Apocalypse Week
Chapter 10: Into the Woods
x.x.x.x.x.
Penny was cranky with Sheldon. She was resolved on the matter, unhappy with the way he had dismissed her ideas. The night before, after slogging through a supper shift at work, she returned to 4A and wasn't even sitting for five minutes before she had to go open her big mouth, blurt out that a fantastic way to save the world against physicists was for them to stop playing with stuff they didn't understand – like how Sheldon told her to stop trying to fix her own laptop whenever she got frozen and incessantly pressed ctrl alt delete, even when it didn't work the first time– and he had glared at her so hard, she thought the force from his eyes was going to break through his cheekbones and attack her. Then, he got all huffy and started insisting that if she had nothing intelligent to contribute, she should just leave.
Penny had tried to stay, really she had, but there was an evil little voice inside her that made her push the issue when it was with Sheldon, and instead of sitting quietly and gesturing for him to go on, that she wouldn't interrupt, she smirked at him and said "It's not my fault you're playing with forces beyond your ken," and then licked her lips when she was suddenly reminded of the line Your Ken can kiss my Barbie and thought, oh, maybe it had subconsciously been there all along.
Sheldon was not thinking along those lines, because he turned a terrible shade of red and all but physically threw her out of the apartment.
Penny was unhappy about that. Heck, she was downright pissed off. So what if her idea went against the whole concept of physics and everything he believed in. She wasn't wrong! She didn't deserve to be given the cold shoulder, she didn't deserve to have her brain blown up, and she certainly did not deserve him telling her to leave and take her archaic, creationist beliefs out of his apartment. She was not someone he could just dismiss like that, like she was of no consequence, no matter how beyond her comprehension the subject matter was.
And for God's sake, she never brought up God. She's just said if you didn't want the world to implode into a pile of mush, you didn't go pressing random buttons on the Hadron Collider to see what happens.
So she went to bed cross and woke up cranky, full on prepared to kick Sheldon in the nads the first chance she got. Oh, she hoped they were doing some kind of full contact activity today, because it wasn't just Omaha on, or Second-Place-National-Junior-Rodeo-Champion on, it was scorned female who knows how to use a gun on, and that was infinitely more frightening.
"You're lucky Sheldon let you out of last night. BOOOOring," Raj trilled. "I tried to listen to my homeboy Bruno Mars for entertainment, but then Sheldon confiscated my iPod."
"Homeboy? Really?" Howard asked. "Isn't he part Filipino and part Spanish?"
"As if you Americans know the difference," Raj sneered. "Brownish skin unite. It's not offensive if I say it."
"I think it's still offensive," Leonard pointed out.
"What do you know, white boy?" Raj asked.
"Hey! I'm Italian."
"That's not even a race," Howard sneered. "Never mind, Jersey Guido."
"Now that's offensive!" Leonard cried.
"Don't look at me, I'm Jewish. Find some white person to direct your ire towards."
"I'm a GIRL," Penny pointed out before all of them could look at her. "We have our own problems."
"Sheldon," Raj decided. "Which is where this conversation started anyway."
"But Sheldon is awesome this week," Howard reminded them. "Even if yesterday wasn't inspired, he's still been pretty great. Less psychotic freak outs, more crazy Apocalyptic fun, and he even got a girl to come."
"Standing here."
"And he hasn't told her off for sitting in his spot, he didn't threaten to string up our comic book collections as obstacles to improve our aim, and not once did he try to teach us how to distil our own urine and then make us drink it."
Raj shuddered. "That was a particularly gruelling experience."
Leonard shrugged. "Haven't any of you wondered since Dune?"
"I try to forget Dune exists, to be honest. Especially in the post Frank Herbert days."
Penny was entirely lost at this. She had no idea what Dune was, and she wasn't sure she wanted to know what Dune was if they drank pee.
Even hearing Howard extol Sheldon's weird Apocalypse Week mannerisms, especially his leniency towards her, didn't put him back in her good graces. It would take much more than that to make up for how she felt rejected the night before.
Of course, Sheldon had just the combination of charm (Sheldon-esque charm, not what anyone else would even call politeness) and bluntness, and his almost superhero-esque ability to say the right thing at the right time, completely unintentionally, to fix all that. He came into the room, a commanding presence that immediately had all of them take notice, hush, and turn their attention to him automatically and without thought.
Penny wasn't sure she'd ever seen that happen before with him. She might be unhappy with him, but a commanding presence was a commanding presence, and she was intrigued by the deference the boys were showing him now. Maybe everyone's perception of Sheldon changed during Apocalypse Week. Maybe it wasn't just her.
Would it fade, she wondered, after a few weeks? All these feelings she had towards him, would she be like Leonard, Raj, and especially Howard, and just forget about Apocalypse Week Sheldon after a few days of normal Sheldon?
She didn't want it to be possible. She wanted to say that it wouldn't happen beyond a shadow of a doubt, but part of her thought it would be easier.
It made her feel so much more cranky towards him.
But then Sheldon was in front of her, and she couldn't entirely blame him for things he hadn't done yet, not when his focus was perusing her from foot to tingling scalp. He looked her up and down, eyes never lingering on one spot to tell her he was looking at anything other than her appearance in general. She still became a little warm at the idea that he was looking.
He tsked. "While it is certainly not one of your more stylish outfits, there is still enough colour to make you highly visible. Do you own anything comparable to our paintball attire?"
Penny didn't think it was time to mention that she had a shiny silver jumpsuit that barely closed in the front, a relic from her tween years when she was a ball of highly competitive energy with disgusting amounts of team spirit. She thought he was probably talking about the colour anyway, what with the big clue of the word 'colour' in his commentary on her outfit. It was good that he said it too, since with the way she was totally cranky and ready to jump down his throat at the first notice, she would have been all over him for thinking her outfit wasn't stylish, but he reminded her that he thought the height of fashion was the more colourful the better.
And hey, it wasn't like she entirely disagreed with him on that. It seemed like they had something else in common and she wasn't entirely sure she was comfortable knowing that her fashion sense could be equated with Sheldon Cooper's fashion sense in any way.
"I will take your silence as a no. There are a number of outfits in the storage room which closely replicate Battle Dress Uniforms. I laid one out on the table in approximately your size."
And he had. It was even hemmed so she still had full mobility in it but it didn't drag or bulk anywhere in a way that would be more detrimental to her safety than wearing a shiny onesie would be. She wouldn't get caught on any tree branches or slowed down too much by a sleeve covering her fingers. This outfit meant serious business.
At that, Penny realized what he had planned for the day and it was kind of wonderful.
It didn't take the boys long to utilize the bedrooms and bathroom to change into their own camouflage outfits, but they didn't leave the apartment right away, oh no, that would be too easy. Instead Sheldon sat them down and taught them how to make various snares, hunting blinds, and other strategic ways to go about hunting and killing in the wilderness.
Penny had actually made a lot of them before, helping her dad as a little girl, but watching his hands quickly make complicated knots was definitely becoming her new favourite thing. She thought that if he could tie them so well, he could certainly untie them. She had a pair of drawstring pants he could practice on, and once he mastered that skill, she had a tiny, sexy little babydoll from Victoria's Secret he could try his hand at.
Where did that come from? she wondered, almost in shock, imagining the ghostly touch of his fingers brushing against her skin.
Penny stared at Sheldon, aghast. Ok, so she had a crush on him, and wanted to kiss him, but this was not the same. She didn't know what to do about a Sheldon who could make her want him, especially since the reverse wasn't true. He didn't want her.
She could sense desperate misery in her future. She could see a whole lot of heartbreak in her future, every time she thought she was getting close to him, she could see him somehow rebuffing her. She could see countless times where she would be feeling intense attraction and fondness for him, only to realize he was oblivious. She could see a last ditch effort to get him to realize what he meant to her, a situation where Penny knew she would throw herself at him physically and emotionally, and no matter how much she wanted it to go differently, she couldn't imagine a scenario where he reciprocated.
Her hands were shaking when she tried to replicate his snare, fingers fumbling with a chill that seemed like it should be entirely imaginary, but was very real and numbing her digits into blocks of ice. He shot her a disapproving glance as her snare unravelled entirely in her hands. Her eyes began to water slightly and she pulled back from the onslaught of tears as much as she was able, knowing her frustrations would be inexplicable and weak, even to them.
There was a metaphor in there somewhere, Penny realized, as she excused herself to go to the washroom and ended up hiding in her bedroom and counting to a hundred until she was composed enough to face him again.
It would take surviving an apocalypse to get Sheldon to love her in return.
x.x.x.x.x.
She ended up riding in the back of Raj's car, a recording of Sheldon lecturing them on cyborgs playing from Raj's iPod hookup. There was no need for discussion, because Sheldon somehow managed to anticipate everyone's reaction.
When talking about how to defeat a cyborg, Howard yelled "Electromagnetic Pulse, duh!" and later Sheldon said, "I know an electromagnetic pulse makes the most sense, but who will make it? Howard, do you believe it to be within your expertise?"
That gave Penny a little insight into why Howard LOVED Apocalypse Week. When facing the Apocalypse, his engineering skills were suddenly key to survival.
"Penny," Sheldon addressed next, "you can say that anything with a base of ninety-nine percent oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus, and 0.85 percent potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium, with the remainder as trace elements, can be killed easily."
"I wouldn't say that," she addressed the podcast.
"That is the composition of the human body," Sheldon reminded them. "You would believe that killing the human element would destroy the cyborg, and even if that were to work, one would have to take into account the potential for data transmission back to the hub. The true danger in cyborgs is they learn from new data provided and are constantly updating their tactics, so in a fight against them, the same idea could not be used twice."
"If they transmit data..." she started.
"Now Penny, I know your next suggestion would be to bring out their humanity again, since they supposedly are, at their core, human; however there is no guarantee that what happened in the eponymous episode Dalek of series one of the new Doctor Who would happen in any sort of reality. However, using their swarm intelligence against them does have potential."
"This isn't live, right?" Penny asked Howard and Raj.
"Nope."
"Then how is he doing this? I mean, when did he have time this week?"
"He probably prerecorded it," Raj suggested. "I know it's weird, he's in your head and bringing up things you were still trying to figure out how to word."
"He shouldn't even have known for sure that I was going to be here!"
Howard shrugged. "It's one of Sheldon's things. He's probably a cyborg himself."
Cyborgs were kind of a big deal to Howard and Raj, and they continued a running commentary on the chances that Sheldon was some kind of terminator vs John Connor, which seemed to be the nerd debate of the week, as Sheldon droned on and on about nanobytes, computer technology already infiltrating modern medicine, and the chances that someday everyone would be part machine.
Penny didn't see why it was such a terrible idea to have the knowledge of the internet implanted right into her brain.
Then he brought up the probability of being hacked.
By the time Sheldon was done his lecture, they were pulling into a dirt road and Penny was feeling distinctly uneasy about the cell phone in her pocket and technology in general. She did not want to become some kind of... cyborg. Cylon. Cyberman.
Good god, how had she not noticed that they were everywhere?
They all scrambled out of the two cars and into an area that was distinctly woodsy, wet, fragrant earth soft beneath Penny's hiking sneakers. She felt like she was betraying a childhood worth of lessons from her father not to have more protective boots on her feet, but she didn't own boots that didn't have three inch (or more) heels on them or weren't manufactured by Ugg. She'd left that part of herself behind in Nebraska with her collection of rodeo trophies, beauty awards, and her Backstreet Boys CD.
Ok, that was a lie. She brought the CD with her.
Penny inhaled deeply, smelling the forest, the scent of decaying foliage and fresh air and living, growing things.
Howard started to cough. "It smells like a dead body lathered in Irish Spring out here."
"It smells like as asthma attack ready to happen," Leonard agreed.
"We don't have the scent of nature in India. All it smells like is curry."
"Seriously? Did you learn everything from your country off American political campaigns?" Leonard asked. "Or movies from earlier than 1980? You're really from Ohio, aren't you?"
Raj shrugged. "It isn't offensive when I say it."
"Antihistamine break," Sheldon offered, dragging out a veritable pharmaceutical nirvana in a travel bag. It included pretty much every allergy medication in existence, accounting for each boy's taste and needs, including Benadryl and eye drops.
"Penny, your epinephrine autoinjector."
"I'm not allergic to anything, Sheldon," she reminded him, looking at the epi-pen he was holding out to her. Each of the boys were already tucking one into their pockets with relief.
"Regardless," he told her, shaking his hand slightly with a clear message for her to take it. "I chose a training ground with a low incidence of bees, but I would appreciate the knowledge that if you were the one who found me face-down on the forest floor, you would not have to turn me over and search my pockets."
She rolled her eyes at his dramatics. Sheldon also said he was allergic to cats, but she once caught him practically cooing over Mrs. Vartabedian tabby in the hallway when he thought no one was looking. She pocketed the epi-pen anyway because it was easier than saying no to him.
As the boys were still combing through the allergy meds like First Years faced with the Hogwarts Express tea trolley, Penny wandered away, testing the area. She took note of natural inclines, which bearing was north, the direction of the slight breeze, and tried to imagine what Sheldon had planned.
She felt like any tracking skills she might have left might be put to use tracking the boys down after they got lost in the woods for hours at a time.
Sheldon promised an accumulation of the skills they had learned, and by promised he meant he had planned an activity where he expected them to be able to draw on a week's worth of skills. Penny wasn't sure what kind of activity they could do that wasn't exactly the same as all the ones before it.
Now that she thought of it, there had been a kind of build-up in intensity of these skirmishes. The first one had been in the living room, which wasn't too difficult and put them all in familiar territory. The second had been in the park across the street, also familiar territory, but with the unfamiliarity of it being outdoors, in the wild so to speak, that was a little outside of their comfort zone. This third one, though, even Penny considered it a little outside her realm of comfort. She wasn't sure if the boys were ready.
They all stood in a semi-circle around Sheldon, listening acutely with various levels of nervousness. Excitement was palpable, but so were fear and unease.
"These are trackers equipped with GPS so you do not get lost. They are equipped to emit a small current if the person wearing it leaves a 200 foot perimeter from this central location, also for your safety. Consulting the tracking system during the game is illegal and it shall remained locked in the car at all times, but if at any time you get lost or are in trouble, you can trigger this alarm that will notify all of us of the danger and we will immediately pause the skirmish and come to your aid. No abusing this system if you feel the only certain danger is death by a comrade."
"Uh, Sheldon. What are we going to use as weapons?"
"Excellent question," Sheldon declared, pulling out the large canvas bag stowed in the back seat. "These vests and helmets are designed to calculate the efficiency of a kill shot. They are as non obtrusive as possible and, while not perfect, do account for the positioning of vital organs and the human circulatory system. Once activated, the sensors will calculate the amount of minutes or seconds the wearer has to live and will then deploy an alarm upon death. They must be worn next to the skin, or as near to as possible."
"Where did you get this?" Howard asked in awe.
"Did you think you were the only one with paramilitary connections?"
"I don't even want to know," Howard muttered, pulling off his shirt and wriggling into the vest.
"I'd rather know," Raj disagreed. "I want to keep my work visa and I would rather not be arrested for being a terrorist and sent to Guantanamo where I will be waterboarded for the rest of my short life."
"That doesn't really happen?" Leonard asked doubtfully.
"You will not be accused of being a terrorist. That is all I can say on the subject," Sheldon responded definitely. "I can assure you on that."
"Yeah? Can you assure my mother? It will be her weeping and clinging to you and getting your shirt snotty if I am disappeared by your government."
"I will assure your mother if you wish it."
"Heck no!" Raj exclaimed. "And have her worry about all the crazy people I am hanging out with in America, corrupting me with your ideas of leisure time and loose, unambitious sex."
"She'd actually comment on our sex being unambitious?" Leonard asked.
"No! I'm commenting on that. My people wrote the Kama Sutra, you know."
"You only remind us every time the subject comes up," Leonard muttered, seeming distinctly put out by Raj today.
Penny listened to all this as she ducked to the other side of the car, using a covering of sparse brush to quickly remove her clothes and put the vest on. She considered removing her bra for a moment, but, well, if she was going to be running around in the wild, potentially jumping out of trees and stuff, she wanted all the added support she could get and she sincerely doubted Sheldon had taken her bra into consideration while arranging for this equipment.
Though that was wrong. He probably had taken it into consideration, as he was the type to consider all angles. He just didn't take it into the kind of consideration Penny secretly wanted him to take her bra into (such as how to get it off her).
The helmets were more like skullcaps in an iridescent metallic colour, which made the bunch of them pretty laughable, standing in a forest looking like a bunch of jaffa or something. But with the Stargate BDUs on, because at least Sheldon didn't play games when telling them how to dress this time, so no one was standing around in flip flops and a Hawaiian shirt because he told them to dress for the beach.
It was actually kind of awesome.
"No Zat guns?" Howard asked, giving Sheldon a disappointed glance.
"Ah," Sheldon said as though he forgot, but Penny was majorly on to his ways now and could see right through him. "The vests are designed to react with a special weapon," he told them, pulling out something that looked like a normal gun to Penny, but with little added parts.
"Oh Krishna," Raj exclaimed. "It's beautiful."
"Are you crying?" Howard asked.
"No!" Leonard exclaimed, clearly sniffing and trying to subtly wipe his nose on his shirt.
"I agree that it does bear more than a passing resemblance to Jayne Cobb's pistol, however I assure you that it is entirely unintentional and is a harmless device."
"We get to use these?" Raj asked, cradling his. "I don't even care if we get arrested anymore. Worth it!"
x.x.x.x.
They scattered into the woods, man against man against man against man against woman, Sheldon proclaiming that any of them could be cyborg or human, there were no teams and no way to tell.
Penny thought the boys were fools, they couldn't even see. He was dressing it up as something pretty, something everyone could get behind: how to defeat cyborgs. It was almost laughable. She could see the larger picture now, and it wasn't comforting. Yes, Sheldon was teaching them how to survive all those scenarios. Zombies, aliens, cyborgs, it all narrowed down into survival, skills they could use for any occasion, any apocalypse, any war.
He was teaching them how to kill humans.
When the realization hit Penny, she had to pause her movements against the chills running up her spine. It was so simple, so obvious, and yet not something she had realized.
Oh, it wasn't insidious. He wasn't encouraging them to go forth and murder, but Penny got the idea that Sheldon realized that out of all the likely scenarios out there, other people were the most likely enemy. Cyborgs? sure. Zombies? sure. Foreign countries invading American soil in a right-out declaration of war? Not entirely impossible, and SoCal was as good of a landing spot as any.
Maybe, though, she was just giving him credit for the thoughts that were in her head, because that was the one that would keep her up at night wondering about. She never really worried about aliens, but she gave a lot of thought to things other people could do to jeopardize her illusion of safety.
The boys might get squeamish if they thought of this as anything other than an exercise against the machine, ideas of electromagnetic pulses circling through their brains, but Penny didn't have any issue with the truth, not when it was clearly an exercise designed to minimize personal harm but maximize the experience.
Hunting humans during the day was an entirely different process than it was at night. During the day, they could see everything around them, but unless they were highly trained or very frightened, that lulled them into a sense of complacency. There was something about being bereft of sight during the night that led to a heightened awareness of the other senses. There was something scientific behind it, Penny knew, but this was where years of training paid off, because she was aware of the limitations of those around her.
She knew they were probably all scared and would be jumping at the barest rustle of leaves, but that type of hyper vigilance would lead to mistakes.
Penny had been worried that her epiphany about her feelings earlier would throw her off the hunt and she would be distracted and incompetent, but the opposite was true. She threw herself into the distraction entirely, and she could feel the gears in her brain switch, realigning the things that were important. Nail polish and Coach handbags gave way to grease paint and ka-bars, the burn of yoga turned into long crouches behind a cover of brush, and love and attraction, well that turned into a determination to survive.
It wasn't that she had something to live for, oh no. She had something to prove, something that had been accumulating for the last 5 days and burned in her gut with a wholehearted desire to win. Part of her, a part she wasn't examining just yet, thought that emerging victorious would solve everything. Another part, the one she was currently embracing, knew that this was not a game. In some convoluted, backwards way, this was very much reality.
Above all else, Penny was a survivor.
Her hunting style had always been more proactive. It had reached a point in her childhood where her father would only bring her on excursions where they were tracking through the woods, searching for prey. On the occasions where her father set himself up in a hunting blind, waiting for the prey to come to him, he left her home. Penny would always fidget and scare away any animals far before they came into line of sight, or she got extremely bored if he was using a long-distance weapon, where any noise she made didn't matter much.
Sheldon told them that the equipment they were wearing was made to reset after fifteen minutes in a "dead" state, but the catch was you couldn't kill the same person twice in a row, that any attacks would be useless, and the other person would then have the advantage. She suspected that was to stop Raj from sitting on Howard's chest for fifteen minutes waiting for the vest to reboot, only to shoot him again. It was definitely every man for themselves, and so far Penny had come across Leonard twice, Howard once, and Raj three times (but had to let him go once).
From her perch in her tree, she could see Howard creeping by. He had his shirt off and tied around his head, the vest shimmering in the sun in a way that had her grinning ferally at the stupidity of others. Sure it was overly warm out, the damp morning evaporating into muggy, humid air, but Penny had very little empathy for stupidity.
She reached out with her gun and shot.
Nothing happened.
Penny frowned, sure her aim had been accurate, but the thing with these guns was even if she had been an inch off, Howard would still live as he bled out from a gut shot.
Howard was now looking around, hearing the small sound that emitted from the gun when the weapon was discharged.
Penny leapt.
x.x.x.x.
Howard was doing ok for himself. He was full of life, bolstered by the idea of his kills in the playing field. He was a baddass warrior, racking up his body count, muscles gleaming in the mid-day sun. In his mind, he replayed all his glorious moves, using them as motivation to be better, to move quicker, and to be the best hunter in these woods.
Raj and Leonard had both been victim to the deadly end of his gun, and once he had gotten Penny by fluke, accidentally discharging his weapon as he had been pretending to be Luke Skywalker and just happened to hit her as she had silently approached him.
It was frightening how impossible it was to tell where she was. She was moving so silently.
He had to be more like her. Maybe he should find some mud and smear it over his skin. That would certainly make him look more like a warrior.
He half-turned at a noise just as something pounced from the sky at him. Howard fell in a jumble of limbs, broken branches digging into his spine. He panicked, thinking it was a real mountain lion for a moment as a weight landed fully on him, all wild blonde mane and hard, compact muscles.
Then it shot him and bolted off into the woods.
x.x.x.x.x.
Leonard heard a scream in the woods seconds before the alarm that signified death went off. He bolted back behind his tree, heart pounding quickly. Had that been close, he wondered? Close enough that he was the next target? His head was reeling and he felt deeply resentful for being there at all. His feet hurt, his hand was cramping from where it grasped his gun, and his eyes were watering from allergens the antihistamines hadn't blocked. It took serious convincing for him to continue his habit of bolting from tree trunk to tree trunk, and the mental stress of it was what was doing him in the most. Still, though, he wasn't doing so badly for himself, years of running from the bully finally coming in useful. He knew how to hide, and once you've been shoved in some jock's locker a few times, contorting yourself into a crevice between rocks was actually preferable, despite the potential for spiders and all.
If fear wasn't taking over most of his concentration, he would be feeling confident that this strategy was working for him. When in doubt, hide. It was his personal motto, and he knew there was a nice ridge he could pull a Hobbit on and burrow into just beyond the next line of trees.
Taking a deep breath to fortify himself against any potential Nazgul hunting him, Leonard dodged out from behind one tree, aiming for another, when something rammed bodily into him, knocking him sideways and to the forest floor. Leonard had no idea what had hit him as he laid stunned on a carpet of moss, but whatever it had been set off the alarm on his vest and then disappeared entirely, like smoke or a living legend.
x.x.x.x.x.
Penny was like fucking Katniss Everdeen, but without any kind of poisonous berries.
x.x.x.x.x.
Raj was still dead from the last time Leonard had shot him, the numbers on his wrist-band making vague count-down motions he could barely see from where he had his hand displayed above his head, the band red to signify his death so those crazy cyborgs would give him a moment of peace without their incessant attacks. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a shape, barely human, uncrouch from beside a tree. It observed him for a moment before slinking back into the woods.
x.x.x.x.x.
Howard was minding his own business, the business of being a badass warrior, and sharpening a stick on a rock, shirt collecting the sweat from his forehead as he worked. It was less a sharp pointy object and more like a sheared off piece of wood, but if there really was a mountain lion out there, he was protecting himself. He felt like Rambo, all sweat and dirt and making weapons out of his surroundings.
It came from out of nowhere, silent and full of grace as feet landed on top of the rock outcropping he was sitting sheltered in. There was barely any noise except for a slight scraping of foot against rock, and Howard wheeled, weapon at the ready.
"You idiot," the mountain lion exclaimed, batting aside the stick. "You could put your eye out with that. You could put my eye out with that. You're not Buffy Summers."
"I thought you were a mountain lion," Howard told her, chastised.
The mountain lion snarled at him and left him dead.
x.x.x.x.
Leonard was huddled under a fallen branch along the side of a hill, completely blending in with his surroundings, when Raj wandered by. What would Frodo do? Leonard asked himself.
Not able to pass up such a perfect situation, he shot.
x.x.x.x.
Raj was getting really good at walking around with his red wristband showing, wishing everyone would leave him alone. He just wanted to go home, and wished people would stop targeting him. He wasn't weak, this just wasn't one of his strengths, he told himself. He did better in a group, and this every man for himself thing was really unfortunate, because he would make great backup to some strong leader.
It was also a little regrettable that these wristbands gave a little jolt when they moved beyond the perimeter, because there had been a small mom&pop diner right before the turn-off to get to these backwoods, and Raj kind of wanted to see if they had any homemade milkshakes. He was tired, and was sick of playing dead, despite the few kills he had got in. The novelty of wearing some kind of awesome wristband like Captain Jack Harkness wore off right around the time he realized he could access all their stats, and he wasn't doing too well. Leonard was doing better.
He paused, standing breathlessly unhinged from a tree from where it was watching him and bolted in the opposite direction. It was huge, a monster of a man, and looked like it ate flesh.
He'd heard tales about the American Bigfoot, but he had thought them all to be legend.
x.x.x.x.
Howard was laying a snare. Only he couldn't remember if the loop went under or over, and he wished he had spent more time listening to Sheldon and less time wondering if these knots would be useable in the bedroom.
Rambo wouldn't give up. He'd never let a simple thing like the inability to remember keep him from survival. Of course, Rambo was not an MIT trained engineer.
Howard took his best guess, and receded back into the woods to wait for his prey.
He caught Raj instead, the snare doing nothing more than tripping him. Howard guessed the loop was supposed to go under, then. It wasn't like hunting was a course at MIT or anything, he decided, advancing on Raj. It might not be the right prey, but it was prey nonetheless.
x.x.x.x.
"Truce," Raj blubbered, holding up his hands at Howard. "Good god don't shoot. Truce. There is some kind of wild thing in these woods and it is coming for me! I've seen it twice, all wild feral eyes. We need to get our friends and leave before one of us gets killed by Yeti."
"You'd be lucky if it was Yeti," Howard snorted. "It's Penny."
"That is not comforting!" Raj wailed in a high-pitched voice.
Howard shot him for leading Freyja the fucking goddess of death right to them. "You'll thank me," he told his friend. "She has no interest in people who are already dead."
x.x.x.x.
At the close of the day, the three boys eventually found each other, banding together into one cohesive unit that could try to protect themselves from all sides. They agreed that the chances of Penny coming for them was slim, as each of them calculated she had been the last one to shoot them.
"We're safe here," Howard decided, somehow thrust into a leadership role, and he knew it was because Rambo had definite leadership qualities.
"That is such a relief, dude," Raj said, sitting on a log. "You don't even know what it was like out there being hunted by a crazed beast."
"I was out there too!" Leonard pointed out, tossing his gun to the ground. He then squealed as his gun shifted upwards, falling back to his feet as a pile of leaves molted, rising from the earth and into the shape of a man.
"I told you there was a Yeti!" Raj screamed.
Sheldon rapidly rose from the forest floor, leaves and debris falling from his form as he stood before them, entirely unexpected. His gun was in his hand and pointed at all three of them before any of them could move a finger.
Raj's vest went off first, as he was the first on the left.
Sheldon moved his aim slightly over.
Before he got the chance to fire, a shadow bolted from the forest and tackled him, both tumbling into the pile of leaves.
"HOLY GOD!" Howard exclaimed. "Epic death match!"
There was a mad scramble of limbs as two shapes rolled on the floor, neither getting an upper hand, and suddenly a vest was going off. Reflexively, all three boys looked down to see if they had been wounded.
Penny stood, arms almost entirely limp with resignation. She held herself as though Sheldon's bullet had been real, and had pierced her armour, unnaturally tired and defeated.
She lost. She hadn't thought she could lose, thinking the element of surprise would surely be on her side.
"That wasn't a very good hiding spot. Did you think I didn't notice the unnatural gathering of leaves from the beginning," she asked, voice hollow. The line had been rehearsed, something she wanted to say to him when she ultimately won, but now she was standing there as the clear loser of their scuffle, and she was unable to help herself from going through the motions.
"You make enough noise when you move to alert the Rangers in the station 50 miles away," Sheldon responded with a sneer. "Did you think I wasn't aware of the moment you set yourself up in wait?"
That was patently untrue. Penny didn't make any noise when she moved. That was why she was so frightening.
"Are you crazy, dude?" Raj asked shrilly. "She's like a ghost. I peed myself alone in the woods when this squirrel ran by because I thought Penny was going to jump at me from a tree!"
Everyone looked at Raj with varying degrees of disgust, and Penny found her eyes immediately drifting down to see if he was telling the truth. Raj seemed uncomfortable with everyone eyeing his crotch, and shifted.
"I meant it as a figure of speech."
"Sorry buddy," Howard commiserated. "Just we never know for sure with you. Besides, you think just thinking about Penny jumping you from a tree is scary, Penny actually jumped me from a tree! I thought I was being attacked by Batman or a mountain lion or something!"
"I killed a mountain lion once," Penny said casually.
The three of them stared at her with various degrees of horror.
Probably not the best thing to say, Penny reflected, to get them off the subject of how terrifying she was. Sheldon's gaze was still locked with hers, direct and with clear disapproval, and it shook something in her to notice that she did something to deserve his criticism. She was slowly emerging from the zone she had fallen into, and it was a little embarrassing to think of all the ways she had attacked her friends.
But, it wasn't her fault she had played the game well.
"Look Sheldon, all of you, I was playing a game, and it isn't my fault I was better at it than any of you were."
"You lost," he said mildly.
"I did not!" she yelled at him, balling her fists and taking a step forward.
Sheldon stood his ground, but his jaw clenched and each of the other boys took a step away from her, almost tripping in their haste to get out of her way. They didn't bother her, they were known to overreact, but the strange vibes and reactions she was getting off Sheldon did bother her more than she could understand.
"Can we go home now?" Leonard asked Sheldon. "Have you demonstrated what you wanted?"
"We are not done for the day, but I believe it is time to depart if we want to arrive back in Pasadena by nightfall. That does not mean we have exhausted today's lesson. Regroup back at the apartment at 20h00." Sheldon gave her this look she couldn't decipher, and moved towards Leonard's car.
Penny turned towards Raj's car. "Oh no!" Raj exclaimed. "I don't feel comfortable turning my back to you right now. I can't spend the entire drive worried you're going to garrotte me with my seatbelt."
Howard nodded.
For once Penny was not impressed by Raj's ability to speak to her. "Come on guys, I wouldn't do anything while you were driving. I don't want to die." Rational speaking in a calm voice was key when dealing with frightened small animals.
"Sorry Penny," Raj muttered, at least looking ashamed. "Even if you are pulling a Damon Salvatore, I need time to believe it."
"I just tried to protect you from Sheldon!"
"You did not!" Howard exclaimed. "Don't even try to make it anything other than what it was. You were going for the kill and taking out your biggest competition. Don't you get it Penny, today you were the cyborg."
"Seriously?" Penny asked, eyebrow rising sharply. When neither of them looked like they were joking, she looked to Leonard, who didn't seem to be able to meet her eyes. At least Raj had been direct. "Seriously, Leonard? How do you expect me to get home?" Her frustration must have been evident in her tone, her voice coming perilously close to cracking on the last word, because Sheldon's head swivelled sharply away from where he was staring pointedly at the car door to look at Leonard.
"You can drive my car, Penny," Leonard offered, all good-guy graces and smiles.
Penny wasn't fooled, but she took the keys. "Do you have a problem sitting in a car with me?" she demanded from Sheldon, attitude clearly compensating for the betrayal she was feeling. It was a game, just a stupid game.
He frowned at her. "Leonard's car does not have a blinking check engine light," was all he had to say on the subject.
x.x.x.x.
They were silent in the car, Penny's hands tense on the wheel. Part of her thought she might be to blame, but a larger part of her was entirely unapologetic for the way she had played. She had been good. She'd been too hot to handle. She wasn't sorry for her obviously superior skills, but she might be a little sorry that she allowed herself to focus so much on survival that she forgot to be gentle with the people she called friends.
Of course, in an every-man-for-themselves situation, friends were non-existent.
"I clearly won," she told him, voice low and dangerous.
"You died twice," he pointed out rationally.
"You hid the entire time!" she told him. "I had three times as many kills as you did."
"If this was solely based on kills, you were clearly victorious. You were also reckless and threw yourself into danger every time the opportunity presented itself. A good hunter is also strategic."
If Penny was being rational, she would have recognised that while she thought she had been level-headed, he was right, she hadn't been as smart as she should have been, and acted impulsively and recklessly a bit too often for something she had been treating as being more than a game. Unfortunately, it was hard for Penny to be rational, when all she wanted was his approval (and to win) and hearing what he thought of her made her feel inadequate, with a sharp edge of fury at his unfairness.
"Of course, you all lost," he continued. "Each one of you took the piece of technology and allowed it access to your vital signs, reassured by assurances it would keep you safe and your trust in the person providing it. Fifteen minutes after listening to an hour-long lecture on the inherent dangers of technology infiltrating the human race, not one of you said no to it when it was presented to you in seemingly innocuous terms."
"Sheldon."
"I'm not surprised Leonard, Raj and Howard were overcome by the tech, but I expected more from you."
"I trusted you!" she said hotly. "That's why."
"You shouldn't."
Penny was silent, allowing herself to think. She knew there had been more to this exercise than what it seemed at first glance, but she'd had it wrong. "So this was a test?"
"Think of it as a lesson learned."
A/N: Quick! Without pausing to think of it, press the review button and tell me your reaction.
Also, join me on tumblr where I occasionally take a break from reblogging to post awesome drabbles about Sheldon stealing Penny from Leonard.