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

[wheyoftheadept]

Saturday sucks in a pained breath.

"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."

[likeits1999]

Kevin looks around the room speculatively, as if trying to see some kind of blood magic sinisterness behind the distressingly lame party. The cake is definitely evil of some form, but probably a mundane one.

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."

[wheyoftheadept]

"They don't have it, but if they could get it, they'd use it." Saturday nods with absolute certainty. "I won't tell about the blood shit if you won't. Don't need spiked coffee - or you dragged off to a back room to be a blood dispenser."

Sorry, Kevin. Saturday has gotten really good at worst-case scenarios. Mostly because they're all that happens to her, these days.

[likeits1999]

"I would extremely appreciate that, dude." Kevin says, on the same wavelength there.

"I don't think they need new ideas cause they got plenty of bad ideas by themselves."

[wheyoftheadept]

"Oh, for sure. Like picking up any-damn-thing the astral spits out and going 'hey, free stuff' like, jesus. Even when you do that with the shit people put out on garbage day you at least wash it first."

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."

[likeits1999]

"...Well," says Kevin. "I guess if I was something real nasty, I wouldn't tell nobody."

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."

[wheyoftheadept]

Saturday considers that. Then she considers what she knows the Things That Live Out There are capable of. Then she shudders.

"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."

[likeits1999]

"Tentacles are the worst," Kevin agrees with the voice of experience. "I'm crossing my fingers for none of that shit. But at least I guess tentacles wouldn't be a surprise, kinda obvious."

[wheyoftheadept]

"They always go for tentacles, man," she complains. "Fucking cheating is what it is. Uncreative, too. Stupid grapply swatting fake arms."

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?"

[likeits1999]

He frowns a little. "I just hope it's not a sign or something. Cause to tell you the truth, I may have some kind of like. Home team advantage on the monster front, but I'm not amazing at it."

[wheyoftheadept]

"Well, if you're surviving an apocalypse, you're at least good at staying alive. Which is half of winning all sewn up, right?"

Saturday grins, inviting him in on the joke.

[likeits1999]

Kevin snorts, he can't help it. "I mean, in a manner of speaking."

He appreciates when phrasing things around life is a joke instead of a blunder that he himself is trying to sort out mid-sentence.

[wheyoftheadept]

"Eh, you walk and talk and think, that's enough for me." She's quite casually certain about it. Saturday has her faults, but xenophobia isn't one of them. "What does being a vampire get you, anyway, besides mind control?"