Disclaimer: I DO NOT own Sly Cooper or any characters or any stuff associated with this game. All that belongs to Sucker Punch and Sony, after all, I am just a mere fangirl writing a fanfic! Note: I don't own ANY copyrighted content except the fictional characters I made up for this (namely, the villains and other nameless folks).
(Chapter One: The Cooper Cub)
It was two weeks later in the hospital. Sly had been idly laying in the hospital bed for the last two weeks, going through the same routine everyday—sleep, eat, sleep, eat and other bodily functions and so on and so forth. He was about ready to leave the hospital for his job at the orphanage.
Today, the doctor was going to come with his name for when he'd be at the orphanage and finally let Sly go off to the orphanage with some arranged transportation. That was why Sly was so excited about today...
Sly had remained perky, bright-eyed and bushy tailed all morning until mid-morning. At 10:30 A.M., just as Sly guessed, the door opened with the doctor and the nurse entering. The doctor walked over to the chair next to Sly's bed and opened the plastic bag that he had left sitting on it for the last two weeks. The crinkle of the bag revealed a forest green sweater, a pair of dark blue jeans and a pair of brown shoes.
"Today's the day, eh?" the nurse commented. The doctor nodded as Sly sat up. "Mr. Smith." Sly cocked an eyebrow (or what would be his eyebrow) as the doctor cleared his throat.
"Daniel Smith is your alias. Not Sly Cooper. When you are at the orphanage, you have to learn to react to the name Daniel Smith. You're going to need it if you're staying undercover there," the doctor announced. "Now go change in that bathroom over there!" The doctor ordered as he pointed to the other side of the room.
Sly quickly stood up as he grabbed the clothes from the doctor, ran off into the specified bathroom and slammed the door shut. After a moment, the raccoon realized it was still pitch black in the bathroom. He raced his paw along the wall and felt for a light switch. He quickly found it as he flicked it on and let his eyes get used to the light, then proceeded to take off the hospital gown he was wearing.
"Daniel" stared at the green sweater in disgust after taking five minutes to slip it on over his bandages and pull his arms through the sleeves. He felt suffocated in the turtleneck of the sweater and the sleeves went at least half an inch past his arms. This made him pull the sleeves up until the sweater fit right. The jeans were hard to get on because of his own tail. Sly became so aggravated that he had to cut a hole in the butt of the pants with a pair of scissors that a worker appeared to have left behind on the sink. After that, the jeans fit him perfectly. The only things that fit Sly perfectly by default were the brown shoes.
After putting all of the garments on, "Daniel" looked in the mirror that was above the sink and observed his appearance. He decided he looked rather scary. Who wouldn't be, with all the bandages wrapped around his head? Sly shuddered as he realized he looked like someone who was actually married.
"Are you done in there, Mr. Cooper?" the nurse asked from outside the bathroom. "The doctor says your ride will be here soon!" Sly exited the bathroom clutching the hospital gown he was wearing before. "Very dashing, Mr. Cooper." The nurse blushed slightly as Sly paced back over near the bed and placed the gown on top of it.
"It appears to fit all right..." the doctor trailed off. "Now let's go down to the parking lot. I've arranged ahead of time for one of my friends who works at the orphanage to take you." Sly reluctantly followed the doctor out of the room, saying naught a word.
The winding hallways had the same sanitary white that had decorated Sly's room. There was crying from some rooms, rejoicing from others, depending on the occasion that had occurred in that particular room. It seemed to go on forever, making the hospital seem more like a mansion. Sly wished it would end. He had spent enough time in the hospital.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the doctor had lead Sly up to the front desk, quickly signed a paper that a secretary had handed him and then continued walking out the revolving front door. The door lead to a large parking lot. It was filled with so many cars that Sly thought the two of them would get lost, except the doctor stopped at the corner of the curb.
"We wait here. My friend should be here soon," the doctor explained as he sat down on the bench nearby. "He might be late. He said it's usually hard to get out of there due to the lack of staff."
Sly leaned against a trash can. Nervous thoughts were stirring inside him. This was the first time from anything he could remember that he had been outside the hospital. This made his wait seem longer. For him, the wait seemed to be for an eternity, when in reality it was only about ten to fifteen minutes.
A blue mini-van pulled up to the curb and the front door on the side of the driver's seat opened. A male calico cat dressed in a short sleeved brown shirt and a pair of khaki pants. The cat's age showed with the white strands of fur contaminating his brown fur, making Sly guess he was in his early forties. He pulled down the sunglasses that he was wearing and revealed narrow, light green eyes.
"About time, Cody!" the doctor exclaimed as he stood up. Sly straightened himself as he followed suit of the doctor and walked over to right in front of Cody. "Cody, this is Daniel Smith. Daniel, this is Cody Bryan." Sly shook Cody's paw as Cody opened the passenger's seat in the front.
"We better get going if we're going to make good time. I had one of the volunteers fill in for me, but she had to leave at one. Let's go, Daniel!" Cody suggested. "Bye, Luke." Sly buckled himself up and closed the door. Before he knew it, Cody had buckled his seatbelt himself and turned on the ignition.
The first hour of the ride was blissful silence, except for the roaring of the van's engine and the music of a rock radio station. Sly was drowning in his thoughts. He had a bad feeling about the orphanage and Cody and all who currently worked or resided there.
The music went away with the click of a button as Cody turned off the radio and cleared his throat.
"So you're Daniel...Luke said a lot about you over the phone. He's right though... You do look a bit familiar..." Cody trailed off. Sly was desperate to say something back.
"Um...Mr. Bryan, how is it like at the orphanage?" Sly asked. Cody chuckled slightly, keeping his eyes on the road.
"First off, before I answer anymore of your questions, don't use the formalities. Just call me 'Cody'," the cat started. "Now, what was your question?"
"How is it like at the orphanage?" Sly repeated.
"Hm...Well, despite the name 'Happy Campers Orphanage', the orphanage is not a happy place. The place is a bit understaffed, so sometimes, when we're not looking, fights break out between even two of the youngest kids. The children's quarters are cramped and in horrible condition. I don't think the other workers even care about the children at all...they never worry about them, just themselves...There was this one cub..." Cody didn't finish his sentence and frowned.
"What is it?" Sly asked. He wanted to get as much information about the orphanage as possible.
"Well...you promise not to tell anyone I told you this?" Sly quickly nodded. "Well, there was this one raccoon cub named Sly Cooper. Loneliest cub I've ever seen. He seemed to have a sad childhood. According to the orphan files, the kid saw his father die at the hand of five criminals, his mother had abandoned both of them long before that and those murderers...they got away with the killing of the father. He never seemed to have that many friends. Just these two other orphans: a turtle, Bentley and a hippo, Murray." Cody paused a minute, making a left turn, leaving Sly a minute to take this all in.
None of this information seemed to ring a mental bell in Sly's head. It just seemed to connect with what the doctor (Sly assumed he was "Luke") had stated back at the hospital correctly. Sly still couldn't remember any of this though. He decided to refer to this Sly Cooper he was listening to about as a different raccoon.
"When the orphanage first located Sly, they found him alone in the house he had been living in with his father. The poor cub had been surviving off what money his father had stashed within the house, but he was about broke—nothing in his name. He didn't have any nearby relatives to take him in either. We at the orphanage decided that his relatives were either dead or didn't care about him at all. It was very sad indeed."
"So this cub was pretty much all by himself before you found him?"
"That's right. I don't think he ever got over the death of his father. You see, Sly always carried an odd looking stick with an end that was like a hook. He said it was his father's and then he told his only two friends that his family was a great legacy of thieves and that the family stored their 'techniques' in some odd book. He called it the 'Thievius Raccoonus' if I remember correctly." Cody scoffed at the story. "I decided it was probably just some fairy tale his father told him to keep him entertained."
"What happened to him?" Sly asked, getting sick of hearing details.
"Well...it was rather strange what happened to him. At age fifteen, a couple years before the orphanage would have released him into the real world on their own, Sly and his two friends ran away without any clues of where they went. No note, no nothing. Every possession they owned between the three of them was gone! All of it...If anyone had just stopped Sly and his friends from doing that..."
"I'm sorry about them. What happened to them after that?"
"No one is quite sure what exactly had happened to the trio, but there was a five year gap before we ever heard the name 'Sly Cooper' again. It was in the newspaper: there was a police file stolen by a Sly Cooper from one of the officers in Paris." Cody paused for a moment as he took an intersection. "No one is sure whether it's really the same Sly Cooper we knew from the orphanage, but there have been rumors spread around...If it's true, then I wish I could have stopped Sly. He had a talent for...drawing. During art time at the orphanage, he used to sketch properly proportioned figures doing moves and poses. They were quite well done for someone his age...an eight year old when he first started...If only I had figured him out sooner..."
Obviously not wanting to talk about the cub anymore, Cody turned the radio back on and became silent, also opening the windows slightly. Sly sorted the entire story in his head carefully, keeping it in mind incase he really was this cub. It all seemed so farfetched though, but perhaps that was because Sly didn't know who or what to believe at this point.
Sly decided to rest his eyes, letting the cross breeze in the car blow by him. Sly was tired because he had been excited last night. He couldn't go to sleep because he was ready to find out the truth. Sly's mind had been active, thinking up theories and creating stories.
Before Sly knew it, he drifted off to sleep...
(Sly's imagination just went active...)
The raccoon was sneaking, his adrenaline pumping and his heart thumping. One false move would mean trouble. Despite the danger this brought upon him, he always had fun doing things like this. It was more of a pleasure or interest than a pastime.
He hit the vent open and dropped into a building. The smell of tobacco and smoke instantly filled his nose, making him sneeze once or twice. He wiped his nose and waited for an order.
"I don't know about this, Sly..." a nasally voice commented.
"Don't worry. I'll be fine..." the raccoon replied back in a calm, quiet voice. "Just let me do this!"
"But I don't think this is the right—"
"Quiet, Bentley!" He snuck around the premises until he realized something was wrong. "Where's the lot?"
"It's at the other end of the building..." Bentley sounded very annoyed as he pointed this out.
"Oh...okay." Suddenly, there was a blow of a whistle. "THE GUARDS!?" The raccoon ran to the other end of the dark corridor and bashed a window open. He expertly jumped out of it into a parking lot full of cars and vans. "Where is it?"
"It's two rows in, second one to the left!" He followed the instructions and sure enough, there was his dream van, equipped with radars and such.
"Looks like it'll need a bit of redecorating..." the raccoon trailed off as he hopped into the van, slammed the door shut and quickly turned on the ignition. The engine purred as he drove out of the parking lot.
"Good work. Now get the van back to the hideout. We'll fix it up from there..."
(The reality returns once more...)
"Wake up, Daniel, we're almost there." Cody's voice woke Sly out of his dream.
"Really?" Sly asked the driver as he rubbed his eyes. Cody nodded.
"Welcome to Lauderville. We're a couple blocks away from the orphanage," Cody announced. Cody didn't notice Sly's grin.
Sly had just had the best dream since...in a long time from what he could remember. Everything was so vivid and realistic. It had his heart beating faster and faster, as if he had been there. Sly exhaled, calming himself down.
"Bad dream, eh?" Cody asked as they pulled into a gravel driveway.
"Um...yeah," Sly quickly lied. He looked out the window and saw a gloomy looking building loom ahead. It sat atop a lonely hill that had barely even a blade of grass upon it. The sky behind it was gray and cloudy, adding to the atmosphere.
Sly and Cody both unbuckled and got out of the car. Sly looked at a nearby sign and it read "Happy Campers Orphanage" in black. Some of the paint from the sign was chipping off, making the sign look like "H-p-y Ca-per- ----age". Cody motioned Sly to follow him up a dirt path leading to the entryway of the orphanage.
The inside looked even gloomier on the inside. There was tacky wallpaper peeling and the ceiling appeared to have a crack or two. To the right, there was a desk with a female white owl secretary with a stack of papers in front of her.
"Excuse me, but Daniel Smith here would like to speak to the headmistress," Cody said, tapping the secretary slightly on the shoulder. The secretary looked up with beady yellow eyes and sighed.
"Slow day today...as always..." she said, yawning with her beak wide. "Well, let's go..." The secretary stood up and led the two of two through a door that was right next to her desk. This led the three of them to a staircase. The stairs creaked with each step and Sly could barely see where he was going—meaning there weren't any lights this way.
After three sets of cases, the secretary took them to a room with a cherry wood desk that seemed to never have been dusted. Behind it, there was a large chair, but Sly couldn't see who was behind it. However, he could see two uncomfortable looking chairs in front of the desk and file cabinets lined along the walls, all the same bland gray. There were no windows. The only source of light was a lamp on the desk, which hurt Sly's eyes after having to walk through such a dark area previously.
"Excuse me, Madam Teresa, there is a raccoon gentleman here to see you for a job," the secretary announced nervously. There was a slight grunt, resulting in the chair behind the desk behind turned around.
"Let me see him," the animal in the chair said. Her voice sounded blunt with each word she said. Sly twitched nervously, being reluctant about walking over. "Let me see him." The female sounded even blunter than the first time.
Sly looked at Cody, who nodded, his face wearing an expression of worry. Sly cautiously walked over in front of the desk and peered into the face of the female. To his surprise, she appeared to be an elderly raccoon. Her eyes seemed to have a strong dislike for Sly.
"Go back to your posts!" the headmistress barked at Cody and the secretary. The two of them skittered out of the room and closed the door behind them with a thud. "Sit down, my fellow raccoon. I think I ought to get to know my future worker better." Sly sat down in one of the chairs. "What's your name?"
"Daniel Smith," Sly replied.
"Uh huh..." The headmistress nodded as she rummaged through a drawer in her desk and pulled out a folder marked "Code of Conduct". "You're a friend of Mr. Bryan's, are you?" Sly bobbed his head up and down for the sake of it. "Well, I'll see how you do tomorrow. Then we'll see if you're orphan dirt material or not." She shoved the folder across the desk, which Sly took willingly. "Now go!"
The headmistress had raised the pitch of her voice, making Sly rush out of the room and literally slamming the door behind him...