goneawayworld | SHEETCAKE PARTY #1

Entry tags:

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’.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Setsuna holds the plate out to her, carefully. "Do you ... want to try some?" She sounds uncertain of whether she wants to encourage this foolhardy, potentially deeply unsafe act.

But then she brightens. "Actually, I really do like dancing. I also like donuts ... sorry if I made them too easy to overthink." She has to pause for a second and throws a worried look in the direction of the donut box. Stacia's demeanor isn't really striking her as odd, exactly; she's never met any Americans before, though one of the other Cures had lived there for a while or something, she thinks, but Stacia acts more like Setsuna's discovered most Labyrinthians like herself to be without the stress of Moebius' regard hanging over them anymore than she seems to act like anything else, with her blunt, almost naive directness and straightforward self-descriptiveness, and it's more than a little comforting. She feels like she knows where she stands in this conversation already. "I don't think I'd like those donuts either, though ... they're not very good at making us feel welcome, are they ...?"

No, I'm just testing your reflex to hand things to people reaching for them, Stacia carefully doesn't say. She takes the plate anyway and immediately puts it down on the table. "Nah, you just looked like you were going to keep trying to eat that, and life is just too short for terrible cake."

She waves off the apology. "Don't worry, I'm not concerned about guessing wrong. The game was more an excuse to start a conversation than anything else." She glances toward the donut box and makes a show of scrunching her nose in disgust. "No, I don't think they are. Though all things considered, I think it's more for show than it is any kind of sincerity."

She taps her breastbone meaningfully. Nobody who wants to be welcoming starts by implanting a device they can use to hurt or kill you.

"Higashi Setsuna -- that sounds Japanese, right?"

If Stacia were presenting herself as a threat, she'd be getting a way less sharing response. The miscommunication happening here is Stacia seems like the opposite of someone Setsuna needs to worry about treating with suspicion, and so Setsuna doesn't see a reason to withhold something like dubious baked goods from her if she's asking. It's not like it's anything important like private information, after all.

Setsuna's face shutters as her own hand ghosts across her chest, involuntarily. "I suppose it'd be hard to take anything here at face value, when they've already cut so deep, wouldn't it."

And then is startled out of her own musings by the next question. "Ah! Yes. That's ... that's right. That's where my family's from."

Which is a weird way to say it, but who knows, maybe she's just not entirely used to being able to speak English, yet.

Stacia and Setsuna just move in different sorts of circles when it comes to manipulative people. Though Stacia can genuinely play nice as much as any other girl socialized to play that way.

Stacia raises an eyebrow at the phrasing, though not a particularly suspicious one. She knows Setsuna's not from America from her earlier comment about prom, but she talks about Japan the same way Stacia and her siblings talk about Russia.

"My parents are immigrants, too," she says. "Russian. They weren't too concerned with preserving our connection to 'the old country' either."

"Oh! Um, it's ... I think I gave you the wrong idea, but I'm not sure how to give you the right one ..." She opens her mouth, a bit like a fish trying for air. Then she lands on her confidence, and replies, a bit more firmly, "I was born somewhere else, but I'm not trying to leave it behind? It's just that ... my family lives in Japan."

She's pretty sure that's a good way to describe it, and either way she is and she will stand firm on that last point, even if it isn't quite. But she isn't trying to play some sort of hard social maneuvering here, just trying to figure out what's even going on at all, so she softens pretty much immediately anyway, eager-eyed and open-hearted at the chance to hear more of Stacia's description of her own family. "I've never been to Russia. It's very cold there, right?"

"My mistake," Stacia says with a smile. It's a little odd that Setsuna isn't saying where she's from, but Stacia's not going to push that for now. Make friends first, pepper them with endless questions later.

"That's what I've been told," she says with a laugh. "I've never been. My grandparents didn't approve of my parents' relationship; I think my parents want to give them a wide berth even thirty years and three kids later."

Stacia's mother having all-but faked her own death to get away from her family probably accounts for more of it, but that's also not a get-to-know-you conversation.

"Do you have any siblings? I'm the youngest, I've got an older brother and and older sister."

"I have a mom and a dad," Setsuna says. "They ... they're very good parents. I can't imagine having any other ones. My -"

She fumbles, a slight pink flush breaking into her cheeks. She hesitates, out of embarrassment more than distrust. She doesn't know how to put this into words, there's a culture clash and a confidence clash all at once in her head, she's never really asked, so this better not embarrass Love, to find out, if Love ever finds out, which she both hopes she does and doesn't, because then she would be here with Setsuna but then she would also have to be here, with Setsuna.

"My partner," she says, finally, "loves them both very much, too. So I'm glad they all wanted me to be part of their family as much I wanted them to be mine, too." She looks up, still blushing with embarrassment. "Does that make sense? I don't really have any other family, so ..."

Stacia meets Setsuna's shy blush with a warm smile of her own.

"No, it definitely makes sense," she agrees. "Family is important, and it's great when everyone is mutually supportive of all the relationships. My mother and I are...we're having a major disagreement right now, but I love her and I know she loves me."

Maybe neither of them fully trust the other anymore, but they still love each other.

"What's your partner like? She must be pretty great for you to look like that."

The pronoun is a guess, but Stacia's no stranger to pronoun games.

If Setsuna were steam-powered this would be the part where a teakettle noise escapes her ears, with how flushed she goes at the (correct) guess.

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.

Setsuna is completely twitterpated, it's adorable. Even if the name briefly throws Stacia off, because what kind of hippie parents name their kid 'Love'?

"She sounds amazing," Stacia says. "You're lucky to have someone like her in your life. How long have you been together?"

"I -"

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.

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?"

"I - I don't know," Setsuna says, hesitantly, very reluctantly. Her hands come together in front of her stomach, twisting, and she looks to the side with a wistful smile - startled into the vulnerable openness she's been wary of showing to anyone this whole 'event'. "I like the way things are, with me with her, though ... I couldn't bear to change that, just for my own selfishness."

"Why would it be selfish of you?" Stacia asks, then winces. "Er, feel free to tell me if I'm being horrifically nosy and meddlesome. Back home, my friends rely on me to help them make sure they're thinking clearly, I tend to slip into 'asking questions' mode pretty easily."

More frequently about violence than about relationships, but the latter isn't completely out of left field, either...

"I ... don't mind, exactly, but, we did only just meet ..."

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.

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?"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

SHEETCAKE PARTY #1

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject