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

[turntex]

Dave is on edge like he hasn't been in a few years now. Even fighting off a bunch of final bosses didn't make him feel this tense, maybe because he knew what to expect and who he could rely on. All this, though? He's surrounded by strangers after going through a good chunk of adolescence entirely isolated with some friends, the people in charge are full of shit and absolutely willing to cause harm to keep people in line...

The point is, he's jumpy and shit and thus dodges the cake suddenly tossed his way like it was a goddamn bullet. The cake hits the ground in a much more crumbly manner than cake really should, scattering more splattering. Stiff, Dave eyes the fallen baked good for a moment before glancing back up at the guy who'd chucked it without even the decency to actually aim at anyone. Fuck, man, if you're gonna start throwing food you might as well good a good old fashioned food fight going and liven this place up some.

So clearly, it's up to Dave to pick up the slack.

"Yo, drop something?" he calls over. Wthout waiting for an answer he scoops some of the mess up, nose wrinkling at the feel of it on his bare hand, and neatly flicks it at the back of the guy's head.

[morebetter]

"Whoa!" It's really only a chunk, and yet Mac levitates about half a foot when it hits the back of his head. Something about the whole, you know, everything of this place has his a little more high-strung than he usually is, and so when Dave comes at him like some kind of cake-pitching hooligan, Mac responds by losing his chill. Just a little*.

"What the fuck was that all about, you little bitch?" Mac swats the mess of cake from the back of of his head and rolls up on a literal teenager, as one does when they're a tough guy over twice said teenager's age. He actually fingerwags, which is bound to do quite a lot for his credibility. "If you're going to be throwing a food fight, it needs to be with food that's actually edible."

And he chucks a handful of stale donut at Dave's chest.

*Mac also enjoys food fights, which serves as an additional impetus.

[turntex]

There's a moment there where he feels a sudden rush of regret. It's the moment where this adult man is suddenly turning on him, entirely without chill, looming over him with what feels like hostile intent, and Dave's normal veneer of unflappability briefly evaporates. It's a surprise blast from the past in a deeply unsettling way. He stiffens, jaw tensing with expectation.

And then he takes a donut to the chest.

...Right. Yeah. Cool.

"If that's the standard then a good fight is a physical impossibility right now." He takes a breath, forcing himself to relax. He's cool. He brushes a crumb off his chest, definitely entirely cool. "Unless you're gonna slaughter one of the furries for their meat. Pretty sure a raw rabbit haunch would be more edible than any of the shit laid out here."

[morebetter]

Mac's pissiness evaporates basically as quickly as it emerged; something about the silliness of smacking someone with inedible food and Dave's refusal to escalate defuses any bomb about to go off. That happens, sometimes, Mac's moods careening around like a car making turns on a rain-slick highway, especially when he's already more keyed up than he realizes by the setting. Realizes or admits to himself, one or the other.

"You think I could?" He raises his eyebrows and looks over his shoulder at the rabbit, the catgirl. He's labrador retriever-levels of distractible from the confrontation to the idea that this rando teenager might think of him as a mighty capable hunter felling a beast to feed the tribe.