"Sly Cooper, i think you're going to enjoy this!" That came over the PA system, and the guards started chuckling... and everybody else winced, because they knew I wasn't going to enjoy it at all. It would prove to be a cruel irony that everybody else ended up dead and we were the two who survived... the two inmates who were meant to be tortured by what we were about to hear. It was an even more cruel irony that it would succeed... but not in the way it had been intended to. What came over the PA system was clearly the sound from a TV, which had everybody puzzled until it became apparent that the TV was tuned to live coverage related to the box I'd tried (and failed) to steal. Normally the warden would have made some remarks of his own to further torture his "captive audience," but he didn't this time since he KNEW that having to listen to this was more humiliating for me than anything he could have said... I wasn't even referred to by my name, just as "one of two criminals who tried and failed to steal this box."
Several minutes passed in this way, and then the eccentric who was the owner of the box got up to speak. He spoke for several minutes about various things and then said: "And now, let's get around to the box. It clearly holds something of great value to whomever lived in those ruins, and the box appears to have been completely sealed ever since those ruins sunk to the bottom of the ocean. I will now open the box..." As he said this, the inmate next to me suddenly opened his eyes wide. That inmate was "the other criminal" who had succeeded in stealing the box, but gotten caught; the male fox who had taken down half the officers accompanying Captain Carmelita... but you already know the rest. He started to chant something strange out loud, and the guards moved in to silence him... the other inmates started to move away from him and I would have done the same... except I found that I couldn't move! Then suddenly a horrific sound was heard over the PA... it sounded worse than my head would have felt if I'd ever tried to make sense out of some of the books that I knew Bentley loved to read... and that's pretty bad. However, it wasn't as bad as what happened next... considering it was pretty much the last thing everybody else would hear.
The walls of the prison burst inwards, destroyed by a massive wave of some dark force, and I was enclosed within a gray sphere of energy with the chanting fox. As that happened, all awareness of anything outside the sphere was beyond my reach. It was just me and the chanting fox... who I KNEW couldn't have been responsible for the wave of that dark force simply because... well there was simply too much of a feeling of pure destruction in it... pure chaos. Don't ask me how I knew... I simply did, just as I knew something horrible had just happened.
A few minutes later, the fox slowed down his chanting and then stopped chanting all together. The gray sphere vanished... and I was left to look upon a strange sky which was blood red in color, no sign of anybody or anything else from the prison (with the exception of a few piles of rubble that I learned a short time later was all that remained of the prison building), and with no idea where I was. I turned to the fox and said: "WHERE DID YOU TAKE ME?" Yes, I was "freaked out," and it didn't help when I got an answer. "I haven't taken you anywhere. I don't even know why you're alive. I thought that sphere would only protect me from it." "WHAT is IT?" The fox turned to me (he hadn't been looking at me before) and I saw a horriible sadness in his eyes. "The contents of the box... the hatred and sorrow that destroyed the world before... and has done so again. The box was never meant to be opened... it was never meant to see the light of day again..." He then stopped, bent down and started to pound his fist upon the ground. "WHY! WHY DID I LET MY GUARD DOWN! IF I HADN'T LET MY GUARD DOWN, THIS WOULDN'T HAVE HAPPENED!" I was speechless for a few moments, and then said to him: "... Destroyed the world before and has done so again? Be serious, pal... what happened?" Now that I'd calmed down a bit, I was skeptical and thought that maybe my companion was attempting to pull one over on me or was weirded out. However... when my companion stopped pounding the ground, stood up, and looked me straight in the face with the same sadness in his eyes, I realized that as far as HE knew (and for the most part what he knew ended up being the truth of the matter) the world as I had known it had ended... and I felt fear and terror grip me completely. That had only happened once before in my lifetime... when Clockwerk and the other members of the Fiendish Five had come after my parents and the Thieivus Raccoonus that fateful night... the night that I became an orphan.
