Chapter Eighteen

Sam convinced Dean and Gary to head out for a walk with Jimi, telling them that it would do both their Mr Average bodies good. It was important that they avoided the fates suffered by the other de-hotted guys, who had succumbed to desperation or despair, he told them seriously – but more importantly, it got them out of his hearing; Dean had found a willing audience for his Chicks I Have Banged stories, and although he would be entirely capable of strangling them both, he would really rather not have to deal with the inconvenience of having to dispose of them afterwards.

He headed out for a run himself, letting the task run in the background, the way he had sometimes done at college, where an essay topic or assignment question could bubble away in his brain while his body did something else.

The why of it, that was the key to identifying the culprit; identify the motive, and you narrowed the data set 'Evil Bastards' down to the subset of 'Evil Bastard Who Could This', then find the intersection with the subset of 'Evil Bastards Who Would Do This', and somewhere in there would be 'Evil Bastard Who Did This'.

Hot guys, turned into not hot guys. With mathematical precision. Turned from statistical outliers to data points smack bang in the middle of the bell curve, in multiple ways. Somebody had made a lot of effort to finesse the curse, not just to diminish some guy's hotness, but to make him a true statistical representative of the average. Why?

Somebody with a grudge against hot guys? Or somebody with a grudge against smartasses? Somebody who took the Deadly Sins thing seriously, and was out to punish Pride? Or if it was some religious nut, was it a crusade against casual hook-ups?

The averageness of them was somehow important; he decided he'd have to have a deeper look into how that sort of information was collected and collated, and how it was analysed.

Heading back towards their room, he made a mental note to be very careful how he phrased the explanation of what he was doing – he could probably refer to sigma values reasonably safely, but the moment he said 'variance' or 'absolute deviation', Dean's mind would head south of his belt and he'd end up wanting to poke out his own eardrums with the nearest statistical anomaly.

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Sam reached the room just as Gary and Dean were returning with Jimi. From the sound of it, the conversation hadn't flagged at all.

"...So if you're ever in Nevada, you should look her up, 'cause Mistress Amanda could teach cowboys a thing or two about ropin' a bucking bronco..."

"So, guys," Sam cut in hurriedly, not wanting to be collateral damage as Dean held forth to his apparently eager audience, "How was it?"

"Great!" beamed Gary, "Your brother is a really interestin' guy to talk to!"

"Not sure 'interesting' is the word I would've chosen," Sam muttered.

"Hey, we've been out and got the ol' large muscle groups movin', right Gary?" Dean said breezily as Gary nodded. "Flipped the foxtrot-word for Jimi, breathed the fresh sea air, got the heart rate elevated, of course, watchin' the progress of the bikini migration can help with that..."

"That's... great," Sam sighed, resigned to the fact that Dean was going to be Dean on the inside no matter what he looked like on the outside, "So, I've had an idea about your curse, I'm gonna do some more research."

"After lunch," Gary consulted his watch, "I got that covered!"

"If you have a box full of egg white alleged omelettes, I will not be happy," Dean cautioned.

"No, no, definitely not," Gary shook his head. "I promise, no omelettes."

Gary was as good as his word, fussing with the microwave, then presenting the Winchesters with their own meals.

"So, uh, what exactly is this?" asked Dean, poking suspiciously at the contents.

"Exactly what it looks like," Gary said firmly, "I promise."

Dean gave him A Look, suggesting that he could not say what he thought it looked like out loud in front of small children, maiden aunts or clergy of an unworldly disposition.

"I think it's great, Gary," Sam beamed, "You're really organised. Chicken, broccoli and carrots, brown rice, this is a balanced meal, Dean."

"The meal may be balanced," Dean muttered, "I aint so sure about the mind that thought it up."

"Sunday is food prep day," Gary told them, "I do all my meals, so I don't have to mess around with it, I can just spend time at the gym during the week."

"You certainly do give the impression that this is some sort of religious observance," Dean noted brightly.

"It's all organic, and it's steamed, absolutely no added fat," Gary assured them, reaching into the cooler again, "But, I brought these along." He brandished three bottles of brown goo, and smiled winningly. "My own secret weapon!"

Dean eyed the bottle he was given with the demeanor of a bomb technician instructor who's just been handed a practical assignment by his least promising trainee. "What exactly is this?"

Gary's tone became conspiratorial. "Well, it's not the sort of thing you'd expect," he bubbled with enthusiasm, "But I've had real success with this!"

"Yeah, but success at doing what?" Dean wondered.

"So, what's in it, Gary?" asked Sam, opening a bottle and sniffing. "Can I smell... can I smell chocolate? It smells like a chocolate thickshake."

"Okay, you guys are probably goin' to think I'm cheating, here," Gary's grin was actually shit-eating, "But give it a try! It's milk, and drinking chocolate, and some malt..."

"Awesome!" Dean twisted the top off his, and took a long swig.

"...and powdered liver."

Dean Winchester was no stranger to horrific situations: he'd seen his house burn down with his mother inside, he'd seen his baby brother die, he'd watched those he loved being possessed by demons, he'd spent forty years in Hell.

And now, he paused, bottle raised to his lips, as he realised that he'd just taken a large gulping drink of something containing liver, and had another mouthful of the stuff waiting to go down.

There was one of those moments of silent stillness in which the universe pauses, and holds its breath, waiting to see what's going to happen: it's the tense, fulminating stretch of time before the boot drops, the excruciating silence that follows a revelation of betrayal, the drawn-out moment between the closing of the switch and the detonation of the charges, the ominous stillness of the flash before the searing heat and the thunderous blast front of a nuclear device follow like a door being slammed in Hell...

"It's skim milk, and no-fat drinking chocolate, and just a pinch of malt," Gary went on breezily, blithely unaware of the fission device he'd just armed, "But mostly liver – it's serious nutrition, that stuff, at least 50% protein, lots of iron, and the macronutrients are better than supplements..."

With the sort of stoic resolve with which the Queen of England can sit through three days of folk dancing and not order anybody summarily executed, Dean swallowed the mouthful.

The moment drew out, intolerably tense, as Sam waited, wondering whether he'd just be vaporised on the spot or be torn apart when the Mach stem obliterated everything.

"That's... amazing, Gary," Dean eventually said in a calm voice, "Really? Liver?" Gary nodded eagerly. "Amazing. Because it doesn't taste like what I'd expect of something with liver in it."

"I know, right?" Gary chattered on happily as he tucked into his own lunch. "It's probably not clean enough for you guys, but I found that it helped me find just a couple more pounds, some of the guys said I should, like, sell it, or something..."

Gary left shortly after, promising to return later, and Sam hit the laptop.

"That was, uh, diplomatic of you," Sam noted carefully, "Not spitting out Gary's liver drink. I thought you were gonna spray it all over the room."

"I may not be a neat freak like you," Dean observed gloomily, "But I aint a complete asshole, either. If I'd done that, somebody would've had to clean it up. And we'd have been trapped in a room that smelled like liver for the rest of our stay here."

"Did you mean what you said?" Sam went on, "About how it didn't taste how you'd expect?"

"Oh yeah," Dean nodded, "That was one hundred percent true. It didn't taste how I'd expect."

"Because coming from you, I'd have thought..."

"It tasted even worse than I'd expect," Dean cut Sam off, slamming the bottle down in front of his brother. "Now, get Jimi's dinner bowl, and pour it in for him to drink."

"What? Why?"

"Because I'm not convinced that it's safe to tip that crap down the sink, that's why, I'd rather play it safe, and have it defused by a half-Hellhound digestion."

"No, what I meant was, I got a new angle on this case I want to check out, why can't you feed it to Jimi?"

"Because I will be busy," Dean told him shortly, getting up and heading for the bathroom.

"Doing what?" asked Sam.

"Brushing my teeth. And my mouth. And my tongue. And my tonsils. And, if I can reach, my stomach."

"There was nothing poisonous in there, you know," Sam chortled.

Dean picked up the other bottle, and banged it down at his brother's elbow. "You drink yours, then tell me it aint poisonous, bitch."

Sam eyed the contents.

"Yeah, okay, just don't use my toothpaste."

"Toothpaste? Fuck that, I'll need to use your shower wash. Maybe mixed with some gun solvent."

"You melodramatic jerk."

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While waiting for a slow page to load, Sam took a minute to download the data from Dean's activity tracker, and smiled widely.

"Dean, you've increased your distance, and your steps, again!" he enthused, "You've done ten thousand steps!"

"Well, anything to shut you up," Dean waved a hand nonchalantly.

"No, seriously, Dean, that's a great effort!" Sam continued. "That's the target that a number of health authorities suggest we should all aim for." He gave his brother a grateful smile. "I can't tell you how glad I am that you're taking this seriously – I don't want you to die before we fix this."

"That won't happen, Sammy," Dean told his baby brother firmly. "I'm too awesome for that. When I die, I will leave a devastatingly handsome corpse, I promise you that. Hell, I promise me that."

By the time Gary returned, Sam was frowning at the web pages of a number of sites claiming to list various statistics about the population.

"What are you muttering about, you weirdo?" asked Dean, as he and his fellow curse target returned to the Book Of Gary.

"About what constitutes 'average'," Sam replied, not looking up. "There are different ways to define 'average', depending on what sort of information you want to get out of your sample population."

Gary looked up. "Huh?"

"Don't ask!" Dean hissed urgently. "Don't ask, Gary, don't..."

"I mean, doesn't 'average' mean the, uh, you know," Gary waved a hand uncertainly, "The, uh...average?"

"Well, yeah," Sam answered, going into what Dean recognised as lecture mode, "Generally, it means unremarkable, ordinary, but in mathematics, in statistics, in order to make a generalisation about a sample population, first you have to decide what exactly you want to get out of your calculation of the 'average'..."

"You fool!" Dean wailed dramatically, "You've doomed us both!"

"...Assuming you have a normal distribution," Sam went on, "You can get an 'average' by looking at the median, or the midpoint, or the mode, or the mean – say for example, you have a group of, oh, say, beetles, and they all have different numbers of spots, and you want to make a generalisation about the spottiness of this particular species of beetle, maybe to compare it to the general spottiness of another species from a different environment..."

Gary looked at Dean doubtfully. "He often talk like this?"

"I'm afraid so," Dean sighed glumly. "He had a nasty case of education as a kid. I blame myself – I stole him his first scientific calculator, when I should've been teaching him to steal booze."

"Median, midpoint, mode, mean," recited Gary. "Sounds like something Harry Potter would say."

"Nah, Sam would totally be Ravenclaw," Dean scoffed, "That was where the eggheads usually went. Now me, I'd be one hundred percent Griffindor."

"I always thought that 'mean' was, you know, being nasty to someone," Gary mused. "What assholes do."

Sam groaned, and let his head fall into his hands. "There are days when I don't want to live on this planet anymore," he complained. "Let's just say, there's more than one way that you could've been, uh, average-ised, and I'm trying to work out which one, and why."

"Don't really matter if you're on this end of the curse," Dean observed glumly, turning back to the screen of the other laptop. "So, Gary, where were we?"

"Uh, let's see," Gary consulted his diary, "Oh, yeah, so, it was legs and back day, so I loaded up with one of my secret weapon shakes, and look, I deadlifted an extra pound for three reps!..."

Gary's detailed documentation of himself rattled on, washing over Dean, who had three tabs open on the screen, looking at the final selfies the other presumed curse targets had taken. Something niggled at his attention...

"...So we went for a drink, I was totally pumped," Gary continued, "But not too much, because I had a cardio session the next morning, and that's a total killer with any sort of hangover, so..."

"Gary, where did you drink?" Dean was staring at the screen. "The night before you were, uh, de-hotified, where did you go? Which bar?"

Gary flipped through the dog-eared pages. "Same place as you," he answered, "Same place we played pool. Lots of hot chicks there."

"So did they." He indicated the screen, then explained what he'd spotted to Sam. "These guys all took selfies up until they were turned unhot, right? Well, look at this. All these pics were taken at the same place. Where we played pool. I recognise the décor."

Gary looked confused. "But, you'd already been, uh, de-hotted when we played," he pointed out.

"That was our second visit to that bar, Gary," Sam told him, "We went back to see if we could find anything wrong with the place."

"And we didn't, not then," Dean noted, "But we now have a connection. All these guys, plus me, plus you, they all had a drink in this bar the night before they woke up unhot." He smiled in grim triumph. "Gentlemen, we have identified ground zero."

Aaaaargh! Real Life keeps running up to me and whacking me with The Unpleasantly Solid Parsnip Of Mundane Reality, and it's scaring poor little Beau-Ponty, but feed him some reviews, and we'll see if we can coax him out - now they've worked out the connection, it can only be a Chicks I Have Banged story or two until they figure this out...