Nakamori hadn't been pleased when he discovered that Hakuba had arrived at the docks just before the police cars did. The boy held a lot of respect for Kaitou KID despite everything the phantom thief had done to him over the past two-and-a-half years, so he would – no, should – have taken heed and not appeared. KID probably had a plan ready.
What if he didn't? Then he hadn't factored for Hakuba and the presence of said detective would screw with his plans. What if Hakuba got in the way? Then those black shadows would get a chance to fire which KID's original plan had ensured wouldn't appear. Would it result in the death of either one of them?
Or would it be both who fell?
The grown man shivered despite his best attempts not to. Nakamori made up a lot of the Task Force's energy, and that energy was exerted whenever Kaitou KID left for them difficult clues. Right now, he was leading them into the abyss, possibly literally if the anomaly was too low. Who had a single idea even close to just how much that drained away at you... Nakamori dedicated much of his time to the criminal; that meant spending a lot of time at work. He knew every member of his task force. To lose anybody there would be devastating. To lose Hakuba, who hadn't even had a taste of romance in his eighteen years, would be worse.
Hakuba closed the door of his car. "Nakamori-san, did you check any of your officers?" he asked, oblivious to the Inspector's current train of thought. "There's the slight possibility that they could be KID in disguise."
Nakamori snapped out of it and gestured to his own driver, whose face was covered in red sore spots. His first victim. "We also have the local police of every town within the Suruga Bay checking everyone near their individual harbours. But it's a big area to search, and a lot of people to go through."
"Agreed," Hakuba replied, walking off.
"Where are you going?" Nakamori called after him.
"To the beachfront," the teenager replied, waving his binoculars above his head. "To see if I can find this anomaly by sight. We'll need to be at the closest point to the anomaly to be able to catch KID before he even dares going in."
The closest point to the danger zone... this would turn out to be a long night.
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Meanwhile, Hakuba himself was on edge. The long time travelling in the car hadn't done much to dull his tension. Kaitou KID needed him out of the way tonight. And no way in heaven, hell or purgatory was he going to comply. He was his own man. He chose where to go on his own, and if it meant going against the wants of a phantom thief, then so be it.
Sighing, he raised his binoculars. There appeared to be nothing odd- ah! There it was; a strange flicker against a white cloud. It looked just like a small insect...
Suddenly, his vision went purple. Hakuba panicked, pulling down the binoculars as fast as possible.
The anomaly had looked like nothing more than a speck on one of the lenses. But as soon as he had looked directly at it, suddenly the entire world was washed into various shades of colour, the area around the actual anomaly cycling through the entire rainbow. In total shock, he put the binoculars into his bag and concentrated on it. Again, everything faded in bright colour. The grasses around him became a bright speckled green, the ocean shone deep blue, the paths were now a perfect yellow... He turned around and everything became horrible and dull.
He never noticed how grey his planet actually was.
Thoroughly confused, he walked back over to Nakamori. "It's only a few miles over to the east," he told him. "You'll know it when you see it."
"Are you sure?" Nakamori asked back. Hakuba grinned.
"As sure as this titanium sky."
Nakamori looked at him oddly. That's funny, he wondered, the sky's particularly blue today.
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A few hours later, near the Matsuzaki Spa, a strange old man dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans and carrying a cane around stepped off a bus. He lifted a mobile phone to his ear, walking off in what appeared to be no particular direction but was actually west towards the buildings.
"Pardon," he said in a voice much too young for his body, albeit croaking and rough, "I wasn't able to come to school today. I had a very bad cold this morning and was unable to talk until just now. Yes? I don't know if I'll be totally alright tomorrow either. I think I caught the flu or something. Yes, I'll be waiting to find out. If it's alright, I'll come in. Alright. Bye."
Kaito ended the call with a sigh. "The things I have to do to keep my mother happy," he whined, slipping it back into his pocket. He walked along the path for a while, keeping his eyes open for a secluded spot, and then ducked behind the nearest man-sized bush available.
Some startled American tourists ogled as a teenage boy of around five-foot-eight emerged from the bush, spitting out leaves and muttering about that happening a lot lately.
Stuffing his hands in his pockets, he headed up towards the spa.
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Time passed quickly when one paid it the least attention. For the hours until the heist, Hakuba had whipped out an English copy of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes and settled himself on a chair on the deck of the police boat, flicking through the pages as if they only had three words on each (he hadn't had the chance to get onto a tug-boat like he'd described earlier; Nakamori had insisted that he keep an eye on him). The officers were talking over it, eating and doing what they generally did when Kaitou KID was yet to appear. Nakamori had contented himself with the checking of every single member of the Task Force; soon it was a sea of red faces from where the Inspector had pulled at their skin. Hakuba was not impressed when the man had attacked him.
Those who saw him with a large lump on the top of his head later were unprotected from a case of the giggles. That is, until he threatened them each with a suspension. Then, of course, they shut up.
Hakuba looked up from his book. The anomaly was now right above them, and that meant that looking up was often very painful for the eyes. He shielded his own as he inspected the sky. A little while ago it had glowed bright orange with the setting sun as a circle of yellow and white. Now it was a burning lilac. The stars were bright white.
He smiled, and looked down at the coastline to the east, as the colours faded away in various shades of grey and indigo. The place had looked very sweet during the daytime, especially the Spa some distance away. He knew he'd have to visit it someday in the future. Even obsessive-compulsive detectives like him needed a rest every now and then. He lifted up his binoculars for the second time and spied it through them.
He stared, mouth falling open. Was that-!?
"K-KID!?" he yelled, causing alarm amongst the others nearest to him. The kite-like shadow had just appeared against the sky and was now cruising towards the anomaly above their heads.
Nakamori burst out of the inner room. "It's not even midnight yet!" he exclaimed.
"I know that!" Hakuba replied. "Somebody get on the roof and try to flag him down before he blinds himself!"
Nakamori gave Hakuba a pointed stare as the usually cool-headed detective suffered a very hot-headed moment and broke into a run along the deck. He stretched his arm out in surprise, running after the boy and whatever mad danger he was headed directly towards.
"Hakuba, you can't be serious! Get back here!" he yelled. "KID doesn't want you here!"
Hakuba stopped and turned to face the Inspector in the midst of the current rush of officers trying to find a place in which they'd collectively have a good chance of pulling the thief down. His brown eyes blazed with fire brighter than the sun through the anomaly's rays. "Listen, if either of us is to catch Kaitou KID, then KID has to be alive as well for us to catch him!" he argued. "Would you rather have a dead thief on your hands or one alive to tell you why he steals?" He wheeled around and grabbed his miniature camera from his pocket.
Nakamori swore under his breath. "Did you even read his warning?" Yes, Hakuba had; that was how Nakamori knew it was a warning in the first place. But it seemed the ainoko wasn't listening to reason any more.
The blond hoisted himself up onto the roof, peeling the adhesive from the end of it. "Of course, Nakamori-san," he said, his voice more subdued this time. "That's why I'm giving him this. So we can keep track of him and make sure he doesn't kill himself." Sighing exasperatedly, he started waving his arms around like a lunatic. "KID! GET DOWN HERE THIS SECOND!"
And, a few feet away from him, a pair of white loafers touched down in front of him. The mysterious KID tipped his hat, resplendent in his white suit and furling cape.
"Tantei-san, what are you doing here?" he asked, the smirk hiding everything else behind it better than the monocle with the dangling blue pendant. "I thought I told the fox to burrow back to safety. Do you want Boggis, Bunce and Bean to take your tail?"
"Do I look like a person who'd hide when you're running into danger?" Hakuba replied, ignoring the Dahl reference. "KID, at the least, take this." He threw the camera to the thief, who caught it one-handed and looked it over.
The monocle glinted in madness. "So you're just a curious man at heart too, aren't you? Did you get that commander on the line? I'd imagine so." He closed his eyes. "The farmers will be taking aim when I fly out. Make sure you stay in your hole, tantei-san, when that happens, and let these trees I see take over then."
Hakuba glanced from the rip to the KID and back again. "How will you be getting up there?" he asked. "You're completely unsuspended and there's no way I can see you managing it."
Kaitou KID bowed. "I'm a magician first," he said, snapping his fingers. As if by magic, his feet lifted from the ground and he rose from the top of the boat. "And a sneak-thief second." He revealed the grapnel gun from behind his back. He must have shot it while flying when he saw Hakuba waving his arms. It seemed that anomalies had a secured edge of some kind. "Of course, sometimes that side likes to come out first," he replied, to which from his pocket he revealed the white handkerchief for the second heist in a row.
"KID..." Hakuba rubbed his forehead. "You'll never get tired of that, will you?"
The thief winked. "Of course not. It keeps you on your toes."
The wire on this side of the anomaly was coming to an end, so KID rolled over and stared directly into the rip.
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As soon as he slipped through and stood up on the two-foot-wide ledge halfway between Shizuoka and the other world that his grappling hook had stuck itself on, Kaito checked the camera that Hakuba had tossed him. To tell the truth, he had no idea why the detective had given him this, although he had a niggling suspicion that it was to do with the police. Yes, maybe Hakuba had given him it to see into all his tricks.
Smirking, and remembering that the cameras still recorded even on the other side, he held it up do his face. "Okay, recording. Houston, do you copy?" he muttered, copying a voice that had played through many an American home television speaker nearly forty years ago. The light reflecting from the item with bright white and the little flashing red LED for recording wasn't doing his exposed left eye much justice either - the lens in his monocle was a react-to-light design and so helped him for the most part - but he didn't care right now.
He paused and then, resigning himself to the fact that the camera would not transmit messages back to him, he stuffed the item in his pocket and adjusted his hang-glider, which snapped into place again, before diving from the ledge and letting the inter-dimensional updraft carry him through the other end of the tunnel.
That was odd... Did inter-dimensional tunnels always end in green?
He glanced back over his shoulder to see that the hole in time and space that he had just traversed through took form in this world of a familiar-looking green pipe with a thick end. Mental images of plumbers spitting fireballs at giant dragon turtles that in no way resembled his beloved Gomera flew through his head, but he shook them off and continued flying through the sky. Although, he didn't want to have ended up in the wrong world by accident.
He was currently several miles above the shimmering surface of a deep and beautiful blue ocean that practically shone with beauty (although the exaggerated light effect wasn't happening now). He reckoned from the size of the waves that he had come out higher from the water than he had been flying through it originally. So passages to alternate dimensions never had a particular height in mind when forming, did they? Laughing at his new world he chanced a dive towards the water and skimmed the surface, dragging his foot along. Then, when pulling up – he actually pulled up back into the sky. He nearly dropped his monocle when he realised that he hadn't fallen into the water as he thought he would.
Maybe this other world had a different set of physics? It would explain the giant pipe, at least.
Along the western horizon he saw a distant brown coast around twenty miles away. Along the side of it, some miles out and several miles up was a gigantic chunk of said coast that had somehow ripped away from the line and now floated in the sky at aeroplane height. Kaito eyed it in wonder. The floating land sported a tall, thrusting mountain surrounded by green jungle, regular forest ground and old-looking purple stone buildings. Waterfalls cascaded down the side from invisible sources, trickling down into the sea.
The odd geography was interesting, that was true, but he was much more interested in the tiny, almost undetectable green glow that he saw coming from an area near the top of the island. He changed direction and swooped towards it, ignoring the wind.
He chuckled in the back of his head. When they'd called it an Angel Island, he hadn't thought it was true. He looked underneath and watched for several minutes the undulating waves until land appeared under his feet. Then he turned his attention to the land. A forest approached him quite soon after reaching his destination, so he turned upwards again and directed himself towards the glow, not noticing how the grass inside the forest had turned into a thin green track with giant rocky loops growing inside of it. He also barely noticed the robotic wasp that captured him on camera and began to follow him.
Forest gave way to brown, water-stained rocks that plunged upward. The stonework seemed even, and almost manmade, but he decided not to ask about the harlequin pattern formed by the stains. Maybe it was just how it worked over here.
Finally, he came to the top of the ledge from which the glow had greeted him, and touched down onto the soft and luscious grass, deconstructing the hang-glider. Before him stood the remains of a giant white temple of a very Greek design (or what seemed). A tall stone stairway led up through a series of circular platforms, finishing at the top. These platforms were surrounded by old broken pillars, although the pillars at the very top were nearly undamaged and holding up little coloured lights... about the side of a large man's fist. It was from the top that the mysterious glow presented itself. He sighed, and decided to walk.
He tested the steps, just to be sure. The stone was still strong despite the obvious weathering. Now more confident, he hiked up the stairs, wondering to himself how those animals had built a place like this long ago. Then again, if they spoke English then it was very possible that they could imitate architectural styles that they'd never seen before.
He may have looked rather calm and adjusted outside, but several hundred questions were shooting off in Kaito's head, all of them without answers. How did the island float on its own accord, for one thing? How did it have so many naturally occurring isolated biomes, for another? Now Kaito did listen in some lessons, and those lessons did include his biology and physics classes, and the island from one look had been betraying all laws of the two. Not to mention that the idea of an alternate world that had also produced grass identical to the grass on Earth was a bit ridiculous at well. In fact, so ridiculous that a certain detective might want to take a look himself and decide if this wasn't just some huge mass hallucination.
He pulled out the camera from his pocket again, and aimed it at his surroundings. "Sorry about the pocket, but tantei-san, if you're getting any of this, you can drop your jaw. This is what another universe looks like." He continued up, and finally after a few minutes reached the top.
The first thing that caught his eye was the ring of seven pillars that he had seen from lower down. Upon each of them was a fist-sized stone that was glowing from the inside. Each one was a different colour of the rainbow. Ignoring the man-sized emerald in the centre from which the bright green light issued, he concentrated on a single gem on the temple. One that glowed bright red in the night.
The bushes at the edge of the 'clearing' shuddered, and he looked behind him. A strange creature, a few inches three foot tall, emerged from the foliage. It was red-furred with a large head that had to be too heavy for its body; a series of strange tumour-like growths, all of similar length and thickness, hung down from its crown as what looked like rather abstract dreadlocks. Its eyes took up most of its face (and skull), and were very close together with a brownish-tan muzzle underneath. The creature had a square torso and thick rope-like limbs, and it wore white gloves like boxing gloves on its hands, with two large spikes jutting out of the knuckles. It wore red-and-yellow striped trainers with a metal panel on the top of each shoe and green socks... cuffs. Kaito couldn't decide.
"Who are you?" the creature said in English. Kaito pointed at himself, trying to confirm the association with the word 'you' for a second. Hmm, male voice, deep baritone, a little rough-throated. Right, got that one memorised, and no Axel jokes.
"I sent a message to the police of my world," he replied after a moment's pause. "I come for a 'Kaosu' Emerald. They tried to stop me on their side and failed, so let me see this world's defences."
If it wasn't already obvious, Kuroba Kaito was shockingly fluent in English for a Japanese high school student. He'd been learning the language since he was about six years old, just before his father was killed. His mother taught him, having learned the language herself from a friend of hers who often travelled overseas for work (that lasted anywhere between a fortnight to three months; he'd heard her mention that that person needed to check on their child a little more in a telephone conversation). That was how he managed to work some of the jokes into his more cryptic heist notes for Nakamori. But the fact that Nakamori only spoke 'professional' English, the type that every policeman knew, was a language barrier between the two... until Hakuba ended up assisting the police, that is. Then KID used English more.
Now, you may analyse that or just wave your hand side to side and ignore it.
The creature banged its knuckles together. "It's not like I can trust you, then, is it?" it said, before charging roughly at him. Kaito dived to the side, causing it to stumble forward and plough into the ground in such a fashion that the dust kicked up nearly choked him from behind.
"You decide who you're going to trust by asking if they come for the Kaosu Emeralds?" he laughed nervously, his poker face hiding his total anxiety and the diminishing dust cloud revealing that red glowing gemstone in his hand. Those spikes looked sharp... "I admit that's a good measure, considering what I heard..." He looked over his shoulder to see whatever damage had occurred to ground behind him.
And that was when he noticed the flying robotic wasp. And behind that wasp he noticed the massive fleet of other wasps. The creature was staring them down, clearly annoyed by the presence of the mechanical insects.
A rush of grey towards him and a pair of round red lights close to his face.
And that was when Kaito blacked out.
A/N: KID's very good at English jokes. Good English explains how a) he wrote the heist note and warning, b) how he understood the video and c) how he managed to surf that group's webpage.