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’.

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Stacia laughs, even as she tries to escape of the remains of her jumpsuit without getting more blood on it.

"That's the first time I've ever heard that term for clothes, but I guess you're not wrong," she says. "I've never shifted in front of a mirror, but I guess it goes fast enough that the horror of 'what is happening' is replaced by 'what is that."

<Don't transform in front of mirrors, even if yours is a smoother process,> he says dryly, drawing closer. <It is not comforting.>

He'd bring up how long it would take him to morph something of a roughly similar shape - there are options, though none particularly wolflike - but now he has a better view of the blood. <Morphing doesn't heal you?>

Ooh, more information on his 'morphing'.

"Shifting itself doesn't heal me," she says. "But I do heal really fast when I'm not human-shaped. Human-shape, human healing. I'm going to shift back, I just didn't want to destroy this jumpsuit any more than I already have."

She cocks her head. "Morphing heals you? How fast?"

Different terminology, he notes. <I'm no expert, but that doesn't look much like a salvageable situation.>

<As fast as the flesh changes,> Alloran says, talking about it as if it isn't his. <When in a particular morph I only heal as quickly as it does, but the morphing itself makes that irrelevant. If my brain is relatively intact and it's possible to focus, no injury matters. Not for long. The technology was developed for healing originally, I think. Then biologists took an interest.>

"It probably isn't, but I'm hoping that if I at least show a willingness to minimize the destruction, our overlords won't make me prove that it's impossible myself," Stacia says.

She whistles at his description of the kind of healing morphing can do. Sure, she could theoretically bounce back from actual brain death if she explored her Rage enough, but morphing sounds like more of a certainty. "Sounds like it doesn't even leave a scar."

Constant use of this amount of clothing really does seem like nothing but a pain. That's cultural difference for you, Alloran reflects.

<It doesn't. Older scars, from before I was given the technology, stayed with me at first. They were part of my image of myself. Unfortunately, I was taken by a Yeerk who had a different image of me, and I can't seem to recover that image. Perhaps with time I can become more symmetrical, at least. These wear patterns were convenient for him.>

One of his vaguely deerlike ears has a thickly furred inside. The other has many fewer hairs, much shorter so that naked skin shows.

Hellooooooooo opportunity to ask potentially impertinent questions. Stacia cocks her head to the side.

"A Yeerk? I don't think I've heard of that."

Perhaps this is what's worse than an internal shock collar?

Alloran does not appear to react, or, well, he goes still, stalk eyes stopping their motion. Radiating out from him is a tangible feeling of... suffocation, or paralysis.

It's not actually imposed, his ability doesn't go that far. Stacia can break through it pretty easily if she tries and sense it as uncomfortable but at a remove. That sense, if she doesn't interrupt him, of the body as just a one-piece garment someone comfortably slips into, down to the tips of every extremity, and that someone sighing happily and in the most intimate tones saying oh, I'm so glad you are mine. It's not a sharp new horror, not terrifying, it's dull and heavy and hopeless.

Then comes the slow burn of waiting for them to cause a breath and feeling the need for air build without the expectation of being able to do anything about it, on and on and on and on and on, until Alloran wrenches out of it and inhales, shaking his head and very consciously fidgeting.

Stacia's stalked enough prey animals that she knows something's wrong when Alloran goes completely still. Then the psychic PTSD flashback happens and she physically jerks backward in the process of shaking loose, baring her teeth in a snarl.

Okay, yeah, definitely worse than an internal shock collar.

"What the fuck."

The three slits of his nostrils visibly flare and flatten with deep breaths and his main eyes are wide, his stalk eyes swiveling to scan the sides and behind and up.

He mutters, <Not intentional. I shouldn't have done that... I must unlearn song, or learn to stop singing.>

"While you're unlearning the song, is there anything we should do to knock you out of singing it?" Stacia asks, still wary but no longer fully defensive. "Because yeah, it's a bad song."

He blinks several times, each eye out of synch.

<I know worse,> he says with a kind of grim amusement. <He's had me singing some of it for decades. But I haven't been singing it without him, and this was at some fraction of my range.< Alloran could stand in the center of the room and blanket it. Probably affect people in the space just outside.

He sounds troubled. <And I don't know. It's some effort to react to the world as something that is part of it. You could hurt me, I suppose. That might work if I wasn't too deep.>

"I was thinking of something less assault-y, but sure. How likely are you to reflexively take my arm or head off with that tail of yours if I slap you upside the head?" Stacia asks. "Because I've delivered a fair few smacks, but if you're likely to delimb me like a tree by accident, I'm going to throw a shoe at you instead."

<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?>

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."

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.>

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."

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SHEETCAKE PARTY #1

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