While you were sleeping

With stealthy tentacles the small octopus pulls itself across your carpet. Moonlight and streetlight leaks in bands onto the carpet through the blinds and the octopus matches these with the chromatophores in the skin of its tentacles and pulpy body. It edges round a discarded 'National Geographic', your bedtime reading, as yellow always makes it itchy.

You change position in the bed with a thrashing of bed covers and creaks from the mattress: the octopus freezes for tense minutes until it is certain you will not rise. As you begin to snore once more it completes its timid progress towards your bedside chest of drawers.

Slowly the octopus drags the bottom drawer open. Inside nestle your socks, paired up and drowsing. It reaches in and takes two socks from different pairs. One of these it stealthily adds to your partner's sock drawer. It puts the other in a ziplok baggie and stuffs it into a pocket on its ninja-suit.

On its way back out the cat-door the octopus takes out a small clipboard and adds a notation to the form on it with a stub of pencil. Only four more to go this night.