"This Nellie almost let you burn down the neighbor's apartment building!" - Beatrice Cahill, The Maze of Bones by Rick Riordan

"Cereal?"

"You got me cereal."

"Yeah, I did."

"Why?"

She ignored his question, asking him, "Which cereal do you prefer: Lucky Charms or Froot Loops? I didn't know, so I got both."

"I'm in the hospital, and you got me cereal?"

"I thought you could use something to cheer you up," she said, miffed. "But if you don't appreciate it, then I can just take the cereal back."

"No, I want it," he said quickly. "And I like Lucky Charms better. Well, I like the marshmallows in it. I only eat the actual cereal when someone's around to make me." He made a face. "I mean, the cereal's not gross, but I like the marshmallows better. I mean, who doesn't like the marshmallows better?"

She handed him the box of Lucky Charms. No bowl, no spoon. Just the box. He opened it and began eating the marshmallows.

"So," he said, chewing the marshmallows. "Why are you here?"

"Well, it's kinda my job."

"What do you mean? I got hurt at school."

"It's my job to watch you whenever you're not at school. And it beats sitting around the house."

"Yeah, but a hospital's not exactly loads of fun, either."

"True, but at least there's someone to talk to."

"Can't you, like, talk to one of your friends on the phone?"

"They're all busy."

"What about the TV?"

"Nothing good is on."

"So you're only here cause you have nothing else to do."

"Pretty much."

"Anyway, why?"

"Didn't I just say that I had nothing else to do?"

"No, I mean why did you bring me cereal?"

"Isn't that what you're supposed to do when someone's in the hospital? Get them something."

"Yeah, but you get them, like, flowers or balloons."

"So you would rather me get you flowers?"

"Eew, no! It's just that's what everyone else got me. I don't know why. I don't even like flowers. I mean, I don't hate them, but I don't like them. They're so girly."

"I'm not like everyone else."

Dan didn't say anything. He wasn't quite sure how to respond to that.

Suddenly, the door opened, and a nurse walked into the room.

"Mr. Cahill? Is everything alright? I heard talking." Then she noticed Nellie."Oh," she said. The nurse stared for a few moments, apparently fascinated by Nellie's nose ring. She then remembered where she was.

"Excuse me, miss, but could you please explain why you're here?"

"I'm visiting my babysittee. What else?"

"Au pairee," Dan corrected.

"I see that," said the nurse. "But Mr. Cahill does not currently have any visitors cleared to visit him. Including babysitters."

"Au pairs," Dan corrected again.

"Either way, she's not allowed in here."

"What do you mean? I'm only here because you guys are short on that plaster stuff you use for casts, and the doctor won't let me go until I have one. I'm getting out as soon as soon as you get that stuff."

"I'm afraid that does not matter. She is still not allowed to visit you."

"It's cool," Nellie said, and got up from her chair. "I'll leave." As she walked out, she called "See you real soon!" She winked at Dan, or, at least, he thought she winked at him. It was quick. He could have imagined it. But if she had winked at him, then it would have had to be quick, so the nurse wouldn't see it. Dan really hoped it was wink. Otherwise, he would be bored to death just lying in the hospital bed with no one to talk with him.

Dan was bored. Nothing exciting had happened since Nellie had visited hours ago. She had said she would be back "real soon," but it was almost ten o'clock. Way past the time he was supposed to go to bed, but he didn't feel like sleeping. He stared at the wall, this time picturing Amy's face when Tommy Cooper had asked her what the English homework was, and she had gotten so nervous that she hadn't been able to say a word. She had ended up running away in embarrassment, her face redder than her hair.

Tap tap

Wow, he was bored. Now he was even beginning to imagine sounds, just for a change from lying in bed, with nothing to do.

Tap tap tap

It sounded pretty real, though. Like someone tapping on a door. But if a nurse or doctor had wanted to come into his room, they would have opened it by now, whether or not he responded.

Tap tap tap taptaptaptapTAPTAPTAP

Actually, now that he thought about it, it sounded like it was coming from the window. Probably just a branch blowing in the wind.

TAPTAPTAPTAPTAPTAPTAPTAP

It was really loud now. And annoying. The wind must have been really strong... that is, the wind would have had to been very strong, if it weren't for the fact that there was no wind at that moment. Realizing this fact, Dan turned to the window to see what the sound was.

An annoyed-looking Nellie was looking back at him. She mimed opening up the window.

The doctor had said not to get up from bed, because his leg needed to heal. But he could just hop on one foot, right?

Dan got up, and hopped on one foot to the window. It was a bit hard for him to keep his balance and to open the window at the same time, but manageable. He opened the window, and Nellie climbed in.

"Do you know how uncomfortable that was?" she hissed quietly, so she didn't alert any hospital staff.

Dan, however, was not as worried.

"How did you get up here?" he asked, not loudly, but louder than Nellie would have liked.

"Shhhh, do you want a nurse to come in here and kick me out again?"

"Oh," Dan said more quietly. "Sorry."

"Okay, here's the plan. I'm going to carry you through the window and down to the ground – "

"How are you going to do that?"

"Shhhh."

"Sorry."

"Anyway, I'm going to carry you down, where Roberto is waiting with his car. There are crutches in there that you can use to walk. Got everything?"

Dan nodded.

"Is Roberto your boyfriend?"

"Ew, no! He's my cousin, and he happens to owe me a favor, after that one time at that family reunion, the one where his girlfriend, the one his dad doesn't like – "

"Where did you get the crutches?" Dan interrupted, not wanting to hear the whole story at the moment. He just wanted to get out of what had to be the most boring hospital in the world, and he knew that when Nellie felt like talking, the only way he could get her to stop talking about something was to talk about something else.

"My friend is using them in this movie she's making for an amateur film contest. It's about this girl, who – "

Suddenly something occurred to Dan.

"What are we going to do when we get to Roberto's car?"

Nellie shrugged.

"You don't know?"

"That's what makes it exciting!" she grinned. "I mean, does it matter? You want to get out of here, right?"

He did. This hospital had to be the most boring place he had ever been in his life, including museums.

"Let's go!" he told her.

"Okay, but close your eyes first, so you don't accidentally look down."

Because Nellie had just warned about looking down, Dan glanced out the window. He immediately shut his eyes so he wouldn't accidentally look down as Nellie carried him out. This is cool, he thought, trying to convince himself that he wasn't scared. We're escaping in the dead of the night, and I'm sure Nellie using some super-sweet ninja moves to get us down from this really tall building...

Thinking to himself wasn't working out. He tried to distract himself by talking to Nellie.

"You said that I would see you 'real soon,' but it took you hours to come back."

"You think it was easy coming up with a plan to rescue your sorry butt? Now be quiet; I need to concentrate on getting us down without falling a hundred feet."

Dan stopped talking.

"So, what do we do now?" Dan asked Nellie, once he was in the back of Roberto's car. "We kinda need a plan right now."

"Well, what do you think we should do?" Nellie asked him.

"Maybe we could go back to our apartment building," he suggested.

"That's the first place they're going to look when they discover you've escaped."

"Who are 'they'?"

"I don't know. But someone's going to be looking for you once a nurse or a doctor comes in to check on you and you're not there."

"Maybe you could go to a place next door to where you live," Roberto suggested from the driver's seat, where Dan couldn't see him.

"That's not much better than his aunt's apartment," Nellie complained.

"Do you have a better idea?" Roberto asked.

"I like that idea," Dan said. He yawned. It was way past the time he usually went to bed. Not that he couldn't stay up later than that. He could. He just got a little tired when he did.

"Fine," Nellie said. She gave Roberto directions to the apartment building as Dan closed his eyes. Just for a moment, though.

"Dan, wake up!"

"Huh?"

"We're here!"

Dan reluctantly opened his eyes. It took him a moment to remember what was going on. He got out of the car. Well, more like fell out of the car.

"Come on," Nellie whispered. "My best friend from sixth grade, Daniella, used to live here before she moved to Colorado. There's this abandoned apartment in the basement where we can stay," Nellie said. Seeing Dan's face, she quickly added "It's not haunted. The last people who lived there moved, but couldn't sell the apartment for enough money to satisfy them. Don't worry, they never came back to visit, and I doubt that they're going to start tonight."

Dan followed her into the apartment building. When they reached the apartment, he collapsed on the bed, exhausted.

"Sorry it's such a small room, kiddo," Nellie said. "But, hey, we're not going to be here very long, anyway." She waited for a response. "Kiddo?"

"Super-rare... must have for my collection," murmured Dan.

"Which collection? I didn't know you had a collection of small apartments," Nellie said. She paused. "Wait, how in the world would you collect apartments? I mean, where would you put them?"

"Please, Amy... Aunt Beatrice won't... a whole week... ice cream."

Nellie grinned. She hadn't known that Dan talked in his sleep. She was going to have excellent blackmail material in the morning.

"Wow, you can sleep."

Nellie jolted awake. Dan was grinning at her, like he found it amusing that she had slept later than him. Nellie glanced at her watch. It wasn't even noon yet!

"I wouldn't look so smug if I was you," she told him. "After what I heard while you were sleeping last night, you better make sure that you behave. You said some very interesting things while you were sleeping." Actually, this was a bluff. If Dan had said anything interesting in his sleep, it had been after Nellie had fallen asleep. While she had been listening, the most interesting thing Dan had said was "Don't let the dog near the Cherry Garcia!", and Nellie had no clue what it meant. However, Dan didn't have to know that.

"Nuh-uh, you couldn't have. I didn't sleep for that long," said Dan.

"You were out like a light the second we got in here," said Nellie.

"Yeah, but I was having night - I mean, I was dreaming about an old family reunion, so I woke up in the middle of the night. I couldn't fall back asleep, and I thought that it was because I was missing my collections. So I went back to the apartment -"

"Wait, you did what?"

"I decided to go back to the apartment to get one of my collections. I mean, I couldn't take all of them, so I just took my bottle rocket collection."

Now Nellie was the one grinning.

"You left here in the middle of the night, went back to your apartment, got your bottle rocket collection without waking your sister up, found your way back to the building in the dark without any help, managed to open the door to both the building and the room while carrying your bottle collection, found your way back to the room without any help, and did all of this without me waking up. Right."

"What? You don't think that would be hard for a ninja lord like me?"

"Sure it wouldn't. So where exactly is your bottle collection that you transported here in the middle of the night?"

"Well, I couldn't open the door while I was carrying it, so I left it outside."

Nellie studied Dan's face. She blanched.

"You left it outside? Where anyone can find it?"

"Oh," said Dan, as he realized what he had done. "What if someone steals it?"

That hadn't been Nellie's first concern, but she was just relieved that Dan had realized that there was a need to go get the collection. Quickly, before someone saw it and accidentally created a disaster. The last thing she wanted was for some curious little kid to touch one of the rockets and set it off.

"Come on," she said. "You gotta go get it. Now."

Fortunately, at least some part of Dan's mind had been functioning when he had left the bottle rocket collection outside. He had at least had the sense to hide it behind some trees, where other people were less likely to spot it.

"Okay, kiddo," said Nellie, after she and Dan had gone behind the trees to retrieve the collection. "Any ideas on where we can hide these things?"

Dan got a look on his face. It was a look that Amy would have recognized as dangerous, but Nellie hadn't been the Cahills' au pair long enough to recognize it.

"Who says we have to hide it?" he said. "Why not set them off?"

Nellie gaped at him.

"Set... them... off?" It was true that she could be reckless at times; after all, she had climbed up to Dan's hospital window and carried him down.

But even she didn't like to play with fire.

"The whole point of you breaking me out of that hospital was so I wouldn't be bored, right?" Dan countered.-

Nellie nodded.

"Well, then we shouldn't not have fun just because we're afraid that someone will see me and send me back there. If we don't have fun, then there wasn't any point in breaking me out."

Nellie thought for a moment. Dan was right. The whole point of breaking him out of the hospital was to have fun. She shrugged.

"Kay, kiddo. Just don't get hurt. A mostly healed broken leg is one thing, especially if you have crutches, but if you get badly burnt or something..."

"I'll do what I can to make sure that you don't bring me back to that hospital. Dude, do you have any ideaa how boring it was there?"

"Well, if I was there, I know what I would do," said Nellie. She took out her iPod and put the headphones in her ears. "Listen to music all day. And if anyone asks, that was what I was doing while you were setting off your rockets. The headphones were in my ears, so I couldn't hear you."

Dan said something, but Nellie couldn't hear him. It was going to be the truth when they said that Nellie didn't hear the bottle rocket collection go off. Dan grinned. Good old Nellie. Only she would let him do something like this and not question its legality.

Dan lit the fuses with a matchbook he had taken with him when he had gone back to the apartment. After all, what was the point of a bottle rocket collection without matches?

After lighting the fuses, Dan stepped back and watched the rockets go off. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

"Sweet," Dan said as he watched the explosions. Then the sparks began to land, setting the apartment building on fire.

Nellie watched in horror as the flames spread. She knew that she shouldn't be surprised that something had gone wrong; after all, one shouldn't play with fire, but she hadn't expected this. Apparently, neither had Dan. His grin slowly fell off his face as he began to realize what was going on.

"Quick! Put it out!"

Nellie quickly ran inside, despite having been told at least a dozen times by various elementary school teachers to never run into a burning building. She found the nearest fire extinguisher and put out the fire.

The fire was out, but the smoke alarms had already been set off. She could already hear the sirens of firetrucks coming. Nellie sighed. It was not going to be easy explaining this to the firemen. Or to her employer.

Dan, meanwhile, couldn't help being disappointed. He had liked Nellie, but there was no way that Aunt Beatrice was going to keep her as an au pair after this. He searched to find the humor in the situation, as he usually did when things went wrong.

"Would it be a bad pun if I said that Aunt Beatrice is totally going to fire you?"

A/N: This oneshot was not for the contest that asked writers to use that cereal line (It was a contest, right?); the line just inspired me. And, yes, this is barely canon; it complies with the information found on pages 6-7 of The Maze of Bones, although I'm sure that Rick Riordan did not imagine the incident like this.

Quote of the Day: "...humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things that are worst for them." - Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J. K. Rowling