SLINGING THROUGH THE TREES

Job 8: Pipe Bomb

Sly leaves the safe-house and jumps from roof to roof, railwalking and spire-jumping between them in a carefree dance. He lands without a sound on a roof across from one of the staircases into the ground and pulls out his binoc-u-com. "All right Bentley, what am I looking for down there?"

"I swear, Tennessee has even less sense than you do," Bentley grumbles.

Sly chuckles. "Guess you rubbed off a little over the years, huh?"

"If you asked me before this, I wouldn't have thought so, but somehow he's even worse," Bentley removes his glasses, polishes them, then puts them back on. "All right. Based on what we know, the robots are fully sentient. Even if that's Neyla in there, we don't want to kill them, but we need a way to damage them."

"And I wouldn't mind blowing Neyla up," Sly adds, twisting his cane. "She did far too much damage before. A little payback seems wonderful."

"Well, the police does have technology to detain cyborg or otherwise robotics-enfused lawbreakers," Bentley says. "I've been working on it for several months as an independent contractor."

"So that's what you and Penelope have been doing over those dates!"

"They weren't dates!" Bentley coughs. When he speaks again, it's in a much more reasonable tone. "In any case, we still need to at least cause damage or stun them, maybe cause them to overload. The moss electrica stimulata that grows in caves in the area would give any bombs I put it in enough heft to break through whatever shielding they have and stun them, maybe even knock them out for a time."

"So you want me to go down the stairs and collect some," Sly says, swinging the cane over his shoulder. "Sounds like a good plan."

"Since there's a chance we'll need to do this with multiple robots, I need you to gather every bit of it you can find," Bentley says. "One plant will go a long way, but more is always better."

Sly tucks his binoc-u-com in his pocket and descends down the stairs. He emerges in the first area Carmelita explored: soap bubble ceiling, broken bridges reduced to ropes connecting pieces of a broken path, guards snoozing at intervals. And pipes overhead, out of reach of any jump.

Sly spots his way up about halfway through. A few spire jumps on half-broken pillars gets him to the far wall, where he presses his back against it and inches along a ledge to one half-broken pipe hanging down, water dripping from the end sluggishly. From there he can climb up and leap to the further network of pipes and get a proper look around.

The pipes are spread out too far to jump between them, no matter what method Sly would use. Rather than a sensible grid, or anything sensible, really, they're in a maze. Sly's somewhere near the center. One end of the maze, near where he came in, has a waypoint: some elec—stim—some electromoss clings to a pipe there (do NOT ask Sly to remember the name). Another waypoint indicates that more of the moss is on a pipe near the other end of the tunnel.

It takes Sly a good ten minutes to navigate the maze to get to the first bit of moss, which he peels off the pipe as though it were a sock, if socks made slurping noises. Then he jumps down and takes the much simpler way back to the center, where he climbs back up and repeats in the opposite direction.

That's all the moss down here, so Sly climbs back to the surface and makes his way to another staircase. He emerges into a similar soap-bubble design, with a crumbly path, but no guards. There are motion detectors through this puzzle, glowing faintly purple in the way that means they absolutely must be avoided, and broken pipes scattered around the ceiling. Two of which, he can see from here, have the electromoss on them.

Now to get up there.

It takes Sly walking almost the entire path to find a pillar without a motion detector on it. He spire jumps from there to a pipe he can climb, and gets to the pipe maze to find it, well, less maze-like but more treacherous.

There are a couple motion detectors up here, sure, but he can avoid those easily enough.

What's harder is that the pipes are broken and rickety and several have obvious rust on them, including one right next to where he climbed up. When Sly jumps on it, it trembles for a precious second, then falls; it's apparent that none of the rusty pipes will hold up under his weight.

More than the motion detectors, that's the challenge here. If Sly falls in the wrong spot, well, he'd better not; he should know where it is and isn't safe to jump after doing the last underground pipe maze. But to get to the three electro-mosses growing down here, sometimes he has to cross those pipes. As fast as he possibly can. Or even, when he can't get across them fast enough, leap to another pipe mid-fall. Once he even has to chain together running and jumping from three different rusted pipes in a row.

And he laughs the entire time he does so, because he's Sly, and he has no sense of self-preservation.

Once he's peeled off the electromoss pipe socks, he leaps to the ground and leaves once more. "Need any more, Bentley?"

"Not need, exactly," Bentley mutters over the maskpieces. "Four should make plenty of bombs. But if I get some more, I can run some experiments. Maybe be able to incorporate it into all our weapons, so we can all deal damage to those robots without the bombs."

"That sounds worth having," Sly says. "I'll keep going."

There's one more staircase to investigate, the dead-end where Tennessee was... was hiding? Was stuck? Was located? Well, he was there, in any case, and now Sly is going there.

Is there. That was fast.

Sly climbs down the staircase and stops there, scratching himself with his cane while he surveys the scene. Based on the broken lamps, broken pipes, and debris scattered around, it's fairly obvious Tennessee was in a fight here; that's not a problem. It means there's an easy way up to the ceiling right at the start, between all the broken pipes and everything else half-fallen down. This challenge involves combining the half-broken pipes with laser security. And Sly doesn't dare fall. Large sections of the path are completely engulfed in murderous motion detectors: Sly doesn't have any way to reach the targets to turn them off himself.

I mean, he could call in Tennessee or Carmelita or Bentley for a rescue if he really needed to, but he'd rather not do that. Sly has no problems calling on his 'little friends' for back-up; he did it when facing Neyla back in Canada. But they've all got other things to do right now, better things than rescue him when he's perfectly capable of handling this.

So Sly is... well, not exactly careful as he makes his way around. Sly is never careful. But he does make it a point not to take quite so many risks as he would under other circumstances.

The electromoss is at the far end of the cave, near where Tennessee was. It's stuck on the end of a pipe; Sly peels it off. "Think there's any more, Bentley?"

"Five should be enough for me to run my tests on," Bentley says. "It may be a few months before I have enough information to alter your cane, though, so we'll have to stick with bombs for now."

JOB COMPLETE

Sly does a pirouette on the pipe, bows, and heads for the exit.

Author's Notes

I'm... I hate admitting this. I'm having some problems financially, and am trying to pick up extra hours at work. Even if I don't, I will be fine, in an instant-ramen-meal sort of way, but this is me swallowing my pride and asking for some help, sort of: I've set up a . ww m/EikaPrime , without the random spaces. I don't have much to offer people I'm not already offering, but I've mentioned before-here and elsewhere-that one of my goals for fanfiction is to always have a healthy buffer, have extra stuff written beyond what I'm posting. The $9-a-month tier will let you read things 2 weeks early. Right now, I've got all of the next 2 week's chapters up for my Splatoon and Sly Cooper fanfics, and have scheduled future posts for all current fics for 5 PM EDT on June 6th and June 13. (Sly fans, I have about 15 chapters/weeks that need to be edited and titled and formatted, that haven't been scheduled. Splatoon peeps, at an average of 2 updates a week for those two fics, I have about 4 weeks written but they need editing and titles and opening italicy things. There'll be more updates.) Whether I get any s or not, any money or not, I will continue updating these things for free. I promise.