The roof is quiet as my boots touch down, and when I’m satisfied everything has remained still, the ruffling of feathers breaks the silence as I fold my wings back into my back. I would have liked to have the silence owl wings have, but being seen is a lot more likely than being heard and so I thought pitch black crow wings were worth the trade-off.

Besides, they go with my outfit; black face mask, black leather jacket, black gloves, black leather pants, black combat boots. Even my hair is black for tonight. 

I’m the epitome of stealth.

Sidestepping a puddle from last night’s rainstorm, I make my way toward a large duct spewing steam into the night air. The grate over it is tightly bolted on, but something like that isn’t gonna stop me; I stick a hand in the bottom corner slit and turn into a spider, crawling through the grate with absolutely no effort. Once I’m all the way through though, I shift to a rat because having more than two eyes makes me queasy. I don’t know what the museum’s vent security is like, but I doubt they want to find human/spider vomit in their ducts.

The Sound City History Museum isn’t a common target for supervillains, so I don’t expect the security to be that tight, but they also have a significant amount of gold across all the exhibits so I wouldn’t be surprised to see something. Like cameras and motion sensors, instead of laser beams and saw blades. 

But I can’t see anything of the sort as I start my adventure through the ducts, little mice nails scrabbling against the metal “floor”. I briefly worry about that being heard, but I don’t think I’m actually inside the walls yet (or under the roof) so it’s probably fine. It isn’t long before I encounter a significant drop in the ducts where they enter the building proper, and I spend a moment debating my next course of action. As a mouse I’d survive the fall, and it’d be fast, but it would also be loud and might draw suspicion. I could descend on a web as a spider, that’d be quiet, but it would also be slow and make me hurl.

A gecko, though… A gecko could stick to the wall and simply walk down. Wouldn’t be as fast as the mouse, but it’d be faster than a spider, safe, and quiet.

A quick shift to a blue and red gecko later, I start walking down the wall of the vent. It’s a bit weird to have my legs off to my sides instead of under me, but that doesn’t slow me down and a couple minutes later I’m at the bottom of the duct.

But now I’m faced with a choice. The vents extend to both my left and right, but not forward, so I’m forced to confer with my mental map. Which isn’t that great, I think to myself. Fuck, which way is it? My target is in the north…western corner(ish) of the museum, and I came in from the east, so right is the right way. But it’s also on the fourth floor, and I should be on the fifth now. So I should take the next drop I see.

I stay as a gecko as I roam through the ducts, my footsteps blissfully silent. My night vision is even better like this and as a mouse, so I briefly wonder why I even bothered as a mouse at first. Speed isn’t that important, at least not over utility. I do peek through the couple vents I come across to make sure I’m on the right path, and I’m rewarded for my stealth by seeing flashlight beams from security guards on two separate occasions. Suckers don’t even know to look up here.

I almost miss the duct to the fourth floor since it’s off to the side from the main throughway, but I catch myself before totally passing it. This drop is a lot taller than the first one so I immediately start down it in the interest of time. However, I pause once I hear a loud noise from below and start to feel a warm breeze blow over me. Shit, did someone hear me? Are they trying to teargas the vents? That would be a problem. But, when I wait a few moments and nothing else happens, I conclude they must have just turned on the heating and go along my way. Still undetected, nice.

The third vent I look out of shows the entrance to the “Mythology of Indigenous Peoples” exhibit, and I decide that’s close enough. I’ll go the rest of the way through the exhibit itself. I turn into a spider again to get through the vent and start to slide down a web to the floor, spinning to scan my surroundings for threats. There’s no security guards around, and I can’t see any cameras, so when I reach the floor I shift back to human and take a minute to lie on the floor and make myself no longer want to vomit.

When I pick myself back up, I give myself cat ears for their higher sensitivity, gecko eyes for night vision, and a cat tail for purely aesthetic reasons. The media has dubbed me “Catnip” for the traits I choose during most of my jobs, and while I don’t like that name, sticking to a single theme does have a certain appeal to it. I’m no supervillain, but it makes some decisions a bit easier.

Stalking through the darkened halls, the exhibit is much the same as it was this afternoon; twisting walkways lined with display cases and dioramas, information panels crammed with text, and artistic representations that were created a few weeks ago instead of actually being from the mentioned cultures. Unlike earlier though, I breeze through the first half of the exhibit without looking at most things, only briefly wondering how many (if any) of the items on display were actually donated. But not much I can do about them if I can’t track down the original owner(s). So I pass over everything else until I reach a display case where I know the answer for sure.

Directly ahead of me is a roughly 8-foot by 8-foot blanket hanging behind a pane of glass, with stone and metal knives on the wall to one side of it, and shelves of woven baskets on the other. The plaques say every item in the case was discovered and donated together, but even a quick glance makes it clear that’s bullshit. The knives and arrowheads are clearly centuries, maybe even millennia old, but the blanket shows few signs of wear. It’s a couple decades old at most. That’s not even counting what I was told earlier, I think. Don’t know about the baskets, though.

With a *snkt*, sharp claws extend from my fingertips and I smile as I put them to the glass–

“Native artifacts aren’t your usual M.O., Catnip.”

I freeze. There’s someone else here. Even with my heightened hearing, I didn’t hear any footsteps, so they must be able to fly. So already I know it’s not just any security guard that caught me, but a superhero, or at least some goody-two-shoes wannabe. God, please don’t let me be some cape’s first cuff…

“Don’t worry about it,” I start to say, “I just really admire the craftsma–'' I’m cut off as everything goes white with intense light, and then black as I lose consciousness.