Monroe

"How did you find me?" Jack asked, as he disentangled himself from Alex's hug.

Normally, he would be absolutely fine with an extended hug from a handsome, brilliant man, but Alex was sort of a kid brother, and also, completely straight.

"Dude, you know that the bracers have cellular functionality, right? If you can have an app track down your kid's location via their cellphone, you don't think that I can't get your location down to what aisle you're in?" Alex shook his head.

"That's fair," Jack agreed. Truthfully, he hadn't really thought about it. The bracers were amazing, but much like a cell phone, it was easy to forget everything that was behind them and just use them.

"So, what are you up to? Besides shopping, obviously, I can see that, I mean, why else would you be at Costco? Although you could be running an experiment. One time, Casey and I were having an argument about mayonnaise, and it some how came around to us wondering who in the hell needs like a dozen massive jars of mayonnaise, and if there were just like, regular people buying them, or if it was all restaurants and stuff, so we came to Costco and we stuck some tiny little GPS transmitters that we snuck out of the lab on all off the twelve packs of gallon jugs of mayonnaise, and then we monitored where they ended up at."

Jack could see the look of confusion on Helena's face as it shifted from confusion, to shock.

"It turns out that it's almost always small restaurants or food trucks, which threw us a bit because a lot of those folks operate out of their houses, you know? So the mayo went to a residential home and sat there, but then a few days later, it started moving around the city, so we used a couple of minutes of satellite time from one of the keyhole satellites that were passing overhead anyway and figured out they were food trucks, but there were two of them, the twelve packs I mean, that ended up at houses and stayed there, which we thought was definitely suspicious, so we checked them out, and one of them was an older couple who do foster care, with like, twelve kids, so I guess there's a lot of chicken and egg salad sandwiches, but the other was a single guy, forty-two years old, a used car salesman, or he was back then anyways. Casey was curious, so he checked into him, and it turns out that the guy would buy a twelve pack of one gallon jars of mayonnaise every four weeks or so, and he'd been doing it for over four years, which was when he moved in there." Alex shook his head. "We snuck his name onto a couple of watch lists. I don't know what he was doing, but there's clearly something wrong with that guy."

Helena's expression had changed to one that combined both outrage and horror.

"Definitely," Jack agreed lightly. "So, why did you track me down? You could have just called, and we could have met up someplace where they serve food that isn't already precut into bite size morsels, no offense to the lovely Helena here," Jack continued, flashing Helena smile number fourteen, which was a combination of flirty and comforting.