• Cookies, chocolate chip and piping hot, sat on the counter on the baking pan. Their scent floated around the small kitchen, making anyone who entered the small space weak in the knees and caused them to drool pools of saliva. The chocolate morsels oozed out of the tops of the golden-brown circles of dough and dripped slowly over the sides to dot the shiny, silver pan. Sugar and chocolate aromas mixed in the air and attacked the senses. They were like little gas bombs that didn't kill, but lured the prey in so the mom could attack with her swinging spatula.
    A ninja, who was very short in stature and build, popped his head out from behind the kitchen wall, his head alert and looking for any hidden danger. Through the slit in his black sock-mask, his little brown eyes scanned the kitchen for the mom's invisible traps and alarms. When nothing came up as dangerous on his Scooby-doo wristwatch scanner, he moved slowly under the counter where the cookies were perched, the 007 theme song playing in his head. When he got this close to the cookies, it was hard for him to stay alert when the smells were coming at him from all sides. The ninja was prepared, however. Upon his little button-nose perched the very high-tech nose plug that he had stolen from the rumbling dryer monster the mission before. The clothespin wobbled slightly as the ninja looked upward, but it stayed in place.
    Slowly, an oversized leather snow-glove reached up and over the counter to try and snatch a rather large cookie from the pan. The padded glove couldn't grip the cookie, though, and the ninja had to resort to desperate measures. The glove retreated from the pan and in its place came caterpillar-length fingers that wrapped successfully around the cookie and pulled it off without any trouble. There was a slight pause in the ninja's actions as he waited cautiously for any alarms to sound or a metal cage to fall over his head, but when none of those things happened, he resumed his very dangerous work.
    Two. Three. Four cookies vanished from the pan and slid into the front pocket of the laser-proof, blue overalls that the ninja wore. Finally, the pocket threatened to burst. The sock-mask covered head pivoted and the little brown eyes scanned the room before the ninja started to move toward the exit. In one fluid motion, the sound of the mom coming toward the towering door of the kitchen was no longer a threat because the soft click of the bedroom security gate could be heard from down the hall. "Mission completed, Red Crayon. I have the packages secure," the ninja whispered into his hairbrush communicator.
    In the kitchen, the mom was about to turn the corner when another hand with small blue nails reached up over the pan to snatch a cookie. "Candace Marie Muller," the mom shouted as the spatula came down with a smack on the counter beside the grasping hand. "Go into the corner now, young lady!" The mom's voice was shrill as she pointed to the corner with her red-hot spatula. "Eating four cookies before dinner," she mumbled as the bent blonde head shuffled slowly to the corner of doom between the freezer and the wall where she would stand for all eternity, or at least till dinner time.
    wink