The final chapter! Thanks for reading and your patience with the delay. I hope I got all the loose ends tied up. Just to reiterate, I own nothing of TBBT or the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Oh and, um, sorry about the monkey.
"Holy crap-on-a-cracker!" Penny breathed, her eyes wide and her hand instinctively searching out Leonard's.
"Sheldon, what have you done?" Bernadette exclaimed in her most strident voice.
"That's it," Raj deadpanned, "Stick a fork in us, we're done."
Everyone stood frozen in their spots, holding their collective breathe as they awaited the inevitable.
Everyone stood frozen, that is, except one little monkey. He leaped from Amy's arms, and running on pure animal instinct, jumped onto The Device to rip the talisman from its place. With it's channeling mechanism removed, The Device abruptly ceased to function. Now the distorted section of space began to collapse in upon itself. The city, with its horrific denizen, started to withdraw into the starry background of the portal. There was a howl of
outrage as the figure on the other side of the portal desperately reached out with its many-tentacled arms towards the kingdom that was about to be denied it yet again.
Of course, it goes without saying that the indiscriminate opening and closing of inter-dimensional vortices can have consequences other than just the unleashing of unspeakable horrors from beyond. As the vortex spiraled down towards collapse it acted as a small gravitational sink. Anything that was loose in the nearby area began to be drawn in towards it, including all of Sheldon's journals, along with one heroic ship's mascot and the small hexagon of exotic matter it clutched in its tiny paws.
The air, which had been preternaturally still since the infernal machine had been powered up, now came alive once more. The wind lashed and the rain came hard as the storm returned and the surrounding atmosphere was sucked in towards the singularity. The group of friends clung desperately to the heavier bits of Leonard's detection equipment and each other. As the monkey slide screeching by, Amy let go of her anchor in an ill-thought attempt to save him but there was nothing she could do as the poor creature was drawn through the rapidly diminishing portal. She herself would have been drawn in as well if a hand had not reached out and grabbed her wrist. She looked up through tears to see Sheldon grasping her and Leonard him, and then Penny and the others in a human chain.
The storm ended as suddenly as it had began earlier that day and the seven friends found themselves lying together gasping, exhausted and relieved, in a few inches of water as the stars shone out in the now cloudless sky. As they picked themselves up and hugged and cried, they could hear in the distance the sound of rescue helicopters drawing closer to their position.
They were taken by helicopter to the island from which they had set out earlier that day and ushered aboard the military transports that would take them to the mainland. Once there, the group that included Leonard, Penny, Raj, Amy, Howard and Bernadette were re-united with Sheldon and the ship's crew who had been ferried in on a second plane. Each of them were to be questioned extensively about strange anomalous weather, radar readings and satellite images that had been observed in the area they had been shipwrecked. They had all agreed to take their knowledge of what had occurred that night to their graves. With the loss of the journals and the talisman there was no real tangible evidence of the lost city or it's malevolent occupant and it was very doubtful that the truth about the night's events would be believed. There were some things that were better left buried in the primordial past and this was one secret even Sheldon could keep if he didn't want his sanity questioned yet again.
A/N; Just a note on translation for the curious. According to the Lovecraft wiki, the incantation Sheldon recites in chapter 9 translates as "In this house of R'lyeh dead (or dread) C'thulhu waits dreaming."