((ooc: Continued from Mondragon Labs.))

“Like stale corn flakes,” Calley said suddenly, quite satisfied with himself. The three members of his support team didn’t even glance at him. It had been a short ride, but somehow, they were already used to this sort of thing.

“We’re here,” Charles pointed out from the driver’s seat of the black jeep. They were parked three blocks away from the Sanctuary, as per Hunter’s orders. They had been for the past two minutes.

Calley waved him off. “Yep; I know. I’m thinking.” Thanks to the jammer on his mini-backpack, the cameras at the Sanctuary were a moot point. So technically, he could probably just waltz in, drop the disk, and waltz out. But that wouldn’t have been very fun. And besides, the Scary Boss Man had suggested monkey form, and Calley was still a little uneasy from that whole jeep-flipped-over-and-held-up-by-his-tail incident. He still wasn’t quite sure what that had been about. After all, you know what would have made the ride over here more comfortable? A pillow. He didn’t understand why the Scary Boss Man had been so dead-set against the pillow. But if the Scary Jeep-Flipping Boss Man suggested monkey form, Calley was more than willing to do monkey form. And besides, Doc Jimmy had made a monkey-sized backpack, and everything.

Calley had finally decided on what was strange with Doc Jimmy: the guy had a personality like stale corn flakes. They looked normal, but when you tried them out... they were just wrong. Wrong like a monkey-sized backpack. Wrong like having an exploding cat collar just sitting around the labs, that day Calley had invited himself into Hunter’s apartment and Hunter’s payroll in one fell swoop. What had the guy been planning to do with an exploding cat collar? Give the Humane Society a little surprise?

“Is something wrong?” Charles prompted. They’d been parked for four minutes.

“Nope. Still thinking.” Calley replied. The rooftops looked like fun. He’d always wanted to make a mad midnight dash across the city rooftops. “Hey, what’s under the seats?”

“Nothing’s under the seats,” Nicholas told him firmly, from the front passenger seat. “Are you going?”

Calley bounced on his seat. “I’m pretty sure there’s a hidden compartment, here.” He slid over to the center, and experimentally began to lift. The seat started to open. A very large hand closed it again. Frank, sitting next to him and looming in that silent muscle-man manner that Frank had, said nothing. But he physically removed Calley’s hands from the seat, picked up the mini-backpack, and pushed it into the boy’s chest. Calley nodded. “Right, then. I’ll just be going.”

Five minutes later, there was a Red-Handed Tamarin on the rooftops. The nametag on his collar declared him to be Captain Banana Hammock. There was a snazzy monkey-sized backpack slung around his shoulders. Clearly, this was a monkey on a mission.

Most of the buildings in this area were the same height; four or five stories. Short for New York. The Sanctuary itself was only a single story. This made things significantly easier, from where Calley was scampering: five stories was easy. A climb up the side of a building in a alleyway next to the jeep, a few skittering rooftop leaps in the moonlight, and he was overlooking his target. The wind ruffled his long black fur as he perched on the ornamental trim of that last rooftop, staring down at the Sanctuary with large baby blue monkey eyes. He was squirrel-sized, darkly colored, and unmoving. In short: nearly impossible to see from the ground. He didn’t see anyone, either. He started the climb down. In the alleyway between the buildings he held himself in the shadows next to a dumpster. There was someone on the sidewalk, but they walked past without incident. He didn’t smell anything alarming. The Sanctuary chefs had thrown out something that smelled wonderful, but that was just a shame. Putting on a burst of nimble speed, he scaled the side of the Sanctuary, and invited himself over to a ventilation shaft on the building’s top. Hello, ventilation shaft.

...Hello, locked cage thing surrounding the ventilation shaft. Don’t you look... sturdy. You’ve even got your own camera. Calley sat back on his monkey hunches, and wondered just how paranoid Dorian King was. Not paranoid enough. With a little monkey grin, he climbed up to the lock, and tugged at the tag on his collar. Time to test out that omni-key of Doc Jimmy’s.

Thirty seconds later, he was in the ventilation system. He’d locked the cage thing behind him and propped up the vent grating so it looked right, even if its screws where lined up in a little row on the inside, waiting for Calley to come back. Heh. This was much more fun than his first mission. Too bad his pillow wouldn’t be waiting for him when he got back to the jeep.

There were exactly four vents looking out into the Sanctuary’s foyer. Calley didn’t know this going in. But he figured it out. Because one of them was only ten feet from the desk, positioned at a nice gentle twelve inches above floor level, with a clear shot to the drawers. He could see it from all three of the other vents. They were positioned as follows: directly above the desk (nice location, but rather tricky for a small monkey to get back into. Note to self: learn to fly); next to the hidden door to the downstairs (a little too visible and a little too far from his target, really, never mind the large potted plant that was stopping him from pushing out the grating); and across the foyer from that last one (also covered by a potted plant). Since he was enjoying his little skitter through the ventilation system, it didn’t much matter to him that he visited the best candidate last. But since it might be annoying to anyone who was watching on the collar-cam, he tried to make it look like he’d simply gotten lost; aka, like he couldn’t have immediately navigated to that choice vent, once he’d spotted it from the one on the ceiling. He thought his performance was rather convincing: the steel-colored ducts probably looked like a labyrinth to someone just watching. Technical note: a labyrinth isn’t an efficient heating or cooling system. Therefore, there existed a straight-forward path to where he needed to go. Calley just, ah, got a better idea of the building’s internal layout on his long journey to finding it.

Vents were really fun.

In any case, he was now perched on a desk drawer, merrily dropping a CD into Receptionator Lisa’s domain. He’d even put it into the drawer reserved for New Mutant Applications; no one would be stumbling across it looking for white out. A quick check to make sure he hadn’t left any tell-tale monkey hairs lying around, and he was done. Easy. He was just about to be a good little Captain Banana Hammock and make his way out when something wonderful caught his attention: the closets behind the desk. They housed everything a new resident could want. That included pillows.

His sudden fascination was entirely the Scary Boss Man’s fault. If he’d just had his own pillow in the jeep, he wouldn’t have cared. Nothing the Sanctuary had could possibly compare to something he’d stolen from Doc Jimmy. And this is why Hunter needed to learn that when Calley said “Pillow”, he should ask, “How fluffy?” Depriving Calley’s attention span of its current focus was a dangerous game.

Calley sat on the floor, entranced. It wasn’t possible. The closet handles were too far up, and a pillow would be too bulky to drag through the vents…

And that’s when he caught the smell of lavender perfume. Crap. He was under the desk well in advance of the sound of high-heeled footsteps. But that didn’t make him any less trapped when Lisa sat down, and tucked her chair neatly into place. He clung upside-down to the underside of the desk, in a furry little ball in one corner. He wasn't likely to be discovered. But it could be a very, very long time before the perennially smiling woman left again. He was beginning to suspect she was a mutant. Her power: being the perfect receptionist. Also, never sleeping. Apparently.

He blamed Hunter.

Hunter could scarcely believe what he was watching. Calley had, after spending what seemed like an unnecessary length of time wondering around in the air vents managed to execute a near perfect traceless drop of the CD only to get distracted by pillows.

He made a mental not to have a very serious discussion about that with Calley once he found a way to let the little monkey get out. Having found a possible way he pulled out his phone and made a call.

A few minutes later Charles walked in through the sanctuary doors. “Excuse me,” he asked the receptionist politely, “I was wondering if you could help me. I seem to have gotten a little lost. I was wondering if you could direct me to Central Park?”

Lisa smiled and began to tell him the way. While she was Charles had moved up tot eh desk and seemed to be listening intently. With Lisa’s attention firmly focused on Charles Frank snuck in with remarkable stealth for a man of his size.

As Calley’s bag had the camera’s disabled and Lisa’s attention was firmly on Charles he managed to place his device in the plant pot and then leave unnoticed. Charles thanked Lisa for her help before leaving as well.

Exactly four minutes and seventeen seconds after Charles left the pot plant caught fire. Lisa shot up from her desk in alarm and grabbed a fire extinguisher. She began to extinguish the pot plant, leaving an opening for Calley to escape.

Calley took that opening with no minor bit of enthusiasm. He'd been having nightmares of having to cling there until the woman suckered some other poor off-the-street sap into a full tour of the Sanctuary.

He skittered silently into the ventilation system, closing the grating behind him. He'd left the screws in the grat so that they could be screwed shut from the inside--and this he did, as he watched with some fancination Lisa's fire-fighting battle. Wow, that thing sure was... flammable. He was happy there weren't any emergency sprinklers where he was. If she didn't get that thing under control soon, there was going to be a repeat of the food-fight-flooding.

Calley, sadly, did not wait to see that.

Back at the jeep, the first thing he did was shift to human. The second thing he did was toss back the bottom of the seat. Woah. "Is that a flamethrower?"

Frank's hand, once again, slammed the seat closed.

"There's nothing under the seats, kid." Nicholas said from the front seats. "And put on some clothes. I think Mister Antonescu wants to have a word with you."

Calley tilted his head. "About what?"

Charles turned to stare at him. Nicholas muttered something under his breath. Frank... Frank took out something that looked suspiciously like a small incindeary device with a timer from his coat pocket. He noticed Calley's avid attention, and put it back without a word. "Buckle your seatbelt," Frank said. "It saves lives."

...The ride back to the labs was quick. It deposited one rather confused Calley for Hunter's inspection.

((ooc: Continued in "The Pillow Talk". *meep*))