Somewhere along the distant shoreline, a strange red object could be seen tumbling out of the spacial anomaly that had everybody worried. A number of people looked up at the sound of buzzing that ultimately emanated from the vehicle's engines with surprise – after all, they had been told that no human being should go near it for fear of their life, and Kaitou KID's quick disappearance as reported by the police was enough to warn them from trying so. Add that to the alien nature of the anomaly and you had a lot to worry about. So when the thing actually came out, wings sliding back into place, and a blue thing was seen clinging onto the wings, there was obviously a burst of panic as all thoughts turned to what could only be a monster coming into the world.

Several of these people had obviously seen too many American movies or kaijuu romps to be called completely unknowledgeable. It was perfectly comprehendible that there might be life on other worlds, or that the anomaly was actually a portal to another planet. All you needed was a little imagination. Of course, the aliens on the plane would not have been happy about the assumption, especially the one who was piloting the plane that he had built himself from scratch at the age of four.

Tails adjusted his height and looked over the world below him. "It's like I'm flying over a history book," he noted, adjusting his goggles. It was so difficult to wear them with such big eyes, and their species had such an amount of hardiness about them, that most only wore them as a fashion accessory. And since fashion was completely dependent on what area you lived in, if you saw any of them covering their eyes while on a vehicle, they weren't likely to have come from the far Eastern islands that Tails and his friends called home.

"I know what you mean," Sonic muttered, adjusting back into a standing position. "This world looks a little familiar."

Tails continued flying for a while, thinking to himself. "Sonic, Knuckles, you remember the boy who appeared last night, right?" he asked. The two both nodded. "How human was he?"

"I'd say full-blooded," said Sonic. "He could use Chaos Control, but that was about it."

"Humans can't use Chaos Control, Sonic," Knuckles argued back. He waved his left hand around. "They can't understand the concept of Chaos Energy. And that's another reason that they shouldn't mix with us too much."

The blue hedgehog gave him the most incredible look. "Why can't they? They did give us our language, buildings, libraries, technology, vehicles..."

Knuckles rolled his eyes. A good chunk of what Sonic was listing were things the echidnas alone had long before humans arrived, a fact that for some reason hadn't gotten around enough.

"...not to mention medicine, a security force (though granted, it's a little off the wall internally), a structured democracy, a monetary system-"

"Sonic, come off it. The Emerald radar is going off," said Tails. He pressed a few buttons on the small device, dodging some things in the system as he did so, and handed it back to Knuckles, who slipped off his glove to reveal vaguely-normal-looking clawed fingers. "Knuckles, keep track of the position for me, please? We have some very unfriendly-looking aircraft headed this way."

"Unfriendly aircraft?" The hedgehog looked around. Indeed there was a pair of light blue planes with downwards-pointing wings and a few small decals in bright red at the tips of the wing and tail, a patch of black on top of the nose and a sideways 'V' on the edge of the tip of the engines. On the side, underneath the protruding cockpit, was a red circle framed by a white one and what appeared to be a serial number. He whistled. "Wow. Know anything about them?"

"It looks like an old military craft," he said. "We'd better start moving quickly."

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Kaito frowned at the cup of tea and parfait in front of him. It wasn't that he wasn't hungry or anything, considering he'd just waited in a building for several hours knowing something would happen sooner or later. It wasn't that he was worried about what had just happened and that was putting him off. It wasn't even that he didn't trust Ai's kitchen skills, even if he could detect uneasiness about her being. In fact, it was simply the fact that he was having tea with a shrunken Kudou Shin'ichi, his neighbour, and his eerily-intelligent friend.

In other words, it was the amazing surrealism of the moment that stopped him from devouring the parfait.

Conan looked up from his own. "Oh, don't worry," he said. "There's goat-milk ice cream in yours, so if you're intolerant, there's nothing to worry about." When nothing happened, he frowned. "Are you alright, KID?" The others laid down their spoons.

"Yes, I'm fine," he replied. "It's just an unusual situation that's caught me off-guard. Nothing to worry about there." He smirked. "Though, tell me: I know you're very intelligent and have a lot of ability in reading people's faces. So why did you not think of that and instead wonder about my possible intolerance to lactose?"

The boy hesitated, almost unnoticeably... That is, for any normal human. Ai lowered her head.

"What's wrong, Edogawa-kun?" she asked. "You've been acting very oddly lately."

He spluttered, his face flushing pink. "I have not!" he growled, causing everybody's eyes to widen slightly. As far as Kaito knew, Conan didn't normally refer to himself as 'boku'; the kid was much the same as he was at school.

"Edogawa-kun, what's wrong?" Ai asked again, her voice more forceful, and Conan quickly buried himself into the tablecloth.

She looked up at Kaito, sighing. "Would you kindly leave for a second?" she asked, gesturing to the door. In this case, 'would you kindly' meant 'immediately'.

"I'm not stupid, you know," Kaito replied. "Something is wrong with tantei-kun and I would gladly like to find out what it is. After all, he's been so curious about me; I have every right to be curious about him. Besides, I still wish to talk with him."

"So this would be about that intruder just, wouldn't it?" the little girl answered, arms crossed as he stood up and wandered over around the table. "Agasa-hakase, didn't you see them?"

The old man himself was quite visibly still. "Haibara-kun, I don't think you'd want to-"

"Tell me."

Agasa gulped. "Well... they clearly weren't... human."

"What!?" Ai looked up at him. "Repeat that to me with a straight face."

"Haibara-san, the intruder in question – as in, the one who wasn't me – was a three-foot-tall rodent not unlike Mickey Mouse with purplish fur, a huge tail, a Stetson and a firearm," Kaito extended. "He attempted to fire upon tantei-kun, but ran when I shot my card-gun into the wall."

Ai's face was, for a moment, incredulous, with wide eyes and a gaping mouth. Her arms dropped to her side as she looked at Conan, who peered out of his protective bubble and, spotting the face, hid again.

She was blinking repeatedly as she spoke. "You... you're telling me that a giant purple rat infiltrated Ku-Shin'ichi-nii-chan's previous home, fired upon Edogawa-kun, and was finally warded off when you fired upon him..."

"Hence the purple fur tantei-kun handed to you. He wants you to check out what it was exactly using the DNA you can get out of the follicle." Kaito looked over at Conan. "Provided that when he so ceremoniously tore them from the kink in his tail, we pulled out the follicles."

"And neither of you thought to detain the specimen?" she enquired angrily, causing the phantom thief to go up into the air. "Or maybe take more physical evidence?"

The thief tipped his hat to her, reaching in his pocket in an attempt to grab his card gun. Not that he wanted to shoot a child, exactly; it was just a defence mechanism he had adapted long ago, since his old sniper had appeared on the scene. Snake was an incredibly sharp shot and one he didn't want to mess with on a monthly basis like he did with the police and his detective buddies. Right now, though, Ai seemed a lot more threatening than any of them.

And, of course, the expression on his face was ridiculously funny. "Excuse me? He fired! With a Ruger!"

"Luger?"

"No, Ruger. With an English 'r'. It's a brand of revolver. American. Very nice." Kaito frowned. "If it had been a Luger, we wouldn't be alive right now."

"I see," she mumbled. Of course, that was a complete lie; she couldn't have handled many firearms in her life, and hopefully not any. He didn't want to end up on her bad side, after all.

Kaito turned his attention to the little boy next. He definitely seemed off. Back in the neighbouring house he had been acting as if his old self was written down on a script and he was only following. Now that he was here, and once the question had popped up about his being unusually unassuming, he'd completely abandoned the pretence. It could have been that Ai's presence was the kind that discouraged lying of any sort but, even though she was sharp, she wasn't that bad. "Anyway, tantei-kun?"

He lifted his head slightly.

"You said you required a word with me before our original interruption," he said. "About my heist last night."

Conan pushed himself up from the table stubbornly and slid down out of the seat. "Yeah. I need to know what the heist note meant."

Agasa raised an eyebrow. "You were sent a heist note?" he asked. "Did you tell anybody?"

Conan looked to the side bashfully. "From the meaning Shi-... I got, it sounded like something I couldn't show Ran and Occhan," he replied.

"Could you have shown us?" Ai growled. A few hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

"I didn't know what to do with it," he replied. "The forsaken child looks to the horizon, and sees a land beyond the abyss. Upon it, a glow promises dawn's return: Who shall claim that sunrise first? See?"

A few glares went Kaito's way... or they would have, if he had been there. Not even a trace of pink smoke remained. It was like he'd never been there in the first place.

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"Hello? ... Conan-kun's teacher, isn't it? ... He did what!? ... Amazing little-... I'm unable to pick him up; I'm currently working on a few witness statements from a few weeks past. I'm at the station right now. I could probably get somebody over, but I don't really have the time to go looking at the moment. Do you have my daughter Ran-chan's number? ... Yes? Good. I'm sorry about all this too. Alright... yes, goodbye."

Kogorou closed his mobile phone, frowning at the newspapers in front of him. "Can't believe the kid would just run off like that from school..."

The radio interrupted him – his horse had just crossed the finish line. Disgruntled, he wrote down the amount he'd lost on his notepad and totted up the numbers.

"...She's gonna kill me."

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"Hello, who is this? ... Oh? Hello, Kobayashi-sensei. What is it? ... What? ... Ai-chan as well? ... I'm sorry; I haven't seen either of them. I just dropped Conan-kun off this morning. You're saying they're not in school? ... You don't know? Oh, God... I'm sorry, I'm in school at the moment, but I'll see what I can do. Is that alright? Right, goodbye, Kobayashi-sensei." And with that, Ran pressed the red symbol, frowning at the bright screen of her own mobile.

"What is it, Ran-chan?" asked Suzuki Sonoko, crossing her arms.

"You didn't hear me just?" Ran mumbled, before straightening up. "Oh, um, Conan-kun disappeared during lunchtime and the teachers have only just found out now when class restarted."

"What!?" Sonoko exclaimed. "He just ran away!? Are those teachers even looking after those kids properly!?"

"I'm going to call Agasa-hakase. If need be, then tell sensei that I'll be out of school to go look for him." She fled the classroom almost as soon as they had walked in, startling the other teenage girl.

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Meanwhile, the Tornado was being wildly tossed about in an attempt to outmanoeuvre the Kawasaki T-4 jet planes. Tails pushed the controls forward, sending them downwards into a dive; the others followed slowly but carefully.

He cursed under his breath. "These guys are being extra careful!" he growled. "I'm going to have to slingshot them!"

"Now you're talking!" Sonic laughed, and secured his grip on the edge of the wing carefully. Tails pulled the plane back up level with the military planes and accelerated, shooting them forwards. Knuckles buried his head in-between his knees, praying for his life. Following behind, the two jets complied and increased their own speed just past the four-hundred miles-per-hour that their prey was barely struggling to up keep... only for the biplane to suddenly shoot directly upwards, confusing them. Tails flipped them over backwards and shot straight down before the two could follow them, pulling up just slightly above the largest buildings.

With a sigh, Knuckles unburied his head. "Thank God that's over."

"Not quite," Tails muttered. "If they're anything like GUN they'll just call in reinforcements. Let's get this over with."

Sonic pushed himself up, testing his foothold in the high speed. Miraculously the wind didn't knock him off.

He glanced down at the land below him. The settlements were incredible – the sheer size was unlike anything he'd ever seen of human colonies before. That meant a lot of them around, and a severe lack of other intelligent species to challenge them. Perhaps they were the only sentient race on this world; the boy had definitely been confused when seeing him and Knuckles. Sonic wondered if that had any hidden meanings in it... But still, Tails had been right. This place looked a lot like the pictured in the history books that the fox had collected in his spare time. If that had any hidden meaning behind it as well, he'd like to know.

What bugged him, though, was that this place seemed so... saturated. Sonic had lived in greenery for most of his life, and had only begun venturing outside of his island's protective bubble when Eggman had tried world domination for the first time. And even then, the colours had been incredibly bright, Eggman being a terrible interior designer despite his talent with robotics. It was only at night, and that one time of severe crisis a few months ago, that he'd been able to walk around without his eyes hurting at least a little.

But here, the grey was just... grey. Boring. Sleepy. He wondered how people lived here with such dullness in their lives.

The handheld in Knuckles' hand suddenly flashed. "Guys," he said slowly, "the Chaos Emerald's moved."

"What!?" The hedgehog edged along the wing carefully and looked down as Knuckles held the little monitor up. Indeed, the light that had previously been indicating directly up ahead had moved eastwards by several kilometres.

Tails reached back. "Oh, my God! I'm on it!" he cried, swerving wildly.

"Wait, Tails, is that at all safe!?" Knuckles yelled.

A tower of smoke answered him. All Sonic could do was sigh and play some dramatic music in his head.

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"I think I've done enough 'hinting at' today," Kaito mumbled, stretching his limbs and diving downstairs. He was stripped of his Kaitou KID uniform and currently wearing his weirdest shirt and a pair of mutilated jeans. "Best check there's not another one waiting in my house."

Of course, he didn't expect the huge crash outside. He blinked, peering out of his window.

The mostly-intact wreckage of a red biplane met his gaze. Part of the front rotor was buried into the grass of the back garden. A wing had snapped in two and a few pieces had flown into the wall of the house (from as best as he could see). Hanging out of the two seats were a pair of furry bodies, one a disturbingly familiar red and the other a golden-yellow colour... with two bushy tails. Panicking, he hurried outside to check out the damage.

As he stepped outside of the house, another lump caught his eye. It was spiky, large and inexplicably blue. Something flashed through his memory as he knelt down to take a closer look at it.

As soon as he reached out, said lump suddenly unfurled. He leapt back, staring, as it looked up and locked thin green eyes with his own blue, and proceeded to wave a white gloved-hand at him, a smirk curling in the corner of its peach -coloured muzzle.

"It's the kid!" it exclaimed in English, in a masculine voice. "How are you, there?"

All Kaito found himself to be able to do at the moment was to stare blankly at the creature. 'He' – if it was a 'he'; after all, he'd been fooled before – was three foot tall, with extraordinarily bright blue fur, long flesh spines hanging down from the back of his head and sticking out from his shoulder blades, and pointed feline ears. He had a beanlike nose standing up on the end of a flat muzzle, and large eyes that seemed to be on the same eyeball, which somehow did not look particularly jarring. He had a large head and a thin body like the purple rat from earlier and the pair currently unconscious in the wreckage behind him, and upon his feet was a pair of shiny red buckled shoes. He was currently standing there with a hand held out, as if expecting him to shake.

So he did. And a moment of panic was resumed when he took the creature's hand and he suddenly realised with the touch of the nylon on his hand that this was actually happening and the surreal events of the day weren't a dream.

It had certainly felt like that: tea-time with little, out-of-character Conan; a civil conversation with Hakuba; a red gem that transported him wherever he wanted to go with only a minimal margin of error; a little girl who acted like an adult; and a giant purple rat with a Ruger who snuck into the Kudou household and fled from a shot of Kaito's card gun. And not all in that order, not that order changed a thing. And now a plane had crashed in his back garden.

"This is going to be a very long day," he muttered in disbelief.

A/N: Indeed it shall be. There are several events to get out of the way that all happen on the same day. I feel sorry for Kaito - with all these things happening one after the other, who's to say he'll be the same boy at the end?