Chapter 8: Reboot
The next morning started, as always, with the jarring sound of Ran's alarm clock, only stopping after she dragged herself out of bed, over to her drawer and slammed her fist on the largest button of the hellish machine. Normally it wasn't that hard for her to get up, even in the early morning, however everything that happened yesterday, kept her up till the 3 or 4 am, so she missed out on a lot of sleep. Yet, she had to get up, make breakfast, prepare hers and Conan's lunchboxes and apologize to the little boy. After her talk with Shinichi, she realized exactly how scary and confusing everything must have been for her little brother and swore herself that she would never lose control over herself like this again.
She was in the midst of laying out the dishes, when she heard the door open with a screeching noise. After she turned to look at the door, her eyes saw Conan standing in the doorway, but unlike she had expected, he didn't seem scared. Then again, it wasn't like Conan to be scared by anything and the worried expression he had on his face, even though Ran didn't like to see it, when she was the one to blame for it, it made her feel a little bit better.
"Ran-neechan? Are you better now? Did Shinichi-niichan help you?" the bespectacled boy asked a bit hesitantly. Ran would have loved to pick him up and squeeze him gently, because he was just so irresistibly cute. How could ever resist such an adorable view? But because she knew that he didn't appreciate close contact very much and didn't want to freak him out again, she held the overwhelming urge in check, only smiling brightly at him and wishing him a good morning.
"Don't worry, I'm all better now." She assured him afterwards and finished preparing breakfast, a task which, much to her delight, Conan helped her to fulfil. When they've ate for the morning, Conan and Ran went to school and for some ominous reason it seemed to her, that he was a lot more talkative than usual.
School on the other hand, was like always, same teachers, same sort of exercises and same sort of talk with Sonoko. Ran told her of her nightly chatter with Shinichi, even though she left out the object of their conversation, and Sonoko started to tease Ran like usual. To make it short, it was a perfectly normal day.
Not so normal however, was the afternoon for Ran. It was not that usual for a teen to visit a children theatre and even thought she originally was only there to watch over the Detective Boys, she quickly found herself enjoying the play. Granted, she liked a lot of things, other people would call childish, but that didn't matter to her, as long as she was entertained by it. Today however, her interest was completely captured by Conan or rather by his reactions. Unlike the other children he seemed not the least bit happy, in fact, even high schoolers would have a hard time to show that level of boredom over this performance. Of course, Conan was more mature, than all other kids, expect for Ai maybe, but even she seemed to find some sort of enjoyment in the play.
"He really does resemble Shinichi a lot.", Ran thought to herself, "He too had a very peculiar taste for stories and, if you would ask him, he would tell you that this was because he most of the time knew exactly how the story would end."
In that moment, Ran a small idea plopped in her brain. Hastily she pulled her phone out and open a new note on it. She carefully typed in the words, "Bored by normal stories" and saved the document under the name "C-S similarities". Obviously, this meant "Conan-Shinichi similarities" and Ran planned to write down everything that the two of them had in common, in fact she already had a dozen plans on how to draw certain behaviours out.
Her scheme started right after the end of the play, when she asked the group what they thought of it and why?
"I really liked it", Ayumi answered as first, "The princess was really pretty and the knight was a real prince charming."
"I thought the dragon was really cool and the way the knight defeated him" Genta was quick to follow. "Your right, especially the way he evaded the dragon's breath was genius" Mitsuhiko agreed with his corpulent friend. "Yeah it was all like SWOOSH and BANG" Genta started to re-enact the scene and dashed forward, with Ayumi and Mitsuhiko hot on his heels.
"DON'T RUN TO FAR AWAY!" Ran shouted after them, but they had already reached the park, so she doubted that anything would happen, "And what about you two?" she then asked Conan and Ai.
"The story was a classic and even thought they changed the script in order to appeal to children, I must admit that it wasn't all that bad." Ai responded with the usual calm and analysing tone.
"It was utterly boring!" came the grumpy comment from Conan, "The plot was really obvious, the hero completely generic and you could tell how it would end the moment the curtain rose."
Ran could barely contain the soft chuckle and instead just smiled warmly at them, "Exactly like his big idol." She then quickly added the reason of Conan's boredom to her earlier note and tugged the phone away. If things would continue to go that smoothly she would have her answers soon.
As always all right go to Gosho Aoyama, the original creator of the Detective Conan Universe.
Questions and review are highly requested and if you want to know how the story continues leave a follow.
I hope you liked it so far and are thrilled for more.
Farewell
