Hey, I'm actually on time for once! This would be more exciting if it were due to me planning it and not on being up so late finishing my final paper and needing something to do while my hair dried.

Either way, enjoy the chapter!

We eventually did tackle the Rail Walk and Rail Slide, but only after Bentley came back and blew a gasket that we hadn't made any progress, considering he'd already booked passage to Haiti and Sly needed to learn the new techniques yesterday.

And if we never stopped making Star Wars references the whole time, well, who would care?

I could sort of manage the techniques, but it was a lot harder for me than Sly. He improved by leaps and bounds while teaching me while I grasped the basics and that was about it. Still, he was the important one, it wasn't like I was going to be out in the field.

Getting to Haiti was a whirlwind of annoyance that eventually led to me being sprawled in the back of the van trying not to be sick while Murray navigated through the uneven, twisting paths of swampland that were the only semblance of roads for miles.

Sly was actually fairly energetic, which probably had something to do with the fact that the sun had gone down an hour ago. He was currently taking great joy in my discomfort.

"How is it just riding in a car can make you this sick?" he asked with a wicked grin that made me want to vomit on his shoes.

"Bentley," I whined, curling into a tighter ball and squeezing my eyes shut, "I defer this question to you."

Bentley sighed, pausing in whatever he was typing, "Motion sickness is basically cognitive dissonance. It's the sensation of moving without actually consciously moving yourself, which is why people who get carsick can drive and be fine, but get sick if they're riding. It affects the inner ear and causes headaches, nausea, confusion, and poor balance."

"Thank you."

"Don't mention it."

"Something tells me it's poor fortune for the world that you two ever met," Sly said absently, tugging on his gloves as Murray swerved to a stop and my brain almost vacated my skull. "Try not to take over the world while I'm gone."

"What about half of it?"

The raccoon rolled his eyes and was gone.

"Is this place really called 'The Dread Swamp Path'?" I asked Bentley as he set up the binocucom station.

"I find it very appropriate," He said defensively, making me think he was the one who named it. He finally got the station working and called up Sly. "Sorry, Sly, but this is one mission you will have to accomplish without me."

"You don't believe in ghosts, do you?" the raccoon teased.

"Sure I do," Bentley said confidently. "My scanners have picked up verifiable paranormal activity. But that's not the problem. This swamp is oozing with disgusting mold and bacteria."

With an eye roll and a dismissive snort, Sly retorted, "Suck it up, Bentley. We've got work to do."

"As much as I hate to admit it," I said, draping myself over Bentley's shoulder, "He's got a point. I don't think you'll be anywhere near the mold and bacteria."

"Aw, thanks Jinx."

"I have a name!"

"Lies."

"Well alright then," Bentley groused, trying to get us back on track, "Don't forget to use the move you got from Muggshot's section of the Thievius Raccoonus, especially on those slippery, moldy, disgusting vines where the bark has worn away."

"Thanks, Bentley," Sly drawled, closing the connection.

"So," I said, sitting back on my heels, "Ghosts? You're not serious, right?"

"Deadly." Bentley gave me a look, "This swamp is rife with paranormal activity."

"Uh-huh, sure."

Ten minutes later, I was having to re-evaluate my entire life.

"Mosquitoes! The size of people! An-and spiders! And what are those, golems?!"

"Yes actually."

I made some sort of high-pitched keening noise after trying to articulate words that, I hoped, conveyed my emotional distress.

"Sly," Murray had stolen the binocucom mic and was whispering into it, "I think we broke Kaia."

"Do you have a receipt? Maybe we can get a refund."

"Bad mojo force fields!?" I shrieked, "Purple candles!?" I grabbed Bentley by the shoulders and shook him, "When did this become my life?"

"Three weeks ago," He answered, pushing me away to snatch the mic back from Murray. "My paranormal scanner is maxing out on that structure there, Sly."

"A reading like that could only be coming off Mz. Ruby herself."

"I think you're right. If you want a crack at Mz. Ruby, you're going to have to find a way inside that skull temple."

"Stereotypes," I whispered, staring off into the middle distance. "Stereotypes everywhere."

Bentley sighed, setting the mic aside, "Are you ever going to do anything besides provide color commentary on our lives?"

"Hey, it's not my fault your lives are the equivalent of a bad sitcom. But I would like to know how that paranormal scanner works."

The turtle's eyes lit up, "Well..."

He launched into a description of the probes he'd scattered across the area via RC chopper and how he used them to detect electro-magnetic-frequencies (EMF), temperature, and a whole slew of other things that added up to paranormal activity.

Explanation or no, when he reached the end, I still sighed. "I'm still not sure I want to rewrite my worldview to include ghosts. It would be so much easier to, say, rewrite it to include spores that induce hallucinations. Disturbingly similar hallucinations. In multiple people."

Bentley gave me a pitying look. "That is more improbably than the existence of ghosts, you do realize that?"

"Leave me to my coping mechanisms, friend."

Sly was incredibly athletic, but even he could only handle so much. Running from a voodoo snake that was the size of a city block and had a taste for raccoon? That could take it out of a guy.

The keys he'd managed to steal so far clinked lightly against each other in his backpack as he hiked back to the van. The guards he'd taken out on the way in hadn't been replaced yet, which either meant they hadn't been expected to report in or Mz. Ruby was fortifying her defenses farther in.

Well, it didn't matter how much she fortified her defenses. He was coming for her.

He heard an odd shifting sound as he approached the van and looked up as he rounded the corner only to stop dead.

Jinx had a sack in her arms that may once have been huge, but was currently only half full. She had a look of intense concentration on her face as she poured something white in a complete circle around the van, about a yard from the bumper.

"What are you doing?" he asked, feeling a grin pull at his face.

She looked up and smiled, which was weird. It was a nice smile too, not like she was plotting or anything. It made his stomach swoop unsettlingly.

"I'm taking precautions," she said, mischief in her words as she completed the circle and hefted the bag in her arms. 'ROCK SALT' was printed on the side.

"Precautions?" Sly asked, meandering toward her.

"Yeah." She swung the bag, forcing the remaining salt to settle at the bottom, and sat it next to her feet. Planting her hands on her hips, she grinned up at him. "To keep ghosts away."

Salt was meant to keep ghosts away? "What, by threatening them with hypertension?"

"Got me. Bentley has a list of things, but sage isn't handy." Her eyes flicked over his shoulder and she casually reached out, grabbed a handful of his shirt, and pulled him over the salt line.

His muscles tensed with the urge to do something in retaliation, but then there was the sound of a thud behind him and he looked over his shoulder.

One of the cat ghosts he'd seen everywhere was recoiling from some kind of impact.

"Ha!" Jinx sounded delighted. "It worked!" Leaning forward, she tilted her head. "Huh. Ghost."

It hissed at her. She hissed back.

Sly was still laughing over that when it hit him that this completely insane and inexplicably hilarious person was going to leave. It was pure chance that she'd stuck around this long and she was going to leave.

"No!" she pointed a finger in the ghosts face, just barely on the safe side of the salt line. "You shoo, or I will exorcise you. Don't even think I won't, I will do a Google search for an exorcism and I will exorcise your furry purple tail."

The cat hissed one more time before drifting off through a tree and only then did Jinx turned to look at him. Her triumphant expression crumpled immediately into one of confusion.

"Hey, are you okay?"

"Fine." He didn't know why it felt like he'd been kicked in the chest. He'd known she was going to leave since he grabbed her, it wasn't like this was news.

It was just- things were more fun when she was around and he couldn't figure out why. Maybe it was because she was new? She didn't have any of the motivation the rest of them did, didn't take this search as seriously, but because of that she kind of forced them to loosen up. Maybe that was it?

"Are you sure, Sly? Because you don't look so good."

He shook his head, forced himself back into the present, and realized she was staring up at him, the ambient light of the swamp reflected in her eyes and made them seem huge in her face.

He couldn't... he needed air.

Reaching over his shoulder, he shoved his hand into his backpack and withdrew a handful of crumpled slips of paper, pushing them into Jinx's hands. "The clues, for Bentley. I'm just gonna-" gesturing back the way he came, he started off back down the path, suddenly filled with twitchy, nervous energy and an urge to get his hands on something that didn't belong to him.

"But you just-" he heard her start to say, before shouting after him, "Watch out for ghosts!"

"Sly's acting weird." I aimed for a casual, conversational tone of voice as I smoothed out the papers from the clue bottles and passed them to Bentley one by one.

"You're going to have to narrow it down," he informed me, not even looking up from his scrap paper. Apparently, this was a normal thing.

Murray looked up from his Gameboy. "Yeah, Sly doesn't make sense much anymore."

"But why is that?" I asked, slouching against the van wall as I rubbed out a crease in the paper with a claw. "I mean, he was just laughing earlier, but then he stopped and looked like I'd hit him over the head with a dead puppy and then he ran off. I don't get it."

Finally, Bentley looked up from his calculation, "Sly, well, he's been through a lot. I'm not just talking about when he was a kid, but that is kind of the crux of it. He puts all these expectations on himself from what he thinks his father, his entire family line, would have wanted."

I frowned, passing him another clue, "Does he even like thieving?"

"Oh yeah, don't get me wrong, he loves it." Bentley carefully lined the clue up next to the others. "It's just that... you know how you can be doing something for fun and loving it, but if someone makes you do it for a grade, or for a deadline, it makes it stressful and takes some of the fun out of it? It's like that."

I thought on that for a little while, waited until Bentley had called Sly with the new vault combination, before asking, "Do you think this, all of this, with the taking down the Fiendish Five and getting the Thievius Raccoonus back, do you think it'll help him?"

Bentley sighed, looking a lot older for a second. "I think it might help him get closure. But I also think it might leave him at a point where he's accomplished everything he wanted to and has no other goals. If it leaves him floundering, there's only so much I can do. It could give him peace or it could drive him in a bad direction."

"We're worried about him," Murray confided. He was still staring down at his Gameboy, but the sound effects from it had stopped.

I rested my head on my knee after passing Bentley the last clue. "This sucks."

"Trust me," Bentley said with a wry twist to his mouth, "We are well aware of that."

"Yeah, but, I mean, it really sucks."

"Welcome to the gang, Kaia. If you have any suggestions feel free to bring them up, we need all the help we can get."

"Sly needs all the help he can get," Murray corrected. Bentley tilted his head, silently conceding the point as he continued to mess with the slips of clue paper.

"If I'm part of the gang, can I get a cut of the loot?"

"You get a cut of the loot when you start helping us steal it."

"Booo..."

The radio Bentley had altered to pick up specter frequencies started emitting a low hissing sound, which made his head snap up, bits of clue paper falling from his fingers. He scrambled to bring up a computer program he'd linked the radio to, fumbling for a set of heavy-looking headphones.

"Something's trying to contact us!" he shouted excitedly.

I exchanged a wary glance with Murray, but he didn't look the slightest bit concerned.

How the gang had survived so long with so many of their members so infatuated with dangerous things was utterly, completely beyond me.

Whacking fifty chickens for a ghost that was craving gumbo while avoiding roosters with bombs strapped to their backs was, admittedly, a little weird, even by Sly's standards.

Having a voice in his ear provide color commentary was not helping the situation.

"How is this a viable form of security?" Jinx was asking, sounding kind of awed, like 'wow, people are amazingly thick'. "Those roosters are more likely to kill themselves, all the rest of the chickens, and burn down the coop than they are to explode any intruders."

"Yeah, well, these are Mz. Ruby's chickens and she creates friends via necromancy, so this isn't her weirdest idea," Sly managed as he dove out of the way of another explosion.

"Who is she even feeding with all these chickens, aren't her guards zombies?" Sly didn't even think Jinx was expecting an answer as much as she was filling the dead air out of some weird compulsion. "Also, why is the ghost scared of being exploded? He's a ghost, he's already dead."

"Some things defy explanation." His teeth were gritted because he was already outrunning psycho killer roosters and also because every word Jinx said drove home the fact that she wouldn't be saying them to him for much longer.

He probably wouldn't ever see her again. She'd go home and probably go to college and get a normal job and he'd, what? What would he do? If Bentley and Murray moved on, what would Sly do?

If it got to the point where he could only remember as much about Bentley and Murray and Kaia as he did about his dad, if it got to the point where he couldn't just talk to them whenever he wanted, how would that be better?

He wanted the Fiendish Five to pay. He wanted his family's book back.

But he kind of also wanted things to stay exactly the way they were.

"And why do you have a time limit? How badly does this ghost need the gumbo? Is he having a party for all his other ghost friends? How do ghosts eat anyw-?"

"Can you just let me concentrate for a second?" Sly snapped hooking his cane around chicken number thirty-seven.

There was a second, just a split second where he had enough time to realize he'd been harsh and regret it, then Jinx's voice came back over the binocucom.

"Sorry," she said quietly.

Then she clicked off and Sly hated himself a little.

"You alright, Kaia?"

I blinked, snapped out of my blank staring contest with a discolored patch of van carpet, and looked up at Bentley. After taking a moment to kick my brain into gear, I nodded and tried for a smile. "Yeah, fine. Why?"

He didn't look convinced and didn't answer my question, but he did turn back to his work station. All the treasure keys had been stolen and he was trying to make sure he had as much information as possible.

Murray was outside, prepping for our getaway. No matter what condition he kept the van in, he still checked it repeatedly when he really needed to rely on it.

And I was just sitting there. Nothing to do, no way to contribute. And I was really starting to question when I'd felt the need to contribute to a gang of thieves.

All in all, not the best frame of mind to be in.

Tapping a pen against the map in front of him, Bentley frowned. "Mz. Ruby is holed up in that skull temple. If something goes wrong, we're not going to have any time to get up there.

"Can she actually take on Sly in a fight?" I asked, mildly curious. I didn't know a lot about Sly, but I knew he could fight.

"She has powers that go against nature itself, I think it's safe to say that attempting to predict the outcome of that fight based on physical skill is a waste of time."

I paused and really thought about that. "He is literally launching himself into a fight where his opponent has mystical powers that he probably can't counter, isn't he?"

Bentley considered that and winced. "Yes, yes he is."

"I'm understanding your concern a little better now."

Something on his monitor caught his eye and he grimaced, "Yup, there he goes. He just used steam pressure to rocket into the lair of a voodoo priestess. That is a thing that he did."

"Do bad guys feel the urge to be as high up as possible for any particular reason or are they just going for melodrama points?"

"Your guess is as good as mine, at this point."

Sly'd had to turn off his earpiece while he was fighting Mz. Ruby.

There was only so much shouting about recklessness and suicidal tendencies he could take before he started getting distracted. And Voodoo Simon Says was not a good game to be playing while distracted.

But he'd done it. The third member of the Fiendish Five, the third person responsible for him being orphaned, had been taken down.

It didn't help as much as he'd thought it would. None of the victories had so far. They did help some, but he knew that he wasn't done. He was over halfway there now, but he wasn't done.

He was closer now. Just like Raleigh and Muggshot before her, Mz. Ruby had dropped a name. A name- and a location.

The Panda King. China.

Sly repeated those words over and over to himself. One more step, one more clue. It felt like he'd never be done, but it also felt like the end of everything was just around the corner.

He couldn't tell which alternative he preferred.

Inspector Fox was, of course, behind him by the average wingspan of a baby gnat. Still, he was good at pressing every advantage he got beyond the point of no return, so he was out of the skull temple with a fraction of a second to spare, leaving Mz. Ruby to face down a furious battalion of Interpol officers.

Turning on his earpiece again, he listened for Bentley's instructions on where to meet up, moving mechanically through the swamp, to where the van was parked. Most of the ghosts and golems were gone, dissipating without Mz. Ruby's energy around to give them life.

The Thievius Raccoonus pages were too light in his hands, too fragile. He'd have put them in his backpack, but he didn't want them any more crumpled than they already were. The humidity of the swamp had warped them out of flatness already, they didn't need any more problems.

Maybe there was a way to restore the pages? No, he couldn't turn back the hands of time. And even if he could, he certainly wouldn't waste the opportunity on paper.

The van was already running when he reached it. It usually was, Murray was nothing if not willing to drive.

His legs hurt and all of his skin felt damp and overheated, like he was running a fever.

The back doors of the van flew open as he approached and Jinx reached out to give him a hand in, a weird expression on her face, somewhere between worried and annoyed. She opened her mouth to say something when he gripped her hand, but he cut her off.

"We're going to find the Panda King. In China."

She stared at him, just for a second. Sound went out of the world in that second, except for the very familiar smack of Bentley dropping his head into his hands.

Then Kaia let go of his hand.

Midway into entering the van, Sly went reeling backwards, landing on the soft, swampy ground.

He barely had time to feel disoriented before Kaia let out a sound of pure, undiluted frustration and launched herself at him.

... Hey, don't look at me, their dynamic is way different when they're younger.

Hope you enjoyed! Feel free to check out the blog and I'll see you in a couple of weeks!