Last night was possibly one of the more stressful nights of my life... So, as I was going to bed last night, Darla was looking very cute and adorable, so I decided to let her run around in her ball while I was getting ready for bed/playing pokémon in bed. She readily got into the ball, I closed the lid, off she went around the room, not quite as fast as when I let her run around the kitchen because my bedroom is a bit small for her to get up to proper "charrrge!" speed, but still fairly speedy.
Half an hour later, I was getting tired and she'd been out for long enough, so I decided to put her away, via a quick bit of playtime on the bed, something that I have previously done as part of my taming efforts. I got her ball, sat on the bed with my legs in a diamond shape, and let her out between them. She timidly ran around for a bit, occasionally going back to her ball, occasionally running over my hands, and then she decided that my legs were good to climb over. No Darla, silly Darla, catch Darla as she clambered over my legs, put her back between them... She tried to climb my legs again. I underestimated how fast she could run. In trying to catch her the second time, I scared her into jumping off the bed and running under my desk.
Well, ****. I tried to catch her, but the big blundering scary thing that was me just made her hide in a more inaccessible place. I tried sitting veeeeery still and waiting for her to come out, but it didn't seem to be working. In the end I made sure she couldn't leave the bedroom, set up a Darla trap using a pile of random climbable things and my bin, with food at the bottom of the bin and treats leading to it, and hoped she'd get hungry and find it.
As I was falling asleep, I watched her scurry out of her hiding place and completely ignore the trap. However, I suspected me moving out of bed to try and catch her again would lead to her running and hiding, so I stayed still while she ran around, until she hid again and I fell asleep.
Fast forward to about 5am. I woke up, worried that she hadn't had access to food or water for a while, and looked in the trap. No, no Darla. I set up another trap using a plastic container and some millet and also put her cage on the floor, with a ramp going up to the lid so she could climb in, and twisting her water bottle around so she could get a drink from outside the cage. By this point I was really worried that she hadn't had a drink for a while, and I'd rather she drank and wasn't caught for a while than didn't drink for ages and was caught because she was dehydrated and ill. Then I told myself to stop worrying, that she would be fine, and went back to sleep.
9:30am. Woke up again, checked the Darla traps. No sign. Now I was really quite worried that, despite the gap under my bedroom door being really small, and despite my having laid a towel in front of it, she had got out of the room. My room being a typical student room, storage for a number of things is currently the floor, so I moved a bunch of stuff around to see if I could find Darla sleeping somewhere. No luck. She also didn't appear to be under the bed, or under the wardrobe/desk/chest of drawers. Eventually I gave up searching, climbed back into bed and started on the pokémon again, hoping that I had just missed her in my search, that she was still in the room, that my searching had awoken her and that she'd come out to investigate once it had gone quiet -- she does the very same thing after I have used the hair dryer in the mornings.
Now, one other thing about my room is that it used to be a bedsit, and thus has what used to be a tiiiiiny kitchen attached. This tiny "kitchen" can no longer be used as such, and I basically use as suitcase, tins and hamster paraphernalia storage. The gap under the door from my room to this cupboard-thing is larger than the one from my room to the rest of the house, plenty large enough to squeeze under if you are a hamster, but because the house is single-glazed with original badly fitting sash windows, and there's no radiator in there, the cupboard itself is freezing cold and there is a draught under the door. While Darla had been evading capture earlier in the night, I had watched her peer at the door and then run away from it, and I decided that the draught was too off-putting for a tiny hamster, so had excluded it from my searchings so far.
11am. Still no sign or sound of Darla, pokémon wasn't helping me not worry, and I really was concerned. At this point I wondered whether she
had gone in the cupboard, despite me thinking she wouldn't because it was cold, and got into one of the suitcases, and went in to check. No sign of Darla in any of the suitcases... but also in the cupboard is a plastic bag of dirty substrate from the last clean out, plus some other rubbish including some dead flowers, that I haven't got around to taking to the bin outside yet. This bag was... moving? A closer inspection revealed a hole torn in the side of the bag, and a small grey Robo hamster tunnelling through the substrate.
Darla was quickly retrieved and re-caged, and is now sulking at me despite the fact that she now has food, water, isn't in the coldest place in the house and has a nice warm bed. I have no idea what inspired her to go out
there rather than somewhere warmer, but thank anything and everything that I managed to find her again.
And the moral of this story is... Don't let your not-quite-tame Robo hamster run around on the bed.
For those who have got this far, have some pictures. They're all from the first few weeks I had her, there's nothing particularly recent because I haven't really had the time
uni gets in the way of taking hamster photos.
Very fuzzy picture on the day I got her:
Darla shortly after I had acquired her from P@H adoption:
During the first cage cleanout:
Exploring the clean cage:
Darla's nighttime adventures
I guess hamsters don't use the same logic as we use - cold it may have been, but oh look, a gap!!! 
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