've got the knack, yeah," Saturday says. She often drops the 'meta' from humanity herself, ever since she learned about genetics. People expect elves to define themselves as something apart; therefore on principle she does the opposite.

"Maggie said somethin' once about how metahumanity thrived 'cause of three factors: we use tools, we got abstract thought, and we're social." She scans the room idly, speaking in the absent way a person does when they're saying something because they need to hear it again as much as to communicate it to another person.

"But the most important is that we're social, cause it means our memories can be bigger than our lifespan. We don't lose data because someone died, as long as they taught another person. So you can build on stuff an' not reinvent the wheel. And if something happens to you, someone's got your back, so one streak of bad luck won't kill you before y'can add what you know to the pot."

She nods, satisfied with whatever conclusions her scan of the room reached.

"We got enough people here to be gettin' on with, I think. 'S just gonna be a matter of getting everyone yoked up and pulling in the same direction. An' like you said: we'll rise to it. It's our nature."

“Well said. Although...”

His own gaze sweeps the room, but they definitely linger on some of the less human looking characters in the room.

“One really does wonder. There’s certainly enough, but not quite enough people for my liking. Some of those types will certainly be an issue, mark my words.”

Of course, that was like saying an ork was going to charge. Or saying the weather outside on Valhalla was a bit chilly. An obvious given.

Edited 2020-04-23 20:00 (UTC)

"Oh? Who you got in mind?" Saturday is an old hand at party gossip: her voice is too low to catch, and her expression remains light and interested. "So far everyone's pretty on board with Operation: Fuck Jorgmundr. I know Catra - you met her yet? - has someone from her metaplane here that she's got friction with, but it sounds like something they can patch over til they're back home."

She notes who he's looking at, and notes their appearances as well. Then she frowns a little.

"You know something I don't yet?"

Right. Saturday’s planet is blissfully ignorant in respect to the dangers of xenos. For the level of industry that a hive planet suggests, vanishingly improbable. The Tau or some sort would have diplomatically snapped them up in a second. Although he would hesitate to call them lucky, if daemons were a problem there.

He doesn’t know the name Catra, but he inclines his head.

“In a sense. The xenos here with us are a concern. I was viciously assaulted by one in particular, but I managed to fight her off. Of course, you can’t expect anything bloody else from them, but it doesn’t bode well for cooperation.”

"The - xenos?" Saturday tilts her head, openly baffled. "Like xenophobia?" She knows that word, it means fear of the different and unknown. Not something she's ever had a problem with.

The turn the conversation's taking is making her uneasy. Now she remembers the Imperium of Man routine, the things he'd said before that she'd dismissed once they got to talking about the Enemy. No one who opposes the horrors can be really that bad, she'd figured.

Maybe she was wrong.

"What's a xeno?"

"An xeno is in other words, an... alien," he says, puzzling out the English word. "It would more accurately translate as 'other', but 'alien' seems to work."

Hmm. That seems to sound about right.

"But I've never met an alien that doesn't have its own interests in mind. The ones that don't just want to eat you, that is. Some co-operation can be temporarily excused if there's a greater enemy at hand, but you'd be mad to trust one further than you could throw it."

"How are you defining alien, exactly?" Saturday is frowning hard now, doing her best not to look too openly suspicious. "Like - on my earth, you got a lot of different subspecies 'cause of how magic effect gene expression, but we're all genus homo. We all originated and evolved on the same planet."

She casts her mind back a bit farther, to barely-remembered history she'd barely bothered to learn. "An' I think we used to think other humans could count as alien if they were like. From a different country. So what's an alien to you, exactly?"

"What's an alien?" Cain echoes thoughtfully. "They're the inhumanity amongst the stars. But in more practical and identifying terms, they're anything that isn't human. It's fairly obvious when something's a xeno, usually," he says with a laugh. "Far too many of them come with fangs and claws the size of your arm, if you ask me."

"But some don't look too different. Take the Eldar, as an example. If it wasn't for their ears, you could almost mistake them for human. It's more than unnerving, to be honest."

"The ears, huh?" Saturday has a sinking feeling that she knows where this is going. "Well, we've never met aliens where I'm from, like I said. But, you know, different subspecies, so a lot of real different looking people. Trolls, orks, sapiens, dwarves, elves, bunch of everything else. Pixies are also a thing."

Her voice is getting increasingly clipped as she tries to do a lot of calculations at once: how much of a threat this guy could be, how reasonable he seems vs the risk of him being not reasonable on this specific subject, and whether or not she can twist the concept of a metahumanity into a configuration that will fit into his existing worldview in a less cheerfully racist way.

And there's also the possibility that in his world, his views are valid; in a cosmic structure that contains a Easter Bunny and multiple unrelated iterations of rock people, there's probably a place where alien contact has only ever been hostile.

"Not sure what you'd call that."

Cain notices the increasingly clipped tone, but he can't quite put his finger on why that is. He pauses for a moment as he tries to puzzle it out without being obvious, but it's still rather unclear.

"Orks and anything else on the same planet? I'd call that a joke." He almost snorts into his lukewarm non-alchoholic cider. "Otherwise, I believe you mean abhumans. There are some in the Imperium, after all, who do perfectly respectable jobs."

Edited 2020-04-25 21:44 (UTC)

"Nothin' wrong with orks, least not our kind," Saturday says, visibly stung. "Good, smart people. I was raised by one. My best friend is one - they're not different from anyone else, 'cept they're a bit tougher, and even then they got nothin' on trolls."

She pushes her hair out of her eyes, uncomfortable with the turn this is taking, but on the other hand - better to have it out in public then someplace no one can see the outcome.

"I - look." Just come clean is what her gut is telling her, and sometimes her gut takes the scenic route but it's rarely absolutely and totally wrong. She lifts her hair up off her ears, showing the points. "I'm an elf, okay? Which is normal where I'm from. And if that's gonna be a problem, speak up now."

In an instant, Cain steps back on instinct like he's been punched in the chest by a Wych knife. He drops his drink by reaching for his chainsword that isn't there, non-alchoholic cider spilling all over their feet, and his eyes flicker through visible confusion, fear, alarm, hostility, revulsion, and then finally settles into cautious wariness with which he looks at her, as if the person he'd been talking with was suddenly entirely wiped away.

Two impressions of Saturday superimpose over the other - one a perfectly fine young woman, and the other an inscrutable alien. He opens his mouth, then closes it again.

"You're an Eldar?" he asks neutrally, looking a little sick. "Or - a mutant?"

The latter is much more likely than the former, being sensible and thinking about it. An Eldar, raised by an ork? They must be different names, or she's frakking with him. It could be some ploy, to feed him ridiculous lines and play nonsense until he lets down his guard and she guts him with a shrieking laugh.

He might have been able to approach it with more tact had he had more sleep, but his footing is entirely wrong. He's sailing in unknown territory alone for the first time in decades, and he'd been fooled by the first human friendly face and potential ally he'd thought he might be able to make. It's only natural that he can't dissemble his reaction in time.

Saturday jumps back when he reaches for his weapon, raising her metal arm to block on instinct. When all that happens is a better waste of the cider than it deserves, she lowers it. The moment of revulsion on his face sring, more than she wants to admit; enough that she clamps down her own expression, hardening around the lips and eyes.

"I'm a elf," she corrects. "Homo sapiens nobilis, an' I didn't pick the name. I'm an elf, my parents were elves, but my grandparents were ordinary homo sapiens. Like I said. Magic affects genetic expression. Whenever the magic cycles back into high, subspecies pop up."

The truth is, she's never really met anyone who hated elves. Anyone in the clans who had a problem with 'Jisan's little girl would have to answer to him, and she was best friends with Mama Sofia's daughter. By the time she was old enough to notice things like that, she was also known as One Of Us, practically blood, and any outsider who had a problem with her had a problem with every ork in clan turf.

And Humanis, of course, had been driven out years ago.

When she's dealt with people who are weird about elves, they tend to be weird in the other direction. Or elves themselves, trying to get her on some kind of ancient and most noble race of whatever trip. Those were annoying. This - kinda hurts. Really hurts. She doesn't like it.

An abhuman. That's what she is.

He consciously pulls his hand away from his hip in reaction to her reaction and tells himself that it's not much different than standing opposite a Navigator or an Ogryn, but it's just unfortunate, then, that her countenance resembles an Eldar so frakking closely. There are some things humans just weren't meant to resemble, and it looks wrong on a fundamental level.

Or is she a mutant because it's the fault of "magic"? He's heard that mutations are more common in worlds closer to the Eye of Terror. This is doing his head in. The hostility starts to recede and the awkwardness sets in, after all he's just said. But there's still a palpable air of discomfort and wariness.

"Homo sapiens nobilis?" he repeats by the way of a question, though his voice doesn't know quite which of a tone to take.

Saturday calms enough to roll her eyes at her taxonomy. "Yeah. Like I said, I didn't choose the name. Buncha Tolkien fetishists - when the magic started to cycle back in, about fifty years ago, people started havin' kids with pointy ears, or tusks, or horns - and they needed a name, so. Sapiens nobilis for elves, sapiens robustus is orks, ingentis is trolls, an' pumi - pu-mi-li-onis" she says, very carefully, "is dwarves. I probably said that wrong, always do. And everyone else gets to be plain homo sapiens."

She's still eyeing him warily, not entirely sure the freak out is over, or what might set him off.

"Science says we're all basically the same species, though. We can all have kids with each other, an' the like."

Cain has no idea what a Tolkien is, but he gets the gist. He finally has the presence of mind to step away from the sticky puddle - his wet ankles are a loss, he's afraid - but it's a step backwards. He shuffles a little, just as much an attempt to get his heels unstuck from the ground as it is to disguise the obviousness of the movement, and he rests a hand on the table.

"How many on your planet are homo sapiens?" he asks. He's trying to keep making conversation and pretend very little is wrong. But there's a stiffness to his stance, and he keeps fighting the urge to glance away. "Nobilis - that's quite the lofty word."

He's back to speaking a little formally now. It almost sounds the same as high gothic, imagine that.

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