I could be a furious story-writer whose ideas have been removed from the game, but... Nah, I got nothing to do with any part of Assassin's Creed. Well, except playing it, of course.
'This should be easy enough' Ezio thought to himself, sitting on a scaffolding overlooking a street, giving him excellent viewpoint from which he could observe his target.
He was currently tracking the last couple of Codex pages, with the answer to the ancient mystery finally in his arm's reach. But before he could at last see the full picture, he had to take care of those couple of errands first.
He glanced towards his target once again. The man he was following now was in possession of one of the last pages, and had the unfortunate trait of valuing his possessions. Still, he wasn't a bad man. But even with that, there were greater things than one's likes...
With that thought, Ezio decided on subtlety, switching the Codex page the man was currently carrying to a bag of gold with twice as much that he paid for it. That should sweeten the deal – even if the man wasn't doing it knowingly.
A leap of faith brought Ezio to the street level. When he stood up from the hay, he went after his target, with the thick crowd giving him perfect protection from unwanted attention. He closed the gap to the man, and just before he softly bumped into him, he averted his eyes somewhat, to keep the appearance that it was simply a careless mistake.
Holding his catch firmly in hand, he slowed somewhat to casually walk the other way. But in that moment he became aware that he had made a mistake, because the thing in his hand wasn't exactly what he was counting on.
It seemed, that in the last second before the theft, someone got between him and the person he was aiming at. Still, his body acted on instinct alone, and he successfully stolen something from the woman he bumped into. Sighing slightly, he once again took pursuit after the man that was still carrying the Codex page...
'Just how messed up a simple thing like that can become,' Ezio thought, once again sitting high above the street, after the job was at last done. But it didn't go the way he had planned. It seemed that the thick crowd was more of a hindrance than help. Every time he was about to rob the man he was following, someone stepped right in front of him.
In the end, he lost his temper and abandoned the stealthy approach. He knocked the man out cold, and swiftly searched his pockets. Of course, immediately about dozen people started screaming bloody-murder, but at that point, with all the annoyances that happened to him thus far, he welcomed some exercise with open arms.
In the hindsight, he might have overdone it. He kept dealing with the guards, not really caring how many he had taken out already, that only when they stopped coming at him he noticed what happened. They haven't stopped chasing him because, like it was usual, he had run far enough for them to loose track of him. They stopped coming because there was no one left alive in sight to call up the alarm.
He sighed one last time, and, clutching the Codex page firmly in hand, he took first step towards Leonardo's workshop. And stopped at that...
Before he could visit his long time friend, he had one more thing to do. Because, seriously, he couldn't simply walk in there carrying more than two dozens of undergarments of various kind. He didn't have the strength to explain how exactly that happened.
AN. I was just visiting a friend, and he happened to be playing Assassin's Creed 2... and I remembered just how annoying the crowd can be at times.