Buying Time to Steal the Stars
A Sly Cooper x-over
by Matthew Talbain
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters or settings within this story unless otherwise noted.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: What's this?! A non-Ranma fanfic?! What's -wrong- with me?! And yes, this fic assumes quite a few liberties, specifically about character ages. Sorry, but it's very necessary for plot-points.
--Prologue: Earthbound--
Blood pounded in his ears, drowning out the mandrill's threats, as the cannon swiveled, aiming at the one person he'd never forgive himself for losing. Almost without direction, his booted feet slapped the ground, closing the distance between himself and the vixen standing there like a deer trapped in the headlights of a Mack truck. He felt himself dive, pushing her aside as his momentum carried him into the cannon's path. He distantly heard himself crying 'Not her!' as he regained his feet.
Then there was nothing but pain and chaos. He felt the miniature explosion ripple against his right side, saw the ceiling in the vault growing closer and closer, but it was staggered. Everything was like a strobe light on its slowest setting, or a badly-animated cartoon. He never felt the impact of the catwalk, he only knew he'd succeeded. He'd saved her, given her another chance. His only regret was that he'd thrown away his own last chance, the chance to tell her how he really, truly felt. Even as he felt the blood pouring from his side, from his lips, he felt resolve filling him. He would tell her.
A second explosion rippled through the vault, loosening some of the rock wall above him, and his last vision, as his eyes closed almost assuredly for the last time, was a spired boulder growing closer.
"No!"
He sat upright, ignoring the twinge of pain in his right side, his motion hampered by the tight jumpsuit he was wearing. His breathing was labored, the sounds around him muffled, yet sharp. He felt a hand rest on his shoulder, shivered quietly as he looked up at the figure next to him, wearing a similar jumpsuit as he did. His hearing returned to him quickly as he shook the sleep from his brain, alerting him to the spiking ring of his new binocucom and the whine of the afterburners of the aircraft he occupied. He pressed the accept button, raising the binocucom as he shared a nod with his well-concealed deckmate.
"What's up, Bent?"
"Sly, your vitals just spiked! Are you okay, buddy? You haven't jumped yet, we can still reschedule."
The raccoon grimaced quietly as he rested his left hand over his right side. The offer was very, very tempting. It had only been a month, after all, since Bentley had saved him from the falling ceiling in the vault and got him back to the group. A month since he'd last seen Carmelita. He could be recovering at one of their Paris safehouses, staking out the Interpol vixen's apartment, telling her of his revelation in that last meeting.
His eyes settled on the male next to him. Apart from the obviously vulpine tail poking from the back of his black jumpsuit and the sunglasses perched to cover the eyes of his face mask, he was a complete mystery. He was nervous, thought; excited. This was important to him. Sly gritted his teeth and shook his head quietly.
"No, Bentley. We have to do it now. The world's premiere master thief can't lose his edge, now, can he?"
He smirked half-heartedly, knowing his friend on the other end was grimacing to himself with worry.
"All right, Sly. Just be careful; those nanites aren't going to magically fix you, y'know. When you get back, you're getting rest."
Sly smiled and nodded. He was glad his friend was so concerned, especially since the machines in his blood were keeping track of his vitals even as they worked at repairing the damaged tissues in his right side. He switched off the binocucom and looked over at the masked fox next to him.
"Who are you, anyway? What's so important about this heist?"
The man just canted his head in Sly's direction before he unbuckled himself and stood up, hooking himself to a bar moving across the top of the aircraft's cabin.
"Call me 'Fox'. That's what we agreed upon when you decided to take on the job. As to why this is so important, this isn't a heist. I need your help conducting a -rescue-, Johnathan Sylvester Conner Cooper. Get up; we're nearly above Broom Lake."
Sly was taken aback, but did as instructed. This man had continued to surprise him, something extraordinarily hard to do, since Sly had agreed to accept his first commissioned 'heist'. To learn that said heist was a -rescue- did, indeed, make this job a bit more interesting, and a bit more urgent. But to know that this man knew his -full name-...
Not even Bentley knew his full name.
Sly shook it off, ignoring the throbbing in his side as he hooked on, pulling on his parachuting gear and locking it onto the bar. He and Fox shuffled down to the jump door, and Sly began to take deep breaths to prepare himself for the jump. He knocked on the door twice, and got a muffled 'Okay!' from a familiar voice: Murray had decided to become their pilot, as well as their driver. It was a bit of a reassurance to Sly. After all, if it had wheels and some way to steer, Murray was the master.
The green light came on, and Fox leapt. After a second, the light came on again, and Sly found himself in free fall. He angled himself using the flaps on his jumpsuit to get closer to the man that had leapt before him, catching up slowly. He pulled on his own mask, activating the short-band radio used only for close-distance communications. Almost immediately, he heard Fox's voice in his ears.
"Alright, then, Cooper. We're gonna open low, otherwise these guys might see us coming. We're gonna hit the ground hard, cut our wires, and run like hell. There's an automatic pistol in your harness; you are going to have to use it."
Sly felt the blood drain from his face. All of his life, he'd managed to go without taking any life other than Clockwerk and Neyla, and he'd never lost any sleep because of the evil that bastard owl had been responsible for and the duplicity, the selfishness the tigress exuded. But now, he was being told to use a weapon created with lethal intent. He didn't think he could do it at all.
"I...I can't. I can't kill innocent people, not even guards!"
He heard a low chuckle coming over his comm and canted his head at the free-falling fox nearby.
"Listen, Cooper. All I can tell you about myself is that I used to make a... temporary residence here. That's why I called you, how I get my information. I have a source on the inside. Believe me on this; the men and women that carry weapons in this facility are all criminals, all worse even than your man, Clockwerk. They -need- to die."
Sly still wasn't reassured, but decided to shelf his worries, for now. He wasn't certain he'd even have to pull the trigger. He had his cane, after all. He was shocked out of his internal monologue when he noticed Fox reach for the ripcord over his heart, and repeated the action. As one, they jerked in their harnesses as their parachutes opened above them.
It was only fifteen seconds before they slammed into the ground. Sly winced as he pulled out a bootknife and began to slice the wires connected to his harness, dropping the parachute's carrier to the ground as he tried to work some feeling back into his legs. He followed Fox across the concrete ground, wondering why there were no sirens, no alarms or alerts, as Fox yanked open an access panel in the side of a building and disappeared.
It was cold as they found their way into what appeared to be an employee break room, apart from the manacle hooks on the legs of the chairs. Fox stood at the door, refusing to remove his jumpsuit and harness even as Sly removed his mask and replaced it with his trademark French cap. He bent down and tied on his crimson thigh-bag for his 'acquisitions' and rested his cane over his shoulder, nodding quietly to himself as he adjusted his suit for optimum motion.
"Alright, Sly. We need to get down to level seventeen, but the elevator will only take us to level fifteen. For security purposes, they've attached a second ventilation system independent of the upper floors to the fifteenth level in the elevator shaft. That's our way in, and that's where we'll need the guns."
Sly looked at Fox awkwardly before nodding, deciding that, like always, there was a reason they couldn't just take the stairs. Besides, it made things more fun this way. There was more than likely a security scanner in the hallways, and if he remembered correctly, military facilities never grouped elevators near stairs for just such security purposes. And if there was a section of the base that required its own ventilation systems attacked directly to an elevator shaft, it more than likely meant that something was going on downstairs that didn't need to risk being carried to the upper floors. Especially if someone was going 'shoot-to-kill' for the lower floors.
"Why are there manacle slots on these chairs?"
Fox just looked at Sly and pulled out his own weapon, slipping a cartridge into the magazine chamber.
"The scientists that work here are all kidnapped from around the world. They don't want them leaving. Don't hurt them, any of them, and they won't give us away."
Suddenly, the rescue idea seemed much more plausible to the raccoon, and, with a scowl and a grimace, he slipped a cartridge into his own weapon, holstering it at the small of his back as Fox cleared the hallway and gave him a thumbs up.
The trip to the elevator was uneventful, save for an instant where Fox pulled a photograph out of the pouch at his own thigh and attached it to a curious clip. He waited a moment, gazing at a red light on the side of a camera in the elevator before it blinked for a moment, signaling a break in the camera's circuit, and the man clipped the photograph in front of the camera's lens. Sly's estimation of the man rose; he was a clever thief.
"C'mon, we've got to get to the fifteenth floor. There's a vent about level with the top of the elevator, so we're gonna ride the top of this thing. The picture's because that camera's circuit resets after only six seconds; not even you could open the hatch and get out before you were spotted. And don't answer your binocucom; any incoming communications will be intercepted and reveal our location. Come on, let's move."
Sly nodded and stepped up onto the handrail, punching the emergency exit open and waiting for the elevator to start moving, giving him room to move on top. Within seconds, his hand was extending to accept Fox's and pull him up onto the roof, but not before the man reached over and unclipped the photograph at another break in the circuit.
"Never know when someone's going to get on this thing."
Sly tried his hardest to think of a witty come-back, but his injury, the nanites, and this mission itself were disconcerting him. Not to mention he had a lethal weapon holstered at his back. He settled for helping the man up and preparing himself for the hasty exit from their current ride.
They rode quietly for a few minutes, Fox handing Sly a pair of pliers and a screwdriver. The raccoon accepted them quietly, cracking his neck. If he could stand up, he'd be shifting his weight nervously. He never worked in such absolute silence before, not really. He'd always been able to consult Bentley in the middle of a mission. He didn't like the feeling, not at all.
In short order, the two were crawling down a ventilation shaft, with Fox in front, leading Sly through twists and turns that would have caught anyone less slim and limber than the two shadows that crawled through. Sly realized, almost all at once, that they were passing through numerous junctions, and Fox seemed to know exactly which way to turn each and every time.
He'd only just opened his mouth when he was forced to click it shut audibly, the man before him finding a space to shift positions, sliding legs first through an access panel in the 'floor' of the shaft. Sly followed quickly and realized they were crawling vertically, now, down two levels of shafts, before they were crawling on their stomachs once again. Fox stopped and snapped his fingers, holding his hand back behind his tail. Sly nodded and passed up the pliers and screwdriver, waiting as patiently as a man with his level of energy could. It was only a minute before Fox was flowing through the ventilation door he'd just opened, closely followed by the master thief. Sly dropped to the floor and used his cane to scratch a tiny little mark on the edge of the grate, shaped like a 'C', before using the crook of the cane to settle the grate back on the edges of the hole.
They moved quickly down the hallway, their weapons drawn, as they found only white coats walking around, all of them manacled by electronic shackles. Fox made directly for one, curiously a raccoon, who just pointed down one hallway and held up three fingers. Fox turned and grabbed Sly's wrist.
"Sly, they're holding our objective in a lab room three doors down that hallway. You move; I'm going for the command center to unlock all of these manacles. After we save all of these people, there's a hangar connected to this level. That's our exit. We have to concert our actions, so I'll be on the short-band."
Sly nodded and lowered himself into his familiar crouching walk, passing by two of the doors as he checked the safety of his weapon. He heard the chirp of the short-band in his ears as he reached the third door, noticing a large window immediately next to the door. He heard Fox say that he was getting into position just as he peeked over the window to get a glimpse of the inside chambers.
"Hurry up, Fox! They've got needles in her!"
It was a blue-furred vixen, strapped to a table with two needles, one in either arm. Sly studied them for a moment before he saw three separate bottles on a tray next to the table. He gasped quietly. The bottles were three different compounds; sodium thiopental, pancuronium, and potassium chloride.
"Fox! It's a lethal injection procedure, are these windows bulletproof?!"
The one syllable that saved the girl's life could be heard over the short-band, seemingly resonating 'No.' in Sly's ears for a lifetime before he stood and, without thinking, raised his pistol, using his thief's reflexes to speed his perception of time to take in the situation. Two armed guards, one with his back directly against the window and one standing closer to the table, were ordering a single scientist to grab the sodium thiopental and inject it into her IV saline drip. Sly raised his weapon, firing a slug through the glass into the guard next to the table. Without waiting a single second, he turned his gun on the one next to the window, only just raising his weapon and beginning to turn as Sly's second round entered his cranial cavity.
Sly leapt through the window and used his cane as leverage on the scientist's manacles, freeing the woman swiftly.
"Unlock her. Let her go."
The girl was out of it, clad only in a white shift for the purposes of the scientist's modesty over her own, and Sly swiftly determined that his sweater would cover the necessities. He shook the girl softly as the scientist removed some keys from one of the guards and began unlocking the girl's manacles. Sly stood guard, an alarm beginning to blare from far down the hall. When the scientist, a female wolf, nodded softly and thanked Sly, the raccoon nodded and raised his weapon to the opened window.
"Reach in my backpack; there's a blue sweater there. Take it out and give it to the girl; never let it be said that Sly Cooper kept a girl naked any longer than necessary."
He winked at the wolf, who blushed softly and set about getting some smelling salts to awaken the poor vixen on the table. In short order, the girl was waking up to the sight of a man standing over her, his back to her, with a weapon raised to the window. She cocked her head softly and smiled gratefully as the woman next to her handed her a blue sweater. The wolf whispered something she couldn't understand, but the way she was pointing at the man and smiling at him, he was a savior, her hero.
She stood up and tugged on Sly's sleeve, wobbling softly. Sly steadied her and climbed out of the window just as Fox came running down the hall. Without waiting, he picked the blue vixen up and seemed to sigh in relief. Sly could have sworn he heard a 'Thank God it's not him..." come from the fox, but he turned and looked at the scientist.
"Get out of here, cutie. This place is hell on your hair."
He winked again and looked at his 'partner', who was settling the girl in his arms down and murmuring to her in a language Sly didn't recognize. Fox looked up at the raccoon.
"C'mon, Cooper. We've got to get to the hangar. I'm out of bullets; it's your show, now."
Fox ran down the hall without waiting for an answer, and Sly pushed the memory of putting two living, breathing animal beings out of their lives down, running after the man. They ran amidst a crowd of white coats, all headed for the hangar, some of them bearing knife and gunshot wounds, and almost all of them carried weapons that Sly recognized as belonging to the guards.
There was little else eventful as they pushed into the hangar, Sly taking the collection of foreign and American fighters undergoing reverse engineering in the facility. He gasped as he took in one aircraft, however. It was an anomaly; it was a sleek, futuristic craft with a single seat, swept-back wings, and four cyan protrusions extending above and below each wing. Fox seemed to grit his teeth as he saw the craft and put the girl down on her feet, running for the aircraft and leaping in. He reached in and pulled a single lever, opening a hatch under the nose of the ship, and he beckoned for Sly and the girl.
"It's been a while since I flew one of these. Sly, is there anywhere you know of where we can set this thing down and have a safe, large facility to work in?"
Sly gritted his teeth as a fresh memory flogged him as Fox helped the girl into the hatch, which was apparently a very roomy cargo area. He wondered for a moment what the man meant when he said it'd been a while since he flew one of these things, but didn't comment as he nodded. He handed the binocucom to Fox.
"Call Bentley, tell him to give you directions and coordinates for my family's ranch in Tennessee. "
Fox nodded and helped Sly into the cargo hold of the futuristic, almost obviously alien ship, then disappeared for a moment. When he reappeared, he exchanged a few of those unfamiliar words with the girl before handing her a bag. She looked into the bag and spoke with a questioning tone, the man just shook his head and closed the hatch. The whine of engines could be heard, and then, there was the sensation of flying and falling at the same time.
The girl studied the raccoon in front of her quietly as she ruffled through the back. She blushed and pulled several articles of clothes out and looked at the raccoon meaningfully. He nodded and turned around, blinking as he heard the fox shuffling behind him. In a matter of moments, she tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around and had to stop himself from gasping aloud.
She was stunning, simply put. She was dressed in a tight blue jumpsuit, one she seemed to be very comfortable in, and the way it hugged her every curve, Sly could believe it belonged to nobody but her. She was wearing a number of tribal decorations in her hair, and was rubbing her arms where the needles had been. Around her neck was a curious choker, and Sly decided to see if she was as foreign as he thought.
"Hello, there. I'm Sly, Sly Cooper. Can you understand me?"
The girl blushed and nodded softly, coughing quietly. Her lips didn't quite seem to match her words, however.
"I can understand you, yes. My name is Krystal. Thank you for saving me."
He smiled softly and turned to ask her something else when he noticed she was still a little out of it. He balled up his sweater, which she'd left on his shoulder when she tapped him, and held it out to her.
"Here. Use this as a pillow, get some sleep. It might be a while before we get where we're going, Krystal."
The girl smiled gratefully, tears welling up in her eyes as she nodded and lay down, curling up and crying quietly as she fell asleep. It had been such a rough week. First, that black hole, then the dogfight near that red planet with those ape-like ships that had followed her, then her rough landing in that desert, and finally her imprisonment. Now that she felt just a little safe, she could allow herself to cry.
Sly settled in and watched the girl's emotions on her face. He felt the craft land, far quicker than he'd expected, especially considering he felt none of the gravity force he'd expected to feel with a flight in a craft this sleek. He climbed out as the hatch opened, expecting to see desert. He gaped as he saw his great-great-great grandfather's ranch spreading out before him, an open barn door framing his field of reference as the retractable ceiling his father had had installed for some of the Cooper family personal aircraft finished closing up. Fox was climbing down the ladder attached to the side of the sleek ship, a grin creasing the mask under his muzzle and a slim, rectangular box-like computer tucked under his arm.
"It's been so damn long since I flew one of these."
Sly simply continued to gape at the barn around him before shaking himself out of his reverie for what seemed to be the millionth time that day. He looked over at Fox, cocking an eyebrow as he reached up into the cargo hold to retrieve the sleeping Krystal, as well as his sweater.
"Love to see your airline miles at work. You get the Triple-A platinum discount?"
Ah, finally! He'd managed something in close proximity to his usual dry wet. It still left him feeling a bit out of it, but restored some semblance of order to his churning, chaotic mind.
"Ha! I wish. Especially with one of these. Nah, I don't have time to explain right now. I've got to get this thing hooked up to a computer. Oh, by the way; this thing's in shit-shape. Don't even breathe on it, I want Bentley to look it up and see if he can do anything about replicating it."
Sly blinked at that. Shit shape? He took it in and blinked owlishly. It looked pristine! Apart from the carbon scoring on the wings, the blue extensions, and just about every inch of the silver body, the fact that every bolt seemed to be vibrating with the strain of holding itself together, and the one wing that happened to fall off at that moment...
Sly reassessed his opinion. It was in shit-shape. He turned and beckoned Fox to follow him, his mind finally reasserting itself as he opened followed a small, worn track to the main ranch house, a refurbished mansion on par with most Texas ranches. Opening the door with the crook of his cane, the only key to most of the Cooper clan properties, he led Fox in and pointed to a small door to their right.
"That's the den. Bentley's got a few computers in there, the black one with the mask insignia on the tower is my PC. Use the guest account."
With that, he carried the girl up the cliche double stairwell. He took a moment to take in the house's furnishings, rather pleased that the stairwell was the only obvious sign of grandiosity. The house didn't even have chandeliers. Sly smiled quietly as he remembered the various accounts and holdings listed in the Thievius Raccoonus, and the lack of personal greed each one he'd visited had shown. He knew, deep in his heart, that while stealing was inherently wrong, at least nobody in his family line had stolen for themselves.
He lay the girl down in bed, the latest affirmation that his life's choice after his father's death had proven the right decision to make. He quietly tucked her into bed, taking a quiet note to have Bentley check her out soon. As he made his way downstairs, slowly stripping himself of his harness, he sat upon the stairs before electing to take a shower.
After his brief shower, he dressed in a simple pair of jeans and a sweater, preferring to remain barefoot when not out on a job. His trademark cap was left on a bed in his own bedroom, as was the jumpsuit. He figured that he'd likely be remaining here for a while. The man in his den, after all, was quite the enigma, as was the ship he'd piloted seemingly effortlessly, and Sly, being the master thief he was, absolutely hated leaving an enigma unsolved unless it was himself.
A master thief had to have his secrets, after all.
He felt himself getting hungry and made his way to the kitchen downstairs, opposite the hall of the den. Rather leery of the cooking equipment, he settled with fixing himself a bowl of instant ramen, a staple of his when Murray, the only member of his little gang that could actually create something recognizable -and- edible, was gone. This reflection didn't sit well with him, something that he had been realizing about most of his habits for the long month his recovery had taken.
Oh, certainly, he was no slob, at least by the standards of most bachelors. Whenever he was alone, that is, whenever Murray and Bentley were gone, whatever pad he occupied at the time was quite clean. However, it irked him that he was almost dependent on his two friends for a life. That was something that he'd realized a long time ago, immediately after the Clock-La incident. Bentley had been broken nearly in two by the foul resurrection of the Cooper clan's ultimate nemesis, and Murray had gotten out of the ordeal covered in bruises and scratches on top of suffering the existential crisis and guilt that had led him to seek the help of the Guru.
Sly had been forced to live alone for several months before Bentley had recovered, and even then, it had been another several months as he and his turtle friend went about their way recruiting new members for their gang of thieves for the Kaine Island job. During that time, Sly had found himself utterly bored, and that particular thought left a bad taste in his mouth. Was he anything without thievery, without the rush of the chase and the satisfaction of a job well done? Even so, he'd never resorted to simple burglary. No, everything he did was for a reason.
The Fire Stone of India, the report about his own gang, the pieces of Clockwerk, everything he'd ever stolen in his life had an altruistic or necessary undertone. Hell, even the Bavarian chocolate had stolen hadn't actually been stolen. He'd paid an almost inexorbitant amount of money for that bar of chocolate under his one legal identity, and even more to have it placed in the Munich museum. 'stole' it from himself in transit. That particular 'heist' had been a reassurance that he and his gang hadn't lost any of their edge and cohesion as a group following their separation. That, and Sly actually had the chance to work on Chapter XVII of the Thievius Raccoonus, always a plus, in his book.
Still, his one recourse in his moment of boredom between jobs was a -job-. It was a depressing realization that his life had, until his injury, been consciously centered around two things. Heists and his gang. The Kaine incident had given rise to a third, much more alluring center: Carmelita. The one constant in his life of crime besides Murray and Bentley had been the fire-eyed, azure-haired, venom-spitting vixen that kept Sly on his toes at all times. It was a beyond-welcome realization, but it disconcerted him that the only reason he even knew her was because of his crimes, no matter how altruistic they were.
He sighed quietly as he finished his instant soup and tucked into a sandwich before deciding to head to the gym located under and behind the grand stairwell. He smiled at that thought; only a Cooper would have a training hall where most socialites at the time would have a grand ballroom. For a moment, Sly felt a brief burst of affection and pride that 'Tennessee Kid' Cooper was -his- great-great-great-great-great grandfather, and still they shared similar tastes. He meandered into the main hallway and peeked into the den, where Fox had removed his mask, though his sunglasses remained perched on his nose and thus removed most chance of identification from Sly's current angle.
"Hey, Fox. I'm gonna be in the training hall, it's through the doors on either side of the grand staircase, bottom floor."
Without waiting for a reply, he walked through the main hall and into the dojo, where he immediately stripped off his shirt and rolled up his tight jeans so that he could move more freely, opting to do without his cane. He needed a hobby besides thievery, and though he knew he could charm just about any girl out of her engagement ring, he wasn't that kind of man, and certainly didn't desire to lose the last bit of his innocence to anything less than a life-long love.
So he turned to martial arts. He wrapped some tape around his forearms, wrists, and most of each hand before he began pounding at every bag and target within the gym, often rolling or leaping from one to another. Apart from the pain in his side, he was completely lost in the activity, allowing lessons long-since past and his eidetic memory of the section of the Thievius Raccoonus recorded by his ancestor Rioichi to flood his body's muscle memory.
Fox was in the room shouting for ten minutes before he decided to walk up and slap the raccoon to get his attention. He received an elbow to the gut that doubled him over before Sly felt himself stopping, a blush spreading across his silver-gray cheeks.
"Uh...sorry, there, Fox. What's up?"
The fox just glared up at Sly, surprisingly effectively considering the ever-present shades hiding his eyes from view. He collected himself and stood up, coughing quietly as he looked the raccoon in the eyes.
"It's much, much more serious than I thought. At first, I'd just thought of having Bentley rebuild and duplicate the ship out there as a bit of a hobby, and a challenge for all of us to keep us busy and out of trouble while the warrants on -your- head expire. Now, I -need- that turtle to replicate the technology of that ship -flawlessly- and improve on it!"
Sly was dumbfounded and lost for words. Mentally kicking himself for being taken aback yet again by the mysterious figure standing before him, he rested his hands on the obviously-agitated fox's shoulders, trying to calm the man down somewhat, with limited success. At least he wasn't pacing anymore, anyway.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, easy, there, hombre. Tell me what's going on, why do we need Bentley to reproduce that pile of crap in my barn?"
The fox took a deep, deep breath before nodding once and looking Sly in the eyes, or at least seeming to.
"Alright. I'm gonna need you and your gang, -all- of your gang, for this one, so I need you guys to trust me like I was your best damn friend. To that end, I'm going to have to tell you a little story. You have a partition between your bathroom and a changing room, here?"
Sly nodded, getting where the man was going with this, and showed him the way to the still-warm shower. Fox thanked him and immediately shut the door between the bathroom and the changing room, a common theme for a Cooper's permanent residence since the days of Sly's Japanese ancestor. Sly ignored the sound of the man stripping and listened solely to his voice.
"Alright, kid. About twenty-five years ago, an aircraft similar to the one in your barn crash-landed in rural Spain. The pilot made it out safely with his flight recorder before the craft exploded. Because its particular energy source had been breached and caused the explosion, not a damn thing was left except the pilot and his little black box. That pilot wasn't flying an experimental craft, he was an extraterrestrial. The whole thing was reported as a meteor strike, and everybody believed it, save one woman. The pilot had been almost fatally injured prior to the crash, and was found near-death by that very woman before the plane exploded."
The sounds of water began, and Sly tried extremely hard to purge the thought of this man in his shower with limited success until he replaced the man's image with that of Carmelita. It took a second before Sly realized Fox was talking again.
"Now, let's go back a bit, to the beginning of this little story. In a place called the Lylat System, this pilot was the leader of a crack team of ace mercenary pilots, a three-fighter group calling themselves 'Star Fox'. There wasn't a damn thing those three couldn't do when it came to fighter craft. They were the most highly-sought after mercenary group, and they never took missions that weren't on the up-and-up. They were most frequently hired by the commander-in-chief of Lylat's capitol world, Corneria, a bloodhound with a highly-developed sense of honor and justice."
Sly almost rolled his eyes at that one. He couldn't see such a man hiring mercenaries, no matter how altruistic they were.
"Well, about thirty years ago, General Pepper had exiled a whack-job scientist by the name of Andross to an inhospitable planet in the system by the name of Venom. He'd apparently been experimenting with explosives or something in his lust for power and destroyed a large portion of Corneria's capitol city. For five years, nothing was heard of the bastard, but then signs of life and activity began to show up on the surface of Venom. Star Fox was hired to investigate and deal with the situation."
The sounds of the water shutting off and a towel being removed broke the monologue briefly.
"It was an easy mission, or it should have been. Our boy's left wingman, however, had decided to take a payday from Andross and shot down our pilot during an ambush he'd set up before turning on the right wingman. The traitor, Pigma, then carted our boy, unconscious and still in his fighter, to Andross' main facility on Venom. They used a refined version of the experiment that had destroyed Corneria City's industrial district on him, still in his jet, as a form of revenge. It was a black hole, but not as you know it. It was a wormhole, and against all odds, it led right to the Solar System, ejecting our pilot into space at a great enough velocity to put him right on course with Earth."
The door opened, revealing the fox, but not as Sly knew him. Instead of the jumpsuit, he was wearing a white blazer over a green zippered combat suit. A red scarf was wrapped around his neck, and a belt with a triangular gold buckle was tied securely around the green combat trousers he wore tucked into a pair of heavy metal combat boots. His sunglasses were still perched firmly on his muzzle, and his lips seemed to curve in an almost-arrogant smirk by nature.
"After that pilot crash-landed here, he held out hope of returning home one day, because he had a young son, about three years old, back on Corneria. With a little time, though, he realized he'd have to make a new start, so he married the woman who'd found him, Aileen Maria Coronado Fox, and took her name. He'd already fallen in love with her, a fact made a little easier since his son's mother had died during the birth. They had a daughter together, a young woman by the name of Carmelita Montoya Fox."
Here, James removed his shades and allowed his bright-green gaze to pierce Sly to the core, canting his head to the side.
"My name is James Marcus McCloud Fox, the father of the woman you've spent the last four years of your life running from. I need your help because Andross is going to be coming to Earth soon, with all of his armada."
A/N: Holy shit, I'm a bastard. Yes, I know, I screwed around with Fox's probable age at the time of his father's disappearance, and yes, I know I merged the explanations for James' 'death' from both the SNES Star Fox and the Lylat Wars (Star Fox 64), and -yes-, damnit, I know I'm not strictly in-character with Sly. That having been said...I wrote this in less than a total of six hours. Hot. Damn.
Oh, yes, and this particular fic goes out to Kit Karamak; it was his Sly and Star Fox fanfiction that percolated this particular idea. My hat's off to you, Kit. May you find your writing as prolific as ever, and thank you for providing me with yet another outlet for my unique creative processes.
After that little side-note, I'm open to ideas for this particular fic. This, and 'Soldier' will be my main focuses for a very long while to come. I've got a few things planned, but I'm going to let you guys give me some more. Have fun, read, and please leave some constructive criticisms in your reviews.