Penny was just finishing her lunchtime shift at The Cheesecake Factory when her phone buzzed in her pocket alerting her to the fact that she had received a new text message.
Group meeting at our place tonight, Sheldon's paying for dinner 7pm L
"Ooh, Sheldon's buying? I'm so gonna be there for that!" Penny fired off a quick reply and slid her phone back into her pocket, completing her shift handover with a brilliant smile on her face.
Raj, Howard and Stuart all received similar texts; Stuart wondered briefly whether he had been sent it in error and then accepted with a shrug. He was sick to death of eating canned ravioli every night and a free meal was a welcome change. He placed a call to his Aunt Verna's house and within a few minutes had arranged for his cousin, Dale to come in and cover the last few hours at the store.
"Okay, Sheldon…what natural disaster has occurred that requires a mandatory attendance meeting?" Raj strolled into Sheldon's apartment a little before seven that evening, his hands tucked into his pants pockets. He paused as he saw the six large whiteboards propped up in the middle of the living room and the stacks of bound papers neatly arranged on the coffee table next to six packages of highlighter pens.
"No natural disaster, Raj." Leonard called out as he placed a plastic crate of whiteboard markers on the arm of the couch. "We'll fill everyone in when we're all here." Leonard glanced around the living room and scratched the side of his head as he tried to think of anything else they might need. "Oh, notepads!" He ran over to the kitchen counter and grabbed a shopping bag, bringing it across to the living room and pulling out a stack of yellow pads and placing them in the middle of the table.
"Not Pictionary again!" Penny's groan of dismay from the doorway announced her presence, "You know for a person that is a supposed genius, Sheldon's sucks at board games."
"Relax, Penny. We're not playing Pictionary tonight." Leonard wandered over to kiss his girlfriend hello, and then Penny crossed over to the kitchen to grab a bottle of water from the fridge. She passed a bottle of low alcohol beer over to Raj who popped the cap off and took a deep swallow.
"Ah, thank you Penny." Raj said with a slight nod of his head and Penny placed a gentle hand on his arm.
"No problem, sweetie. Once upon a time it would have taken you the whole bottle before you could say hello; now it's just one sip."
"One sip, that's practically half the bottle." Howard bounded into the apartment, carrying a stack of pizza boxes in his arms. "That's forty three twenty five, Sheldon. I got Pepperoni, triple cheese, sausage and mushroom and a bag of garlic dough balls. Stuart's got salad and onion rings; he's just taking a call from Dale out in the hallway."
"Oh Dear Lord! He left him in charge of the store again? Don't you remember what happened last time? He got the 'Silver Age' issues mixed in with the 'Batman Chronicles'!" Sheldon was walking back into the living room when Howard arrived, and he now had a look of mild panic on his face. Howard snapped his fingers together to get Sheldon's attention.
"Don't worry, Sheldon; it's Tuesday night, the deliveries don't arrive until tomorrow and when I picked Stuart up from the store Captain Sweatpants was already giving Dale a hand. All he's really got to do is ring up any sales that come in and Stuart will cash up when he gets back." Howard saw the rigid frame of Sheldon's shoulders relax a little as he finished speaking and the other man gave him a faint smile as he sat down on the couch.
"Good, at least we have one less thing to worry about. Ah, that must be Stuart…" Sheldon glanced up as there was a hesitant tap on the door and then Stuart nervously edged his way into the living room.
"I wasn't sure at first whether you had sent me that text in error; I mean you don't normally invite me over for dinner at your apartment." Stuart hovered near the door and Leonard gave him a warm smile of welcome.
"We should've done it a lot sooner, come on in and grab yourself some pizza. Sheldon, do you want to let everyone know why they're here?"
"Not just yet, let's enjoy our meal first. There will be plenty of time to chat a little later." Sheldon selected a slice of the sausage pizza and placed it on a paper plate, before grabbing a handful of napkins to avoid any mess.
"Ooh a mystery!" Raj grinned as he grabbed several slices of the pizza and started munching. "My spidey senses are all tingly in anticipation!"
"Come on Sheldon, don't leave us hanging like that; what's going on?" Penny nibbled on a piece of the cheese pizza and leant forward in the armchair. "You finally make a breakthrough in your research and want us to proof read your paper or something?"
"Heh, good one Penny." Sheldon let out a breathy chuckle and shook his head in amusement. "You never cease to amaze me sometimes…as if you would be able to understand my data."
"Hey! I can spell you know…It might do you good to have a non sciency person read your stuff every once in a while." Penny gave Sheldon a hurt look and he patted her arm.
"There, there…don't get your britches in a twist. This has nothing to do with my research in the slightest." Sheldon set his unfinished meal down on the coffee table and wiped his hands with a napkin. "As it appears that you are all incurably impatient, I guess I can fill you in on a little bit. On the table you will see six stacks of papers, each stack has a letter in the top right corner and I will give you a piece of paper with a keyword. What I would like is for each of us to look through the papers and use a coloured highlighter every time you see that particular word written within the text; using a five bar gate system you will make a note of how many times the word appears in your stack. When you have finished your stack, I'd like you to pass it along to the next person who will repeat the process looking for the word on their card and so on…"
"So, you want us to use a different colour pen for each word?" Stuart asked and Sheldon nodded.
"Yes, every word gets a different colour and a separate tally; I will record the results on the whiteboard and hopefully be able to find what I am looking for. There is one catch…all of you will have to sign a non-disclosure agreement and promise not to comment, disparage or gossip about what you find. Leonard, if you wouldn't mind?" Sheldon glanced over at Leonard, who had already pulled the file out from the desk and was handing the forms over to Penny, Raj and Stuart.
"Why doesn't Howard have to sign one of these?" Penny noticed that Howard was continuing to eat his pizza and he looked up with a grin.
"Already done, m'lady."
"How long is this gonna take?" Raj asked as he handed back his form to Leonard, who slipped it back into the wallet. "I've got an early session booked on the telescope tomorrow and I was hoping to get an early night."
"What we don't get finished this evening, I can pick up tomorrow; I've booked a few days off work."
"Wow, I guess this must be really important to you huh?" Penny whistled between her teeth as she scrawled her loopy signature across the bottom of the agreement. "I can't remember you voluntarily taking a day off unless it was a movie premiere or one of your Star Wars memorial days."
"Extremely important." Sheldon said quietly as he leant forward to neaten up one of the stacks of papers. "I wouldn't have asked the rest of you to help if it wasn't the case." Penny noticed Leonard rubbing Sheldon's shoulder comfortingly and the way Sheldon looked back at his roommate, even Howard seemed to be a little quieter than usual.
"Let's get started then, I'll clear away these boxes so that we have room to work." Penny started stacking up the pizza boxes and salad cartons, moving them over to the kitchen counter so that anyone could grab another slice if they were still hungry. She spritzed a little cleanser on a piece of kitchen towel and ran it over the coffee table to make sure that no stray droplets of sauce would mar the paperwork.
"Alright then. Everyone grab a stack of papers and a coloured highlighter and let's get to work. Penny, your papers are marked 'A' so please use that on your five bar gate ie. A = 5, Raj, you've got B, Howard C, Stuart D, I'm E and Sheldon's F; when we swap Penny will start a new tally looking for her word on the next batch of papers." Leonard handed out the notecards with the keyword written on it and Sheldon crossed over to the whiteboard.
"Penny, what is your keyword and what colour highlighter have you chosen?"
"Um…Harvard and pink." Penny watched as Sheldon selected a vivid pink marker from the box and wrote her keyword across the top of the first whiteboard.
"Raj?"
"Neurobiology and yellow." Again Sheldon selected the corresponding marker from the box and wrote the keyword across the second whiteboard.
"Howard?"
"Primate Addiction and I'm gonna go for green." Sheldon nodded and set up the third as Stuart called out his word, which was Chancellor's Award and his colour choice of blue, Leonard just said 'name' and selected orange and Sheldon had the more challenging task of skimming the papers for any town within a twenty five mile radius of Pasadena and the black marker. Only Howard, Leonard and he knew the full details of the search and Sheldon wanted to keep it that way for a little while longer. The group bent their heads over their papers and soon there were little colourful bands appearing on the search results as they worked their way through their papers.
"Leonard, there twenty five cities, towns or suburbs within the twenty five mile radius of Pasadena; this could take a while." Sheldon murmured as he checked his list, Leonard looked up from his own stack and peered over Sheldon's shoulder.
"Yeah, but once we've narrowed it down to those within say a twenty minute car ride to one of the universities…"
"Hmm…yes, that could work." Sheldon pursed his lips thoughtfully and started cherry picking towns from his list, concentrating on those within a reasonable driving distance from either UCLA or CalTech.
"Okay…I've got thirty nine hits on mine." Raj stated as he waved his tally sheet in the air. Sheldon set his papers aside and crossed over to mark Raj's findings under Neurobiology.
"Sixty four for mine." Stuart called out and Sheldon noted that one the board.
"Okay, the two of you swap papers and we'll see if we get any closer." Sheldon waved his finger between Stuart and Raj and they swapped their stacks, bending back down to pick up their highlighters.
"I've only got ten." Penny said mournfully as she finished reading the last page, and Leonard looked up interestedly.
"That's a good thing, Penny."
"It is?" Penny perked up at the news, and Leonard nodded.
"Yeah, if everyone else finds their words within your highlighted section then it narrows down the field even more. Good job!" Sheldon scribbled Penny's total on her whiteboard and turned around to face her.
"No one else has finished their section yet, so you'll just have to wait a while until either Howard or Leonard finishes up searching for their word."
"I'm done, seventy four for me." Howard capped his highlighter and Sheldon looked over in surprise.
"Really, that many? I thought for sure that one would have been our secret weapon."
"Yeah, either one person has racked up a lot of web chat or there's a lot more people studying primate addiction than we first thought."
"Hmm…" Sheldon frowned a little as he entered Howard's totals on the board and then waved over at him. "You two go ahead and switch over. Leonard, how are you doing?"
"Not as good as Penny but a little better than Howard; thirty eight so far, but I've still got another four pages to go."
"Okay, so far I've got ten for Glendale, six for Pasadena and another thirteen that just state Los Angeles." Sheldon turned back to his stack and picked up his pen again. "This is going to be a lot harder than I first thought; a lot of this stuff seems to be social media feeds."
"Yeah, I've seen a lot of that as well." Howard tapped his current set of papers and looked up. "It always amazes me how some people like to put every little detail of their life on the internet. Listen to this one, it's a Facebook feed…" Howard selected a passage that he had just finished reading; "Thank goodness that's over for another year! Just got back from the annual banquet and some of the team once again managed to get themselves lost on the way back from the party…a little too much alcohol and not enough food in their system. Some very funny speeches again this year and we were even treated to a little song…Here's hoping that the capuchins are extra noisy in the morning!"
"Hmm…interesting; does the feed have a date stamp on it?" Sheldon asked as he tapped his pen against his bottom lip.
"March, why?"
"The person could be referring to the Chancellor's award banquet and the little song could relate to my own unfortunate speech…Capuchins are a small primate."
"Yeah, I'll circle it just in case." Howard nodded and scrawled a large circle around the passage and continued to read.
A few hours later and things were looking more promising, Penny had finished checking five out of the six stacks of papers, as had Raj. Stuart had left a short time ago to check on Dale and cash up, promising to call back in as soon as the store was securely locked up for the night.
"That's it…I'm done. Twelve on that final section." Raj yawned as he made the final highlight and pushed his papers to the side. "As much as I would love to see what all of this means, I'm going to have to get some sleep. My telescope slot is in five hours and I still have to make my final calculations."
"Thank you for your assistance, Raj." Sheldon rose up to enter Raj's final tally and stacked the papers carefully on top of Penny's completed pile.
"No problem, see you tomorrow at the comic-book store?"
"I'm not sure, it depends how well the rest of this goes." Sheldon tapped the pages and Raj nodded as he collected his jacket from where it was flung over the back of Leonard's desk chair.
"Goodnight then."
"Yeah, night Raj." Leonard waved over from where he was checking the last few pages of Sheldon's original stack. "Five."
"Really? Just five?"
"Yup, that's all." Leonard neatened up the edges of his pile and glanced over at Howard who was skimming through the last of the stacks. "Howard, what about you?"
"Twelve." Howard checked his tally sheet to confirm and looked up with a grin. "I think we're getting there. If Leonard's only got five that match Sheldon's location then we're almost certainly looking at five definite possibilities. We just need to see if anyone else's colours are also in those particular sections."
"I've only checked five stacks, what's the last one?" Penny checked her notepad and Leonard rifled through the stacks to find the one that Penny hadn't checked.
"This one, it's the one that Sheldon had so it took him a little longer."
"Okay, I'll check it now and then they're all done." Penny uncapped her pen and started running her finger over the paragraphs. "Hmm…nothing so far."
"That's good…keep going." Leonard glanced over at Sheldon who was nervously biting his lip as Penny kept reading.
"Ooh, there's one!" Penny highlighted one section and looked up with a grin. "It's got blue, green and yellow, but no black…but that might be because there isn't a location mentioned in the article." Penny bent over the pages again as Sheldon skimmed through the rest of the stacks looking for where the most colours were found. A few minutes later, Penny looked up with a grin. "Four…and most of those were next to sections already highlighted."
"Howard, warm up the search engine if you will." Sheldon grabbed the stack from Penny and compared it to the last stack that Leonard had checked. "Please search for the following names; Amelia Marie Burton, Amie Elliott, Amy Johnson-Shaw, Amelie Elisa Martins and Amy Farrah Fowler; see if you can find a picture or more information."
"Okay…here's the first one now; Amy Johnson-Shaw, graduated Harvard Medical School in 2001 with a degree in Neuroscience, went on to join a research team in San Francisco in 2003…Oh, it's a picture of her wedding to a Daniel Shaw in 2006." Howard swivelled the screen and Sheldon glanced at the image, shaking his head.
"Not her." Leonard picked up a pen and scrawled a large black cross over her details and nudged a stack across for Penny to do the same.
"Alrighty…Amelia Marie Burton…graduated Harvard in 2003, went straight into working at a private laboratory in LA…no photos but she did receive a Chancellor's Award at this year's banquet." Howard looked up at Sheldon with an encouraging smile and Sheldon glanced over at Leonard.
"Put that one down as a possibility, Leonard. Go on Howard."
"Next up Amelie Elisa Martins, graduated Harvard in 2004 with a doctorate in Neurobiology, received the Chancellor's Award this year…oh." Howard's tone grew softer as he swivelled around in his chair, "Sheldon, this one is taken from a piece in the Monrovia Daily…a few days after receiving the award, Amelie was involved in a head on collision and she didn't make it."
Sheldon's face paled at the news, he didn't even want to consider whether that was why he hadn't seen Amy in his dreams since the night of the banquet. He felt Leonard press his arm against his side and drew strength from his comforting presence.
"Show me the picture."