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

[ahtohollaback]

Elsa's approach, up until now, has been informed by the following:

- There's a high level of weirdness on this ship already. Plenty of people can do plenty of strange things and aren't bothering to hide it. Her ice powers, most likely, will not be the thing that turns the whole ship against her.
- Having repressed her powers for a very long time, Elsa would really rather not go back to that, not if she doesn't have to to live.
- But she does not want to attract attention, over her powers or anything else.

So, she's kept them low-key, until now. Adora comes up, and is very enthusiastic and very loud, and Elsa gasps in surprise. Her heart rate spikes, and so does the ice around her cup -- little jagged edges make a ring around the waxy paper rim. It takes her a moment to get over her startlement enough to process what Adora is actually saying.

"Yes," she says, recovering her composure with another deep breath. "Yes, they are. I've always had them, ever since I was born." Then, the rest of Adora's sentence sinks in. "Wait, did you say you know someone else who can do this?"

[princesspower]

Oh, woops. Did she startle her? Adora tries to dial it back just a little, but she's still an enthusiastic person. At least when it comes to friends and making new ones and finding out about cool powers.

"Yeah - Princess Frosta. I think she's had her powers since she was born too, but hers come from the runestone that her kingdom has, so..."

She frowns. Probably different, but the similarity is still pretty neat. It's something vaguely familiar in a world where everything else feels incredibly strange and off-putting. So Adora runs with it, because she just wnats to try and shove through everything. It's how she works.

"Sorry - I'm Adora, by the way."

[ahtohollaback]

Elsa's eyes stay wide, but the expression in them turns from surprise to cautious interest. The ice on her cup stays stubbornly in place; though she's calmer now, Elsa can't quite work up the energy to melt it, but that's fine, the snowman's out of the bag anyway.

"I'm Elsa," she says. "Queen of the kingdom of Arendelle." It isn't that Elsa expects the title to carry any weight around here, but since Adora mentioned a princess with ice magic, it's worth a shot to see if she's heard of Elsa's kingdom. "But we don't have a runestone. At least, if we do, there's no record of it in the royal library."

She would know.

[princesspower]

"Arendelle..." Adora mutters thoughtfully. Doesn't ring a bell. That hadn't shown up on any map of Etheria she'd ever seen. The "queen" part doesn't throw her at all, though. Royalty? Totally normal.

"It might be different from Etheria, then. Unless you're... from Etheria?"

She sounds almost hopeful. Someone else from home? Maybe? Possibly?

Probably not.

[ahtohollaback]

"Etheria..." Elsa repeats, turning it over in her mind. Then, she shakes her head. "I don't remember it on any of our maps," she says with a sad, apologetic sort of shrug. Elsa knows the maps well: she has to know Arendelle's neighbors and trading partners, and it was part of her education and preparation for taking on the mantle of queen.

"It must be very far away. Do you have many runestones in Etheria that give people powers?"

[princesspower]

"Well, it's a whole planet, so it'd be kinda hard to miss... and it was in its own weird dimension for a thousand years, so not that surprised!"

She laughs, as if that was a joke, but she's honestly pretty serious about the whole thing.

"Well, there are a few, and most of the princesses have powers related to them. They can tap into the natural magic and energy of Etheria. Other people can learn how to use magic, too. It's, uh, complicated and I'm not really an expert on it..."

It's her turn to shrug apologetically.

[ahtohollaback]

Oh. Elsa's not sure how a planet can be in a dimension, but she nods along anyway. If it's important, she can ask later. The second half she understands better.

"It sounds like a nice place," she says. "Runestones that let you use natural magic. Understanding where it comes from." Elsa looks down at her hands and the spikes of ice around her frozen cider as she muses over this. She still doesn't understand her own. Why does she have it? Where did it come from? Why her?

[princesspower]

"There's more to it than that, but it's... really complicated and I'm not entirely sure I understood it all myself," Adora replies with a bit of nervous laughter. Being the key to a world-spanning superweapon had been a trip, let her tell you. She notices that glance, though, and after a moment her expression falls a bit.

"Hey, you OK?"

[ahtohollaback]

She blinks in surprise when she's caught letting her mind wander, eyes immediately snapping back up to Adora and back to the present. "I'm fine," she reassures Adora, her tone still soft but maybe a little too certain. "At least, as fine as I can be," Elsa adds, drawing the subject away from magic powers for now. "As fine as any of us are."

Elsa's had bad things happen to her before but they were a very different kind of bad thing than this. Being on the rig is a new kind of unpleasant for her.

[princesspower]

"Good point," Adora responds with a sigh, "I'm not sure any of us are really OK right now."

She laughs. It's not really a funny, ha-ha, laugh, more of a "wow, I'm really stressed" laugh.

"I mean, I know I'm not."

[ahtohollaback]

Elsa's eyebrows draw up. She feels bad, but she also feels bad for reminding Adora about how Adora feels bad. She kinda wants to put a hand on Adora's shoulder? But Adora isn't her sister or Olaf, and they aren't that familiar, so instead, Elsa just holds her frozen cider in close to her stomach.

"Me too," says Elsa. "I know it could be worse. But why do they have to pretend we're supposed to be happy here?"

[princesspower]

"Probably because there might be some people who don't know any better or who... sort of think that everything is OK and that if they just keep pretending that everything is fine that maybe it will be. Maybe it's not that bad," Adora replies with a grimace, "Or maybe they just like watching us squirm. It could be either."

[ahtohollaback]

"There's so much here I don't understand. Arendelle wasn't anything like this."

She looks at Adora, thinking of a way to change the subject.

"Was Etheria?"

[princesspower]

"Parts of it were," Adora replies slowly, "Most of it wasn't. Most of it was... wonderufl. Or at least just full of people trying to live their lives without someone crushing them underfoot."

Adora sighs, "This is... I don't know what this is."

[ahtohollaback]

Parts of it, hmm. Maybe there were other countries around Arendelle who operated like this. She's never been to the Southern Isles (and doesn't plan to) but maybe they were like this. Maybe Weselton is like this. But Arendelle wasn't.

"Do you think any of us have a chance of getting home?" she asks.

[princesspower]

"I think so... they brought us here, so there should be a way to go back," Adora frowns, "Although the last time I ran into someone trying to use portals it didn't work out so great. But that was because the planet was actually moved into an entirely different dimension..."

sorry for how late this is! feel free to handwave the end

[ahtohollaback]

Her eyebrows draw up, her confusion pulling her out of her sadness.

"I'm sorry," she says. "What do you mean by a different dimension?"