Penelope

Penelope is a mouse from Holland who led a double-life as an infamous pilot known as the Black Baron. She was the founder and fulltime champion of the ACES dogfighting competition. She was later unmasked by the Cooper Gang, after which she joined them as their RC specialist up to and during their mission to access the Cooper Vault. During this time, she developed a relationship with Bentley.

After the Cooper Vault job, they both began constructing a time machine. During which, however, Penelope disappeared and joined forces with Cyrille Le Paradox's gang in an attempt to sever all of Bentley's ties to the Cooper Gang and unlock what she believed to be his full potential, which was implied to be world conquest. She was defeated by the Cooper Gang and imprisoned, but later escaped and remains at large as a fugitive.

She was voiced by.

ACES
Nothing is known about Penelope's life before she attempted to join the dog-fighting league. When she tried to join the league, she was denied due to her young age. In order to bypass the age restriction, she created an alias called the Black Baron, an infamous dog-fighter. Online, she still identified as Penelope, but no one was the wiser about her double life.

As the Black Baron, Penelope became a celebrity in the dog-fighting world. She was a skilled pilot, and eventually created the annual ACES competition in an effort to attract more worthy opponents. Every year she would win the competition by normal means or, in the event of her near loss, by using her large gunships to shoot down the near victor.

Joining the Cooper Gang
When the Cooper Gang met Penelope online, they expressed their interest in a specialist with remote-controlled inventions, something that Penelope was also very adept with. She gave false information, claiming to be one the Black Baron's mechanics, but told the Gang that if they wanted her on the team, they'd have to beat the Black Baron in the upcoming ACES competition. She uploaded an edited image of herself, to match Bentley's fake image, igniting Bentley's romantic interest in her. The Gang accepted her challenge and traveled to Holland.

Some time before the ACES Semifinals, Bentley contacted Penelope via ham radio and requested her help in defending the Cooper Hangar from Muggshot and members of the Baron's staff whom he had bribed, as they attempted to destroy their plane. Penelope, who was against cheating between teams, fully supported the Gang in defending the hangar.

During the Finals of the competition, Sly Cooper managed to nearly destroy the Black Baron's biplane, so the Baron called in his gunships and a passenger plane for backup. Bentley, having anticipated the gunships, utilized the nearby windmills to destroy them, and Sly battled the Black Baron on the left wing of the plane. The mask of the costume was destroyed and Penelope was revealed to be inside it. She later explained the purpose of the suit, and joined the Cooper Gang without hesitation.

Cooper Vault heist
Between the events of joining the Cooper Gang and the Vault heist, Penelope assisted in recruiting two more members to the Gang—the Panda King and Dimitri Lousteau—through the use of her RC devices.

In China, she showed early signs of attraction towards Sly and his athletic ability. Bentley recognizes this and causes some resentment between him and his oblivious friend. While recruiting the Panda King, she was captured by General Tsao's Stone Dragon, which Sly managed to free Penelope from, causing her feelings to grow. She was later captured by Captain LeFwee, who had planned to make Penelope his wife until the Gang intervened. Penelope even demonstrated her ability in sword dueling against LeFwee on his ship's mast, the latter of whom lost and fell to the ocean. She also realized that she held strong feelings for Bentley, leading her to heroically save him and become his girlfriend.

As part of the heist, Penelope was crucial to eliminating the threat of guards in Sly's path as he climbed his way towards the Cooper Vault. After the heist failed, Penelope utilized her RC car to destroy the nearby radar towers; had she not, Sly—who later used his biplane to clear the skies of enemy fire—would have been under attack by homing missiles.

Betrayal
"If only Bentley hadn't been brainwashed by Cooper's "honorable thief" nonsense! We could have made billions in weapon design!"

- Penelope talking to herself.

After the heist was a success (even though Sly had disappeared) and the Cooper Gang disbanded, Penelope remained with Bentley and worked with him on a number of inventions, the most notable of which was a time machine. Sometime near its completion, Penelope vanished, much to Bentley's dismay. Bentley later discovered that the Thievius Raccoonus was beginning to disappear, so he had to put off searching for Penelope to get Sly and Murray back together to save the Cooper legacy.

As it turns out, Penelope's disappearance was intentional; Cyrille Le Paradox hired her to steal Bentley's time machine plans and create a completely separate time machine. While Bentley's machine suffered from a tragic flaw—it requires an item from the era the user wishes to travel to—Penelope's machine did not; the year itself can just be input. Le Paradox also entrusted Penelope to steal Sir Galleth Cooper's cane and stand guard over Medieval England, using a new suit, the Black Knight.

Penelope's intention was to double-cross Le Paradox and convince Bentley that the two of them could be the greatest minds in the world, using their combined intellect to gain money and power. Bentley, however heart-broken he was at Penelope's betrayal, stuck by his friends and their code of honor.

Bentley confronted Penelope and she explained her motives. Bentley tried to inform her of the truth: that she was just being used by Le Paradox to do his dirty work and was nothing more than his puppet. Penelope refused to hear it and declared their relationship over as she attacked him with her Black Knight suit. However, she was defeated by Bentley's own mech suit (made from parts of the Moat Monster) and sent to Europe's highest-security prison. She escaped rather quickly, and sent Bentley mysterious postcards with her symbol spray-painted on the photographed locations.

Physical appearance
Penelope is a light lavender mouse with long blonde hair (which in Thieves in Time's animated cutscenes is a strawberry blonde shade) in a braid and brown eyes. In Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves, she wears an orange shirt, blue overalls, brown shoes and gray gloves. She has round glasses and has a red bandana over her hair leaving her forelock exposed.

In Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, Penelope wears a yellow jumpsuit with black gloves, shoes and belt. On the right side of her jumpsuit is the Le Paradox logo. She still wears a red bandana on her hair, but her glasses are changed for either orange tinted safety glasses or oval glasses. In her left ear is a gold earring. Her hair is no longer in a braid, but instead is a long ponytail. She is also slightly taller in this incarnation. In prison, Penelope's yellow jumpsuit is replaced with a standard orange jail jumpsuit.

Despite being a mouse, Penelope lacks a tail in Sly 3. Her design has a tail in Thieves in Time.

Personality
Penelope initially comes off as a nice and outgoing person. She enjoys utilizing her RC talents against enemies, and while doing so she can get a little excited. While Penelope had only been a member of the Cooper Gang for a short time, she was dedicated and loyal to her new-found friends, eagerly supporting them whenever they needed help. Unfortunately, her lack of physical prowess and abilities makes her rather timid when actually confronted by an enemy, but when someone she loves—namely Bentley—is threatened, she becomes a powerful combatant.

Unfortunately, at some point during her relationship with Bentley, Penelope became corrupted by the opportunity for power as she realized that she and Bentley could make billions in weapon design. Growing possessed by the belief that Bentley and herself were being held back by Sly's ideals, she chose to abandon her code of honor, despite once being a moralist herself when she was an extremely firm opponent of cheating during the ACES competition. Of course, it is possible that her dislike for cheating and her violent reprisal against those who betrayed her Black Baron persona were a result of them going against rules she had set for the tournament, but only added to the point of her being virtuous. However, she did not consider herself in league with the bad guys, justifying her selfish actions on the grounds that what she did was no different from what thieves do and that she only had Bentley's best interests at heart.

Having abandoned her honor, Penelope started on a dark, downward spiral. She began to use and betray anyone to get what she wanted, growing more aggressive, arrogant, proud, vain and dominating, prominently when trying to finish off Sly and then tried to defeat Bentley as a means of making their breakup official. She believes herself the greatest genius, but knows—though refuses to admit—that she falls second to Bentley. She would also come to hate admitting when she had been outsmarted. She became surprisingly cruel and gained a dark sense of humor, torturing Sir Galleth physically and mentally by putting him in the circus, and even joked about making a rug out of what was left of Sly. She once considered turning the Cooper Van into a clown car, and even said behind Bentley's back that she finds him "cute when he's being dumb." She was unaware that Bentley watched and listened to her while hiding.

After the Le Paradox incident, Penelope's true character is a mystery, as it has been hinted that she came to regret her choices and still holds feelings for Bentley. She also seems to be huge on masking her identity. Her actions, however, suggest more of an anti-heroine than an actual cold-blooded villainess, since she openly admitted she was just using Le Paradox for her own personal gain.

Abilities
Other than boxing or sword fighting, the latter of which she probably had to self-teach quickly in order to fight LeFwee, Penelope does not have much in terms of physical abilities. This makes her a potentially easy target when out in the field, shown by her constant capture by certain enemies in Sly 3. To make up for this shortcoming, she has multiple fields in technology, including piloting, using remote-controlled devices, and machinery. She is also capable of using disguises to get through certain bumps in the road. In her debut, she mostly only utilized her RC capabilities, using the RC car and RC chopper. Where she acquired any of these talents is unknown.

Appearances

 * Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves
 * P. "Beginning of the End"
 * 3. "Flight of Fancy"
 * "Cooper Hangar Defense" (playable)
 * "Operation: Turbo Dominant Eagle"
 * 4. "A Cold Alliance" (playable)
 * "King of Fire"
 * "Tearful Reunion"
 * "Down the Line"
 * "Operation: Wedding Crasher"
 * 5. "Dead Men Tell No Tales"
 * "Dynamic Duo" (playable)
 * "X Marks the Spot"
 * "Operation: Reverse Double-Cross" (playable)
 * 6. "Honor Among Thieves"
 * "Carmelita to the Rescue"
 * "A Deadly Bite"
 * "The Dark Current"
 * "Bump-Charge-Jump"
 * "Stand Your Ground" (binocucom)
 * Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time (seen in Bentley's binocucom)
 * P. "Prologue" (cutscene)
 * 1. "Turning Japanese" (mentioned)
 * 2. "Go West Young Raccoon" (indirectly mentioned)
 * 3. "Clan of the Cave Raccoon" (mentioned)
 * 4. "Of Mice and Mechs"
 * 5. "40 Thieves" (mentioned)
 * E. "Epilogue" (cutscene)