What manner of monkey is this?

I should have known it was too good to last.

For four days, I had the fortress entirely unto myself. No Man, no Woman. No Rodent. No strange experiments in the night or clanky assemblings of bizarre pseudoscientific mechanisms intruding upon the easy calm of my solitude.

The couch, the whole of it, was mine. The pellet bowl eternally full. Everything in the universe was, at last, right.

And then, and then.

The Woman returned, looking badly beaten and leaning pathetically upon a rolling scaffold for support, her gait uneven, her eyes sunken. She was followed closely by the Man, teetering and exhausted, and carrying in his arms some... thing.

At first I watched the door for signs of the Rodent — surely he would be close upon their heels (in fact, he did not return until later that evening, escorted by the Melodious Freckled Lady and My Doorman). But my attention was soon diverted to the twist, the x factor, the elephant in the room. The thing.

It was small. Tightly bundled, yet still squirmy. Definitely alive. I mounted the couch for closer inspection. Smelly. A somewhat medicinal scent, with strange conflicting overtones of both hygienic cleanliness and exremental contamination. And it was vocal — mewling and squawking and hiccing and burping in a manner not unlike the Rodent in his heyday.

Could this monkey-thing be the product of the Man's Bay B experiments?

And then I moved in slightly closer, and suddenly it reached out with one of its sickly-pale digits and tugged at its swaddles, and I saw, oh help me, I saw its face.

No no no no no.

The Man has cloned himself.

Bast and Sekhmet preserve us from stinky evil!