Sorry, ya'll, birthday weekend, I forgot the update until it was bed time

A Wise Man Once Said…

Sly hopped down off of the wall, closing in on the bats. "Boys, we need to have a little talk," he said casually, like he was talking to a group of friends. "Namely, about your attacks on the Coopergiwa family."

The bats shared looks, and then their swords were directed at the gang. The shrieked command was in Japanese, so he had no idea what was said, but the results were clear. The bats weren't going down without a fight.

That's fine, neither were they. Sly had noticed familiar switches had returned to his cane after the night at the ballet, and now felt like the perfect time to reintroduce it. With a press of his fingers, electricity that mirrored lightning began to crackle along his cane. When he snapped it against the ground, the current solidified into blue-white crackles along the crook.

For his part, Murray clapped his hands, calling on a technique that Sly thought the hippo had forgotten. But much like his Ball form, he still remembered his Fists of Flames. The bats who had the misfortunate of being hit by him quickly ran off shrieking as their fur or clothes caught on fire. But the flames would putter out quickly, designed more for a shock factor than to cause permanent harm like Carmelita's gun.

Bentley was a lot easier. The turtle had a veritable horde of grenades to pick from. It was just a matter of picking which one he wanted to use.

Ninja weren't that easily cowed, though. Sly and Bentley quickly found themselves overwhelmed by sheer numbers, no matter how many bombs went off. It was Sly who noticed that the bats were using their distraction to either as one darting off, single or as pairs. "They're getting away!"

"The Murray has it handled!" With that, their muscle stopped fighting and instead backed up for one epic belly flop. While many of the bats fled, several more were stunned, unable to move.

Sly wasn't one to waste such an opportunity. He dug a rope out of his pack, handing one end of it over to Murray. Between the two of them, they had the trio of remaining bats tied up in a jiffy. He twisted his cane, using it to tilt up one of the bat's chins. "So, about the Coopergiwa family?" he asked.

Ears twitching, the lead bat in the middle said something grabbled in Japanese that Sly couldn't make heads or tails of. Of course, their luck had to run out now on being able to understand their opponents. He sighed, looking over to Bentley, who was rapidly typing as if trying to translate.

"Sugah, I don' think you want to know what he just said about yer mama," a familiar voice drawled behind them.

The three boys turned and looked. Lady and Karin both were approaching in all their finery, their sandals clacking as they walked. Both had their fans out, and Sly winced as he realized that not only were those twice-cursed things heavy with their steel frames, but the spines were sharpened.

"You can understand them?" the boys…and Karin?...chorused.

Lady's head tilted to the side. "Yes. Karin-san and her family use the Kansai dialect of Japanese. The bats are from northern Okinawa, so they speak the Ryukyuan language of Kunigami." At the blank looks, she held up her hands. "It's like comparin' Latin-based languages together—French, Spanish, and Italian. Just enough differences that they can' understand each other."

"And your teacher was from Okinawa, so you know both?" Sly guessed, half-sarcastically.

She shrugged. "I can get by in both. You have special tricks, I have languages, Cooper."

"Well, you can question the prisoners then," he said with an exaggerated bow.

Stalking past him, she grumbled, "Do I look like yer Interpol girlfriend?" but she rattled off a question at the captured bats before Sly could contest. Lady stood over them, her mask making her seem like an impartial judge. That sparked some cowering and anxious chatter. She nodded her head slowly, and tilted her chin, giving Sly the feeling she was looking towards him now. "Note in the one on the right's pocket," she said.

Reaching into the pocket, he pulled out a piece of paper. The kanji on it might as well be gibberish, but the picture at the bottom got his attention. He tilted it to show it to Karin.

She grimaced. "The bamboo flowers and leaves of the Minamoto clan," she confirmed.

"Let's leave this rabble for the headman to deal with," Bentley suggested, adjusting his glasses. "Now that we have proof, we should go back to the compound and make a plan."

The group shared nods, and while Sly was reluctant to leave his rope, he knew it was for the better cause. Karin wrote a note for the headman, pinning it to the shirt front of the lead bat, and that left them to catch up with the other three.

And it gave Sly an opening. "So, cousin…" he drawled, crossing his arms behind the back of his head. "You and Shinji make the family and the family business work, right?"

Karin tilted her head, eying him curiously. "Yes. You have questions, Sly-san?"

He grimaced. "More like I am in desperate need of advice from a feminine source. I am lacking in those, and Bentley and Murray are…not experts in this regard."

"Ah. This is about the fox," Karin said wisely, her tail twisting through the air. "The one you are attempting to court?"

"Courted, albeit unconventionally, won, then fell out with, then sort of made up with, and now… I don't know," he sighed, shoulders slumped as he admitted the completely the mess of his love life. Karin hummed, encouraging him to keep talking. "I spent years flirting with her! She spent years chasing me! And it was a good partnership, it was. I helped lead her to all sorts of busts, got some really awful people off the streets."

"But?" Karin prompted.

Sly gave her the side-eye. Yeah, the problem was obvious, wasn't it? "She couldn't let me being a thief go," he finally muttered. "I couldn't get her to understand what a master thief was. I can't even get Lady to understand! And so when the opportunity came, I… pretended I didn't remember anything. She made me believe I was her partner still, but she made me… a member of the same law she served," he hedged, not wanting to get too specific to his time period.

"And then you were happy together," Karin concluded with a sigh of her own. "Except you are a Cooper."

"Except I'm a Cooper," he agreed. "I got hit with the itch, and then we found out that there was a mess that I had to deal with. But she didn't understand, not until the end, and then when I came back from that blowing up, she… She tested me. And I failed, but I'm so mad at her for testing me in the first place! I gave up everything, I was going to give up everything again before…" He trailed off, not sure what else to say.

She tilted her head, looking at him. "It sounds to me, Sly-san, that in this relationship with the fox, you are always the one to make a sacrifice to your identity and way of life. And if something occurs that aids your mutual cause but requires you to pick up what you left, she is insecure. Is this correct?"

He shook his head, his ears flopping. That sounded…wrong. And very bad on Carmelita's character. "She's just trying to do right by the law," he argued in his…paused…girlfriend's defense. "And she is still figuring out where her comfort level is with my life meeting with hers."

"But you said you were going to give up those aspects of your life," Karin persisted. "Again. And yet before you could tell her, she began to test you."

"Yeah, that was bad," he admitted with a cranky grumble, but his tail switched nervously. "But I think the fact she next saw me with Lady was why that reaction was so bad."

Karin huffed. If her cousin was going to ask for her advice and then get defensive, there was no point to continuing this conversation. She folded her hands in front of her, trying to think of something her father-in-law would say that would give Sly something to stew on for a couple of days. "Cold tea and cold rice are bearable, but cold looks and cold words are not," she finally settled with.

Sly knocked his hat askew, scratching at his scalp absently. "Tea and rice?" he repeated.

She snorted at him. "Think about it, Sly-san. You will figure it out." Eventually.

"Hey guys!" Murray waved his arms, catching their attention. Lady and Bentley had stopped walking, waiting on the group to gather up a little more. "Bentley has said that I can go ahead and start getting the ronin gathered up and chased out of town. He says that they are just going to get in the way regardless." He fidgeted with his gloves. "But we gotta have somewhere to keep them."

Karin hummed, slowing to a stop as well. "There are a family of dogs just down the road who run an inn," she suggested. "If you exhaust them enough, they may decide to stay there for a time. It would offer us a window."

"A fight with the Murray will wear them down," he agreed, slamming his fist into the palm of his hand.

"Just don't get caught, I don't want to commit any jailbreaks tonight," Sly joked, which got some snickering from the other boys as they remembered the awful jail bird outfit from when they visited Tennessee.

"I feel like I'm missin' a joke," Lady muttered to Karin behind her fan, making the older female chuckle.

Sly frowned over the tablet and book spread out on the low table. Bentley was muttering at his own displays, putting together a plan for them to confront the headman as quickly as possible. It had to be tonight, or else the enemy warriors would be back on patrol. Of course, Bentley had proven that he was getting much better at dealing with time crunches and pressure, so it was just a matter of time.

In the meanwhile, Sly was taking a crack at the puzzle that was Karin's section of the Thievius Raccoonus. He trusted Bentley, he really did, but sometimes it took another thief to look at a puzzle and figure out the best way to solve it. Of course, he couldn't read kanji at all, so the original writing didn't do him much good unless the clue to solving it was supposed to be a picture. But he had to try at least.

Of course, Lady chose just then to swan into the room. Karin had helped devest her of her borrowed finery, so she was back to normal. Sly chose to ignore her, and the slight sense of relief that she was back to what he was used to.

Not that Lady decided to ignore him. "Whatcha up to, sugah?" she asked, leaning over his shoulder to look at some of the writing.

"Looking at Cooper secrets, so shoo," he said, reaching over to snap the book shut.

Unfortunately, Karin had been right behind Lady. She snagged the book, twisting it to read the kanji there. Well, that answered one of Sly's questions—she could read, at the very least.

He looked up at Lady and scowled. "You aren't a Cooper, remember?" he said rhetorically.

"I'm also bored," she pointed out, and then flounced away to look over Karin's shoulder, making Sly growl. "Oh hush, I can' read Japanese this old anyway," she snapped at him.

"Both of you behave," Karin admonished with the absent-minded air of a mother with wily kits. She tilted her head as she mouthed some of the words. "This is my section, yes?" she confirmed with Sly.

"Uh, yeah," he said, looking up from the tablet. "It describes your coin magnetism techniques, as well as some of your life history, but it's pretty brief compared to normal. I thought it might have gotten lost when branches of the family combined."

"Hmm," Karin hummed without commenting, continuing to read.

"So where did this family of so-called master thieves start, anyhow?" Lady asked.

"Egypt," Sly answered, though it sounded like a dirty word when he said it. "And we are master thieves."

She rose her brows and came to stand over his shoulder again, resting her chin on top of his head. "There are other theivin' families, sugah," she pointed out. Lady ought to know, even if her situation was…complicated. But like Hell was she trotting out her little sob story for this group. Not yet. "What makes you and yers so special?"

"I told you, we only steal from other thieves," he said with exaggerated patience.

Lady snorted to show what she thought of that. Really? He was going to trot out that line again? "I could do that too, but would that make me a master thief?" Sly jerked to look up at her, his brow furrowed and his mouth half-open in protest. She continued before he could actually say anything. "Uh huh. That's what I thought. So there's more to it. Talk, Cooper."

He scowled up at her. "I mean, there's a level of tradition to it," he pointed out with a growl at her. "We've been doing this since ancient Egypt. We create techniques, improve on our ancestors', and pass them down to our children."

"And so do the other thievin' families," Lady repeated herself with her own taste of exaggerated patience. "And in fact, I could argue the Coopers are actually the worst at it. Everyone knows about yah, and you've made more mortal enemies and rivals than I can shake a stick at. And it's why we are here, by-the-by."

Sly sputtered at disbelief of his family being called the worst of the thieving circle. Lady let her tail sway from side to side, enjoying annoying him more than she was really ready to admit to. He just made it so easy. There probably was more to this "master thief" nonsense, but it was too much fun to needle him when he thought he had a sound argument and she saw big ol' glaring holes in it.

A barking laugh that was in no way lady-like made the turtle and two bickering raccoons all jump. They jerked their heads to look over at Karin, who had her hand over her mouth, trying to muffle her laughter as she set the book down. "Oh, oh my goodness…" she gasped out, trying to catch her breath. "Oh, I definitely did not write this, Sly-san. I do not have such a turn of phrase."

"Okay, I gotta know the joke," Lady said, jumping up and over the table to look at the book. "What does it say, Karin-san?"

Still snickering, she pointed to a specific set of kanji. "This is a saying, if you look at it right. 'Even a lone mutter in a well is known after three years.' And then here is another. 'It is dark one inch ahead of you.'"

"So, secrets come around to bite yah, or news travels, and expect the unexpected…or who can guess the future," Lady said slowly and then blinked. "Oh. Wait. Is this… Is this a warning about time travel and keepin' yer mouth shut about it?" she said, trying to lean closer to the book like if she could get closer, she'd be able to understand it. "And what the heck is that supposed to be?"

"It is a dragon," Karin said, tilting her head. "And it is… Jumping? Between the columns."

"Leaping," Sly said with a groan, smacking his head against the table. "It's a leaping dragon. It's a nod to a move that your son, Karin, is going to invite in a few decades. Rioichi must have been the one to transcribe the Japanese into the merging of the books." Between meeting Sly twice, Rioichi would be the best person to do such a thing. Underneath that old man of the mountain thing that the old ninja had going on, Sly was realizing that he was hiding a mischievous streak a mile long. That little brat.

"Interesting," Bentley said, looking up from his own work. "I don't remember the section seeming any different than from when we first collected it from the Five, so this isn't something that was affected by temporal dissonance. So we have always been on these trips, and it was noted in the Raccoonus. Rioichi must have used Karin's section as a way of warning others who might encounter us multiple times to play dumb if they saw us, and to keep quiet on family legends detailing with it, even in the official history."

Something about that made Sly's brain feel strange, almost like he had a word he wanted to say and he couldn't remember it. Hadn't it been the book that had led Bentley and Murray to realizing he was in ancient Egypt when he had gotten lost? But he couldn't remember what it was that he had done specifically to create that clue.

"I wonder how many of your other ancestors have done similar?" Bentley mused.

Karin snorted. "Well, I will go ask Shinji to make copies of what I have currently written. You can add them to your copy of the book as an addition, yes?"

"Right. If you'll do that, Coopergiwa-san, I will get set up here for our briefing." Bentley looked at his display, a slight smile tugging at his face. "I think I've figured out the best plan. And Lady, we're going to need your skills specifically."

"What skills might that be, cher?" Lady asked, sounding skeptical. Sly didn't blame her. The turtle hadn't exactly been complimentary of what Lady was doing within their little group.

Bentley's answering, silent grin wasn't particularly comforting either. Sly was having flashbacks to the Carmelita as a belly dancer fiasco. Covering his eyes with one hand, he slunk down a little. Oh, he had a feeling he was going to want to have an easy exit once Bentley laid out his plan.