goneawayworld | SHEETCAKE PARTY #1

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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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"I -" Hrrrk. It feels like swallowing sand. Sand that has been wet at some point long enough to clump into chunks and then forgot to stop being like that even after it dried. And also someone sprayed it down with the most aggressively floral-noted perfume imaginable. And it's in her throat.

She has eaten bad meals. More bad meals than good ones, if she's actually counting, though the good thing about meals that you only eat because you must is that the minute you start eating food because you want to those memories last longer, but still. Those were inarguably bad meals.

This is something else entirely. This is concentrated discomfort in a pan. She coughs. "... it's fine," she finishes, weakly, visibly drained by the effort. "I'll be fine?" Yeah, no, that's exactly too wobbly of a smile to be believable as reassuring in any capacity. "It seemed like it'd be - rude -" she coughs as a few more pebbly, gritty crumbles of it briefly stick in her throat on their tumbling way down - "to just ... leave it there, like that ...?"

Adora just stares in horror. Poor Setsuna seems like she's half-choking on the cake and she isn't quite sure what she should do about that. She hastily hands her one of her tiny glasses of cider. That'll help, right? Liquids are good? Or maybe a pat on the back. She doesn't know.

"You don't look fine," Adora points out, "And I don't think we need to think about being polite when they basically forced us into this. Besides, it looks awful."

She gives her a nudge with her shoulder, "Just... don't eat any more of it, OK? That bite looked bad enough, I'd hate to see what trying to put that whole slice down would do to you..."

The cake "taste" is so bad Setsuna's murmured "Mm, thank you," is less a conscious effort to be grateful and more a reflexive burst of relief at being handed the liquid refreshment necessary to at the very least wash some of it down and maybe also by some miracle dissolve what refuses to un-stick itself from inside her mouth.

She all but chugs the cider down, gasping for air after. "Thank you," she says, again, this time intentionally. "It's ... not very good cake, unfortunately. If I didn't know any better, having this be part of the welcoming party might make me feel threatened."

"I've felt threatened since I got here," Adora mutters, "Maybe not because they want me to be, but because I'm worried they're going to accidentally kill us somehow."

Still, best not to say that part too loud. Might get zapped. She gets another tiny cup of cider for Setsuna and offers it to her new co-worker. Hopefully she's not going to keep coughing up more of that horrible cake.

"You doing OK now?"

She nods, shakily. "I'll be okay, I think. I just wasn't - expecting it. And, um, I know what you mean. Just ..."

She looks into the distance, at nothing. If she sees any cameras in the room, it's not because she's looking at them, so they can't say that she noticed and she can't say that she did either. And she isn't really looking for them, anyway; she's looking at her own thoughts, if she's 'looking' at anything. "I'd like to give them some credit, I guess? I -" Her face darkens, like she's swallowed a bite of something even worse-tasting than that cake. She forces a lighter tone into her voice, by contrast, her expression trying for blandness. "I mean, if they were going to kill us," Setsuna says, somewhat carefully, rubbing a couple fingers into the place where the incision would've been, "they probably wouldn't need an accident. So it's probably not ... fair to them ... to think they would. Right?"

"I mean, probably not. I've been around people who are... kind of like this. If they want to kill you, they'll do it. They don't need to make it look like an accident," Adora frowns. She has no compunctions about hiding her emotions or trying to bland about the situation. She doesn't like this and she's not going to be quiet about it.

"So maybe this is just a really bad welcome party..."

Which is better, honestly. Still makes this pretty awful.

"Plus, you know. Forcing us to work for them."

"... mm." Setsuna visibly goes inside herself at that, over-contemplative. There's enough options she has to weigh about how to respond to Adora's admission that she has to consider what to admit in return, whether Adora really thinks of what she said in those terms or not. "If you've ... been around people like this, you get a sense for whether they believe they need what they're doing, for ... good reasons, or ... not."

Her eyes tighten, glistening in the ugly office-bland, office-bright lighting. "I don't know if I, um. Know enough, about them, to ... know, if they care enough to want to do this." Her mouth slides downward in a frown, hesitating ... swallowing the tension. "If they just wanted to force it out of us ... I ... know the ways they could make that more efficient." It feels like an acknowledgement too far, too soon, but she isn't sure how to say what she wants to say without it. "I don't know what it means, that they're - 'bad' at that." She smiles tightly, self-deprecatingly. "That's weird, right? Being confused they're not better at treating us worse?"

"I don't know if anyone I worked for had a good reason to do what they did," Adora replies with a shrug and a sad little frown, "They pretended they did, but... at the end of the day, I think it was just selfishness."

She listens to Setsuna for a long moment, frown deepening. Some of that sounds a bit familiar or at least makes her think of people she's talked to before. It makes her think of the Fright Zone. She'd been treated terribly there, but she hadn't known any better or any different. It was just... normal, right?

"I mean, I guess so. But at least where I was from, they tried to make us think that the way they treated us was normal. That there wasn't an alternative. Maybe they're doing the same thing?"

"No, that's what bothers me," Setsuna says, on a breath, pulling her hands up her arms as she grips herself in a hug just below her shoulders. She's starting to hesitate less, but she's still picking her words so carefully, like everything she says is a step out on a tightrope over a long fall she's afraid to look down from and find out whatever it is she doesn't know is waiting for her at the bottom of.

"This isn't really good for people. This isn't the best option for anyone. Nothing is, if it has to roll over them to get what it wants from them. It just wants to be. But if they mean that - I'm sorry," she says, a self-deprecating smile breaking her pensive expression, as she looks aside, "I really don't know what I'm trying to say? It's just that, well, where ... I used to be from, they were a lot better at - making convincing examples. If I didn't know better, I'd think -"

She says it as she gestures at the offensive pastry display, which isn't a great example of anything except an impressively bottomless lack of care. She furrows her brows, drilling down into the memory at the forefront of her thoughts. And then swallows. "... I'd think they wanted us to get upset about this, to see what we'd do about it," she finishes, going even quieter, wishing she had a cup of cider already in hand to help with how her mouth has suddenly gone dry.

"Hey..." Adora says as she see Setsuna hug herself so tightly. She steps forward and wraps an arm around her in a little squeeze, brow knit with concern. She has no idea what Setsuna has been through or what her experience with this kind of thing is, but it sounds like she hasn't had a good time. She can hear it in her voice, even if Adora isn't always the best at picking those things out.

"I mean... you might not be wrong? Maybe this is a weird test to see how we react," Adora allows with a sigh, "Or maybe they just want to into our heads and make us think this is just weird and uncomfortable instead of flat out bad..." Adora maintains that side-hug, cradling Setsuna a little closer. She has first-hand experience on how helpful hugs are. She's maintaining this one.

"Or... I don't know. It could be a lot of things. But let's not overthink it, OK?"

Which is advice she really ought to follow for herself, but hey. That's Adora.

The gesture is unexpected and Adora is unfamiliar, so Setsuna briefly stiffens, unsettled; she isn't prepared to be comforted, under the circumstances, and doesn't know how to react, if it's okay to react. There's a lot of memories telling her comfort is unwantable intruding on a life of hard-won acceptance that it very much is. But as painful as the eight of her own history is, her body is a warehouse of instinctive refusal of all those lessons, regardless, and she leans into the half-embrace with relief anyway, letting the anxious tension out with a long sigh. Adora isn't someone she trusts with a gesture like this, not yet, but ... it feels good to be hugged like this, anyway. She needed it.

"It's hard not to, when you don't know what to think," Setsuna says, still pale but slightly mollified. She smiles sidelong at Adora, and says more or less what she's already thinking aloud outright for once. "Uhm, thanks. For being nice. I needed it." Her smile grows wider, genuine and bright. "I think I was starting to forget what it felt like to have someone really be nice to me for a minute there."

Well, at least Setsuna isn't pulling away. That's something, isn't it? And Adora is more than willing to maintain the hug and offer some degree of comfort. It just feels like the right thing to do, even if she doesn't know her that well. She nods in agreement, despite that.

"I mean... I know what you mean. I wasn't used to that for the longest time and sometimes I still feel like... why are people nice to me, you know? I mess up everything I do and somehow I still have friends."

Adora laughs nervously and then breathes out, flashing a little smile at Setsuna.

"We have to look out for each other."

"You probably don't mess up everything you do," Setsuna says, thoughtful and chiding. She gives Adora an impish smile, friendly and intentionally silly. "I mean, it's hard to mess up giving hugs. People probably like you because you're a nice person?"

But she nods, letting the seriousness fade back in without letting the smile, and the comfort it shows she's feeling, fade out. She reaches up one hand - awkwardly, given their positions - and squeezes Adora's shoulder, grateful and, hopefully, reassuring on her part, too. She doesn't really know Adora that well at all, but ... yes, she decides, the other girl seems like someone she wants to know, after all. "... we do, yes. It's hard to know who'll be a good friend, when we've all barely met, but ... it's always good to make more friends."

She can't help a little laugh. Just having made the decision makes her feel better already. "Especially when they give good hugs."

"Well, I don't like to brag, but I do give pretty good hugs," Adora winks at Setsuna and actually laughs, miracle of miracles. Some of the tension bleeds off and she seems a little more relaxed. Maybe it's that shoulder squeeze that does it.

"Besides, if there's anything I've learned it's that just because you're new friends doesn't mean you can't also be good friends," she continues, "We're all in this together... so let's support one another. That's how I got through the Fright Zone. I had... one really good friend."

Oh, that's kinda sad to think about. She should probably find something else to think about.

"Where are you from, if you don't mind my asking? I've probably never heard of it."

Setsuna winces as she catches that sadness in Adora's body language when she remembers her 'one really good friend'. She can, unfortunately, relate to that in several directions, though in at least the one case one friend led to more friends than she ever expected to have. It's a good thought and she holds onto it, instead of thinking about how long it took her to stop taking Westar's dedication for granted, and how it was almost too late by the time she did.

Yes, better to think about how lucky she is to have met a girl like Love when she did, instead.

"I ... suppose I have two homes," she says, after thinking about it. "There's a place called Clover Town, on a world called Earth, and then Labyrinth, the world where I was born." She pauses, unsure of how to continue, unsure if she feels comfortable saying all this so soon after they've just met, but - she has this gut feeling that it's something Adora needs to hear, and if she's learned nothing else from Love Momozono and her family and friends ... from her own family and friends, now, it's that when you meet someone and you have a gut feeling like that, you need to grab it and chase it to the ends of the earth if it's telling you you have to.

"So, uhm. I don't know how much of what Labyrinth was like will make sense to you. But ... I feel like even if you don't really know what I mean, I ... need to explain it to you. I want to. Because I think you'll understand."

She pulls herself away from Adora, not to withdraw in on herself but because it's hard to explain and stand that close to someone else as she does so. The press of another person against her would make it too hard to get the right words out. "Where I was born... Labyrinth was made under the oversight of our great leader, the lord Moebius, living ... and," and she gets an expression on her face that is almost certainly indecipherable in the total meaning of it but is definitely in part a bleak, wry anger, "if it was ordered, dying, according to the 'perfect' control of a system that determined even the optimal efficiency cycles for what paths we could walk, and measured our ability to meet its standards accordingly. Our bodies were Moebius's to utilize from birth, and discard when we had met our predetermined end date of best use." She sucks in a shaking breath, willing herself to keep talking, while she still feels like she can. "It was fine, of course. To die for any other reason would be a waste of the resources that went in to providing for our perfected way of living. Anything that was not Moebius was flawed, inefficient, and had to be converted or crushed until everything, in every universe, belonged only to Labyrinth, and only to Moebius. I used to be ... part of the advance forces. An infiltrator, and a conqueror. Except ..."

She turns back to look at Adora and smiles, lopsided and the happy kind of sad, gripping her hands behind her back. "I failed my mission. I ... made friends, instead. I found a home. I don't know if I could have realized how wrong everything I'd thought was right had been, without it." She shrugs. "I don't know if I could have survived fighting back against the world I came from if I hadn't known what that felt like."

And then she falters, as her hope comes rushing back in between her ears in anticipatory terror. "Do you know what I mean?"

Adora listens to Setsuna with an expression of complete seriousness and more than a little sympathy. Everything she says sounds familiar, almost eerily so. It's not a perfect match, of course, but it mirrors her own experience with the Fright Zone and then Brightmoon. She spent her whole life thinking there was only one way of doing things, that she had a certain destiny to fulfill, only to find out that everyone she had trusted was lying to her. That there were better ways, that she was being used to hurt people. So she listens and she understands.

She takes a step closer as Setsuna finishes.

"I... I feel like I know exactly what you mean," Adora replies and she wraps her arms around herself in a bit of a self-hug, gaze sliding away from Setsuna as she thinks.

"I grew up in a place called the Fright Zone and I never really knew if I had actual parents or not. It was a really bad place and we were all training to become soldiers for the Horde, under Hordak, and none of us really mattered to him. We were all going to be disposable, I guess. They groomed me - well, Shadow Weaver did - to be a leader for them. I was going to help them conquer the rest of the planet. And then..."

She pauses, trying to figure out how to explain it.

"I found a magic sword, but that wasn't really it. I met a bunch of new people and they became my friends and they showed me what the Horde was doing to everyone, so... I left. And I started fighting them. The Horde, I mean. Not my new friends!"

Setsuna gives Adora her own serious and thin-lipped attention, grim-faced and a little taken aback at how much this really does align ... she'd had this gut feeling, this certainty, that she really had met a kindred spirit in this, but to hear it aloud is another thing entirely.

She rocks a little on her heels, hands falling to her side awkwardly as if they're going limp with uncertainty about what to do or where to go. "I envy you a little bit ..." She says it without much self-consciousness at the thought, just, like, ahahha, yeah, that's the feeling, not regret, that Adora didn't have to, you know, die to figure these things out for herself, she just swapped sides and made her peace with it. "It wasn't that easy, for me, but ..." She shakes her head, smiling brightly. It's a reassuring weight in her chest against the anxieties of the day, just how much she won't have to explain to Adora, now that she's said all this, she thinks. Now they've both said all this. "No, I know exactly what you mean, though."

A thought occurs to her, then, and she thinks of how hard she had to fight against and to get through to Westar and Soular ... "Your friend, who kept you in one piece in the Fright Zone ... did you have to fight her, too?"

"Well, I wouldn't say any of it was easy. There's been a lot, you know? It's just... I haven't even felt like I've had time to sit down and really process it. Everything's just been happening ever since the day I left the Horde and I've been having to fight and make sure things don't get worse..." She sighs. And now this. She's really going to have to just take some time to process at some point, but it doesn't look like this is going to be it, either.

When Setsuna asks about her friend, her expression falls a little, looking a little sadder, a little grimmer, "Yeah. Yeah, I did. She stayed with the Horde and she... well. We're not really friends anymore."

It hurts to think about. Every time Catra comes up, she has to wonder what went wrong and go through it all in her head again. She has to worry about what Catra is planning. She has to worry about how she might try to hurt her the next time. Although here that's less of an issue, obviously.

"I think that's the part that hurts the most."

Setsuna hesitates for a moment, and then reaches out to take one of Adora's hands in hers, giving it a quick squeeze, and then just keeping it held, so she knows 'being held' is a thing she can have like this. She lets Adora talk and then waits for her to meet Setsuna's eyes again, giving her a firm nod when she does, deeply sympathetic.

"If it helps, ... I had to fight some of my friends, too, for a while. They didn't understand what had ... changed, for, with me. It was so hard, because they didn't understand why I just couldn't ever go back. They didn't see it the way I could, the ways it was ... hurting us, to be like that."

She squeezes Adora's hand again, her head tilting slightly as she smiles. "I ... really hope you don't have to watch her die like I did my friends before you get a second chance to make things right with her." The words come out slightly forced and ragged, but she doesn't sound upset, only trying to reassure. "And I can't tell you if ... not giving up on that friendship, and what it means, is the right thing to do or not. Because I thought I'd have to, too, once. But I can tell you that ... it doesn't have to hurt forever."

"I don't know if mine couldn't see or didn't want to see or just... wanted to hurt me for some reason," Adora frowns. She's still working through a lot of things, but she's honestly happier outside of the Horde rather than it, despite everything. Even if her heart still hurts because of Catra. She squeezes Setsuna's hand in reply and slowly does her best to smile.

"But you're right. I'll heal. I'll... keep going. Somehow. It's what I do, right? I get up and I keep going."

Even if she does have a tendency to run herself ragged. Oops.

"It's all any of us can do." Setsuna reaches up with her other hand to pat Adora by the shoulder. "But it's all right if it hurts, too. Everyone's pain matters."

She sighs, exhaling with a rueful huff through her nose. "... it's easy enough to say, I suppose." She shuts her eyes, a wistful expression stealing across her face. "I have this friend back home, named Hayato. He's ... really a ridiculous fellow. When we served Moebius, the rest of us thought he was so incompetent, but he was so loyal and dedicated. No one was more certain he would prove his usefulness to lord Moebius than he was, or more certain that what we did was obviously all we could do. Before ... everything else happened on Earth, I don't think I could say I had a more steadfast friend." Her chest feels tight at the memories. "But you didn't have friends in Labyrinth. You had coworkers, fellow soldiers, and competitors. When I started fighting for Earth's sake ... no one else I fought was more vicious, more insistent, on fighting against me. It took me a long time to understand ... he never stopped believing I should be his friend, even if he didn't have the words to say it. All he could do was try to make me stop doing all the things that were taking his friend away from him anymore."

She shrugs. "I don't know if it's the same for your friend in the Horde, not really ... but I know how much it hurts to feel a friend hurt you and not be able to understand why. And, um, I guess, also how much it hurts being the friend who has to do it, anyway. I don't think I'd be as good a friend to Hayato now if going through that hadn't hurt us both so much then." She smiles, as brightly as she can manage. "So I hope you and your friend can manage the same, in the end. Because ... it's so good to have friends who care for you that much in your life, and so painful when they're not."

"That... sounds a little familiar, honestly," Adora replies. She knows that part of why Catra was so vicious because of the fear and the anger from "losing" her. She also knows that Catra did it simply to be cruel and she's still processing all of that. Still figuring out how she feels. It's not easy to put that all down, even here. She squeezes Setsuna's hand again.

"I'm sorry about your friend, but... thanks for talking this through with me. It's kind of weird and strange and finding someone else who sort of gets it is a huge relief."

Setsuna can't help but offer Adora a bright, light-hearted smile, as she squeezes back. "It's not like someone walks up next to you going 'hello, I know what it's like devoting my life to a world-conquering menace only to have a crisis of conscience at the last possible minute and end up having to hurt the people I care about to save the people I care about too, let's be friends' every day, is it?" She giggles, easily, relief bringing the laughter up out of her mouth like water from a brook.

"Really ... as much as it's been a lot to adjust to, I'm glad, at least, that it's given us the chance to meet."

"I mean, when you put it like that, not really!" Adora laughs in reply. It's a bit more of a nervous laugh, but it's also a way for her to get the stress out. She's been incredibly stressed since she arrived and Setsuna is proving to be a good way to get that stress out. Especially with their eerily similar backgrounds. It really isn't every day you meet someone who gets what you went through on such a real level.

"I'm glad I met you, too. And I'm glad that even if this place is weird, I'm still getting a new friend out of it."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

SHEETCAKE PARTY #1

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