Disclaimer: see first chapter.

You were right, YumeTakato, the last chapter was more of an interlude. This chapter has more stuff actually happening, and may be the last update before my computer access goes away.

As usual, editing for errors and clarity has been done on previous chapters.

Shinichi woke up feeling like he'd just gotten over a bout of malaria.

"This is getting old," he muttered to himself, not bothering to open his eyes. He rolled onto his side, reaching toward where the pile of folded clothes was certain to be–

–and fell two feet onto a hard floor. Completely unprepared and still feeling slightly bruised as he had been after awakening, the impact knocked the wind out of him and had him seeing stars of pain for several seconds.

Ow. Ow. Ow. That was not good. What the hell just happened?

When his vision cleared, he found to his surprise that he was not in the storage closet at Agasa's and that he had, in fact, been lying on a bed, which he had just fallen off of. A beat, and he suddenly realized it was a very familiar bed, and, for that matter, a very familiar room.

He lurched to a sitting position, instantly regretting it, but when his head cleared again his initial impression was confirmed. He was in his own room, in his own house. And when he turned his head, more gingerly this time, there was a pile of his own clothes on the nightstand with a letter on top.

A wry smile crept its way onto his face as he lifted his wrist, confirming the continued presence of the strange watch, and a few glances also confirmed that he was, yet again, in a t-shirt and boxers, and that the door was locked from the inside.

At least something in this mess is staying predictable.

The letter was typed this time, and Shinichi frowned in disappointment at the loss of the opportunity to study that strangely familiar handwriting. He searched halfheartedly, but was not especially surprised to find no trace of the previous letter.

This one didn't bother to have his name on it.

"As you have no doubt noticed, you are now in your own bedroom. Tell no one about waking up at Agasa's or the circumstances you find upon awakening. If anyone asks, tell them you always wake up at your own house with no idea how or why."

Shinichi stopped reading long enough to snort. "Not that that'll be hard."

The letter continued.

"This is not a joke, and neither are your parents behind it. They know of the general situation, but not of these arrangements."

Shinichi blinked.

Huh, how about that. I was just wondering about whether they set this up before I passed out last time.

That thought led to another, and he frowned.

I wonder how long it's been since then? It feels like only a minute to me, but I wouldn't know if I was unconscious. If nothing else, it must have taken a while to get me here and set everything up. How much time have I lost?

Frowning, Shinichi put aside the matter for later.

"The first thing you need to do is get caught up on what's been going on in the world. You've been out for longer than you think, and you need to find out what's changed. Try to stay inconspicuous, and don't call attention to yourself. You'll notice the clothes are not what you usually wear. Acting introverted will also help to keeping you from being recognized. Your mother's an actress, you can manage that, I'm sure.
Feel free to leave the house as long as you follow those directions, but be back when your watch reads 4:30."

Again, there was no signature. Glancing at his watch, Shinichi noted he had about an hour.

A brief prowl around his house revealed that everything was neat, but small things were changed or out of place, like it had been cleaned by someone wasn't intimately familiar with it. The air had an unused smell, and there was dust accumulated where daily activities would not have allowed it to settle. Shinichi's brows furrowed slightly.

Hmm.

A brief glance at his father's old study quickly established the source of the note. One of the old typewriters had been set up on the desk, a stack of generic paper fished out of a drawer resting beside it. It had been used recently, and it was the work of a moment to establish that the typeface was identical to that of the note. Indulging an impulse, Shinichi did an impromptu dusting for fingerprints with some flour from the kitchen (from which, he noted in passing during his search, all perishables were unaccountably absent). He was not especially surprised to find nothing. His father's prints were too long ago to pick up, and whoever had set up his accommodations in such a fashion would hardly be so careless as to not use gloves.

After cleaning up the flour, Shinichi eventually found himself by the front door and sighed.

Well, exercise is supposed to be good for you, after all.

I think it's a nice day for a stroll.

Walking down the street, a baseball cap pulled over his head and sunglasses obscuring his face, Shinichi frowned as he studied his surroundings. He had set out with the intention of finding a newsstand, computer, library, or some combination thereof, but after only a few blocks had rapidly decided to spend his available time reacquainting himself with the neighborhood. The traffic patterns were subtly different, with less people in some areas and others, like the street he now walked down, more crowded. Some houses nearby were not the same color he remembered; cars in driveways were different. He had started to walk toward a commercial district he favored, only to find his way now blocked by a new branch of an elevated railway. There were buildings he did not remember seeing there before. Countless little details, but all together, his world had changed, and he frowned, not liking the sensation. A niggling worry was growing in his mind: it would have taken time for all the construction projects to have gone through. They didn't look all that new, and from the few in progress he encountered there was no sign that the rate of development had suddenly increased.

Just how much time did I lose…? What is going on here?

He was startled out of his reverie by a voice calling his name.

"Oi! Kudo!" An unfamiliar teenager about his age with dark skin and a Kansai accent hailed him, looking surprised. "You managed to get back to normal?"

Shinichi stared at him. "What?" Suddenly realizing this was a chance to get some answers, he closed the distance between them himself. The other boy backed up slightly, looking confused.

"What's the matter, Kudo? It's me, Heiji."

Shinichi's eyes widened. "You know me?" Then Heiji's greeting registered, and the detective grabbed the Osakan's arm, removing his sunglasses to see more clearly. "You know what's been happening to me for the last few – however long it's been?"

The other teenager stared at him, eyes wide beneath forward-spiked hair. "W-what – I, uh," he stammered, taking a step back and pulling his arm out of Shinichi's grasp, still staring at him. "I-I'll call you later. I have to go." Heiji turned and took off running like a shot, catching Shinichi by surprise, though he supposed it shouldn't have. Shinichi took off running himself, doggedly tracking the other boy through the crowds. Checking his strange watch, he found he didn't have much more time left before the deadline the note indicated. For a moment, he wavered, but the chance to find out what had being going on – not to mention the instinct to pursue a fleeing subject of questioning – won out. Shouldering his way through the other people, Shinichi vaguely registered that they were heading away from the crowds and toward the less populated, rougher districts. To his thinking, that was all the better; it would be easier to keep track of his target that way.

And it was easier in the emptier streets and alleys, allowing him to catch up slightly, right up until the point when pain lanced through him and blurred his vision.

"Heiji? Hey, Heiji, open up!" a high, disgruntled voice called, punctuating the staccato of light knocking on the door of the hotel room. The Great Detective of the West got up off the sofa and peered suspiciously through the peephole, to be met with a concentrated glare of irritation from about three feet above floor level on the other side of the door. The Osaka native opened the door with a sigh of relief and beckoned his visitor in.

"Oh, man, it's good to see you. I was going to call you, actually – the strangest thing happened to me earlier today. I saw someone who looked exactly like you, only he acted like he didn't know me or something. I was worried that there might be an imposter sent to flush out–" the teen suddenly froze, eyeing the apparent child in front of him with sudden distrust.

Noticing, the boy pushed his thick black glasses up on his nose and sighed in exasperation. "Yes, Heiji, unless They've managed to either kidnap a lookalike, co-opt him, and give him really good acting lessons, it's really me. Either that, or they've figured out how to shrink themselves, in which case the game is up anyway and you're really screwed."

Heiji relaxed at the thick sarcasm and sat down with a sigh, motioning his guest to do the same. The smaller detective did so, still glowering.

"Now, for the love of…first of all, why didn't you tell me you were going to be in the area?"

Heiji shrugged helplessly. "It wasn't my idea. Kazuha wanted to come, and I could hardly say no. I was actually going over to let you know when…you know." He gestured vaguely, then frowned. "Or do you know? What exactly is going on here? Was that you?" The currently taller detective leaned forward, frowning.

Conan had settled into a sustained medium-grade radiation of disapproval at how the universe was ordering his life. "Heiji. I have had a hellish afternoon, I feel like crap, and it's all your fault. If you'd stop talking, maybe I could explain," he snapped.

Heiji subsided, intimidated partially by Conan's attitude but more by the fact that he was actually pulling it off in a grade-schooler's body. Conan transferred his gaze to the middle distance and, frowning, laid out the situation with Ai's departure and the peculiar nature of the new cure in a few terse sentences. Heiji made a noise of understanding.

"Oh, so that's why you didn't recognize me. But you still remember that now, right?"

Conan's glower returned full force. "Yes. Which is how I know you spent the afternoon playing tag with Shinichi. Now he knows your face and is going to be mistrustful of you from now on or, worse, going to try to get the details of what he's been doing out of you. You of all people should know that nothing looks more suspicious than running!"

"It was more like hide and seek," Heiji replied with dignity, "and it wasn't exactly a picnic for me, either, you know. You're fast, and I was having a hell of a time trying to lose you. Besides, how was I supposed to react? If it were an Org imposter and I didn't run, that would have been more of a problem. And you do realize you're talking about yourself in the third person?"

"Stop trying to change the subject. This wouldn't have happened if you'd told me you were coming."

"Oh, come on, that's not a big problem. We can work out what story to tell now, and next time I can explain that I was worried that your enemies had sent an imposter to find out your secrets, and that I don't really know anything because I've only worked with you on a few cases. It's even true. You don't need to get that worked up about it."

Heiji instantly shut up because Conan was giving him a full-out Glare of Death.

"The problem is that you got Shinichi running around the back streets of Tokyo right around the end of a dose of the temporary cure. So when the deadline came around, instead of being at home I ended up changing back behind a dumpster. In an alley. A filthy alley."

Heiji's survival instincts told him this would be a very bad time to laugh.

"It might have been a good thing you led me to a not-so-good area of town, since nobody was inclined to investigate the noises of pain or the swearing afterwards."

Heiji choked, turned it into a cough under Conan's glower. The shrunken detective folded his arms.

"Do you have any idea how hard it is to get home from some godforsaken dead end halfway across town when you're alone, you look like you haven't hit puberty yet, the only clothes available are around twenty sizes too big, your glasses are missing, and you have no means of communication, transportation, or money? Not to mention having to get past Ran and the Detective Boys without them noticing?"

"So…how'd you manage it?" Heiji risked asking, only to hastily recoil from the resulting reaction. No one under four feet tall should have been able to pull off a look that could probably vaporize lead.

"I. Don't. Want. To. Talk. About. It," the other boy gritted out through clenched teeth.

Heiji's detective and survival instincts held a hurried consultation and presented a unanimous conclusion that he'd better find some way to make it up to Kudo, and fast, or his Eastern counterpart might decide to make him find out firsthand. He shuddered mentally at the thought.

And we don't know what that temporary cure does to people who haven't been dosed with the toxin, do we?

He was suddenly very sure that he didn't want to be the one to find out.