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

[credit_not_blame]

"Using your own logic, that must be your name," Stacia says. "And I'm going to guess that it's the one about your hometown, because otherwise that's just sad."

Stacia knows actual wolves that could make a better cake than the one Jorgmund has tried to fob off on them.

[becauseimacoward]

"It would be better, but it wouldn't be good. Cooking isn't something I do very often, much less baking"

But he's pretty confident he wouldn't make a baking disaster as this one.

"But you're right."

[credit_not_blame]

"Baking is easier than cooking, I've been told," Stacia says. "Baking, you have to follow the instructions to get what you want. Cooking instructions are more of an outline. But I don't do either very much myself. Where's your hometown? I'm from Seattle, in the United States."

Volunteering information generally makes people more willing to share some of their own. Plus, it lets her know how different their histories are if he doesn't know about the United States.

[becauseimacoward]

"Yasoinaba, Japan. You...are aware of Japan, aren't you?"

If there's one thing he has managed to catch onto while talking to people around here, is that sometimes whatever places they come from seem to vary a little too much. What's a Fodlan. What do you mean there's no Japan over there.

It's almost overwhelming to know the differences are that big sometimes.

[credit_not_blame]

"Yes, I know about Japan," Stacia confirms. "Not enough to know about where Yasoinaba is, but the country is in my reality." She glances around the room "Does someone here have a United States and not Japan? Because that would be really, really weird."

[becauseimacoward]

"I have...heard a few interesting places here. Places that don't match what I know"

Neither the United States nor Japan existing, too. It's like an entirely different world, not just a parallel dimension but a completely new planet!

The explanation Doreen would give them all about the multiverse theory would answer so many questions, but until then, it was impossible to consider those other worlds another Earth.