It didn't take long for Jocelyn to get settled into her room at the Sanctuary. She didn't have many belongings to settle. There was a duffel bag full of clothes, which got unpacked into the dresser. That filled one drawer. Her gun (not the police issued one with the smiley sticker on the bottom, but the illegally obtained one) and knife went into the drawer in the nightstand, easily reachable from either the door or the bed.

Unpacking took about five minutes.

Next up, changing out of the hunting clothes that made her look like a tramp and feel like her feet were going to go on strike until she gave them a pay raise and better working conditions. The tall boots went in a pile by the door. The short dress in a pile in the closet. She replaced them with well worn tennis shoes, cut off jeans, and a loose fitting red tank top.

That took another five minutes.

Sigh.

Jocelyn collapsed back onto the bed. A broken spring greeted her spine in a poking manner. Something rustled in the wall. Jocelyn listened, then sniffed. Amidst the smells of chlorine from the pool, which she was still getting used to, mildew in the shower, and various scents of the inhabitants of the Sanctuary and their rather exotic pets, she smelled something that belonged only in sewers.

It was a rat.

She could live with murderers with skunk pets and mildewy showers, but she was not going to live with a rat in her wall.

-An hour later-

What did one do with a dead rat anyway? The hole in the wall she could fix with a little spackle. Disposing of the rat would actually be more difficult. She didn't even know where the garbage canisters were in this place.

Maybe a tigger pet would want it.

On a corner of a piece of newspaper, she scribbled a note. “I left a present for you in the fridge.” She used the rest of the paper to wrap the present and put Calley's name on it. “Kaylee”. The note she left on the floor by his door, since she didn't have any tape. She made her way towards the kitchen with the present itself.

The kitchen staff were somewhat busy, and someone pointed out that she should be sitting out in the dining room if she was going to join the family dinner for the evening. Ah, okay. Right after putting this in the fridge... and Jocelyn scampered out to the dining room to avoid any more harsh glaring. Note to self, don't get in the way of the kitchen staff.

...and family dinner? Really?

(Calley rises to the challenge in I see your rat, and raise you...)

"Have you seen Stephen anywhere?"

Kaitlyn asked this of each person at the table, and each one shook their head. "'Fraid not, kid," one of them said.

"Are you sure?" her voice was a little bit strained now.

"Look, don't worry about it," said a man with a handlebar mustache, "he's a smart kid. He's bound to show up sometime soon. Why don't you just sit down and wait for him? They're already serving dinner, too."

"But... his mom's gonna kill me if she --"

"Stop right there." handlebars interrupted. "He's three years older than you"

"Two years," Kaitlyn snapped.

"Whatever. He's older than you. That means that he's supposed to be smarter than you."

Kaitlyn raised a finger as if to protest this, but handlebars wouldn't let her get a word in. "So you shouldn't be the one looking after him. It should be the other way around. Now, is it your fault that he decided he didn't wanna eat dinner?"

She looked at her feet. "...No?"

"Exactly. Problem solved." A rather large hand reached out and patted her on the head, before the man turned back to his buddies. "Now, as I was saying, Leo..."

This didn't seem to satisfy the little girl. She looked around the dining hall for a while, almost at a loss for what to do. Then, she spotted the woman with the red tank top enter the room, and decided to ask her.

"Hey," Kaitlyn approached her, "Have you seen Stephen anywhere?"

Then, something occurred to her. This lady looked lost, as well as unfamiliar. She was probably new to the Sanctuary. Some more information was in order.

"Umm... he's about this tall," Kaitlyn indicated with her hand that Stephen was a few inches taller than herself, "and he has a long pink tail that he makes room for by cutting a hole in the back of his pants. Also, he can turn into a rat. Oh – and I'm Kaitlyn."

Jocelyn was suddenly not hungry any longer. Family dinner? Maybe some other day.

“A... rat,” she parroted. On the outside she plastered a helpful and friendly smile on her face. On the inside she was running through every moment of the previous two hours.

The rat from her wall had not acted like anything except an ordinary rat. If it had been a boy, it would have had plenty of chances during their encounter to shift back to a person. Also, it hadn't smelled like a mutant, a boy, or anything other than a dirty rat that had been crawling around in dirty places and eating garbage.

She was pretty sure the rat in the refrigerator was not a shifter mutant. Almost definitely sure.

Almost.

“So... Kaitlyn. Does Stephen have a room at the Sanctuary? We could go check to see if he's at home.”

She could also check to see if his belongings smelled like the particular rat that had ended up in her wall. Not that she suspected he would. In fact, that might not even be necessary, since Stephen probably was in his room right now.

What were children doing running around the Sanctuary, anyway? This was clearly no place for children.

She started toward the door, completely bypassing the dining room table where people were starting to gather for dinner. She was definitely not hungry.

Kaitlyn followed red tank-top lady out of the dining hall. Even though she probably hadn't seen Stephen anywhere, it was nice to have some help finding him. She gave the lady an appreciative smile.

"I already checked his room," she said, "but maybe he went in since the last time I looked. Let's go check."

The Orderling led the way quickly through labyrinthine hallways and up several flights of stairs, passing right by a handful of mutants who were on their way to dinner. Rumor had it that dinner was going to be something good today, a rare and beautiful thing when there wasn't some special holiday that called for it. But Kaitlyn had more important things to think about than food right now.

Her stomach grumbled loudly in protest. Yes, she had much more important things to think about.

Things such as the identity of this mysterious new lady who was trying to help her find Stephen. It was a really nice thing this stranger was doing, skipping out on dinner to help like this. As the pair trekked on through the sprawling maze that was the Sanctuary's living quarters, Kaitlyn broke the silence:

"Say, what's your name? And what mutation do you have? Mine makes me kinda like a bomb, and I can blow stuff up with it. But don't listen to what people say about me; I'm a lot better at controlling it than I used to be."

Or at least she was better at avoiding things that tended to make her lose control. But such details were too... involved for the kind of small talk Kaitlyn was going for right now. And with everything that was going on right now, it really wasn't that important. Of course.

Jocelyn tried to be patient with the slow pace of this short legged little child. She tried not to rush ahead, since she didn't actually know where they were going. She tried not to think too hard about the possibility that Stephan might... not be home.

And then something made her stop short, if only for a moment. This girl was a walking bomb?

A child with an exceedingly dangerous mutation was being raised in the Sanctuary, surrounded by murderers and thieves, listening to them brag about their kills as if it was just another day at the office... or whatever these people talked about at their family dinners.

They are raising a weapon. This girl could be the next Isabel Duskmoor or Rena Whilver.

The thought sickened her.

But she had to keep going. She had to keep walking as if nothing was out of the oridinary. She had to keep living as if she accepted everything the Order was doing. She had to answer the girl's question before the silence got awkward.

“I have the nose of a wolf. I can smell things really well and track them. It's how I picked my name: Lupe. I'm hoping to use my nose to help you track down your friend.” Hoping really hard, because she didn't want to be someone that killed innocents, even if it was by accident.

“How did you come to be living at the Sanctuary?” If little Kaitlyn had been kidnapped and brought here against her will, someone was going to have hell to pay. Possibly even if she hadn't been.

So, she was called Lupe, and she had a super-nose. Kaitlyn smiled at her. "That's great! You should be able to smell him from really far away. He smells really bad, kinda like an actual rat. I can tell when he walks into a room, just 'cause of how gross he is, so it should be easy for you." Kaitlyn hoped Lupe would give him just as much of a hard time about this as she did herself. That kid needed to take a shower or something. And he clearly never used the soap that she bought him for Christmas. A heart-felt gift if she'd ever given one.

>>"How did you come to be living at the Sanctuary?"

Kaitlyn had been asked this very question hundreds of times, and she had an answer prepared: "Lori adopted me after my father died, and now I live here with her," she recited.

This answer wasn't strictly true, but it helped her sleep better at night when she could trick herself into beleiving it. Everything would be a lot easier, a lot better if that man was dead. But, as Calley told her on her first day here, the police knew that she was missing. They had posters with her picture on it and everything. Somebody had to have told them about her being missing, and that was probably her dad.

But all that stuff was behind her, anyway. That was over a year ago. Hopefully, the police had forgotten all about her by now, and hopefully, there wasn't anybody else around who would recognize her face from those posters. Though there was always a chance that somebody would.

The tiny Orderling ran to one of the doors and grabbed the handle. "Here's his room," she said. It was unlocked. When she pushed it open, she got a noseful of nasty. The room still looked empty, it still had his dirty, often tattered clothes randomly strewn about the room, and it still smelled like a garbage bin. She could only imagine how much the smell must be bothering Lupe.

Kaitlyn walked in tentatively, careful not to step on any clothing, lest her furry little friend be sleeping under there in rat form. "Stephen? Are you in here?"

There was no immediate response.

Stephan's hygiene problems: further proof that children and the Sanctuary just shouldn't mix. Why did no one but another child try to teach him about how to take care of himself? Jocelyn thought that it was something she could easily handle along with whatever Order duties she would be assigned.

That was provided Stephan was still alive. If he wasn't... words would not describe how awful she would feel. She would make it up to him; she would make sure that every child at the Sanctuary was properly cared for and taught appropriate safety procedures.

That included Kaitlyn, who swore that she had been adopted by someone named Lori who also lived here. Children were not especially skilled liars; they certainly told enough of them, but there was always that fear of being caught that gave them away. Telling a convincing lie was not something that came naturally to them.

Kaitlyn, who up until this point had been cheerfully telling the truth, smelled of just a little bit of nervousness when she recited her residential status. Lupe raised an eyebrow at her, but didn't say anything. She could do more poking around later. She didn't want to scare the girl away from being her friend by poking into a past that the little girl obviously wanted to keep hidden. There would be plenty of time for that later.

They arrived outside Stephan's room, though she could smell it long before they ever got there. It smelled very much like rats and sewers and mildew and who knew what else. Once the door was opened, Jocelyn almost gagged. The sheer amount of smell was overwhelming. It took a few breaths before her nose was able to adjust to the onslaught before she could enter.

The room looked as terrible as it smelled. The piles of clothing wriggled as she stepped near them.

As her nose got used to the onslaught, she started to be able to pick out the individual smells: rats, at least three of them; stale pizza crusts; rotting banana; ants in pop cans; a pancake with syrup; raw putrid chicken; a liquified potato; and sweat, blood, and tears.

Lupe picked up the cleanest looking article of clothing she could see: a t-shirt draped of the bed post, labeled “Rock Paper Nuke” and thoughtfully inhaled. The scents were all mixed up. A mutant boy had worn it, but a whole host of rats had also gotten their scent all over the thing. She had no way of telling if the boy's scent morphed into one of the rats' scents.

One rat skittered from under the bed to a hole in the wall.

She turned to the little exploding girl, indicating the direction the rat had gone with her chin, “Kaitlyn, we've got to catch them all.”

"Uh... okay."

Kaitlyn didn't relish the idea of actully touching a rat. With her bare hands. Rats were gross, no matter what Stephen said about them. But if grabbing one would help her find her friend, she would do it. Slowly, cautiously, she crouched down, then laid on her belly to look under Stephen's bed, doing her best to avoid landing on something nasty.

A pair of rats were lying under Stephen's bed, possibly sleeping. She also noticed some stale, moldy bread of some sort under there, a white plate from the dining hall with a partially eaten stack of pancakes, and a small hole in the wall. At least she wasn't feeling very hungry anymore. Kaitlyn very carefully reached out and tried to grab one in each hand.

They must have heard her coming. One of them bolted out from under the bed and into Stephen's closet. Kaitlyn managed to catch the other one by its tail, then used her free hand to get a firmer grip around its torso. "I got one!" The rodent wriggled and writhed in her grip as she dragged it out from under the bed, then held its struggling form out towards Lupe for her to see.

"What do we do with it?"

After this was over, Kaitlyn was going to wash her hands. Thoroughly.

Kaitlyn was the first to successfully catch one of the things. Jocelyn was finding it much more difficult to catch one when it was with her bare hands rather than the point of her knife. When the little red head held up her wriggling prize, the undercover cop couldn't help but wrinkle her nose. This really was gross. She looked around the room and grabbed a t-shirt and held it out like a sack.

Carefully, so as not to touch the rat if she didn't have to, Jocelyn pulled the shirt up around the rat and tied it at the top. Hopefully it would be a little while before the rat was able to wriggle or chew out. For good measure, Jocelyn tossed the makeshift sack into a dresser drawer.

“Now it's my turn I suppose.”

Jocelyn dove at a grey shadow that was sneaking its way into the closet.

After almost half an hour, thanks to the power of teamwork, Lupe's makeshift bag held four rats, all of which constantly struggled to escape. As much of an accomplishment as this was, Kaitlyn was convinced that another one had managed to escape through one of the holes in the wall. They weren't going to be able to catch it.

One rat bit the girl after she snatched it up from the rotten food and foul-smelling garbage beneath Stephen's sink. With a loud pop, the rat flopped onto the yellow-stained tiles of the bathroom floor. It struggled for a while, squeaking loudly and making feeble attempts to get to its feet, but it soon gave up. Kaitlyn looked at her finger, and saw that the bite had drawn blood.

She came out of Stephen's bathroom gently cradling the rodent in her hands. "I got the last one. And I think I hurt it," she admitted almost guiltily. It laid perfectly still in her hands, except for the slow rising and falling of its chest.

"What do we do now?"

Jocelyn really wanted to wash her hands, or maybe even take a shower or two.

She glanced at the still, but still breathing rat in Kaitlyn's hands. Honestly at this point she wasn't really too worried about him unless he turned out to be the kid they were looking for.

“I suppose we tell them that if they are Stephen, they should shift back to human. If that doesn't work we can drop them off somewhere far away from here so they don't find their way back in again.” Normally she would have just killed them, but considering their current status as possible humans, she didn't really want to add to the rat bodies in the refrigerator.

The super sniffer leaned down to poke at the one in Kaitlyn's hands, really wishing that she could use a stick instead of her finger.

“Hey, you a mutant? You should shift back if you are.”

While she was at it, she took sniff of him, trying not to make a face while she did it. He smelled like a rat, or course, but he also smelled like all the places he'd been and all the things he had touched. Drywall and insulation of the Sanctuary walls, moist concrete and washed up garbage of the sewers, and more strangely, the distinct smells of two different people who had touched him within the last few days. One was a mutant boy, probably the rat shifter Stephen. The other was a girl, another mutant with a psychic scent. That a rat should be touched by humans at all, but for this one to be touched by two, or rather four now, humans in a short period of time seemed very odd.

What she didn't smell was the scent of newness, of an animal body that had simply begun existing suddenly with a fresh slate of smells. This rat had been a rat for quite some time and didn't seem ready to change back any time soon.

“I don't think this one is Stephen,” she said, reverting her gaze to Kaitlyn. “Let's check the others.”

It was the same for all of them. They all smelled like rats, sewers, and the same two mutant children.

She shook her head at Kaitlyn when she had finished checking the last one, then added, “Stephen doesn't have any friends, does he? I mean... other friends who like to pet his rats, too?”

"...Not really. He has friends like me, and we all make fun of him for playing with rats so much." Kinda like how they made fun of her for blowing up the place so much. Kaitlyn glanced at the injured rat, which she had carefully lain on Stephen's bed. "Rats are gross."

The door to Stephen's room flew open, revealing a little boy with misshapen pink ears, a tail, and a fierce overbite. He tried to say something with a sqeaking sound that one might call a voice, but it was more than a little hard to hear.

POMF

The rat on his bed flew off, a chair was knocked over, a bedside table began to wobble, and an unlit lava lamp fell to the floor and broke, releasing its colorful contents onto the carpet.

Stephen surveyed the scene in his room, shocked. "...I guess I kinda deserve this. But what are you doing in my-"

"Where were you!?" Kaitlyn demanded. People who go missing for hours in the middle of hide and seek and make her miss dinner don't get to be the ones asking questions.

"I didn't have a choice!" he immediately got defensive."Letitia did this mind thing and then I was at her home."

"Who's Letitia?"

"She's... I think she's my girlfriend."

The dual revelation of Stephen's safe return and his having a girlfriend seemed to overwhelm Kaitlyn. She started to ask a question, then stuttered to a halt halfway through the first syllable and defaulted to staring at him incredulously. A girlfriend. Stephen? Stephen with a girlfriend? How does... who would... what?

"Shut up, Kaitlyn!" He almost laughed. The look on her face was priceless. "So, why are you in my room?"

Jocelyn blinked at the doorway. A boy stood there. She hadn't smelled him coming, because she was already surrounded by his smell in this room.

Stephen. The rat shifter.

“Haha!” Jocelyn let out a laugh. She hadn't realized how tense she was until it was suddenly released. She could just take him and spin him around the room... but that would be strange. She was a strange adult catching rats in his room. Add in spinning, and he'd have every right to call the cops on her. Already did, actually. They were breaking and entering, after all.

She settled for a handshake. She didn't even care that he pet rats. Her hands had just as many germs on them at the moment.

“Kaitlyn here was worried about you. I was helping her look for you. I'm Jocelyn, a new resident around here. Welcome back.”

She didn't care so much about Letitia or whomever he was talking about, she mostly just cared that he was alive, which meant she wasn't a murderer. From now on before she attacked animals, she'd be double checking. She couldn't keep the relieved smile off her face.