Piper 90: Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
goneawaymod) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
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’.
no subject
Robbie is holding the ice to his lip, effectively shushing him. Brainy nudges his hand to hold the ice to his cheek instead. He doesn't take the ice from Robbie, which may be an obvious signal to Doreen that he likes Robbie's attention.
He snorts at the comparison to Tony Stark and Reed Richards. He's met them. He was impressed by their intellect but not entirely impressed by their character.
"We met when Robbie was brought to my dimension and time by a cosmic being trying to help my team save all of existence. Though he was sent back to the moment he left, he spent close to year with the Legion by our reckoning." He goes on, his voice very complimentary,"It was quite the situation to adjust to, especially since my dimension is 1000 years in your future, but he comported himself admirably. If not for Robbie and the other dimensional displacees, we may have lost, which would've been a cataclysmic disaster for the multiverse."
The praise is glowing. It was certainly the whole team's effort that won the day but he'd certainly made a fine contribution, keeping teammates alive and protecting civilians. During the techno-organic zombie incident caused the Brainiacs, he'd been one of the people in the hottest hot zones, helping keep people alive and uninfected until they were evacuated.
"He is my friend. One who is inordinately and annoyingly fixated on remedying my nonexistent social live," he says wryly. Then in a gentler voice, he breathes out, "He helped me through a very difficult time in my life."
no subject
"...please tell me that's the way your universe feels about him in general."
Well, maybe not quite that way, because she's already kind of shipping it.
"Please? I just wanna know if there's a universe out there that's treating him the way he actually deserves."
no subject
“You could say your cheek’s worse. The world won’t end if you admit you’re just a sentient like the rest of us,” Robbie huffs quietly as Querl gives a brief run-down of the Legion.
Only it begins to dawn that it’s not about the Legion of Superheroes. It’s about Robbie himself, and Doreen is more than happy to pick up that ball and run with it.
“Is this really the time and place where you two have to have this conversation? I don’t ask you about Mole Man - for the record, I am not comparing Brainy and Mole Man.” The lines in the room have been redrawn, and no one bothered to ask Robbie what team he wanted to be on. He might be the one inadvertently touching Brainy’s face, but he suddenly isn’t on Querl’s side anymore.
He can plainly see the team-up that’s about five minutes away from happening, and it’s called ‘Brainy and Doreen Gang Up on Robbie for His Own Good (TM).’ “They treated me fine. Same as most of the others. I mean - no one’s going to get treated like Cosmic Boy. Think like Cap, but like a 20 year old Harry Styles who’s already been the starting quarterback for the Patriots. And our universe isn’t that bad anymore.”
no subject
So he keeps it simple. "Our world was very grateful for his help and the help of the other displacees." Making it about the group effort means Robbie can feel less put on a pedestal. "And the team is very fond of him."
That brings it back out of the realm of what Robbie karmically deserves - which Brainy is on the same page as Doreen about but knows Robbie has to be eased into accepting - and brings it back to the realm of relationships between individuals.
They are fond of him and he's fond back. Brainy knows it'll take time before Robbie can accept more than "liked by my friends" and start accepting "objectively a good person." Sometimes you have to start small.
"His support came at a very tumultuous time. For myself especially." A pause. "Though it seems that tumult may be continuing whether we want it to or not. This situation is less than ideal."
no subject
Love was a beautiful thing, but that didn't mean she hadn't wanted to scrub her brain of the image of the happy couple making out.
"He even showed up to help me stop Melissa's whole revenge plot." With Galactus's help, but the fact that the Mole Man had agreed to help even with the odds stacked against them meant the world to her.
"As for this all?" she says, moving onto Brainy's point and deciding to back off of Robbie for the moment, "we're superheros. Not ideal is kind of the whole deal. This does take the cake though...and I swear the pun wasn't intentional this time."
no subject
Yeah, he finally caught up to the Tricephalous thing, and Robbie now knows how it feels for a dog to catch a car and have utterly no idea what to do with it. He gapes at Doreen, mouth opening and closing several times, until he cobbles together enough words for an actual sentence. "But Tricephalous has three heads! How does that work? Wait. Does that count as poly, because they're all on the same body so they've only got - oh god, mental image. Mental image. Just kill me now please, can we go back to the two of you getting along too well? I'm so sorry."
Thrusting the ice cube into Querl's hand, Robbie goes to hack off a few pieces of cake just to have something to narrate in his head and try to mentally drown out the concept of Mole Man/Tricephalous. First, you have to get a knife, then you have to saw your way through the cake which is going to take a long time with a dinky plastic knife, and it's a really bad time to think about that serial killer documentary that links knives to sex, Robbie. "Someone talk about something else, please."
no subject
"I'll assume the circumstances you're spreaking of would be equivalent to the mercifully hypothetical situation of Validus and the Emerald Eye having a torrid romance."
But he moves on, to spare Robbie's poor, battered imagination.
"Indeed, this is not an unexpected situation to find ourselves in, but nevertheless...dire. My attempt at finding a means to override the shock collars was successful to a small degree, but ultimately fruitless." He lowers his voice significantly, eyeballing the room for anyone learning to close. "From what I've seen, it's going to take a significant level of coordination between the captives here to have a chance of overwhelming our captors."
no subject
By making everyone hate them. True, there was still a lot of work to be done. Investigations needed to be done, plans needed to be made. The hard part, getting a bunch of people with vastly different life experiences from vastly different worlds to agree one single thing, however? That had already been taken care of.
no subject
Immediately regretting it.
He coughs and has to down about 4 tiny cups of cider to get the crumbs down his throat. "The cake is barely legal for life. And - yeah, but we should probably watch who we bring into those conversations. I mean, being real for a second here, we don't even have a way of checking if every new hire is a new hire."