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

[becauseimacoward]

"If that's the logic then it's appropriate I don't have a number anyway"

Well, unless you count the times when he almost dies, in which case...maybe he'd have a 1 right there on his name. That counts as a reset? Probably not.

Still, that's certainly an explanation, and one tidbit of information that adds more mystery to the entirety of Saint. It's going to be so hard to understand his existence as a whole...even more for someone like Dojima.

Such is the curse of being a typical everyday person! At home, at least.

"So where does the...floating drone fit in that story?"

The Ghost, he means. He glances at it, really unsure how to refer to that.

[purple_paradox]

"I am a Ghost," Gepetto replied. Like most Ghosts, he normally liked to keep quiet unless directly addressed, a byproduct of their naturally flighty nature, though he was more willing than most of his kind to engage in regular conversation.

"Ghosts were created by the Traveler in its dying moments, to find and choose Guardians for humanity such that we might channel the Light into them and grant them the strength to face the Darkness. Guardians like Brother Saint-14 here."

He said all of this in all complete seriousness, without a shred of irony.

"We have had to explain this a lot today," Saint added. "To put simply, he gives me superpowers. Different thing from being Exo, there are normal human and Awoken Guardians as well."

[becauseimacoward]

"I guess explaining all that is getting old. Sorry for making you say it all again"

Perhaps Dojima should be glad he doesn't have anything like that to explain over and over and over. Like the Ghost -- very noticeable and, turns out, very hard to take at face value. Light, darkness, guardians, so many terms to keep track of.

At least Saint explains it in a simple way -- although now Dojima doesn't dare to ask what Exo is. He makes an assumption about Awoken Guardians, though. It sounds to him like it's a tier above Guardians in one way or another

[purple_paradox]

Well, the Awoken, the reefborn ones at least, would probably consider themselves a tier above everyone else, but for the most part they were just glowy blue humans.

"No worries, friend, it is a strange situation we find ourselves in. Curiosities abound, so questions are not unexpected."