FISHING FOR FEATHERS

Job 8: Calling All Copters

Sly makes his way to the mission start zone by jumping from tree to tree, making a game with how little he can touch the ground. Below him, tapirs use their flashlights; here and there, monkeys sit atop the trees, and he avoids those. Sidling along branches, jumping from branch to branch, climbing to the top and gazing out over the world... it was times like these that he knew just how good it was to be a thief. Sure, nothing beat the adrenaline rush of being chased down an alley, Carmelita yelling behind him, or the heart-in-his-throat rush when he was moments away from being discovered. But this... this is nice.

Of course, all trees are cleared within jumping distance of the wall, but that's no problem. Sly goes around. When he's safe on the other side, he climbs one of the trees there and brings out his binoc-u-com. "Okay Bentley, what am I doing here?"

"Sly, I need you to climb to the top of that cliff and tell me what you find up there," says Bentley. "That's the most likely location of General Tsao's satellites. Once you find it, I can talk you through splicing me in so I can monitor everything he's doing."

"All right, just leave it to me."

Sly tucks his binoc-u-com away and studies the cliff face. There doesn't seem to be a good way to get on it from here, so he backtracks towards his detour around the wall. From there, rather than jumping from spot to spot and back to the other side, he leaps to a spot with a place he can wall-hook leap from, and from there lands on an old, frayed piece of rope stretched between two segments of cliff side. This takes him on the side of the cliff away from the rest of the island, open sea stretching beneath him and into the distance, and he sees a new landscape.

In his head, he hears Bentley mutter about how the locals must use those ropes when they steal seagull eggs. Indeed, when he gets too close to a nest, seagulls dive at him, trying to knock him away. Sly really doesn't care where the ropes came from, though. They let him go up and down a sight easier than leaping blindly, and it's a fair bit of fun, too.

Swinging and climbing and missing and gliding to a better perch, finding a nice spot to stand and admire the view, it's all just part of the job. And if seagulls nearly bash him off the cliff face and one manages to steal his hat, well, he laughs the entire time he steals it back.

Cheeky things.

At last, he reaches the clifftop to find... something he rather didn't expect. He pulls out his binoc-u-com and focuses on it. "Bentley, I don't think I can splice into that," he says.

"Drat," says Bentley, looking at the tiny box-like protrusion at the top of the cliff. "That's definitely where the signal's coming out... but where's the rest of it being stored?"

"Beats me," says Sly. "If there were wires, I could follow them."

"It can't be far," says Bentley. "It's probably inside one of the caves along the cliff. See if you can locate it."

"Sure, I'll just take the elevator," says Sly.

"Uh-huh," says Bentley, adjusting his glasses. "You'll be up there a while if you wait for it to be built. Like, say, three hundred years."

"That'll still be worth the wait," Sly says, looking back over the cliff side The side he just came up is pockmarked with caves and, if he decides to go to the bottom, there's even one opening partially submerged in the waves. "Look Bentley, last time I went in a cave around here it was too dangerous for me to go alone. So what gives?"

"Do you really want to see Murray climb those?"

"Sure. Let's just attach some springs to his feet, he'll love it."

Bentley doesn't respond. Instead, he simply looks at Sly, the expression of pure exasperation that he must have used so many times at this point that it's practically patented.

"...Forget I said anything."

"Thought so."

Sly puts away his binoc-u-com and starts the work of checking all those caves. It'd be easy, if it weren't for the wind picking up. He can't jump into it, so he has to either wait for it to switch directions—which it does often, as though the weather itself is playing with him—or not jump. When he jumps with it, though, he can go a lot farther—which is a lot of fun when the paraglider gets added into play.

He finds some interesting things on his way down: a hidden guard station with binoculars aimed at the ocean, waiting for a ship to swing into view (Sly knocks those guards out, pockets their wallets, and takes every pair of binoculars. Even the ones that are bolted down. And anything that can possibly be sold, too, of course); a family of a species he's sure is extinct in the present day, that he almost decides to take with him back to the present if Bentley weren't having a heart attack over it; even a treasure map. A few of the caves have wires running down the backs of them, indicating that, yes, Sly needs to go even lower.

Of course, it's not in the very bottom cave. I mean, there is a very nice item he'd run back to the safe-house if Bentley wouldn't throw a hissy fit about it, either to put on display in his personal collection or to sell; there are also what look like messages in bottles, three of them, that if he bothered to collect them—and the many others scattered around the island—would undoubtedly give him something nice. But the actual machine he needs to splice is about 3/4 of the way down, in a cave that requires a fair bit of maneuvering to get into.

The box with all the wires on it uses a combination lock. Sly cracks his knuckles and crouches next to it, ignoring the rest of the world as he turns it this way and that, ever-so-slowly, feeling for the moment things click into place. As for the splicing itself? Takes three seconds; he's inserted enough splice clips by now that he doesn't even need Bentley to tell him where it goes in this system.

"Perfect, Sly. Hmmm... it looks like the ships he uses all have GPS positioners on them, and he uses this to direct them to different coordinates, and keep track of where they are. He's even outfitted Henriette's stolen ships with them. This could prove useful for the heist."

JOB COMPLETE

Sly twirls his hat on his cane, then snatches it back before a seagull can steal it.