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 takes a long moment to deliberately smooth down the unimpressive and unremarkable front of her Jorgmund-supplied brandless shirt, multiple times, digging her palms and fingers into the fabric, until she can feel the heat die down in her cheeks and she can talk calmly again. She has not, ever, actually referred to Love like that aloud and even that feels intensely intimate, even if she's not sure how else to explain something as naturally occurring to her as gravity. She reaches up, brushing a stray lock of hair away from her face, nervous, lost in thought.
"Love is ... kind, even when she's being unreasonably stubborn, or self-involved. She never doubts that other people mean well. She will do whatever is in her power to make other people happy ... sometimes a lot more than anyone ever asks her to do, whether they wanted her to help them or not. She's ... she's far from a perfect person. She's not always capable of handling it well when she doesn't know how to help somebody. She gets impatient faster than anyone else I've ever met, it's hard to get her to stay focused on one thing when she could be distracted by a lot of things at once instead ... but when she smiles the entire room is brighter, and it's almost impossible for you to resist smiling with her."
She can't stop herself from smiling at the thought of it, even now. "She gets a lot of that from her mother, I think ..."
Does she really notice how all that sounds said aloud? Not particularly; she just can't help herself but be this sincere in how she feels about Love.
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"She sounds amazing," Stacia says. "You're lucky to have someone like her in your life. How long have you been together?"
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Setsuna fumbles. "It's not like that," she eventually manages. "Maybe ... someday. I'm just happy to have her in my life, that's all."
Someone has spent the last two years being all but married to another girl and not registered that the girl she loves really does feel the same way she does. She is the worst example of useless lesbianing ever to walk the earth. Possibly she needs help. Possibly.
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Ouch, pining. That's never fun.
"Well," Stacia says, a little more gently, "I suppose there's not much I can do to meddle here and now. But, let me ask: what's the worst that could happen if you told her what you feel when you get home?"
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More frequently about violence than about relationships, but the latter isn't completely out of left field, either...
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It's not said in an offended way, more a helpful, 'you did ask if you were crossing my boundaries so I'm trying to be considerate of your consideration because I probably don't have any real reason to be miffed' sort of carelessly innate self-disregard on Setsuna's part. She almost sounds ... apologetic, to have to express it aloud.
"Maybe we can talk about -" she flushes again - "this, um, some other time, when there's ... better ..." She gestures, at the surrounding 'party' space. "Food?"
She does not mean the food, to be clear, nor the rest of the "New Hires". But it's hard to say 'fewer potential ways to be eavesdropped on' aloud when that's what you're worried might be overheard.
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Huh. That's not a please stop prying into my personal life. Neat.
I'm down to table this topic of conversation for a time with better food," Stacia says agreeably. "You have a new topic of conversation in mind, or shall I go harass our other new co-workers about...whatever pops into my head, I suppose?"