A/N: Let me firstly say, thankyou SO SO much to all of you that followed/favourited/reviewed this story. I was completely and utterly overwhelmed by the level of support I got in just one chapter/night and it made my day.

As a result, I managed to get a 2,000-odd word chapter, which is much longer than the last.

Still setting up a little bit here, introducing the rest of the OC cast (who all have fairly important roles) but from here on Lark's focus will be on getting Jesker happening ;)

Enjoy!

II. Plotting

Yesterday, when I experienced my genius revelation, I mustn't have been thinking straight. After all, what is one cleaner going to be able to do to play matchmaker? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Two would be better. Or three. Nope. Five. There is only one way to undertake such a plan - enlisting minions to assist you. After all, I couldn't do it alone could I? The brains of the operation always needs minions to complete the plan.

Thankfully, I know just the people to undertake those roles. Walking into the Cleaners storage rooms late that night for the start of my shift I immediately spotted the dear people, my friends, who were the perfect candidates for such a task.

Marty Freeman, my best mate, was busy pulling on rubber gloves (poor sucker drew bathroom duty for a week) in the corner. He looked up when I walked in and gave me a wave before pulling a face at his roster (I am truly blessed to have friends that don't know when a roster's been rigged - after all, cleaning toilets?! Disgusting. I draw the line.).

John Arnold had seemingly just sat down and begun doing something on his laptop. I swear, that man carries that thing around with him everywhere - probably hoping that maybe someday, someone will notice the person who cleans the IT rooms is actually good with computers and he'll get promoted from cleaner to staff (however unlikely that may be).

Thatcher Harding, dear, dear Thatcher, blonde hair sticking up all over the place, (seriously, the man is a hunk - how he managed to remain unnoticed and wasn't hired as a supermodel is beyond me) was setting up the bins, ready for us to get started (luckily the levels we're assigned to - mainly the ADD level - aren't too hard, nor require much of a thought process). Just looking at those toned muscles from using the gym equipment (which he was supposed to have been cleaning) for the last few years makes me - Stop. Let's not go there.

The last one who flounced into the room behind me, was Penny Cardly, black hair bouncing and swinging immaculately behind her. I nearly choked and gagged as she passed me - the smell of her perfume was so strong. But then again, I guess you want to have a strong-smelling perfume if you're laundering overalls from the menagerie workers and sweaty soldiers all night. You wouldn't really want those smells rubbing off on you would you? Yuck.

"What have we got today guys?" I asked, rather bored by the whole proceedings that John had insisted we implement when we had first started working together. Four years later and we still had to follow the stupid procedure - don't ask me why.

Not surprisingly, Thatcher was the one to answer, seeing as John was intent on his laptop, Penny was buried under a mound of washing and Marty had chosen the opportune moment to shove half a sandwich in his mouth (even though he still had his gloves on - which is quite disgusting really).

"Marty's on bathrooms, Penny's got to wash the training uniforms - the new recruits played paintball today and you can guess how that went," Thatcher drawled, crossing the tasks off his fingers, "Apparently, it was that weird-looking guy from IT's birthday on Monday and no-one remembered so they threw him a consolatory party at lunch today in the IT room's - John's on that. You and I are on bins."

"What, where, who said my name." John looked up, dragging himself away from the computer for a moment and blinking slowly when he noticed me (the guy looks like a stoned owl with his magnified glasses on - seriously). "Oh, hi Lark. Do you want to look at this? I was just going over today's CCTV feeds and it looks like there was a particularly juicy fail in the practice rooms."

One thing you should know about us, is that the five of us have a sick sense of humor. We take great delight in noticing the epic failures of our employees and higher-up staff; especially when they don't realise it (this does of course include a lot of sniggering, and late-night checks of the daily CCTV feeds courtesy of John).

We notice everything. Jess, the best field-coordinator is pretty brilliant, but even she has more important things to do than to analyse every minute of footage from the day (John however, doesn't).

We knew, before everyone else did, that Abby proposed to Connor; we knew that Phillip was having more than a few secret phone calls and meetings with Connor about the anomalies before convergence.

We saw it, when early one morning, Becker spilt a cup of coffee on his pants and had to race down to the locker rooms before anyone else came in and change into a spare pair of trousers he had in his locker (Penny and I replayed that particular segment for weeks afterwards - focusing on the part where he went hopping around the room in his underwear).

We know where Lester keeps his secret supply of whiskey. Marty has assured us - through experience - that it's of the highest quality (well at least, that's what we think he said, it was rather slurred at the time). You might call it nosey, but we call it enlightened.

Of course, knowing about everything doesn't really mean a thing. We swore, both legally, when we took the job as cleaners at the ARC and in friendship when we realised the potential for the abuse of the power we have; that whatever we did in our storage room, would never be heard about by any others outside, or within the the ARC. It was just the five of us.

John's tidbit of the day was certainly enjoyable. One of the newer recruits had managed to completely miss his target sending an EMD blast ricochetting around the room. Apparently, he was distracted by a rather pretty tech walking past the glass viewing screen. The CCTV footage showed soldiers running everywhere ducking the electricity bolt (Becker among them) and diving for cover.

The whole scene had the five of us sniggering, even as we prepared to begin our tasks. The ARC was always attended to by at least one team, after all, anomalies didn't sleep and could pop up at any time; so we weren't quite alone when our shifts began at 11PM and finished at 4:40; but pretty much so.

"My minions, I have a proposition for you!" I said, tugging my overalls over my head.

"Minions?" Penny said, wrinkling her nose.

"Yeh why are we YOUR minions?" John asked with a frown, "Why can't you all be MY minions?"

I rolled my eyes at the comment, "Because John, you don't have nearly as productive organisational skills as I do; and besides," I added, (feeling the need to be imperious and quell this rebellion for good); "You don't even know my proposition, you might not have the balls to undertake such a mission."

Thatcher snorted and John glared at me in reply. "Well what is this proposition then Lark? Come on, spit it out already," Marty spoke up, easing the tension a little as he lifted up the toilet cleaner in his hand and pointed it at me, brown eyes laughing, "because you know, I have things to do, places to go, toilets to clean..."

"Yeh, yeh," I scoffed, waving my hand in dismissal before propping myself up against a nearby bench, "Okay, well just recently, it came to my mind the amount of money that's just languishing in the 'Jesker' maintenance pot. I'm not exactly sure how much-"

"£875.50." John interjected helpfully, coping a glare from me at the interruption as he pushed his glasses further up the bridge of his nose.

"Thank you John," Thatcher said sarcastically.

"You're most welcome Thatcher." John said, obviously quite pleased with himself. It's painfully evident sarcasm isn't the man's strong suit (and he wonders why he'll never get noticed or promoted to a tech!).

Just as Thatcher was about to reply with no doubt, some snide comment, I cleared my throat impatiently, we had already managed to digress from the topic and we hadn't even managed to get down to business yet. Typical. "Anyway, as I was saying before I was interrupted," I said, shooting a pointed glare at the bespectacled man, "there is a LARGE amount of money in there, and I think...we could win it."

I waited for my words to sink in, which they did (albeit slowly...) and noted with some satisfaction the contemplative looks on the faces of my friends and compatriots.

"Are you saying we should try and rig it so that we are the catalyst for Becker and Jess to admit their feelings to one another?" Marty said slowly (as usual, the first to catch onto one of my brilliant schemes).

I beamed at him in reply. "Exactly!" I crowed happily. At least someone understood me! Penny on the other hand was looking a little confused...

"Erm, but isn't that cheating?" Penny asked.

I shook my head emphatically, I had already considered this and come up with the answer, "Nope, after all, there were no rules in place to say whether or not anyone could give them a 'bump' in the right direction," I said, looking around at my colleagues, (who I could see were slowly coming round to the idea) with a grin, "The rules only stipulate that the person who guesses closest to the date wins the pot. So are you in?"

"£875.50 split five ways? I don't know about you guys, but I could do with the extra money." Thatcher said with a shrug, the corner of his lips quirking in a smile as he leaned back in his chair, "I'm in."

It didn't take long for the others to cave into the idea after Thatcher agreed, and slowly, they began to warm to it even more.

"Well what are we going to do to give them the nudge then?" Marty asked contemplatively, "It's not like we can be conspicuous about it, we hardly see them, and I'm not sure they even know we exist!"

"Could we create some kind of 'end-of-the-world' situation to try and get them to admit their feelings for one another?" Penny offered, frowning in concentration (thinking really was not her strong suit at times).

"Well the world has already threatened to end with convergence and they did nothing," Thatcher drawled, rolling his eyes with a huff, "so it's not very likely Becker'd make a move for that."

"Not to mention the fact that we have absolutely no means of creating an, as you put it, 'end-of-the-world experience'," I remarked dryly, "without attracting some kind of attention, and I prefer going through my life fairly unnoticed thank you very much!"

Silence echoed around the room for a moment, before John cleared his throat awkwardly, "Well could we somehow design a way to get them alone together at least?" he said hurriedly, continuing as the rest of us looked at him, "Early in the morning maybe, or late at night, when basically no-one else is around? Give them something to talk about?"

I frowned in contemplation as I considered the idea, in fact (amazingly), it wasn't a bad one at all. "Not bad John. See, that's why you're a minion!" I said, shooting him (what was hopefully) a dazzling smile, "Now we just need to figure out a place where the two of them would definitely meet up, at morning and/or night; where they are also likely to be alone-"

"The locker rooms." My minions all chimed in one voice.

"Ahh! You guys! I couldn't have asked for better compatriots." I said fondly, slipping off the desk, "You can brainstorm in your head as we work, and then we can discuss our ideas here in our break - NOT beforehand, we don't need anyone catching on to our little operation."

"Right. You're right. We can do this." Penny said, more to herself than the rest of us I think. She glanced over to me and smiled, letting out a short squeal of excitement that had the men reeling, "Oh this is so wonderful and romantic! I feel like a real matchmaker!" she said happily, "After we've done these two - and I just know we're going to succeed; we should do it again, or maybe I should just take it up in my own time..."

I laughed quietly to myself as she continued to blabber on about all the matches she was going to make, and the guys slowly edged away from her, looking rather uncomfortable. "Look what you've done!" Thatcher whispered comically to me as we collected our bins and headed for the door, "You've created a monster!"

I only snorted in reply. So, maybe I had, but it was going to be well worth it if it meant this venture would be successful. For the money and the peace of mind. It was about time Jess and Becker got their butts into gear.