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FIC: The Star Turtle Embarkation (Chapter 2)
The Star Turtle Embarkation
Title: The Star Turtle Embarkation – Chapter 2: And Then There Were Three
Spoilers: None specific, but may be mild general spoilers through season two.
Rating: PG-13 (Future chapters may sneak up to R for Mildly Mucky)
Word Count: 2100 (Ch 2)
Disclaimer: The Big Bang Theory is property of Warner Brothers and CBS, Discworld is property of Terry and Lyn Pratchett. All other IP property of their respective owners, no challenge is intended or financial gain made. The story is fictional, but some of the people aren’t entirely; I’d like to say no resemblance to people living or dead is intended, but you can’t have everything.
Summary: When his other friends drop out, Sheldon is stuck taking Penny to the Discworld Convention in England. It may not be the first time Penny’s made Sheldon blue, but definitely the first time she’s been so literal about it...
Part one at http://awmperry.livejournal.com/34629.html
“Penny. You’re still here.”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Are you doing anything next week?” Sheldon had that expression on his face that he saved for times when he thought he was being subtle. Or maybe cunning, it was kinda hard to tell.
“No. No way. I’m not going to England at six days’ notice just because Leonard’s getting it on up in Portland.”
“But you have to! The tickets are booked! The convention is counting on our attendance!”
He waved a sheaf of papers as something he probably thought was evidence.
“Yeah, well, they’re not counting on me.” She headed for the door.
“Penny...”
She spun, exasperated.
“For heaven’s sake, Sheldon, I don’t have time! I don’t have the time and I don’t have the money, and I don’t even know what it’s about!”
Sheldon looked shocked, but recovered quickly.
“I beg to differ! The tickets are already booked and paid for, and it’s too late to cancel them. You would really be doing me... us a favour, increasing the effective received value of the tickets. The alternative is for just me and Howard to go, an alternative which...” He seemed to consider for a moment. “...is unappealing in any number of ways, quite apart from the fact that it is effectively two for the price of three. You would be attending as... well, my guest.”
“What, free?” She cocked an eyebrow. “You want to take me to the other side of the world free of charge?”
“Britain isn’t really ‘the other side of the world’ in any accurate way, but yes, that is the general idea. It’s either that or waste a ticket, in which case I could have simply burnt the money I spent on it.” A thought caught him. “Which would, I suppose, have given me a chance to use spectroscopy to determine the chemical makeup of the hundred-dollar bill, which I’ve often wondered about. Did you know, it’s theorised that the average bill has specimens of seven people’s urine and more bacteria and impurities than a sidewalk?”
Penny stood, gaping at him. Then she shook her head, bringing herself back to reality.
“No... no, come on, Sheldon, I can’t just disappear for a week. I have work...”
“The Cheesecake Factory is closed for ten days from Tuesday. They’re renovating the kitchen. Had you forgotten?” He looked genuinely incredulous.
“Wait, what? No they’re not!”
“They are. There’s been a notice about it on the door for almost a month.”
Penny stared. A very vague memory, blurred by long hours and the occasional seriously slutty Cuba Libre, drifted back. Dammit, Sheldon was right. Again.
“Okay,” she conceded. “So maybe I do need a break. But I don’t even know anything about this... Disco World thing.”
“You have a point.” Sheldon stalked to the bookcase and pulled out a slim case with barely a glance. “Here. Men At Arms. You have little time, so the audio book will serve you better. And it’s ‘Discworld’.”
Penny read the blurb and looked back up at him.
“Sheldon, this is for smart people.”
“Yes.”
“I won’t get it.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Sheldon...”
He fixed her with a gaze. “Your academic record notwithstanding, I have no reason to believe that your intelligence is insufficient to understand the essential elements of the books. You may miss some of the more obscure references, but the search for elucidation is often considered part of the ongoing appeal.”
“The search for the what of the what?”
He rolled his eyes – there’d be payback for that sooner or later, she decided – and she could almost hear the gears in his head shifting down to Talking-To-Penny mode.
“I’m trying,” he said, “to tell you that yes, they are intended for smart people with an inquisitive approach to the world, and that I have no reason to believe that you would find them beyond you.”
She tuned her mind to Radio Sheldon and managed to decipher his ramblings.
“Sheldon, are you trying to pay me a compliment?” Okay, so maybe payback wouldn’t be quite the bitch she’d been planning.
“Clearly.”
“Awww...” Maybe she was making progress after all. “All right,” she said with a smile, “I’ll come with you.”
“Excellent.” She thought she caught a flicker of a smile, but it passed too quickly to be sure. Sheldon, meanwhile, returned to his computer. “And now I have to finish the précis for Howard.”
Howard. Damn. She’d forgotten about him.
“Oh, hey, that’s a thing, I won’t have to share a room with him, will I?”
Sheldon glanced up with an expression of horror.
“Good Lord, no! I’ll share with him. He was going to have a room to himself, but we’ll rearrange things so you get that and he can take Leonard’s place.”
“Great. I’m not sure all three of us would be coming back otherwise.” She saw the text covering his computer screen. “What exactly is that?”
Sheldon followed her gaze.
“Oh, that. It’s a brief summary of the Discworld books so far so Howard can maintain an intelligent conversation on Terry Pratchett’s works and thus avoid embarrassing us all.”
“What about me?”
“Your capacity for intelligent speech isn’t inversely tied to your libido.”
Was that a compliment? Oh well, she’d take it as such until further evidence presented itse– Where the hell did that come from? And... wait...
“Wait, why does Howard want to go, if he’s never read the books?”
Behind them, the door opened.
“Howard claims to be interested in the talks,” Sheldon began. “More significantly, in my view, Leonard made the mistake of showing him photos from last time, and women at the con are inordinately fond of corsetry.”
“Hey, that wasn’t my fault.” Leonard. And just as she was getting into the conversation. “I just left the photo album open on my laptop. How was I supposed to know he’d trawl through it?”
“Potato, potahto,” Sheldon said, waving away Leonard’s objection. “Making those pictures available to him was grotesquely irresponsible.” He turned back to his screen. “Imagine what could happen when he finds out about the Guild of Seamstresses!”
“Yeah...” Leonard fidgeted. “That could be bad...”
“Three Mile Island was bad, Leonard. Howard Wolowitz added to an infernal concoction of seamstresses and over-tightened corsets is a recipe for a libidinous supercritical mass of simply apocalyptic proportions. And speaking of libidinous masses, weren’t you going to visit Stephanie?”
“She had surgery,” Leonard grumbled, as Penny sat down on the couch.
“Fascinating.” Sheldon glanced at his computer’s clock. “And if Mythbusters hadn’t been about to start I might have been interested.” He stood, without looking behind him. “Penny, if you want to stay and watch them disprove the ending of Deep Blue Sea, you’ll have to move out of my spot.”
How the hell did he always know? She shuffled over into the middle seat as Sheldon sauntered over from his desk and sat next to her.
As he sat, his knee touched hers. An innocuous nudge, but for a fraction of a second she found herself feeling... something. And that was weird. He was Sheldon. She wasn’t interested in him, she’d never been, and she was pretty sure he wasn’t interested in her, and why the hell did it feel like her knee had just nudged one of the electric fences back home?
She curled up on the couch, hiding her confusion and drawing her legs up under her. Sheldon looked oblivious as always; maybe, just maybe, his hand was touching the spot where her knee had hit, but that could mean anything.
They sat in relative silence for a while, Sheldon watching the TV intently and occasionally butting in with complaints about the Mythbusters’ research methodology. He left the apartment during the first commercial break, returning a few minutes later writing on a notepad and ignoring Penny’s questioning glance. Then, out of the blue, just after Tory had fired a harpoon into a giant foam shark:
“What size breastplate do you take?”
Penny blinked.
“What? Why?”
He looked at her as though it were obvious. “For your costume, of course.”
“Costume?” She raised an eyebrow.
He sighed, as though tired of having to explain everything.
“This is a Discworld convention. Hall costumes are highly recommended, particularly for first-time attendees.” He sounded like he was reading off a script. “I’m reliably informed that they help ‘break the ice’.” He paused. “Given the aesthetics demonstrated by your Queen Penelope avatar, Angua would be a good choice.”
She rolled her eyes. Wackadoodle.
“Whatever, Sheldon. How do I know my size?”
“Ideally you should be measured by an expert costume maker.”
She turned to him, raising herself slightly on her haunches.
“That Flash costume you’ve got, who made that?”
“I did, of course.”
“It’s pretty good, right?”
“It’s ninety-seven per cent accurate to the comic books.”
“So you’re kind of an expert?”
“In so many fields. But yes. Why?”
“Just thinking.” She smiled at him, although she wasn’t sure why. “All right, so what, you need to copy one of my tops?”
“It’s estimated that eighty per cent of all women have incorrectly sized brassieres. I had hoped you had been more diligent, but unfortunately my research was inconclusive just now when I checked your underwear drawer.”
* * *
“You did what?”
She had drawn herself up to a kneeling posture, glaring at me. This was, I would note, an unusual perspective for me; I am not accustomed to looking up at people, which my seated position necessitated given her relative altitude.
It was a most uncomfortable situation. I don’t look up at people, it upsets the order of the world. But the solution was, at least, simple in this case. I would quite simply stand up, thus reconfiguring things to a more acceptable state of affairs.
So I stood, just as she directed another tirade at me, jabbing an accusatory finger where my elbow had been a moment ago. Unfortunately I had risen too fast, leading to three consequences which, while unfortunate on their own, combined into one disastrous one.
Firstly, I rose too quickly, thus reducing the blood pressure in my brain and inducing a brownout; while I normally moderate my movements as a prophylactic measure against orthostatic hypotension, I misjudged the speed this time as a result of the stress of the argument. Consequent to the lowered cerebral perfusion, I was thus suffering from dizziness, poor balance and blurred vision, which exacerbated point number three, which I’ll get to in a moment.
Secondly, my abrupt change in position caused a shift in the couch cushions; minor, but sufficient to affect Penny’s balance. She, in obeisance to the laws of gravity and preservation of inertia (which, I suppose, should teach her not to jab at me so emphatically), pitched forward and downward at roughly the same time as I rose.
Thirdly, as I was turning to deploy a scathing retort, my head and upper body were facing her, although the brownout meant I had neither the vision to see her plummeting towards me nor the balance to react adequately on impact.
The result is that we met somewhere in the middle, and things started to go wrong.
I reached out to catch her, but even my admittedly superior brain power was unable, given the lack of reliable data, to accurately compute... contact surfaces, if you will. The female chest, it appears, is not an effective grip surface for arresting a fall, regardless of its slight cushioning effect.
It is curious, in its way, how time seems to slow in times of stress. It’s an evolved neurological response, of course, enabling cavemen more perceived time to act just before they got eaten by sabretoothed tigers (although I must confess to always having a certain fondness for the genus Smilodon, at least compared to that ridiculous tortoiseshell cat Missy keeps, but I digress), but in this case it did little but enable me to experience the full horror of the... collision.
Penny’s impact causes me to lose my balance conclusively, imparting an impulse directly away from her and with a certain rotational component. This prompts my knees to bend, and I fall backwards, where the couch breaks my fall – and I break Penny’s.
She decelerates rapidly, and her face stops less than an inch from my own; had our noses been aligned it would certainly have resulted in epistaxis and severe pain at the very least. But instead, almost continuing her motion from the fall, she locks her gaze with mine for a couple of seconds, then briefly closes the distance to my mouth and aligns her lips to it and –
Gliiiip.
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um. aside from the corsetry, please don't tell me Howard got hold of Jack's talk titles....
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