Hey guys! I just almost copy-pasted Chapter 3 in here instead of Chapter 2. Man, you guys would have been lost. Also, I have a fever and a headache, which is probably the reason for the almost-mix-up. It's also why I'm going to stop writing this note now.

Enjoy!

I awoke with that singular feeling of having been in an extremely deep sleep. You know the one, where you feel as though you have become one with the mattress. Or in my case, the carpet. My nose crinkled. Why was I on carpet? It smelled like feet and pizza.

I sneezed once, then opened my eyes. It took me all of two seconds to remember what had happened. I sat up way too fast and almost immediately found myself horizontal again, glaring at the ceiling as the white sparklies faded from my vision.

"Good morning, starshine." The dry acknowledgement came from somewhere to my left. It sounded like the turtle.

I sat up more slowly this time. I meant to look over and look at him, but instead my head tilted forward and I found myself staring at my toes and announcing, "Hey, I have legs."

"Congratulations."

My brain finally managed to rearrange all the most recent images in my head (blurry or otherwise) into some form of explanation, "Did you drug me?"

He shrugged, "We had a long drive ahead of us. I did remember to get these, though." He tossed something over his shoulder. My reflexes were even less awake than the rest of me, so it hit me in the face.

I rubbed the site of impact and picked up the small tube. Motion-sickness meds. At least he got the right kind.

"Where's the hippo and the fun-sucker?" I asked, crawling over to Bentley to look over his shoulder at his computer.

To my surprise he actually paused in his typing to snicker a bit. "Sly's out getting himself into Raleigh's operation. Murray is out finding snacks. I don't know how, considering we're on an island, but he'll probably come back with peanuts or sunflower seeds or something."

My stomach let out a pitiful gurgle at the mention of food. Bentley took pity on me and reached into a container at his side, producing a package of peanut butter crackers that I greedily snarfed down. "So, Raleigh is here then?" I was honestly surprised. Why would a known criminal stay in one place for a decade?

"According the amount of security here, yeah."

"That seems... suspicious."

He looked at me appraisingly, "I agree. But asking Sly to follow the logic of self-preservation and generally do things that prevent, you know, death is about as effective as trying to paint a rainbow with water. And equally as frustrating."

"Yeah, I noticed that he didn't exactly seem like the most safety-conscious guy around." That was an understatement. Anyone who flirted with Carmelita was basically asking to be either arrested or shot. Sometimes both.

"Oh yes." His computer suddenly started beeping and he held up a hand, "Observe."

He pressed a button in a program I'd never seen before and a small window appeared that showed the raccoon in question. From the little light above the monitor, I would guess that he could see Bentley as well.

"That blimp seems like the most secured location on this island." Cooper launched right in, directing some sort of camera toward a dark shape in the sky, "If Raleigh's really as smart as your research suggests, that's where I'll find him."

"Wonderful idea..." Bentley nodded, "But your plan is flawed."

The raccoon frowned, "Why?"

"Because it's impossible to get near him," Bentley said as though explaining a very simple conclusion, "To access Raleigh's blimp, you'd have to sneak through that high-voltage power tube. To do that without getting electrocuted, you'd have to destroy that power generator. And to do that, you need two more of Raleigh's treasure keys, which are heavily guarded."

"... Interesting. So when are you going to get to the 'impossible' part?"

My mouth dropped open. Seriously?

"Fine!" Bentley snapped, "But I warned you!" A few short bursts of typing later, "I've marked the areas you need to hit with holographic markers. Follow them to your objectives."

"Thanks!" Cooper said, far too happily.

"Don't mention it." The turtle grumbled, "It's your funeral." He closed the connection.

"How have you not punched him in the face yet?" I asked, genuinely curious.

"I have skinny arms; if I hit Sly, I'd probably fracture something."

"So why do you put up with him?"

He turned around to look at me fully for the first time since I'd woken up, one eyebrow raised like his opinion of my intelligence had suddenly dropped, "We're family. That's what we do."

"Well, yeah," awkward conversation about family with orphan is awkward, "But I know tons of brothers that can't seem to even be civil to each other unless they're in different states."

"Well," he spun back around to face his computer, "I bet all of those brothers have one thing in common."

"What?"

"Parents."

I then decided that it was in my best interest to get my foot out of my mouth and let Murray in when he started banging on the back doors of the van.

"I'm so bored. I want my iPod. My iPod would make my life right now so much better. But no. I don't have my iPod. Do you know why?"

"Oh, please tell me."

"Because, when I was taken on this spectacular little adventure against my will, someone wouldn't let me grab my backpack. Even though it would only have taken half a second."

"I was kind of in a hurry."

"Also my shoes. Who kidnaps someone and doesn't let them take their shoes?"

The video stream on the laptop before me shook as Cooper turned his binocucom over in his hands, "Is there not a mute button on this thing? Put Bentley back on."

"Bentley left after the whole thing with the barrel and the murderous globes. He was frustrated. I think he and Murray are working on the van." A loud clang from the front of the vehicle confirmed my suspicions, "He told me how to turn on the mic and said I could talk as much as I wanted."

"He is way too good at revenge sometimes."

"Well maybe you should be nicer to him. I mean, out of the two of you, he certainly seems to be the party more concerned with making sure you continue to do the important things in life, like breathing and having a heartbeat and stuff."

"Oh don't you start lecturing me."

"Well it's far too easy, you're not a very nice person." Then I was silent for a few moments, just long enough to make him think I'd run out of stuff to say, "... I'd kill you for my iPod. Well, really I'd kill you for a chocolate chip cookie; I'd just rather, you know, have my iPod."

"Oh that's very specific. Nice to know you wouldn't kill me for just any cookie, no, it has to be a chocolate chip cookie."

"Well yeah, if the cookie in question is oatmeal raisin or snickerdoodle or something, then you're dead and I have a cookie I'm not going to eat and nobody wins." I realized I was on a roll with the cookie soliloquy when it came to my attention that I could actually monitor the raccoon's vitals via the computer and saw that his blood pressure was slowly, but surely, starting to rise. "And it can't be one of those thin, crunchy chocolate chip cookies either. It has to be one of those thick, chewy ones that aren't even crunchy around the edge."

"You have very specific cookie criteria."

"Well I have to, especially now that I'm considering a career as a hit woman paid exclusively in cookies."

"For the love of God, please stop talking."

"Not a chance. Seriously though, who has lily pads big enough to jump on?"

"Um, a frog, genius."

"I mean, who has a path of lily pads in his treasure vault? It leads straight to the key!" I squinted at the screen, "This is barely security. I mean, sure he's got the laser beams of death, but their off-switches literally call attention to themselves. And only two guards? It's like he wants you to come up to visit!"

"Shut up, don't jinx it." He snagged the key, grabbed the last clue bottle, then ran back to the safe, "Seriously, get Bentley. I need him to decipher the clues."

"No you don't." I said around the pencil in my mouth, carefully lining up the ruler on the page in front of me.

"Listen kid, are you an idiot? We need to get into this safe and he's the only one with the brains to figure out all of these numbers."

"You're rude," I informed him, quickly jotting down three numbers. "Bentley already opened two safes, he got an idea for the codes and worked up a rough key for me. He's still taking his frustration out on the engine of the van. The code is four-three-six. And don't call me 'kid', I'm only three years younger than you."

"You're legally a minor and I'm legally an adult, I can call you 'kid' as much as I want. And I don't trust your work. For all I know, that code sets off the alarm."

"How on earth would having you set off the alarm help me? We're on a virtually unreachable island, in a part of the ocean controlled by a weather machine which is in turn controlled by a criminal. I want to get out of here as fast as possible and it looks like that means helping you get whatever it is that you're getting."

"It's a book, it my family's book of techniques."

A book, huh? That was actually a tolerable answer. "Good for you, now enter the code or I swear by all that is considered holy, I will start singing!"

Cooper's code-entering skills were quite fast when he put his mind to it. "Have mercy." He commented dryly.

The safe swung open, "See! I told you."

"Another page of the Thievius Raccoonus." He gently lifted the sheet of paper, "Excellent."

"What does it say?" I asked, curious despite myself.

"Like I'm going to tell you." He tucked the paper carefully into his backpack, then placed a calling card in the safe, leaving it open.

"Who keeps stationery in their gloves?"

Cooper just sighed.

"What's that?" I asked, pointing at a small bit of the tangle of machinery under the hood of the team van.

"That's the distributor cap," Murray cheerily informed me, spraying half-chewed peanut all over the engine.

I nodded, like I understood what he was talking about, and continued to watch him work. I knew a little about a lot, but I knew next to nothing about mechanics, something I hoped to remedy. It wasn't going particularly well. The last time he had given me something's name I asked him what it was and he looked at me like I was an idiot, an especially debilitating expression when coming from Murray.

In one of his expeditions to collect Raleigh's 'treasure keys', Cooper had sabotaged his weather machine. He hadn't knocked it out completely; Raleigh was a genius machinist, he wouldn't have just one area that could knock out everything else. It had, however, stopped raining, which was why I'd ventured out of the van at all.

Now though, I yawned. I wasn't sure what time it was or how long I'd 'slept' earlier. Maybe I could catch a quick nap in the van.

Of course, as many of my plans had had a tendency to do as of late, that plan went straight to hell as soon as I decided to implement it.

This was through no fault of my own, but more because, as soon as I opened the back doors to crawl into the van, I noticed the Bentley was conversing with Cooper via his laptop.

"... I've found a way up to Raleigh's hideout, but unfortunately it's doomed to failure."

"You're not going to tell me I have to shoot myself out of that cannon?"

"I'm afraid that's the only way."

"Now you're talking!"

"You're really scaring me, man." I agreed with Bentley. The raccoon was not only willing to shoot himself out of a cannon, but was excited about it. That was seriously messed up. "Anyway, to get inside that thing, you're going to have to steal all seven of Raleigh's treasure keys."

"So what are we waiting for? You show me those... 'holo-what's-it's-"

"You mean my holographic markers?" Something told me that Bentley was trying to make a point by correcting him, but I couldn't fathom what it was.

"Yeah yeah, and I'll swipe whatever it takes to get shot out of that cannon and steal back my family's Thievius Raccoonus!"

Cooper must have cut the connection then because Bentley stared at the screen for a moment, carefully removed and set aside his glasses, then threw his head down on his keyboard with a loud thud and left it there until his computer started beeping in protest.

"I have an idea." I suggested brightly, closing the van doors behind me, "How's about we leave him here? We go back to the mainland, I buy you and Murray breakfast, and we part as unlikely friends."

He laughed slightly, rubbing his forehead and replacing his glasses. "I'd love to take you up on that, but unfortunately I have a conscience. You can go back just as soon as you have nothing relevant to tell the cops."

"Curses, you've seen through my cunning plan." I sat next to him, looking at the overhead map he'd somehow acquired of the Isle O' Wrath. "Holographic markers? Can't the guards see them?"

"No. That device Sly has is called a binocucom, it's something I made to help him on heists. I project the signals so that when he looks at a certain area through the binocucom, a waypoint will appear. Since I have a map, I can set the coordinates here, see? And over here..."

As Sly made his way through the gunboat graveyard, his mind began to wander. This was through no fault of his own, he'd been trying to keep a tight leash on the thing, but the graveyard was so sparsely guarded that he was actually bored dodging in and out of spotlights and collecting the clues Bentley needed to open the safe Sly had yet to find.

So his thoughts began to worm their way out of the chokehold he'd kept them in over the last few months as he concentrated solely on becoming the best thief he could possibly be in order to steal back his legacy. They were tenacious little creatures, unfortunately, and as always turned his mind toward things he would just rather not think about.

The first and foremost thing they concentrated on was, of course, his relationship with his friends.

He angrily shook the thought away. There was nothing wrong with his relationship with Bentley and Murray. Sure, maybe it was a little strained sometimes, but it had been that way for years now. They weren't kids anymore. And it wasn't going to last much longer anyway.

Sure, they all acted like they were just getting started as a team, but Sly couldn't shake the feeling that, if it weren't for him, they'd be living completely normal lives. And they'd probably feel the longing for normality after he'd gotten his family's book back. They were probably feeling it now. No way would they want to stick around for long and he wasn't going to ask them to. After this all was over, Bentley would go get some ridiculously complicated job with computers and Murray would probably be doing something with cars.

As for Sly...

Well, that was another one of those things he'd rather just not think about.

He smashed open the last of the bottles against the wing of a downed plane and unrolled the small scrap of paper within. Sometimes there would be riddles, gibberish, equations, mathematics that (according to Bentley) actually were riddles, or just random doodles. In this case, however, there was simply a string of numbers.

He opened the connection to send a picture of the numbers to Bentley, but his fingers froze on the binocucom when his earbud crackled to life and fed him the sound from the other side of the microphone.

The turtle was laughing.

Sly didn't know why he was so surprised by this, he'd heard Bentley laugh hundreds of times before... just... not recently. Well of course not recently, they'd been planning how to get the Thievius Raccoonus for ages now and they were all a little stressed out.

"... You are ridiculous!" Bentley was saying.

"It's a legitimate theory!" It was that girl. What was her name? Something with a 'j'. 'Jenkins' or something. Maybe 'Jenks', yeah, that was it. Heh, 'Jinx'. It certainly fit. "You just watch, I'm so right!"

"I will bet you any amount of money that you didn't even get a single number right."

"... You don't really seem like a betting man."

"I'm not. This isn't a gamble; this is free money."

"Oh, go boil your head."

Before he could help himself, he broke in, "Please tell me I'm about to settle an argument."

"Sly!" Bentley sounded excited. Again, he didn't know why this surprised him. Bentley got excited over a lot of things, "Did you get the last clue?"

"Yeah," He snapped a picture of the clue and sent it in, "Work your magic."

Out of curiosity, he left the connection open as he made his way to the safe. There was about a minute of the sound of pencils on paper, then a very loud and angry, "Oh, screw you, Raleigh!"

"I told you so."

"Silence, smug reptile."

He smirked slightly. This was just too entertaining. "So, do either of you have a code for me?"

"This process makes no sense!"

"It makes perfect sense, your thought process is just skewed. Alright, Sly. Are you at the safe?"

He entered the numbers and listened to the bickering and felt oddly at ease for being in the middle of a gunboat graveyard.

Cooper had shot himself out of the cannon and up to Raleigh's weather machine almost half an hour ago and we hadn't heard from him since.

Bentley had started to panic after about ten minutes, so Murray had driven the van onto the ferry we were using and prepared for a quick exit. This proved to be a good idea when the weather machine sputtered out completely a few minutes later.

"Um, guys?" I leaned on the railing, looking down at the post the ferry was tied to. It was barely visible under the rapidly-rising water. "We need to cut loose. Like, now."

"Sly's not here yet!" Bentley was rapidly looking between the small rock tunnel Cooper was meant to come out of and whatever he had pulled up on his computer. "Come on, buddy, you can make it..."

I chewed on the inside of my lip anxiously. This was nerve-wracking. How did they deal with the adrenaline? "We can cut loose and still stick around until he gets here, I just don't want this thing to go taut before we can cut it."

Granted, I didn't know that much (anything at all) about boats, but somehow, I didn't think it would be a good thing if we were tethered to a dock that was completely submerged.

We did have to cut the rope. We stayed as close to the dock as we could, but something was going on with the steadily rising water (and I wasn't quite sure what), that kept trying to draw us out to the ocean.

We were about twenty yards from shore when Cooper finally came out of the steadily-flooding tunnel in the rock, one hand clutching his cane tightly, the other clenched around one strap of his backpack.

He waded down to the end of the dock, but still wasn't anywhere near the boat. I wondered why he stopped there, didn't just swim for the boat, until I heard Bentley behind me on the binocucom.

"Sly, you have to try! I picked up transmissions from Interpol, they're closing in as we speak!"

Even from that distance, I could see Cooper's expression twist into a grimace. He cast the water several dark looks before taking a step back, slipping his backpack off his shoulders and onto his arm. He spun it by the straps once, twice, and again before sending it flying in a high arc toward the boat.

Murray managed to catch the red pack, just about the time Bentley started up a round of panicky squawking into the binocucom, "What are you doing?"

It was about then that the pieces finally came together in my head. Cooper couldn't swim, he was planning on staying behind and wanted his friends to hang on to whatever was in that pack so Interpol didn't get it when he was arrested.

Something struck me as... fundamentally wrong about the situation.

I pinched my lower lip between my teeth and took a look around the deck. There was a life-preserver on the wall that was probably as much for show as anything, but it was secured by a very long rope wrapped around a winch.

I didn't like Cooper. I found him condescending and narcissistic. But I liked Bentley. He was kind and loyal and currently appeared to be on the verge of an anxiety attack. Or an asthma attack. One of the two.

After slinging the life preserver up onto my shoulder, I unlocked the rope wheel, and threw one leg over the railing.

"What are you doing?!"

I threw Bentley a grin, "Four years on a swim team." Bracing myself on the outside of the railing, I dove into the water.

I wasn't lying, I was a good swimmer. It had just been a very long time since I'd been in the water. Still, the momentum of the dive gave me a fair deal of distance and strong swimming is something you never really forget, so I was able to reach the dock with a minimum of difficulty.

To my surprise, Cooper reached out a hand to help me up when I reached him; saying, "Should have known you'd want to be here for this."

Ah, he thought I wanted to watch him get arrested. I just loved surprising people.

I grabbed his hand in a tight grip, clenching the life preserver between my arm and my side, and grinned up at him, "Hang on."

Then I planted my feet on the underside of the dock and used my leverage to pull him into the water.

He started flailing as soon as he hit, arms flying every which way before securing themselves around my neck and shoulder with a death grip. It was hard for me to stay above water even with the life preserver, I had to keep dragging quick, desperate breaths whenever my mouth and nose even partially cleared the surface.

Fortunately, Bentley picked up on what I was doing almost instantaneously and put Murray on the winch. The rope attached to the life preserver to which I was so ardently clinging snapped taut so quickly I almost let go of the flotation device.

Then we were gliding through the water. Not fast, but I could tell we were making progress to the boat, the current actually aiding us, despite the fact that Cooper's weight was a significant drag.

In spite of these problems, I wasn't scared. That was weird for me, drowning was at the top of my list for ways I didn't want to die. I should have been scared out of my mind, but I wasn't.

I didn't have much time to contemplate that, though, because a pink hand the size of a dinner plate had plunged into the water and grabbed the back of my shirt. I could only assume another had done the same with Cooper, considering the lack of weight around my neck when we were lifted free of the water.

Then we were on the deck. Cooper was making inarticulate noises of barely restrained panic (apparently he wasn't just unable to swim, he was scared of it. Oops.) while I coughed and spluttered out the water I hadn't been able to avoid inhaling, then taking wonderful, deep breaths.

"Murray, let's go!"

Just in time too, if the distant flashes of red and blue against the clouds were anything to go by.

"What the hell was that?!" Cooper sounded livid.

I just sighed, grabbed my heavy braid, laden with water, and pulled it over my shoulder to wring it out, "You're welcome."

Hope you guys enjoyed! Feel free to leave a review and head on over to the blog if you haven't already. I'll see you guys in a couple of weeks!