Rating: T

Setting/Spoilers: The Sly Cooper half of the story is set after the first game. The Monkey Island half is set before Tales of Monkey Island. I do have a reason for doing this, I promise. There will be some spoilers for Curse of Monkey Island, but other than that the other games will mostly get some references. Also, the Sly Cooper half will dovetail into another fic I am planning, but that will come about later, so the prologue here is a little misleading.

Warnings: Ah, the fun part. Not much more than what's in the games, although this story is going to be a bit more violent. I can't help it, I've always written whump-fic. There will also be a fair amount of suspense, including cliffhangers, in the chapters to come. The prologue may start a bit slow, but I promise things will pick up from there.

Disclaimer: Sly Cooper and Monkey Island belong to their respective creators and owners. This story is a work of fanfiction written for no profit, and no infringement is intended.

Well, I don't think you want anything else from me. So on to the story! Enjoy!


Prologue: From the Pages of the Thievius Raccoonus

The life of a master thief. I'd like to say it's been nothing but adventure and excitement since Clockwerk's defeat, but I'd be lying. Knock down one criminal kingpin and five others rise up to take his place. And the gang and I...well, we'd taken out the Fiendish Five. There were now five very big sets of shoes empty, and every two-bit thug who had ever worked with the Five were jockeying to fill them.

In other words, the world was ripe for the Cooper name. So many would-be crimelords gathering their wealth and resources to fight out all the others for a spot at the top. It was the perfect time to practice the skills I'd learned from the Thievius Raccoonus. We even helped tie up a few loose ends for Interpol along the way (though not too many...wouldn't want the good inspector to get sloppy, would we?).

And now, almost two years have passed since Clockwerk's final defeat at Krack-Karov volcano. Bentley and Murray have gotten a taste for adventure, and have been training to be better in the field. Bentley's been brushing up on his hacking skills by tapping into some of the biggest and most corrupt companies in the world. We've found more leads than I ever thought possible thanks to his computer skills. And Murray...well, Murray's been taking "self-defense" classes from a retired pro wrestler. He says it's so he won't be a burden to us anymore, but I know he's enjoying himself.

We were targeting a local counterfeit artist when Bentley turned up a strange lead from the Interpol database. It was a file simply titled "Cooper Artifacts". Someone at Interpol was researching my family history. The file had information about the signature items my family had carried over the years. The cane was a recent change-every few generations one Cooper or another would modify the family symbol for their own thieving style. I knew all of this from reading the Thievius Raccoonus, but according to this file many of those items were still out there.

I'm not sure how many of my ancestors fell to Clockwerk over the past few centuries, but it seemed like not all of them were able to pass their symbols on before they died. A few had wound up in private collections, mostly owned by criminals, but most were simply lost (unless there was some massive treasure vault somewhere that held the accumulated wealth of the Cooper clan, but how likely was that?).

So it was decided: the gang and I would go after these lost artifacts and restore them to the Cooper name.

Bentley zeroed in on our first target: the cutlass of Henrietta "One-Eye" Cooper. She had stolen from notorious pirates and corrupt British officers on the Caribbean seas, always carrying as her trademark two cutlasses in the shape of the Cooper emblem.

Somehow, one of these cutlasses had wound up in the hands of a modern-day pirate named Charles Boehr. Now my gang and I were going to get it back.

We were off for Scupper Island.


To be Continued...

Next Chapter: An Interrupted Reunion. Wherein everything goes according to plan. Yeah, sure, when has that ever happened?