Piper 90: Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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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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[Corporate culture in Japan is a biiiit unhealthy, really]
The ideas aren't too bad. It's the execution what's wrong here. It's true parties do help people feel more at ease.
[...when they're decent and not...this mess. Bad job, Jorgmund]
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[ Sylvain's been to more than a few in his time - and the boring noble functions never did much to endear him to the rest of high society. The smaller celebrations with his classmates at the Officers' Academy, on the other hand... ]
If there's something there to build on it, it works out well enough, but putting a bunch of people who haven't had any reason to connect or depend on each other yet into a room just makes half of them look for the exit.
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A detective is always sharp, really, so he looks around like he's trying to find it out right away. This is the most...baffling group of people he has ever seen. He hasn't even gotten used to the fact some of the non-human people in this team exist, frankly!
Finding a similarity has to be almost a folly.
"Not that I have figured out what it is"
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The non-humans are less confusing to him than the technology. "How does your home compare to this? That is, from a...weird gizmo standpoint. It seems like there's some kind of machine for everything here. Back where I come from, about the fanciest thing we've invented is the arbalest."
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"I would say it's close enough. From a glance I'd think it's almost the same, but a few things are more advanced" Such as for example whatever they used to bring them all here. That has to have happened thanks to technology of some sort. Dojima points at the karaoke machine. "Machines like those are common. It's nothing special"
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Which is a reminder of where he could be right now, really. A bar with a good drink would be much better than this party.
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"Does it give you the music? Is it like...a bard in a box?"
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A bard in a box? Well that's not wrong! In concept, at least!
"The bards aren't present inside the box, but their voices are. Uh, how do I describe it..."
He really is at a loss about how to explain it! Never been too good at explaining things in simple terms.
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God bless fantasy universes for making it easy.
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Magic. That sounds like a convenient explanation, albeit completely wrong. It sure saves him the need to explain how a karaoke machine works.
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"Something about 'magic' you don't like, maybe?"
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Unless some...stuff happens. Even then, all he has is secondhand accounts. He has never seen anything supernatural firsthand, magic or not.
It's so hard to try to think that, for some people around here, magic is an everyday thing.
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He's not used to not being able to just coast through and still understand everything without really working for it, but it seems like he can't make any assumptions about things here without something biting him in the ass.