"Trust Bentley to take the fun out of this," Sly thought to himself. "Sometimes I wish that Bentley wasn't so... Bentley. Of course other times I wish I could be a little more like Bentley... then maybe I could understand a little more of what he says to me." As Sly descended through the hole in the ceiling, he had no idea that this was just the beginning of what would be a long night. He was also about to find out that Bentley's other device worked a bit too well.
As soon as Sly's feet touched the floor of the museum (the alarm that should have gone off, he quickly made his way to a shadowy corner of the room, and took out the tape recorder/sleep gas deployment device. "Ok, it's showtime... wonder what I should say into this recorder? Hmm... Ah, I've got the perfect line!" Sly switched on the tape recorder and said into it: "Hey, stupid meatheads! I'm over here, come get me!" Sly switched off the tape recorder and said to himself: "That should do the job quite nicely... and I know just where to place this thing."
Sly headed towards one of the hallways that he knew to be protected by a security system exactly like the one that the Inspector had gotten caught in earlier that week. Sly tossed the recorder into the middle of the area protected by the security system (the device was far too lightweight to trigger the security system) and pressed the button marked "Playback" on the side of the triggering device. Within seconds several guards came running in from the other side of the hallway towards the sound of Sly's taunt being played back by the recorder, which promptly triggered the security system.
Bentley's voice came in on the Binocu-Com almost instantly. "Nice job trapping those guards, but you may want to knock them out with the sleep gas before they call in more guards... and the Inspector as well." "As much as I'd like to see the look on Carmelita's face when she sees this, I have to agree with you. Carmelita alone or the guards alone I can handle... but put them together and it's a whole different story." Sly pressed the button marked "Sleep Gas" on the triggering device, and the recorder promptly spewed out a cloud of green sleep gas which knocked out the guards instantly.
"I hope they enjoy their nap because they're going to have one major headache once the Inspector's through with them. I can just imagine the look on... uh, Bentley? Should the sleep gas be coming down the hallway towards me?" "The gas is coming down the hallway towards you? That shouldn't be happening!" A few moments later, Sly raced out of the hallway just moments before the sleep gas started coming out of the hallway into the room with the hole in the ceiling. "Bentley, the next time you make something designed to knock out guards, make sure you test it BEFORE you give it to me!"
It was fortunate for Sly that the gas began to dissipate almost immediately after it started moving into the room. However in his haste to escape Sly had dropped the triggering device, and he now realized that the insult he had recorded was playing back over and over again. To make things worse, the hallway was amplifying the insult and he knew it would only be a matter of time before somebody else came to investigate. Sly decided to return to the hallway to retrieve the device, but just as we was about to enter the hallway, Inspector Fox appeared and fired a blast from her shock pistol at where Sly's voice was coming from... promptly releasing the rest of the sleep gas stored within the device all at once as it was destroyed. Sly managed to escape from the sleep gas, but in the process he triggered several security systems which (while not capturing him) would make it extremely difficult to escape the museum the same way he had entered it.
As such, the old plan had to be scrapped as now being too risky, but the new plan that Bentley came up with was risky as well. It involved escaping through the front entrance of the museum, the only option now because the air vents of the museum were suffused with the sleep gas released from the destroyed device. "You have got to be kidding me... There really isn't any other option? I know that a lot of gas was released, but come on... the ventilation system must be big enough that the amount of gas I'd run into at any point would be no problem for me at all." "Unfortunately, the potency of the gas and the amount of the time you'd have to spend in the ventilation system mean that it's not an option. There's a 95 .7 percent chance that you'd end up being knocked out by the sleep gas because of that." "What about the other 4,3 percent?" "That's the chance that you'd suffocate before somebody found you... somebody meaning a member of law enforcement or of museum security." "I'm sorry I asked..." "Don't be... if you hadn't I'm pretty sure you'd have just gone off and tried to escape through the ventilation system anyway because of that 4.3 percent. You and I BOTH know that you like to defy the odds."
One might think that many things would be going through Sly's head as he thought about what would come next. You might believe that he was thinking that this looked like the end of the line, that he would be caught and sent to prison... or maybe that he'd like to wring Bentley's neck for that fiasco of a device. He might even be thinking about giving up on the heist and escaping from the museum. All of these would be logical guesses... but they would also all be WRONG guesses. This is what was going through Sly's head: "Now I REALLY want to pull this heist off. This is exactly the kind of challenge worthy of a Cooper... not to mention that combined with the rest of what I've got, Carmelita will hit the roof, and perhaps not just in the figurative sense this time around."