FIENDS FROM THE PAST

Job 8: Cooper Crypts

This time, when Sly climbs the cliff walls to the vampire caves, he's not alone. Slaigh comes with him, whistling a cheerful tune, sidling along edges and hoisting himself up with more ease than anyone has any right to when wielding a cane that weighs more than Sly.

Slaigh reaches the cave first and leaps in with a booming yell and a landing that shakes the ground. Sly hoists himself in a second later, grinning at the guy's enthusiasm as echoes continue through the cave. "So! Sli, young Cooper, what is our task today?" Slaigh demands.

Sly gestures to the cave with his cave. "Somewhere in here is the vampire crypts. We'll take it out, we halve the guards."

"Aha! Without those lavvy-heads, we can surely make a mighty blow towards our objectives!" Slaigh says, starting ahead. Sly follows a moment behind. Slaigh turns to walk backwards and says, "Do you have a plan for locating the thing?"

Sly smothers a laugh. "I kinda just planned to go down hall after hall until something jumped out at me."

"Jumped out at—are you serious?" Slaigh demands, stopping in his tracks. "You're just going to wander? Without a plan, without a care?"

"Oh, we have a plan," Sly says, walking past him.

"Good lad," Slaigh says with a sigh. "I was startin' ta wonder-"

"I plan to search every inch of this place until I find a crypt."

Sly can't see Slaigh's face, and neither can anyone reading this, but oh, it is glorious. "What are they teachin' young thieves these days?" he asks aloud, as Sly moves on ahead; Slaigh hurries to catch him.

At the first intersection, there are no ghosts; blowing up the generator worked perfectly. Sly stops there and glances at Slaigh. "So, do you think we should split up? Cover more ground?"

Slaigh picks Sly up by the scruff of his neck and pulls him up to eye level. "Are ye crazy, laddy?" he asks. "Ye don't split up in a place like this. There are twists and turns and more passages than sheep on a grassy field!" He gestures wildly with his cane. "Unless ye have a hundred people ta split and split again, which ye dinnae have, ye stick together and keep track o where ya been!"

Sly scratches the back of his head, ears cocked, looking sheepish. "Sorry. So, you got a plan for keeping track?"

Slaigh looks at the ceiling. "Sweet mercies on us all, the lad's a—" he cuts himself off there, seemingly remembering that he still has Sly by the shirt. "Not that I'm blaming ye, lad, ye're a fine thief, it's just—haven't ye learned a thing in yer years?"

"I've learned lots of things," Sly says, shrugging as much as he can. "Including that sometimes, you just have to get into the field and do things without knowing the specifics. Could you put me down?"

"Ach, sorry lad." Slaigh sets Sly on his feet and dusts him off, knocking off Sly's hat and nearly knocking Sly over; Sly puts his hat back on with a grin. "I'll keep the two o'us from getting lost, then."

With that, play starts. The player controls Sly as they go down passage after passage, looking, searching, sneaking. It's a downright, bone-fide maze, with turns here and there and connecting passages, but every time they come to a turn, Slaigh marks he way they've come from, dragging his heavy stone cane against the floor in an arrow pointing to the exit and an X in the direction they went. When they go in a full circle, emerging from one path into a four-way intersection with an arrow and an X already there, he draws a line connecting the two circling paths.

And on no less than a dozen occasions he tells Sly not to go down there, they've already been that way, ye dozy sheep!

I think Sly's gone back and forth on whether he likes Slaigh or just tolerates him a dozen times before they finally locate the crypt. It looks a bit different than the one back in China. In China, it looked like a natural part of the graveyard it was a part of, albeit a fair bit larger. Here, it looks like a stone sandcastle.

There are vampire terriers all over it, of course. Stupid stinking things. After peeking around a corner at it a few times, Sly turns to Slaigh. "All right, that's our target. Think you can destroy that thing?"

Slaigh smacks his cane into his spare hand. "By holding the square button, I can do a super-powerful two handed swing. It can knock down walls and break boulders. A course it can take down that wee structure."

"Wee structure?" Sly repeats, but Slaigh is already striding off towards the castle—er, crypt. I'm sorry, did I say 'striding'? I meant 'galloping like a runaway horse while shouting loud enough to echo,' that's more accurate.

What follows is a brawl that would make Murray proud, with Sly taking care of some of the guards but most of it involving Slaigh, as the player, literally hitting vampires so hard it works as a pickpocketing maneuver and occasionally stopping to deliver a massive two-handed blow to the crypt. When it crumbles at last, with a cloud of dust and a scattering of fangs, the two raccoons stand on opposite sides of it, panting.

"I think that went pretty well," Sly says at last, straightening up. He walks over to Slaigh and claps him on the shoulder. "It's good to know you're good in a fight."

Slaigh smacks Sly's back in a friendly manner that nearly sends him careening into the collapsed crypt. "Ye ain't so bad yerself, Sli," says Slaigh. "Things may change between now and ye's time, ay, but it's good ta know some things don't."

"Couldn't say it better myself," says Sly.

JOB COMPLETE

Sly and Slaigh do identical victory poses, then start making their way back through the maze.