"Flowers for Sheldon..."

"Flowers for Sheldon...Parts XIV, XV..."

Flowers for Sheldon..."

Summary: Leonard and the gang discover Sheldon has taken advantage of Penny's request for help with her binge drinking to make needed improvements...

Disclaimer: BBT is all Chuck Lorre's...

Part XIV...

A fuming Penny, next to Leonard in his car, the rest of the gang, in the rear...

"I cannot believe Stanley let me go...After I redesigned the whole operation to be at least 2.3 times more efficient..." Penny glared...

"I think that might have been it right there..." Leonard noted...Sheepish look at Penny's hard stare... "I mean, he is the manager..."

"I understood the social dynamic and the possible awkwardness of the situation...I offered to tell him in private...But he kept staring at me and telling me he'd 'like to see that'..." Pompously sarcastic tone... "So I went and showed him..." slightly impish grin...

"Sounds like you were perfectly within logical reason to me..." Sheldon noted... "Though the idea of any thought being wasted on such an operation seems beyond pointless to me..."

"I just wanted to help...I didn't want any credit...I told him that..." Penny shook her head..."And then everybody else staring at me...He said they were all afraid of me...How could they be afraid of me?...Have I changed?..."

"Not a whit, your Highness..." Howard, obsequiously...

"Howard?..." she frowned... "We've discussed this?..."

"Right...Sorry..."

"The man obviously suffers from low self-esteem...Understandable in one whose greatest accomplishment is to produce a series of low nutritional value meals at inflated prices...And responded to your initiative as a threat to his position...To put it in colloquial terms, you scared the shit out of the little prick..." Amy noted...

"Exactly..." Leonard nodded... "And the others just weren't used to your doing things like that...But you haven't changed, fundamentally, Penny..."

"You might profit by my experience here, Penny...I having contributed so much to your intellectual gain..." Sheldon began...

"Oh, Lord..." Leonard groaned...

"When I first began to use my gifts, I'd no idea the effect such dazzling abilities as I had been entrusted with would have on ordinary folk...Though I remained the same, unspoiled child of nature I had been on emerging from the womb...To my surprise, many I encountered soon became uncomfortable in my presence...Even at times, hostile...As if they dreaded dealing with such a superior intellect...In time I found myself actually ostracized from much of my local society..."

"Gee...Unbelieveable, Sheldon..." Leonard, sarcastically...

"Uh-huh..." Penny, rolling eyes... "Sheldon, I said I understood the social dynamic here..."

"Yes and failed to deal with it, obviously...Do you know how I dealt with such behavior?..."

"You ran away to a university and after getting a Ph.d, took a job where you'd never have to deal with real people and holed up in an apartment with the only person who could bear your unspoiled child of nature persona...Within limits...?" Penny, pleasant tone...

"Definitely within limits..." Leonard noted...

"Well, yes...But I also learned to ignore such fears...And focus on doing the things I knew I could do better than anyone else and that would, in the fullness of time, help the most people...In my case that being a fuller understanding of the universe...Until our current 'Operation Penny', the only task worthy of the gift I'd been given...I accepted that it was more important to make use of the gift I'd been given, rather than worry what anyone thought of me, despite my empathic eagerness to please those around me..."