Sly Cooper and the Gang In: A Long Lost Love

CHAPTER 1

Art credit: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rRleP6  

Sly sat atop the Eiffel Tower, watching the lights come on one by one as night fell over the city. This wasn't the Paris he remembered, wasn't the home he loved. Where there had once been good food and music there were now cold, towering skyscrapers, lit up from tip to tail in neon lights. Flashy holograms advertising the latest dangerous thrill flickered above and around him, like visible music so loud it hurt the eyes. The Safe House wasn't the same anymore, either; they'd relocated to an abandoned building on the outskirts of the new tech city, and Bentley had not been pleased with how far he'd had to redirect their power lines for his work.

Murray, however, was late. The enormous purple Sky Racer was supposed to pick Sly up from the landing pad at 10pm, but Sly hadn't seen the aerial Cooper Van crest over the lower apartment buildings yet. Sly tapped a foot, twitching his tail as he massaged his temples. Exhaustion clung to his muscles like a weighty blanket, and the icy rain that poured down on him didn't help matters. The water sluiced under his collar and down his back like long, freezing fingers. He disliked having to oil his cybernetic shoulder after weather like this, but if he didn't it would grind, and on their next mission, that would be more than just unpleasant–it'd be dangerous.

"Sorry I'm late, Sly," Murray shouted across the airspace. He leaned out of his rolled-down window, fingerless leather gloves shining with rain. As he descended on the landing pad, Sly pulled his hood over his head and padded across the steel beam he perched on, ignoring the aerial vehicles humming by overhead. His titanium knee whirred, the hydraulics sticking slightly, as he ducked through the passenger door. "Bentley had me running errands all day."

"Good to see you, Big Guy," Sly muttered as he slid into the seat and tipped his head back. The warmth of the cabin felt nice after soaking to the bone for an hour and a half. "What do you have for me?"

Murray scrambled around on the dash for some sugar-stained papers. "They last saw her at the FarFlight building in early 3027." Five years ago. Sly slicked the water off his fur and replaced his cap, holding only the edges of the paper so he wouldn't add his damp fingerprints to the jelly smudge already obscuring half a paragraph. "She walked in at two in the morning and didn't come back out."

Sly's heart sprouted wings in his chest. This was the first lead they'd had in months. He'd spent every waking moment tracking Carmelita's last known movements, pouring over the files and searching every letter of the case she'd been working on before her disappearance. So much of it had been redacted, confiscated, scrubbed from servers, or 'lost' that, after all their work, all they had was her last known coordinates–a building with a score of landing pads and connection with at least a dozen underground passages snaking beneath the overpopulated city. So many ins, so many outs, and nothing but censored camera footage to go by. He sighed. "Lovely."

All he wanted to do was go home. Murray obliged, dropping him on the 75th floor of a high-rise in the middle of the bustling city center, and went to deliver his research to Bentley. Sly's green comrade hadn't left the Safe House for so much as an hour in the last month. He'd been so busy modifying his cybernetic chair for any possible eventuality they may encounter searching for Sly's wife that he hadn't made much time for outside life. Or life in general. Penelope kept him company most days, but her research took her away from him at odd hours, leaving the too-clever turtle alone more often than Sly would like. He resolved to invite the three of them to his flat for a gaming session, hoping to give them some sort of reprieve from the constant stress they'd been under, but he'd have to tidy up first.

Digital projections of news articles covered the walls of the flat he'd once shared with Carmelita, and where there were no projections, there were chips and thumb drives and written eye-witness accounts and hand-scribbled notes and time clock logs. Her coffee mug sat untouched in the sink, all her toiletries, clothing, and refrigerator magnets still firmly in place, exactly where she'd left them. Like she'd never left, except she had.

His television ran a constant stream of news and missing person reports from where it sat embedded in his south wall. He scoured the channels daily, and often at night when he couldn't sleep or woke to a siren blaring as a police vehicle blurred past his window, but had found nothing. Not a single clue–either good or horrible–as to where his wife had gone the night she disappeared.