The War Rooms, Interpol HQ. Lyon, France. 10:32am 28th July 2013
They come across the main centre of this underground command centre. A massive circular bank of TV screens adorn every side of this cylindrical room to give all the workers the maximum amount of information. Live satellite feed is seen from one of the screens on the motorway. It is one fast moving car with an entire fleet of police cars chasing in pursuit. Others show weather conditions, satellite orbits and current positions of agents in the field via GPS trackers. The screens provide most of the illumination for this large room, this gives a higher contrast of the images, making the screens appear clearer and brighter whilst reducing power consumption. It has a 3 story high circular atrium in the centre with a circular gangway on the outside for people to make their way around the centre without having to disturb any other people. Below, banks of monitors and servers are churning away at all of the data that is being crunched by their operators. All these systems are cooled by what is probably the most noticeable feature in this room. A giant fan covering the entire roof of the centre, sucking out all of the hot air and venting it out in tiny pressurised pipes that are too small to crawl through.
All the flashing lights and rapidly changing images on the screens causes Sly to keep his sunglasses on even though they are 50 metres underground. Penelope stands 2 metres behind Sly, not wanting to be within striking range when he finds out.
"Don't you want to see this?" Sly whispers to Penelope, coercing her forward to the railing to look down at all of the hard working people who are bathed in their own sweat. Reluctantly, she moves to the railing, careful not to glance at the small back passageway leading to all her fears.
"All of them are looking for me, yet I'm right here." Sly acknowledges.
"What are we doing down here? We should wait until the director comes back." She says.
"You should know what's down here, you've been here yourself." Sly points out.
"They could have changed everything since I was last here." She worries to Sly.
"Let's just go down." Sly instructs as he walks down the handrail to the bottom floor. Penelope follows him down but progressively gets further and further away because she is scared of what Sly might do when he finds out. They make their way to the dimly lit ground floor. All of the analysts are glued to their screens, meaning no chance of them to look at the thief amongst them. Three hallways jut out from this circular room to even darker places. Sly makes his way down one of them. It is not the one that Penelope is concerned with, that one is on the opposite side. She has the feeling that Sly is going to look around every last nook and cranny in this place for clues. Sly is doing just that, sneaking ahead with intent. He looks into rooms and keeps on moving, like he is looking for something as well. All the rooms in this hallway are just small offices filled with shelving of documents only someone with a PhD could decipher.
Since Sly does not have a PhD in anything, he moves out of the corridor and back into the main area where the analysts type away furiously into their computers in a vain attempt to isolate the location of Sly Cooper. A little known technique called looking up would solve the problem but in this group of highly specialised and qualified individuals, none of them posses this skilful trait. Suddenly, as Sly is about to enter the next corridor, he picks up something that is invisible to Penelope. He doesn't go into the corridor but moves directly onto the next one. The adrenaline starts to pump in Penelope's body, preparing her for her escape or something worse. It's a shame of what this might come to if that were to happen. They had gotten along well as the two of them. Even after what had happened, Sly was able to look past the past and concentrate on the future. He has that compassion that few have, let alone for someone's conscience to be clean in this line of work that he does. It's what separates the Cooper's from 99.9% of all thieves.
Penelope goes along the corridor to watch what Sly is doing, she dare not enter his space as that might attract attention towards her. He might make the connections and then go after her. She knows the walk inside this room, it frightens her the further she walks. She hides behind the hallways, only watching Sly from around the corners. Sly doesn't notice that his partner has gone missing. He is still going down the hallway like he is attracted to some unseen force. Sly quickly changes back into his normal thieving outfit as he stops outside this one particular locked door. Penelope can only see him start to pick at the lock, she takes a deep breath to calm herself down at what might happen next, all the permutations run through her head like she's running a simulation on a computer. Examining the outcomes of all the possibilities that could happen when he enters that room. All of them in her mind all result in some form of escape for her or a fight with Sly. She is that worried about the situation.
Sly tries to pick but remembers he has brought something with him, Bentley's keys. He has been working on a set of skeleton keys that could open all types of doors, whether they may be electronic or normal keyed locks. There are two locks on this that must be done simultaneously in order to open it. The locks are only a centimetre apart so only one person is required to open the door. Sly gets out a keycard and a normal key, he inserts them both in their appropriate locks, the light turns green, meaning that this door can be opened. The moment of truth has beset on Penelope, who hopes most out of all that she will still be alive long enough to explain her reasons.
Sly slowly opens the door only to see a beam of light amplified by stimulated emission of radiation, commonly known to most people as a laser. In fact, there are many lasers pointing in all sorts of directions around this large room. Is this some kind of laser trap that Sly must get across to access something else? There isn't anything that he can see which indicates this. He only knows that something in this room has drawn him here. Sly fully opens the door so he can get inside. He takes a look around the room. More lasers adorn the room in some sort of odd pattern that doesn't make sense from this angle. He tries to look around for any traps that make unstick him but there is nothing out of the ordinary to suggest so. It only means that whoever is in this room has set them up very well. That's what must be assumed by a thief who is trying to get anywhere, it's how he doesn't get caught. The only light in the room is the laser light that doesn't illuminate the room. Sly tries to sneak further into the room to look around but he is ambushed from above, he feels the force drag his shoulders down to the ground. Sly tries to break out of it but his frantic bursts are not enough to break this unseen persons grip on him.
"You think I'm Sly Cooper? You better get back out before I show you what your friends missed out on." He shouts at Sly's face. Sly goes into extreme shock, he no longer moves about trying to escape, he is motionless not struggling with the grip of the assailant. This unseen figure notices this as well; he thinks he has given another analyst a heart attack by the sheer ferocity of this takedown. He has had enough of people coming in here disturbing his research and trying to make him pretend that he is someone that he is not. He takes out his anger on this particular entrant very hard, venting out his anger towards all the annoying and foolish outsiders in this underground bunker. But he lets go of this intruder into his workspace and walks away, he knows that this one will be fine, they always seem to wake up after the initial and violence has passed. This is followed by a hasty getaway and the sigh of relief that his space is now to himself. He goes back up to his top floor with his papers where has sprawls down some more calculations on a sheet of paper.
"Directional momentum seems to be the only way of supporting any sort of reasonable mass but only in the same direction as the laser is pointed. The momentum of these photons is not enough to support any stationary mass. I just need a way of quantifying the movement velocity against the momentum of the photons. So if I slide down here again. That works. But if I stop, I fall back onto the ground." He says, talking to himself. Once he lands back on the ground he realises that the body is still there. That is a bit unusual; he must be one of the weaker minded ones. He goes and feels this bodies pulse; it's very low for one of these analysts. Being fit and being an analyst don't go together so this person must not be an analyst. There are no other lights in this room; any other electromagnetic radiation sources could affect the results of these experiments. There is no way to see who this person is without touching them. He moves his hands over his shoulders and down his arms until he reaches the item that is being held in one of the arms, he feels the material that he has not felt before, it feels smooth with no imperfections. He moves one of his hands to determine the shape of this object, slowly moving up to the top and around the curved tip. It's a cane. Have they decided to make a replica from a new material to give to him? But why? He can't think of any reason why. He then feels around the face, trying to give himself a kinaesthetic picture of the intruder. He feels around the snout, the eyes, and the cheeks. From his own knowledge, this must be a raccoon. He walks away, wanting to concentrate on his own work for now. But he can hear the subject stand up as silently as he can. He turns slowly to face the intruder once more. One word comes out of the intruder's mouth that causes him to stop in his tracks.
"Dad."