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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She contemplates this for a moment.
"Musta been like when Ryumyo did his flyby on Mr. Fuji, back in 2011. One moment life is normal, the next there's dragons and elves and mages. Except you just got vampires, sounds like. Can't imagine people liked that."
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This whole other worlds thing is confusing, and it sounds like a lot of them are garbage so that's not great, but... it's also really cool. Kevin keeps thinking about how really cool it is sometimes.
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She thinks for a second, then explains essence. "Essence is like - your soul, almost? It's the mana-power, the magic energy, that everything that's alive has and generates because it's alive. Get infected with HMHVV and you're still like, alive, but your essence is gonna be leaking out steadily and you can only get enough to keep yourself going by - well, some gotta drink blood, some gotta eat flesh, some gotta make a certain kind of emotion... can get real baroque. Real fuckin' problem. No cure, either; no one really knows what to do about it, 'cause it's not like people ask for the condition. Well, some people say kill anyone who gets it but those people are assholes."
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"That sounds hella messy," he says. "Like, it's bad enough with vampires drinking blood and having mind control powers and being immortal and all that crap, but different kinds of ways to be fucked up that are all kind of cousins like that? Yikes, dude."
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She shakes her head a bit. "And yeah, it's lame as hell. I got a friend back home, she's a ghoul - needs to eat flesh - it fucking sucks for her. It doesn't even have be alive still, she's got a deal with the local chopshop like most ghouls do, but people are so freaked out... it ain't right. It's a shit disease and a shit situation but how we're treating the people who got it ain't right."
Saturday has One political opinion, and this is it, apparently.
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His attention perks up at the mention of ghouls, though. "Ghouls? That... sounds like it means something way different over there from what it means over where I am."
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Saturday fidgets a little, in the manner of someone who knows they should mention a thing to be fair but doesn't want to.
"...an' all right, a fair number of 'em lose their minds when they transform and just - are like mindless monsters - but the ones that don't didn't ask for this and there's gotta be a better solution - "
She cuts herself. "Eh, inside baseball. What's a ghoul mean where you're from?"
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It's probably just that he's disturbingly used to the blood thing.
"It's what you call a person that's drank vampire blood," says Kevin. He lowers his voice a little. It occurs to him that knowing some of this about vampire blood... might be bad if Jorgmund gets ideas about it. "It gives people some little vampire powers like being strong and stuff, but it's crazy addictive and mind controlly. So like. Don't."
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And anyway, ghouls can use the dead and vampires need the living; as far as she's concerned, that makes ghouls much easier to deal with. A body without a person inside is just meat.
She is aware that not everyone shares this view.
"That's - yeesh. I guess there's no way people don't use that to be shitheads, huh?"
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"I am so sorry, chummer."
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"...But on the bright side, at least I don't think these guys can possibly be that bad."
It occurs to him that he may be dropping a jinx right now, but maybe if he tries hard enough not to think about that it won't stick?
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"Oof. I got some bad news for you, then." She doesn't exactly smile; it's too angry to be a smile. "We got operations like Jorg all over where I'm from. Ain't a damn one of them wouldn't use mind control in a heartbeat if they could make it work - hell, fair few of 'em probably do. I wouldn't put anything past Aztechnology. Buncha' bastards."
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Probably.
"I feel like... if these guys had mind control powers or brain zappy remotes or whatever, we woulda found out about it by now. But also I'm like, an optimist or something, so."
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Sorry, Kevin. Saturday has gotten really good at worst-case scenarios. Mostly because they're all that happens to her, these days.
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"I don't think they need new ideas cause they got plenty of bad ideas by themselves."
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Is Saturday comparing herself to a highly questionable couch left to molder curbside for wednesday pickup? Well, yes, but she's also comparing everyone else. May they all be bedbugs in Jogrmundr's sheets.
"They're just lucky nothing really nasty's come out at them yet."
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He's a vampire, it's only natural to think that way about it.
"But if you mean just straight up monsters, yeah. I get the feeling they already deal with that sometimes though, considering they're asking us to stick around and do something about that. I think they gotta be worse than some pissed off chairs in that case."
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"Wow. Brand new crop of nightmares, right there. Yeah - the real nasties wouldn't announce themselves, would they?"
If only she was any good at all at checking for horror marks.
"Monsters are easy, in comparison. I wonder if there's any of the tentacle ones, those can be tricky."
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Saturday has bad memories of tentacles. They are just so rude, and you can't break them like a normal limb.
"It is kinda weird how many of us are used to monster fighting. Jorg got lucky, huh?"
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Saturday grins, inviting him in on the joke.
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He appreciates when phrasing things around life is a joke instead of a blunder that he himself is trying to sort out mid-sentence.
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