Monroe

Chapter Three Hundred and Sixty-Two. Alex.

"You need to recognize that this is a problem," Amanda said.

"Just once?" Bob asked.

"We're on vacation," Amanda repeated. "Now when you saw all those people wasting away, you had to act, we all understood and supported you. There isn't any reason for you to delve a Dungeon when you're on vacation."

"I just want to see what it's like," Bob protested. "I wasn't even going to delve it for experience, just at one level over for crystals."

"Bob, you spend twelve or more hours every day in the Dungeon, just grinding away," Bailli said. "I know why you're doing it, and I know you have the ability to prevent mana density sickness, but it isn't good for you, and if you're going to keep up that pace, you have to take breaks. Going into Dungeons when you're taking those breaks is counterproductive."

Bob sighed as he leaned back in his chair. He'd suggested that maybe they should tour the Dungeons on the island, and he'd been surprised at how vehemently the group had objected.

"Ok," he said, raising his hands in surrender. "No Dungeons."

"Right, so let's focus on relaxing, yeah?" Jessica said. "I'm super keen to visit the wrecks tomorrow, plus we've got that barbie tonight."

"Sixty-two million likes," Dave crowed as he walked into the room, showing his phone to Amanda.

"You might be in the lead for Monroe, but I've got Bob at forty-nine million likes," she replied, offering her phone.

Bob closed his eyes for a moment. With a sigh, he opened them and looked at his friends. "What, exactly, has generated all of these likes?" He asked.

"Well, we've been gone for a while, so your facebook accounts have been dead, and we wanted to put some fresh pictures up," Dave explained. "Our phones are waterproof, so I tried to get some shots of Monroe underwater, and I nailed this amazing picture of his face just as he had entered the water." Walking over, he showed Bob the aforementioned picture.

Monroe was front and center in all of his majesty, his ruff spread out like a halo as the massive Maine-coon appeared to be smiling for the camera as bubbles streamed from his nose.

"Ok," Bob shook his head. "That's a really amazing picture."

"Ah, but I got a great one of you," Amanda beamed as she offered her phone for inspection.

Bob blinked, then squinted at the photo. It showed him, shirtless and in flower print board shorts, looking out over the ocean at sunset, his chest, shoulders, and arms gleaming with moisture as the last rays of the sun illuminated him.

"How did you take this?" Bob shook his head. "When did you take this? I look like some one who missed the last ferry home and is going to huddle on the beach under some palm leaves for warmth."

"You look like the forgotten Greek god of body cologne," Jessica disagreed.

"Oh relax, I didn't post that one," Amanda grinned.

"You shouldn't either, I don't need that much competition," Jessica winked.

"I posted this one," Amanda said, swiping on her screen.

The image shifted to another underwater shot, this one with Bob wearing a shirt as he was drug through the water by Monroe's collar as the super-sized kitty tried to grab a massive Sun Fish. The photo clearly illustrated that Bob was attempting to restrain Monroe, and failing, badly.

"Ok, that one isn't that bad," Bob admitted.

"Aside from the likes, most of the comments are kitty worship, although there are a few asking how he's keeping his fur dry underwater," Amanda said.

"Maybe you could have waited till after we were done with the vacation?" Bob asked. "I mean, it can't be hard for people to figure out where we are based on these."

"Anyone who would waste their time looking for us isn't likely to have the money or ability to actually get here," Amanda said.

Bob opened his mouth to reply, but was interrupted by an electronically amplified voice that reached into his Summoner's Redoubt.

"Mr. Whitman, are you on this beach?"

Bob was joined by the rest of the group as they moved to look out the window that faced down the beach.

There was an impossibly large man with a megaphone looking down at a tablet.

"You had to say it, didn't you?" Bob muttered as he stepped out the door and started walking down the beach towards the man.

The man turned towards Bob, then looked up from his tablet. "There you are!" he shouted as he sprinted across the sand.

Bob stopped walking, preparing to bring out Jake if the man turned out to be hostile.

"Where were you hiding? The armbands register that you've been on this beach a lot, but they keep disappearing, which is weird, but what's even weirder is that they're still communicating, which makes no sense, because if they're communicating, we should be able to triangulate them, right?"

Bob sighed, lowering his guard a little. Now that he was in front of him, Bob recognized his voice.

"Good evening Mr. Thompson, I see you were serious about coming to see us," Bob said.

"Just Alex, Mr. Thompson was my dad, and yeah, of course I was serious," Alex's smile could have served as a lighthouse. "I've got to get my hands on that data, I mean, dude, it's going to be so important, and also I really wasn't supposed to let anyone have those, so I need something to show for it."

He continued to smile up at Bob.

Alex was almost seven feet tall, and if Bob had to guess, was tier six. He had flaming red hair, light blue eyes, and he had more freckles than anyone Bob had ever seen.

"OH, you're wearing it!" Alex grinned and grabbed Bob's arm, craning his head to inspect the armband. "Had to make the band bigger, I told them that as people tiered up they'd get huge and the strap wouldn't have enough adjustment, but they told me that day was years away, and not worry about. Sure it's technically been over a year, so, years I guess, but I was right, the original band totally wouldn't fit. Man, there sure are some gnarly scratches on this thing, I can't wait to see what kind of abuse it's seen."

"Can you let go of my arm, please?" Bob asked.

"Yeah, sure, sorry, you aren't big on human contact stuff right? I remember reading that, shitty childhood, sorry about that, it had to suck, oh, hey, this your team right? Your peeps? Hey Jack! Long time no see! Are you still building communities and stuff on the otherworld because that sounded super cool, and I had a few ideas about using the mana catchment rituals that people used to use to build Dungeons to take advantage of mana that was heading to a Dungeon and redirecting it into another ritual. I'm not sure about the applications, but you might be able to generate power with it, but no will let me slap it on top of a building near a Dungeon to test it."

Alex had let go of Bob's arm, but he continued, his voice deepening. "No Alex, you can't put an untested ritual formation on top of a Dungeon, it might destroy the Dungeon, or everything around it." He shook his head. "I wasn't suggesting we test it in downtown LA, ya know? Just that we test it somewhere. Bureaucrats, am I right? No interest in scientific advancement." He pulled a cable out of his backpack, which unwound as he reached over and tapped it against Bob's armband, where it clicked into place magnetically.

"So, can I get a picture with Monroe?" Alex asked hopefully.

"I always wanted a cat, but my Mom is allergic, so it was a no go all through highschool, and then she had to drive me back and forth to college because I was too young to stay in the dorms, and I moved out for my doctorate, but she was diagnosed with cancer six months in, so I moved back home to help her."

Alex was half buried in fluff as he stretched to give Monroe a full pet from head to tail. "Man, he's so soft, like, I've been able to love up on a few kitties, but he takes the prize. I bet it's because of how powerful he is, isn't it? Such a mighty kitty."

Monroe accepted the supplication as his rightful due.

Bob was happy that Alex's verbal onslaught had been directed toward another target, at least partially.

"He's so huge," Alex said happily. "Have you ever ridden him? I bet that was totally a he-man moment right?"

"No," Bob shook his head. "I've never done that."

"I wond-" Alex was cut off as his backpack beeped loudly.

"Man, you must have an absolute ton of data!" Alex bounced away from Monroe and ran to his backpack, where he yanked on the cable, freeing it from Bob's armband, and therefor freeing Bob.

"I'll let you get into that," Bob said, and he dropped through a portal into his Summoner's Redoubt, where he collapsed into his chair.

"He's a bit much, but he's a good guy," Jack grinned as he swirled some sort of blue drink in his glass.

Bob looked out the window at the excitable researcher. "Someone, who is not me, should bring him a pavilion or an umbrella."

"I suppose that's on me," Jack sighed dramatically. fre𝚎w𝐞bn𝗼v𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝗼𝚖

"The thing about Alex, is that he's stupidly smart," Jack explained. "Graduated highschool at thirteen, bachelors at fifteen, masters at seventeen, doctorate at nineteen. Just an off the charts genius, you know?" He shook his head. "I met him in the library when he was working on his masters, and I thought he was an extra scrawny freshman. I started talking to him, and then he started talking back." Jack grinned. "He's got no filter, but he was kind of adorable, like a puppy. Also, he was incredibly lonely. He'd been fast tracked since he as nine years old, completing multiple years of school every year, so he only really had a chance to interact with adults, and he was just starved for conversation with someone closer to his own age about anything not related to school."

Amanda frowned. "Jack," she said warningly.

"Amanda," Jack said reprovingly. "I'm a bit of a rake, but I'm not that." He shook his head.

"What did you do?" Amanda asked.

"I took him to a party and got him laid, of course," Jack replied. "He's super straight, I mean like a flat zero on the Kinsey scale, and I was twenty-two at the time, so sixteen was a little ick anyway. Fortunately, there were a few young women, freshman of course, who were happy to throw themselves in front of that particular bus."

"So," Jack continued, "I'd apparently endeared myself to young Alex, and we kept in casual contact. Unsurprisingly, DARPA scooped him up while he was working on his doctorate, and afterwards they stuck him in lab. He's one of those rare minds that works well in a vacuum, so having a beer with me every couple of weeks was about the only social contact he had outside of his Mom. These armbands were all him, and I know he's come up with some other things that don't have practical civilian applications."

"I'm surprised that DARPA just let him take off to Hawaii," Dave said.

"They probably didn't," Jack grinned. "This isn't the first time Alex has escaped from his lab and into the wild, as it were. Some very serious men once came to my door after he'd disappeared for a week or so. It turned out that DARPA hadn't been responsive to his requests for a field test of a project he was working on, so he rented a boat and took his equipment out to test it himself."

"He must be something special if they keep him around," Bob said as he checked Monroe, who appeared to be passed out on his coffee table, having devoured an entire sunfish. Bob had hoped that if the feline of mass consumption was in a food coma, he wouldn't cause any mayhem at dinner.

"Pretty much," Jack agreed. "Chances are good that he'll have an updated, upgraded version of our armbands after he analyzes the data and has some time to fix any deficencies"

"They're pretty damn indispensable already," Dave shook his head. "We aren't going to have to give them up, right? I mean, I can't imagine DARPA is happy to have them out in the wild."

"Chances are good DARPA doesn't even know we have them," Jack said. "Even if they do, it's not like they can make us give them back. It's in their best interest to let Alex improve them. We're not exactly enemies of the state or anything."

"Actually, I think I am?" Harv said thoughtfully.

"No, you're more persona non grata," Dave said. "The United States Government doesn't want you here, and if they discover you are, they'll ask you to leave, and deport you if necessary, but you haven't taken actual hostile action against the country so you're not an enemy of the state."

"The President knows, and she didn't say anything," Bob frowned. "I'm pretty sure she knows."

"Harv is fine, no one even remembers that little incident," Jack said dismissively. "Anyway, I was thinking that since we've got him here, we should definitely turn him lose on the Freedom."

Bob considered that suggestion. His immediate reaction was to say no, but why? It wasn't like they done anything revolutionary. DARPA, and most likely Alex, had provided the transceivers that could interact with ongoing magical effects. Linking them to sensor arrays wasn't exactly ground breaking, and they'd likely already considered that application. Further, Bob was a physics guy, Dave was networking, Amanda was marketing, Jack was management, Jessica was a veterinarian, and Mike was a detective. None of them were experts when it came to computers.

"If you're sure you can trust him, I don't see why not," Bob said.

"We just need to make sure he has someone with him to remind him that he can't take anything important apart," Jack said reassuringly.

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