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

[princesspower]

Adora listens to Setsuna with an expression of complete seriousness and more than a little sympathy. Everything she says sounds familiar, almost eerily so. It's not a perfect match, of course, but it mirrors her own experience with the Fright Zone and then Brightmoon. She spent her whole life thinking there was only one way of doing things, that she had a certain destiny to fulfill, only to find out that everyone she had trusted was lying to her. That there were better ways, that she was being used to hurt people. So she listens and she understands.

She takes a step closer as Setsuna finishes.

"I... I feel like I know exactly what you mean," Adora replies and she wraps her arms around herself in a bit of a self-hug, gaze sliding away from Setsuna as she thinks.

"I grew up in a place called the Fright Zone and I never really knew if I had actual parents or not. It was a really bad place and we were all training to become soldiers for the Horde, under Hordak, and none of us really mattered to him. We were all going to be disposable, I guess. They groomed me - well, Shadow Weaver did - to be a leader for them. I was going to help them conquer the rest of the planet. And then..."

She pauses, trying to figure out how to explain it.

"I found a magic sword, but that wasn't really it. I met a bunch of new people and they became my friends and they showed me what the Horde was doing to everyone, so... I left. And I started fighting them. The Horde, I mean. Not my new friends!"

[passifloraincarnata]

Setsuna gives Adora her own serious and thin-lipped attention, grim-faced and a little taken aback at how much this really does align ... she'd had this gut feeling, this certainty, that she really had met a kindred spirit in this, but to hear it aloud is another thing entirely.

She rocks a little on her heels, hands falling to her side awkwardly as if they're going limp with uncertainty about what to do or where to go. "I envy you a little bit ..." She says it without much self-consciousness at the thought, just, like, ahahha, yeah, that's the feeling, not regret, that Adora didn't have to, you know, die to figure these things out for herself, she just swapped sides and made her peace with it. "It wasn't that easy, for me, but ..." She shakes her head, smiling brightly. It's a reassuring weight in her chest against the anxieties of the day, just how much she won't have to explain to Adora, now that she's said all this, she thinks. Now they've both said all this. "No, I know exactly what you mean, though."

A thought occurs to her, then, and she thinks of how hard she had to fight against and to get through to Westar and Soular ... "Your friend, who kept you in one piece in the Fright Zone ... did you have to fight her, too?"

[princesspower]

"Well, I wouldn't say any of it was easy. There's been a lot, you know? It's just... I haven't even felt like I've had time to sit down and really process it. Everything's just been happening ever since the day I left the Horde and I've been having to fight and make sure things don't get worse..." She sighs. And now this. She's really going to have to just take some time to process at some point, but it doesn't look like this is going to be it, either.

When Setsuna asks about her friend, her expression falls a little, looking a little sadder, a little grimmer, "Yeah. Yeah, I did. She stayed with the Horde and she... well. We're not really friends anymore."

It hurts to think about. Every time Catra comes up, she has to wonder what went wrong and go through it all in her head again. She has to worry about what Catra is planning. She has to worry about how she might try to hurt her the next time. Although here that's less of an issue, obviously.

"I think that's the part that hurts the most."

[passifloraincarnata]

Setsuna hesitates for a moment, and then reaches out to take one of Adora's hands in hers, giving it a quick squeeze, and then just keeping it held, so she knows 'being held' is a thing she can have like this. She lets Adora talk and then waits for her to meet Setsuna's eyes again, giving her a firm nod when she does, deeply sympathetic.

"If it helps, ... I had to fight some of my friends, too, for a while. They didn't understand what had ... changed, for, with me. It was so hard, because they didn't understand why I just couldn't ever go back. They didn't see it the way I could, the ways it was ... hurting us, to be like that."

She squeezes Adora's hand again, her head tilting slightly as she smiles. "I ... really hope you don't have to watch her die like I did my friends before you get a second chance to make things right with her." The words come out slightly forced and ragged, but she doesn't sound upset, only trying to reassure. "And I can't tell you if ... not giving up on that friendship, and what it means, is the right thing to do or not. Because I thought I'd have to, too, once. But I can tell you that ... it doesn't have to hurt forever."

[princesspower]

"I don't know if mine couldn't see or didn't want to see or just... wanted to hurt me for some reason," Adora frowns. She's still working through a lot of things, but she's honestly happier outside of the Horde rather than it, despite everything. Even if her heart still hurts because of Catra. She squeezes Setsuna's hand in reply and slowly does her best to smile.

"But you're right. I'll heal. I'll... keep going. Somehow. It's what I do, right? I get up and I keep going."

Even if she does have a tendency to run herself ragged. Oops.

[passifloraincarnata]

"It's all any of us can do." Setsuna reaches up with her other hand to pat Adora by the shoulder. "But it's all right if it hurts, too. Everyone's pain matters."

She sighs, exhaling with a rueful huff through her nose. "... it's easy enough to say, I suppose." She shuts her eyes, a wistful expression stealing across her face. "I have this friend back home, named Hayato. He's ... really a ridiculous fellow. When we served Moebius, the rest of us thought he was so incompetent, but he was so loyal and dedicated. No one was more certain he would prove his usefulness to lord Moebius than he was, or more certain that what we did was obviously all we could do. Before ... everything else happened on Earth, I don't think I could say I had a more steadfast friend." Her chest feels tight at the memories. "But you didn't have friends in Labyrinth. You had coworkers, fellow soldiers, and competitors. When I started fighting for Earth's sake ... no one else I fought was more vicious, more insistent, on fighting against me. It took me a long time to understand ... he never stopped believing I should be his friend, even if he didn't have the words to say it. All he could do was try to make me stop doing all the things that were taking his friend away from him anymore."

She shrugs. "I don't know if it's the same for your friend in the Horde, not really ... but I know how much it hurts to feel a friend hurt you and not be able to understand why. And, um, I guess, also how much it hurts being the friend who has to do it, anyway. I don't think I'd be as good a friend to Hayato now if going through that hadn't hurt us both so much then." She smiles, as brightly as she can manage. "So I hope you and your friend can manage the same, in the end. Because ... it's so good to have friends who care for you that much in your life, and so painful when they're not."

[princesspower]

"That... sounds a little familiar, honestly," Adora replies. She knows that part of why Catra was so vicious because of the fear and the anger from "losing" her. She also knows that Catra did it simply to be cruel and she's still processing all of that. Still figuring out how she feels. It's not easy to put that all down, even here. She squeezes Setsuna's hand again.

"I'm sorry about your friend, but... thanks for talking this through with me. It's kind of weird and strange and finding someone else who sort of gets it is a huge relief."

[passifloraincarnata]

Setsuna can't help but offer Adora a bright, light-hearted smile, as she squeezes back. "It's not like someone walks up next to you going 'hello, I know what it's like devoting my life to a world-conquering menace only to have a crisis of conscience at the last possible minute and end up having to hurt the people I care about to save the people I care about too, let's be friends' every day, is it?" She giggles, easily, relief bringing the laughter up out of her mouth like water from a brook.

"Really ... as much as it's been a lot to adjust to, I'm glad, at least, that it's given us the chance to meet."

[princesspower]

"I mean, when you put it like that, not really!" Adora laughs in reply. It's a bit more of a nervous laugh, but it's also a way for her to get the stress out. She's been incredibly stressed since she arrived and Setsuna is proving to be a good way to get that stress out. Especially with their eerily similar backgrounds. It really isn't every day you meet someone who gets what you went through on such a real level.

"I'm glad I met you, too. And I'm glad that even if this place is weird, I'm still getting a new friend out of it."