"...And that's the situation," Elena said.
In the empty cafeteria Conan, Nancy, and Haibara were being briefed via speakerphone about the deal with Sonoko.
"Hold on," Haibara said. "How do you know this?"
"Masumi knows, and she was gracious enough to inform me right away," Elena answered. "In fact, she was the one who helped Sonoko pinpoint where the calls were coming from."
"When do they leave?" Conan asked.
"Tomorrow morning," Elena said. "They won't be having any classes then, and neither will you, so that is the ideal time by all means. Shiho, I guess you don't need to go all that badly. You have the option of sitting this one out."
Haibara shook her head. "No, I'd like to go with them."
"Fair enough. Shinichi, Ran, I trust the two of you are going no matter what I say?"
"Of course!" Conan said.
Nancy was silent.
"Good. After school, the two of you need to pack your bags and get ready for the trip. Either convince Sonoko to buy you a ticket or to by car. It goes without saying that if I provide you with a ride it'll raise too many questions, so if nothing else works then ask that Professor of yours for a ride. This situation must be resolved, one way or another, preferably before the Men in Black are able to catch the slightest whiff of it. Do I make myself clear?"
"Yes ma'am," Conan and Haibara said.
"Alright, good. The two of you has better get back to class before your teachers start worrying."
"The two of us?" Haibara asked.
"Yes. There's something I need to talk to Ran-chan about. Alone."
And so, Conan and Haibara returned to class, leaving Ran to face the music.
"This must all be quite baffling to you," Elena said to Ran. "Listen, what I'm about to tell you, do not repeat to Kudo-kun."
"Um, okay. Might I ask why?" Nancy asked.
"It's for his own good. It's enough that one person should have to suffer this."
"I don't understand, but okay. I won't tell him. "
"Can I have your word on that?"
"Yes. You have my word."
Elena sighed. "Have I ever told you my religious background?"
"Um, no?"
"I was born and raised into the Anglican Church. My family would attend services twice a year: on Christmas, which celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ, and on Easter, which celebrates the anniversary of His death."
"Huh? But isn't Jesus Christ the central figure of Christianity? Why would they celebrate Him dying?"
"They say that He died for the sins of humanity. Anyways, when I grew up and went to college, I came to reject organized religion as false. I was once a hard atheist, but now I consider myself to be more of an agnostic. I don't believe in the soul, or that there's a Heaven. Or Hell for that matter, of course. But just for a second, let's ask the question: what if I'm wrong? What if we humans do have eternal souls?"
"Well, the soul can exist independently of the body, so life would continue after mortal death," Nancy said.
"Yes, but it goes the other way around too. If a dead person were revived, would the soul which had departed from the body be forced back into it?"
"Heeeehh?! what kind of a morbid question is that?"
"If you'd please give me a straight answer, I'd appreciate that."
"Hmm, well, I imagine it would. I don't buy that if a person's heart stops beating for thirty seconds, and then he's resuscitated, that he'd be soulless."
"Red herring. When your heart stops beating, your brain remains intact for a while. You aren't really dead yet, regardless of what standard medical practice claims. Of course, it wouldn't be enough for you to loss consciousness, such as when you're in a coma, since nobody would say you're dead when you're asleep. I define death as the total cessation of brain function, also called brain death. After that dire point was crossed, if your brain was magically brought back to life, would your soul be restored to the body?"
Nancy was silent.
"The truth is, we have no way of knowing," Elena said. "Just some speculating on my part for a second: the soul's residual connection to the body is broken gradually after death. In the minutes immediately after, there might very well be no issue, but...Ran, you were dead for several days. Do you know...do you know what I'm saying?"
Nancy hesitated, but then answered:
"A-Are you saying that my soul...might not have returned to my body after I died?"
"*Your* soul? I think you misunderstand. If my concerns are grounded in fact, you are not Ran. You are the body that Ran inhabited. Your thought processes are the exact same as hers would've been had her soul been reunited with her body, playing on autopilot. Make no mistake: yours may be an exact copy of Ran's personality, but it is a copy, nonetheless. You are an advanced biological computer, and nothing more. If it turns out to be the case that your friend Sonoko has somehow been in communication with Ran's soul, then that makes you little more than a pretender, a fraud even...Note of course that I could be wrong. I'm only human, as such I'm in no position to make a conclusive judgment about the nature of the soul, and of existence. What I presented just now was one theory, one that presumes a supernatural aspect to existence. If the material is all that is, then there's no reason to assume there's any legitimate distinction between the you that is now and the Ran that was prior to her death."
"But...if you are right, and everything that I'm thinking isn't real, if I am not in fact Ran, then..."
"Again, I shouldn't try to tell you what to do, because I don't know the truth about you, but...even if you are just a copy...well, you shouldn't let that change anything. Kudo-kun wishes to be with the love of his life. Whatever you are, know that you're the closest thing he's got to that, the closest thing there is to Ran Mouri. If he doesn't know the truth, then he can be happy with you regardless. You want him to be happy, no?"
"Of course I do!" Nancy protested, her voice starting to break up. "How can you say otherwise? But, I don't think that I...that I should be...!"
Nancy abruptly hung up, fell onto her hands and knees and broke down sobbing.
Opening
(Shameless by CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE)
Whoo girl you're as cool as ice
Deal me another full deck o' lies
Dontcha dare break yer poker face
Empty my heart's vault at record pace
Baby yeeeeeah!
(Not all that glitters is gold! A pearly white smile can mask a heart as black as coal! The line between ours and the netherworld is disturbed, resulting in a crisis of identity! Perceiving the one and only truth! With the body of a child but the mind of an adult, my name is DETECTIVE CONAN!)
And so we find ourselves at this crossroad again
Per my count, you've lied to me five times tonight
You've woven a tale that'd leave J.R.R. Tolkien speechless
A carefully constructed narrative flimsier than a house of cards
I don't know if I should let you walk away
I don't know if you're worth the trouble
But what I care enough to demand an answer to
"What did I have that you wanted for your own?"
You shameless thing, a web of deceit left in your wake
Antithetical to the driving force that binds people together
A thick veil of mist shrouds the true you that you can't let slip
In the name of all that's true, I'll deconstruct you piece by piece!
The Hand That Grabbed Her Ankle, Part Four!
The next day, Sonoko and Masumi boarded a train that would take them all the way to Shin-Hakodate station in Hokkaido in about four hours time.'
As the door to the train was just about to close, three more people got on:
"Heeeeehh?!" Sonoko said. "What are you doing here?"
"What, it isn't obvious?" Conan said. "I cared about Ran-neechan too, you know. And so did the Professor."
"And I came along mainly because I wanted to see Hokkaido," Haibara said coolly.
Conan, Haibara, and the Professor had boarded the train. Of course, the one person who hadn't was...
Well, I guess it's fitting that she isn't here, Sonoko thought. I threw Nancy out like yesterday's trash whenever I ran out of further use for her. So why should she be here for me now? Besides, she never even knew Ran.
That was strange for sure, Conan thought. Her decision not to come. Her, of all people...it must've been something that Elena-san told her. If only I knew what that was.
This trip is gonna cost me an arm and a leg, The Professor thought.
Scene Transition
Four and a Half Hours Later
After arriving in Hakodate proper they left the station, walked over to a nearby seafood restaurant in the Donburi Yokocho Market, and enjoyed a late lunch.
"Here you go," the guy behind the counter said as he served them their dishes. "This was all caught fresh earlier today."
Meanwhile, there was a TV mounted on the wall. The local news station was playing:
"Standing here beside me is one of the nearly 50 people who lost their homes in the aftermath of yesterday's fire, which burned down half a city block in what was the third in what's now a string of devastating fires to hit Hakodate..."
They ate, and then Dr. Agasa turned to Masumi and Sonoko:
"So, you do know where the Kojin Shrine is, right?"
"Yeah," Masumi said. "There's just one problem: it's very remote and isolated."
Scene Transition
Masumi wasn't kidding. Every year, huge numbers of tourists flock to Mt. Hakodate. One can ascend to the summit on foot or by cable car, and then be greeted by an amazing view of the city below.
However, any mountain has two sides. The other side of Mt. Hakodate, it would turn out, was not frequently traveled. Sonoko, Masumi, Conan, Haibara, and the Professor had to walk all the way around the mountain, and soon found themselves on the temple grounds of Hakodate's only shrine to Kojin, the Shinto deity of the hearth and the kitchen.
There was a garden and a traditional Shinto gateway, or torii, and a short set of stairs leading up to it.
There was a single large building, constructed in traditional Japanese style, and then a smaller side structure which housed the open-aired shrine to Kojin.
A monk was tending to the plants when he saw them
"We have visitors!" he shouted at the top of his lungs.
A minute later, three other monks had come outside to meet the five visitors.
"Welcome," one of them said, bowing politely. "Are you here to pray to lord Kojin?"
"Uh, no," the Professor said. "We're actually here because...
Sonoko stepped forward. "We're here because somebody's been prank-calling me."
The monks looked at each other nervously.
"Let me guess," one of them said. "You've been getting calls from a departed friend or family member?"
"Hey, how did you know?" Masumi demanded.
'"U-Um, actually, you're not the first," another one of the four monks said. "Before you, we've had three other parties come here in the last six months searching for answers about that very same thing."
"Huuuuhh?! the five of them exclaimed.
"Please, have dinner with us and we'll explain," that monk said.
Scene Transition
The meal served that night at the Shrine was ramen.
Sonoko and comrades sat on one side of the table, the four monks and the older headmaster of the shrine sat on the other side.
"We apologize if it's lacking in flavor," one of the monks said. "We've blown through most of this month's pension so we've been having to make do with ramen straight out of a cup.''
"Oh, no, it's very good," Sonoko and the Professor lied.
"You said earlier that you'd tell us what you know," Conan said.
The monk who invited them to dinner nodded. "The first person who came here for the same reason as you did was a German immigrant who worked as a customized prosthetics maker in Yokosuka. He had married a Japanese woman."
"And she died?" Haibara guessed.
"No, he said she's doing fine, but he was good friends with her brother, his brother-in-law, who died 3 years ago under...*ahem* less than graceful circumstances, in a freak accident of sorts. Anyways, they were in communication with each other for about four weeks, via telephone, and then the calls ceased. In the last call, he and his wife were told to come here."
"That's strange," Sonoko said. "The person claiming to Ran said that he or she never contacted anyone besides me, but in that case then the caller contacted two people?"
"That's what they said then," the monk said. "The second party was a single person, a woman employed as a paralegal whose fiance died in a big car wreck. She says they were only in contact for about a week and a half, and then the calls abruptly stopped."
"How did she know to come here?" Masumi asked.
"She traced the phone address of the caller," another one of the monks said.
"The third caller was a veterinarian whose older brother, a heavy smoker, died of lung cancer. The two of them were in contact for about 3 weeks, and then it stopped. But on the last call, he told him to come here."
"And when they came, we told them exactly what I'm about to tell you," the headmaster said calmly. "We have no idea why this all is happening, or why this shrine seems to be at the center of it."
"By the way," Conan said, "there's something I'm very curious about: which phone is it? The one that was the source of the calls."
"Oh, that? Actually, some of the other people asked that same question. Let me show you."
He pointed to a phone there in the dining room, showed them one that was in the kitchen, and then led the guests to the headmaster's private quarters, where there was one sitting on a desk.
"All three of these phones are linked the same landline," he said. "If you call that number, all three phones will ring."
"Can I test that out?" Sonoko asked.
"Sure. Go ahead."
Sonoko dialed the number by memory and then pushed "Call".
Sure enough, all three phones went off at the same time.
Satisfied with the outcome of her experiment, Sonoko ended the call, and the phones went silent again.
"So ultimately, if it was some kind of prank call, any one of us could've done it," the monk said.
"No," Sonoko said. "Not quite. I know how to narrow this down a little further. Which one of you is named Yoshichika?"
" I-I am, " the monk who'd done most of the talking up until this point said. "It wasn't me, though! I swear!"
"I know that," Sonoko said. "What I meant to say is: you're the one guy here who couldn't have done it. But if nothing else, you confirmed just now that the person who picked up the phone during that last call was one of you four!"
She pointed to the other three monks, and to the headmaster.
"Don't be absurd," the headmaster said nonchalantly, finishing off his bowl of ramen. "I know all my boys well enough to tell you with complete confidence that none of them would ever be responsible for such mischief."
"To be honest, these occurrences have been just terrible for us," one of the monks said. "You see, this shrine was founded in the late 50s and since then it's struggled to compete with Seicho-ji in Osaka, since they have a bigger and way more popular shrine to lord Kojin. Not enough people come here and put coins in the donation box for this place to be self-sufficient. The only reason we're still open is that the city's been providing us with a fairly generous pension for all these years. But now they're blaming us for the complaints lodged by some of those people like yourselves, and they've been threatening to take away our funding if something like this were to happen again."
Yoshichika looked at Dr. Agasa's cup: "Oh, you're done? Let me get you some more."
"No thank you, I'm good," the Professor said.
"No, I insist," Yoshichika said.
He took The Professor's cup and went into the kitchen.
"Oi, Sonoko," Masumi whispered, " What do you think? Do you recognize the voice of the caller?"
Sonoko shook her head. "No, and that person's voice was agitated, unlike all these people here."
Yoshichika returned. "Here you go."
The Professor immediately noticed the small slip of paper under the tea cup. He took it, unfolded it, and read it:
"I can't speak truthfully and openly right now. Pretend to leave and then meet me at lord Kojin's shrine in exactly one hour. I'll tell you everything then."
The Professor quickly put the note in his pocket, but it seemed apparent that all the monks knew what Yoshichika had just done.
"Um, okay, I guess this trip was a bust," Dr. Agasa said, standing up. "Thank you for your kind hospitality, and we'll be on our way now."
Scene Transition
"Sorry Shinichi, Ai-chan, Hakase... I can't do this. Just go on without me. Bye!"
That was what Nancy said at the last minute whenever they were about to purchase their tickets for the bullet train (shinkansen) to Hokkaido. Before any of them had a chance to convince her otherwise, she turned the other way and ran as fast as she could.
Now, she was walking home, by herself. It was snowing very lightly.
How could I have not figured this out sooner? she thought. Even if the calls Sonoko's been getting turn out to be a hoax, it won't change anything. I should've known it wouldn't be so easy to cheat death, no...to cheat God. Death is God's rightful domain, right? The afterlife, heaven or hell. It's an expression of divine sovereignty over the hubris of man. What kind of extreme arrogance leads us to believe that we can steal from God so easily?
Like Elena-san said, I am a pretender, she thought. I'm leading on Shinichi now, but when we both die he's going to find that I can't ever follow him to that other place, since I am a creature of this world and this world alone...It's only fair that I break this off here and now, so that his suffering in the end will be less. After all, the more you love, the more tightly you hold on, the more painful it'll be when the righteous cleaver of God forces you to part ways...But how can I do that? He'll never let me go, not willingly.
There was only one way. She had to take her own-
"Ooh yeah, I knew there were goodies in here."
Shigeo Yasuda climbed out of a nearby dumpster, triumphantly holding a half-eaten taco.
"Huh?" he said. "You're that girl from the other day. Your name's Nancy, right?"
Nancy didn't feel like stopping to talk to this guy. She turned around and began to continue walking.
"Ey, kid, dontcha ignore yer elders when they be tryin to talk to ya, ya hear? What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong," she said dismissively.
"Now dat just ain't fair. What you take me for, an idiot? Yer lips they be blabbin one thing but yer heart's sayin something else entirely. That ain't healthy. I know that much. Come on, tell me what this is all about. A girl like you's much too young to be carrying a burden like whatever's on your plate."
"Maybe I'm not as young as you think," Nancy said.
"Yeah, I know that," Yasuda said. "I know I only got a few grey hairs, but I think of myself as being old as dirt. Age is relative for sure. Now enough evading the question."
Nancy sighed. I guess I have to tell someone, she thought.
"I don't know who I am. I'm not sure if I even have a soul. And I mean that literally."
Yasuda suddenly looked extremely serious. "That's no light matter. This I know. Life can't be worth living under such conditions. Even confirming that you don't has got to be better than not knowing. So...how badly do you want to know?"
"More than anything!" Ran/Nancy confessed. "You're right, this uncertainty is no way to live!"
"Alright then. Let's find out, shall we?"
Suddenly, Yasuda sat down right there on the pavement. "Listen here: this is a crapshoot. I don't know how well this is gonna work, since the last time I tried this on someone there were, well, let's just say there were some unintended consequences. So it's paramount that you do exactly as I say. First of all: look me straight in the eye. Do not break my gaze, and try to blink as little as possible. Don't move a muscle."
He put three of his fingers on Ran's face.
"W-What are you, some kind of medium?" Nancy asked.
"Hmm, medium. I like the sound of that one. One guy I'm familiar with compares me to the Serpent, but I don't like that comparison at all. The Serpent was one bad Joe. He didn't give humanity any special knowledge worth knowing, and then he made humans bear the brunt of the punishment for their rebellion against God. I'd much rather be compared to Prometheus, the Greek god who stole the secret of fire and shared it with humanity. That was a truly awesome development, one which arguably kickstarted human civilization. And he alone took on the due penalty for his actions. He was a true humanitarian, an extraordinary individual, though fictional, and I consider him to be a much worthier role model. Now then, let's get started."
Scene Transition
One hour had passed. Dr. Agasa and the four others snuck around back and returned onto the shrine grounds.
They stood near the place where worshippers prayed to Kojin. But:
"Come on," Sonoko said , tapping her foot impatiently. "Where is he?"
They waited about five more minutes, and then finally they went up to the front door and knocked.
One of the monks answered the door.
"Excuse me," Agasa said. "Is Yoshichika-kun in there?"
"Huh?"
"I-I'm honesty kind of embarassed that I have to tell you this, but he and I actually agreed to meet privately."
" ...I see. Well, he's been in the shower for the past 25 minutes or so. "
"Does he normally take showers that long?" Haibara asked.
The monk shook his head. "No. This is highly unusual. Yoshichika's the most punctual of all of us, save the headmaster. Come in."
They walked into the room with two sinks. The bathroom door was open, but the door to the shower room was closed.
The monk knocked on the door. "Oi, Yoshichika. Hurry it up, will ya? Your company's here."
No answer.
The monk left and then came back with a key. "Hey, if you don't answer me I'm coming on in, whether you're dressed or not."
After a few seconds passed, the monk sighed and unlocked the door to the shower.
He opened the door and-
Sonoko screamed.
"...Oh," the monk said calmly, "I guess we'd better call an ambulance."
Sonoko's scream caused the other monks and the headmaster to come running.
"What is all this commotion about?" the headmaster asked.
It was Yoshichika. He had fallen over and hit the back of his head on the metal shower faucet, killing him.
Ending
(Secret of my Heart by Mai Kuraki)
Donna kotoba ni kaete
Kimi ni tsutaerareru darou
Arekara ikutsumo no kisetsu ga
Toorisugita keredo
Itsumo soba de waratteru
Watashi nimo ienai koto ga mada hitotsu dake aru
SECRET OF MY HEART
Utagattemo nai ne
Itsu datte sukoshi no mirai ga areba
Shinjitsu wa te ni irerareru hazu
I CANNOT SAY mou sukoshi dake
I'M WAITING FOR A CHANCE
Next Conan's Hint: Thunder