Troy Barnes finished his voyage around the world on a warm, calm September morning, swimming through the surf to climb onto the welcoming sand. His shipmate followed, and then Abed and Annie, exhausted but content as they rode the waves in to shore. They walked at a leisurely pace up the beach, making their way towards Shirley's apartment to celebrate with the rest of the group. Still, as they rode the elevator up to their floor, Annie worried about the reunion she had been so excited to arrange—for just one reason: she might need to explain to the others how she and Abed had already run into Troy. At the last minute, she made up her mind to interrupt Troy and Abed's conversation to come up with a cover story, but Troy was already running ahead in his eagerness to see everyone.
The issue was put on hold when no one answered the door. Annie momentarily assumed that they would have to wait outside, thinking the spare key must be at the bottom of the Atlantic after their impromptu midnight swim, but Abed produced it from a zippered pocket. She grinned, impressed by his preparedness. Inside the apartment, they saw no sign of Shirley.
"Maybe she went for a walk?" Troy wondered.
Annie glanced around and shook her head grimly. The doors to both guest rooms were wide open, not how they had left them yesterday. Entering her room, she found her bags open, her meticulous organizational system disrupted. Annie's time with the FBI had taught her to recognize the signs of an intruder. She glanced at Abed. "I think we might be in trouble."
There was surely nothing to seriously worry about; Shirley Bennett was on the case. As Abed would point out, TV detectives always coincidentally stumbled onto a mystery when they went on vacation. Though the apparent disappearance of both Abed and Annie was alarming, no doubt everything would turn out to be fine. And maybe tracking Annie down would level the playing field between them after Annie's little caper in Washington won her investigative bragging rights for a while. Not that that was important. Lacking hard evidence, the first step was to locate possible witnesses, or maybe suspects. It would be just typical of Jeff and Britta to lure young innocents into disreputable late-night activities and not even bother to invite her.
Shirley knocked loudly on the door of their motel room. After a minute, a disheveled-looking Jeff Winger opened the door. "Shirley? You know, some of us like to sleep during our time off—"
"Where are Annie and Abed? I know you wouldn't corrupt them with your late-night carousing in bars and not tell me about it."
"Wha—I don't know, I left them at your place last night! Aren't they still there?"
There went that theory. "They were last night, but I haven't seen any sign of them since."
Jeff rolled his eyes. "They probably just went for a walk, you know they've both been hanging out on the beach expecting Troy to show up any minute."
Shirley shook her head. "Their beds don't look slept in and I couldn't find any of the clothes they were wearing yesterday."
Britta walked up behind Jeff. "You went through their luggage? You know, the fourth amendment—"
"It's my apartment, Britta! If you want to protect them, help me figure out what happened to them. One of my towels is missing, so they might be on the beach. You walk up to my place. Jeffrey, come with me; they've been exploring that nature reserve, we need to make sure an alligator didn't get them."
Annie scanned the beach with trepidation, wondering what the others had thought of her disappearance. Shirley had apparently been concerned enough to go through her luggage; she must be out looking for her and Abed now. Not seeing their host among the scattering of early-morning beachgoers nearby, she glanced back to Troy and Abed, who were keeping lookout atop the dunes (LeVar had wisely chosen to wait in the lobby while they dealt with explaining things to the study group). "Should we call Shirley, or wait for her to get back?" she asked.
Abed considered for a moment. "Meeting her in person would be more dramatically compelling, but I suppose calling to announce Troy's arrival might divert her attention from questioning our absence."
Annie reached for her phone, but Troy interrupted, pointing to the south where one of the people in the distance had started running towards them. To her relief, Annie recognized Britta and saw that she was alone. "Back to plan A," she announced to Abed, who nodded.
After giving Britta and Troy a minute to talk, the couple walked over to them and explained to Britta what had happened in the last few days. As Abed had predicted, she was pointedly self-congratulatory about suspecting the tension between them, but eager to help.
"I think Jeff will handle it OK," she reassured Annie. "He wants you to be happy and he cares about Abed."
"Right now I'm worried about Shirley—I think she's noticed that we're missing, and if she found out we were sneaking off to, you know…"
"Yeah, she's already arranged a search party. She woke me up and sent me here to look for you. She's going the other way down the shore with Jeff." Annie gasped in alarm; she hadn't realized how seriously they would take the matter. "It's all right!" Britta said. "I'll cover for you. I've got this. C'mon, let's call them before they send the Coast Guard after you."
With no specific leads, searching the nature preserve might have seemed a daunting task for two people. It included much of the land along the bay shore west of the condo development, as well as the coast along the point of land to the south, and the inland territory was largely swampland with a maze of unmarked trails. Shirley wished her kids could have flown out this week; Elijah and Jordan had explored the whole area, they could have guided the search party. But the missing towel suggested that they should start on the beach, and Shirley had led Jeff to the spot where the main road ended just inland from the dunes. The two of them climbed upward to get a wider view. Before they could see over the top to the ocean, Shirley noticed something that didn't fit: a piece of orange cloth fluttering in the sea breeze, the bright color contrasting sharply with the subdued landscape of sand and sparse grass. "That's the towel that was missing," she told Jeff. Previously sarcastic about their search, her friend now looked concerned; here was concrete evidence that Abed and Annie had disappeared out here. The towel was caught on a tall tuft of grass, looking like it had been carried over the top of the dunes by the wind. Shirley scrambled the rest of the way up, Jeff close behind.
From up there, they could see for miles along the beach. The crowds were just beginning to arrive to the north, next to the street; in the other direction there were only a handful of walkers among great flocks of seagulls. But Shirley's eye was drawn to the water, where a sailboat sat at anchor a short distance beyond the breakers. It looked deserted, but familiar. "That's Troy's boat!"
"Oh, well that explains everything," Jeff said in a relieved tone. "They went out, ran into Troy, and stayed with him."
"Not everything. It doesn't explain what those two were doing sneaking out of my apartment in the middle of the night."
Hearing footsteps outside the door, Abed nudged Annie, who had fallen asleep on his shoulder almost as soon as they finally sat down on Shirley's couch. Though he was exhausted too after staying up all night, Abed couldn't sleep yet; he needed to see the rest of the reunion episode play out. Shirley and Jeff's arrival could make a good finale: the remaining members of the study group all gathered again, with LeVar as the guest star filling Pierce's spot for the moment. The one remaining concern was the fallout from his new relationship with Annie, but maybe that could wait until they were back at Greendale.
Troy was waiting at the door to greet them; Shirley hugged him, while Jeff congratulated him and offered his advice on the legal complications of inheriting Pierce's fortune. But after the greetings were done, Shirley looked sternly at Annie and Abed.
"You two had us all worried. How did you manage to disappear as soon as Troy showed up?"
Britta winked at them, enthusiastically taking on the secret-keeping role. "Annie saw Troy's boat from the balcony, so she woke Abed up and they went to find him. They would have told you, but they didn't want to disturb you."
Abed saw Annie wince. Given the opportunity, he would have warned Britta that Shirley might have been hurt to be deliberately left out of such an expedition, but it wasn't likely to matter. Too late he realized that Britta hadn't known just where Troy had landed. Sure enough, Shirley immediately questioned the story.
"I saw where that boat is, you couldn't have recognized it from this far away. And why would you bring one of my beach towels and then abandon it?"
Annie spoke up. "Uh, listen…I wasn't sure how to talk to you guys about this…"
"Have you and Abed been dating and kept it a secret from us?"
In retrospect, this wasn't a surprising plot device, but Abed hadn't seen it coming. He made a note to be more aware of Shirley's observational skills as well. Between that and Annie's career plans, the study group could make an elite detective agency if they ever needed a reboot to keep things fresh.
"How did you know?" Annie asked, fidgeting. There was still the issue of Jeff's possible reaction to sort out.
"I've been seeing you two holding hands and whispering to each other all week! Besides, it just makes sense. You share an apartment and already have weird in-jokes nobody else understands, and you'd be really sweet together."
"Awww, thanks!" Annie turned towards Jeff. "We didn't really mean to announce it like this—"
"Don't worry about it," Jeff cut her off. "You deserve someone who can make you happy, and Abed's the first person I'd trust to do that."
"And there's the lesson in trusting our friends," Abed announced. "This storyline proceeded to a tidier conclusion than I expected."
"Great," Jeff replied. "Then maybe we can stop being meta and start celebrating Greendale's newest world-travelling multimillionaire, Troy Barnes!"
Shirley headed for the kitchen; Abed had seen her baking a cake with a world map on it a couple days ago. As the others followed, Annie snuggled up to Abed again. "I guess we didn't need to worry so much about telling the others," she whispered.
"Yeah. I'm hoping that will clear the way for us to have more epic genre-based escapades when we get back to Greendale. And maybe we can work on Time-osaurs 3 together."
Annie smiled and came in for a kiss.
"Cool. Cool cool cool."