goneawayworld | 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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Oh look, a poor child has washed up on Mac's doorstep. Wait, no, it's just Setsuna, in the middle of attempting to wallflower after the debacle with actually trying to eat a slice of cake has resolved itself, eyebrow raised in mild confusion.

"Are you ... stealing our drinks?"

"That's not how theft works, dummy." Mac has an incredible ability to sound very confident as he's about to spout relative nonsense, and the fact that he's talking to a child adds to that. "This champagne is mine as much as anyone else's, which mean it's really a you snooze, you lose situation for everyone else, including you."

He clicks his teeth and makes a little fingerguns gesture at her, champagne bottle now conspicuously sitting like a terrible-formed pregnancy belly under his clothing.

"I don't think that's how 'sharing' works," Setsuna says, as doubtful as it's possible to sound about such things. Which is pretty doubtful, and a little worried about whether this grown man she's talking to is, you know, mentally all right up there.

And then her brain clicks onto an idea that only a kid who's never actually had a real glass of champagne before to realize that's what it is and who doesn't in the slightest understand what comes of the cost of asking Mac to do anything for them would consider having - at least, not with the expectation she has for how this will be taken by him, anyway - and she pivots to saying, "In fact, if you really mean that, you'll pour me some before you drink the rest, at least, right?"

"Everyone had a shot at it, I just got here first. And "got here first" is how America was built." The grown man she's talking to is not, in fact, mentally all right up there, but nevertheless, he persists, blissfully oblivious to the way normal people live and the value they hold, insulated from the pains of self-awareness with a healthy lack of observational skills and a potent distaste for seeing others as actual human beings in their own right.

He squints at her, not quite sure what her play is, and clutches the champagne to his chest. "Why would I do that?"

"I'm not American, do they not teach Americans that that only works if you don't get caught before you can get away with it?" It comes out with a little bit of an edge despite the placid expression of concern on her face, just enough of a warning sign that someone is actually aware that she could, in fact, get Mac in trouble for doing that, if she wanted to.

If she wanted to. Which she actually does not. But she remembers how it felt to want to. And also she worries he's a little like a badly-trained puppy or ... or, to relive some feelings she'd rather not feel about other people again, like she used to feel about Westar and needs a smack in the nose to remember that he should share what he knows with the rest of the class, sometimes. Only with even less of a concept of personal hygiene. No, that's a terrible thought. Maybe he's just like ... a less reliable Kaoru. Yes, that puts her mind more at ease; now if only there were any decent donuts here, to actually test this theory.

She gives him her most sincere smile. (It is, to her credit, fairly sincere, because she is being fairly sincere about it, despite her growing sense of this whole situation as some sort of utterly ridiculous negotiation with someone probably twice her age who should absolutely know better than she does when it comes to this sort of thing.) "Because sharing is caring?"

"Right, well, you don't have to be American to know that the way Americans do it dictates it for the rest of the world." He points a fingers and moves it through the air, as if he's drawing an invisible line-and-a-half between the heart of America, Moscow, and France. "Point is, I got to the champagne first, so..."

He grimaces and cocks his head to the side momentarily in an expression of not-particularly-apologetic self-effacement. His subsequent smile back at her is fake, not because it masks any malice, but because it's the insincere expression of someone who's already justified doing what they want as the only (cool and therefore) respectable way of doing things, and any contradiction as a woeful social faux pas on the part of the one disagreeing.

"See, the things is, I already shared it with everyone with all the time they could have used to come get it, so at this point they've really more forfeited it than anything?" He squints and tilts his head as if he's appealing to some omniscient figure larger than Setsuna.

SHEETCAKE PARTY #1

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