He'd never expected this to happen, Hakuba mused to himself as he ate the lovely cake that Ran had made. This was all very... interesting? Was that even the word to use for it? He supposed so; after all, it wasn't everyday you had tea and cake with the daughter of another famous detective. Not to mention finding out Kaitou KID's 'tantei-kun' was actually the little boy who lived with them.
And that worried him. 'Tantei-kun' was not anybody with a particularly large connection to Kaitou KID. 'Tantei-kun' was not any official or unofficial police detective. 'Tantei-kun' was not even anybody over ten years of age. 'Tantei-kun' was an eight-year-old boy, very much on the short side, with much too large a head for anybody of that age to even be able to hold up, and who was currently in the middle of a mental and emotional breakdown from whatever had happened a week earlier.
Just how had these two bumped into each other, again?
"Conan-kun?" he asked, frowning at him. "Can I just ask you one thing?"
The little boy looked up at him. He had his own mouth clamped around a humorously massive cake, looking for all the world like a wide-eyed puppy caught eating a slipper. Okay, it was a strawberry-frosted slipper that looked tastier than a regular slipper, but thinking that really ruined the simile.
"I have this incredible urge to know," Hakuba said as he stirred the tea in his cup, "and Mouri-chan hasn't yet told me, since I've not asked yet... What is it you actually saw last week that stopped you from exiting the house?"
Conan fell silent again. The teenage detective tipped his head, confused. Something so traumatising he wouldn't talk about it anyway, or was it that somebody who shouldn't know was in the room?
And was it Ran or him that didn't deserve to be told?
However, it did seem Ran was willing to supply an answer. "He ran away from school last week for some reason," she said. "Apparently, he managed to run into the police at the scene of a crime. Somebody had shot at a patrolling officer – Conan-kun heard the rumours about the criminal and went running after him. I guess Agasa-hakase, who lived on the man's path, must have spotted him before too long... but I'm sure something else must have happened."
Hakuba frowned. "What day exactly did this happen?"
When he heard the date he froze. It had been the exact day after the heist. The day Kaitou KID had visited him. Why had Ran neglected to mention it?
"What did you see of the criminal, Conan-kun?" he asked. If this was KID in disguise deliberately trying to work up a young child, he'd kill him where he stood. That is, if he wasn't so bloody difficult to get a hold of in the first place. Sure, when this KID had started, things weren't as regular, but at least back then he wasn't using ridiculous tricks to grab attention and lose the police in the crowd. He was completely betraying the idea of being a phantom thief – the quiet, ghostlike Robin Hood that appeared in so many stories in Europe and Japan. Then again, somebody had to be an exception to the rule.
"Conan-kun wouldn't tell me," Ran replied. "But I can tell you what the witnesses of the shooting saw."
"There were witnesses?"
"An entire street's worth," the girl replied. "Unfortunately, their testimony is rather unusual and I'm not sure if I should trust what the police said about it… They told me that the shooter was some large purple rat." There was a long pause. The teenager looked over at Conan, who was looking down at his feet for some reason. "Like I said, it's not exactly a reliable statement."
"Did they give you a further description?" Hakuba enquired, raising an eyebrow.
She nodded. "Eventually, yes. I called them again about five days ago to see if they had further information. They told me that they had gotten a better idea of what everybody seemed to have seen. One of the witnesses spun a very poetic description of the creature. They said it had a large head, feet and hands, thin limbs and a long white muzzle, and was wearing shoes and a Stetson hat. They also said that it was three-foot-tall and ran away at high speed. It matched up with the officer, Takagi-keiji's memories of the shooter, not to mention what everybody else saw. I'm very worried. In fact, I might be beginning to wonder if maybe it actually did look like that, seeing as there was nobody there who saw anything different."
What was it that KID had told him about the aliens he had seen? "The aliens were... unique, to put it in the best way. They were bipedal, had brightly-coloured fur, and had an unusually large skull, to put it in the most literal." Now, Hakuba was certainly not an idiot. The creature she had just described had several parallels with Kaitou KID's own account. He'd be willing to bet that they were the same species, if it hadn't been one of the creatures that KID had actually seen first-hand.
He stood up, bowing slightly but not managing very well. "Well, if you'd excuse me, I'd best be off. Must keep lo-"
Something had grabbed his trouser leg. He looked down for a surprise – somehow Conan had managed to slip through their sights and was now holding onto his trousers with a tight fist.
He blinked. "Conan-kun, what is it?"
"Can I go with you?" he asked. "I want to - to help."
Hakuba glanced up at Ran, who was just as shocked as he was. She did have her reasons to be, too; it seemed to be the first brave move that Conan had made in a while. That she had seen, anyway.
However, she regained her dignity quite easily. "Right. Okay. Would you like me to come along, just in case, Conan-kun?" she asked him.
The boy shook his head. "I think Hakuba-nii-chan can look after me," he said.
"Don't worry, Mouri-chan," Hakuba said, smiling. "I'm more than capable. We'll return by four o' clock, if that's fine?"
"It is." She looked slightly happier now. She had every right to be. Conan was leaving the house.
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As soon as they had left the building, Hakuba took the hand of the little boy and started steering him down the street. He had already found his 'tantei-kun', after all, so there was no need to keep looking for what was in front of him.
At the same time, he hadn't exactly been lying when he'd said that he 'must keep looking'. To find out that 'tantei-kun' actually meant 'detective boy' was rather surprising, and slightly unbelievable. There was no real reason for Kaitou KID to actually nickname Conan as 'tantei-kun', at least from what he remembered. All the boy did was follow around (and give clues to) Mouri Kogorou, who was somebody who seemed far more likely to take the title, being the man the prefecture newspapers raved about every few weeks when he solved a particularly large case. And KID did have a remarkable sense of humour – if indeed there was one – when it came to nicknames. For example, Hakuba was '-san'. When they talked, he was always and had always been a '-san'. Never mind how he had been sixteen when they first collided with one another. But when KID felt humoured, it was '-ojii-san'.
Oh, hah, hah, hah.
Then again, speaking about Mouri Kogorou, Hakuba had always felt odd about him. Maybe it was the fact that his big case-solving moment was when he made an awkward noise, span around on one foot and fell against a wall or into a well-placed chair behind him. Yep, that was it, actually. Mouri acted like a complete idiot so that everybody underestimated him, and then collapsed into a serious tone where all the masks were off. Yes, that was completely believable. He knew Poirot had done the same with his faked broken English, but Mouri's actions were so thorough it was very hard to believe the same thing with him.
And Edogawa Conan seemed perfect for the name at the exact same time. The first time they'd met, for example, Conan was the one who had identified a majority of the clues, was the most comfortable to be sitting in a group of other detectives, and had as a final flourish saved their lives by concocting a staged massacre across the whole house. Only afterwards, while doing some research, had Hakuba discovered more about him: his age was nowhere near affecting his high intelligence, he was the pet of Beika Division One, and he often followed Mouri everywhere they went. In fact, this current week was the major exception to the rule; Mouri was solving cases and Conan was staying at home.
And it was this week that things weren't getting done properly, according to everybody that Hakuba knew in Division One. Mouri was coming up with answers, yes, and they did make sense in context; the problem was that some of the rookies even knew he was thinking it through the wrong way.
"Conan-kun?"
The little boy held his trouser leg even tighter. "Yes, Hakuba-nii-chan?"
"Tell me what happened, please," Hakuba asked, not daring to look down. He'd seen the boy's face as they had walked out. There was nothing more disheartening in the world. "It would be the most helpful thing in the world right now."
"Okay." There was a long pause, as if he were trying to work out what he was doing. It took about a minute for him to pick the conversation back up. "I got a phone call from Shin'ichi-nii-chan's neighbour, Agasa-hakase, telling me that somebody was moving around inside Shin'ichi-nii-chan's house. I was already feeling horrible that day, and I really didn't want to be around any of the others because I felt really uncomfortable about them, so I couldn't pass up the chance to get out of school. I ran a long way to his house, and I ended up bumping into the police at an alleyway. Occhan is friends with Megure-keibu, and I was worried that somebody might have been killed." There were no qualms about using the phrase. That scared Hakuba more than anything else. An eight-year-old child was less scared about mentioning and talking about death than a seasoned detective.
The worst part of it was that Conan did actually have a reason that explained it. Mouri only dragged him along because he had to. It was part-and-parcel of the whole carer gig. Most of the time, Mouri also had to take his daughter along with him, and Conan would end up being left alone in the house. So they took him along. And they usually ran into his cases on those social events, meaning that his family got to see the work he did on a very regular basis. Even the eight-year-old, who was apparently completely unflinching and the first to approach the cadaver, as pointed out in many official reports. Hakuba had eventually chalked it up to desensitisation via overexposure.
"But it was just an assault on the job. I wanted to get to Shin'ichi-nii-chan's house, but I had to ask around since it was my friend Takagi-keiji who ended up being shot. The rest of the witnesses reported a strange creature had fired upon him and had escaped in the direction of Shin'ichi-nii-chan's house."
Ahh, he could see where this was going, now.
"I asked them what the creature was... they told me it was a big purple rat, like you heard Ran-nee-chan say before. 'With a cowboy hat and pistol'." He must have been quoting then; his voice had taken on a much more mature tone and speech pattern. "I... I got a notice from Kaitou KID before the heist and knew he was going to go through the spacial anomaly, so I was worried about it and started running as fast as I could."
"How did you know he was going through the anomaly?" Hakuba asked.
"Well, it was easy enough to figure out from the note," Conan replied, narrowly averting a bad in-joke. He began talking in English. "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?"
His English was pretty impressive in Hakuba's opinion. Most kids his age didn't learn much past the title of their favourite television show, and any other words were picked up from adverts or their parents. Conan, however, only spoke with a slightly strong accent. The fact that he was quoting from memory also made it impressive; Hakuba's own memory was just a little worse at the best of times, and yet the boy was recalling all of this in a non-native language.
"So, what do you believe it all means? For starters, what is 'the forsaken child'?"
"'Forsaken' means... somebody that was abandoned. Forgotten. Right?" Conan hummed to himself. "And children play, like KID does. The 'horizon' is either the coastline or the edge of the earth, and the 'abyss' is the anomaly. The 'land beyond' is another world." The little boy looked up at him. "He travelled there... saw another world. That's what I guessed, anyway." He clearly had no idea how right he was. "The 'glow' is probably... whatever he stole, and the 'dawn' is the first light of the day. The 'return of dawn' is a new day, but it's also... the return of something good. Gemstones are also considered to glow in the light if you hold them up to it. The gemstone promised the return of something good and the dawn of a new day."
The boy shrugged, probably not realising what Hakuba had just seen. For a few seconds there, while explaining, he had seemed almost mature. Said maturity was coming from a small elementary school student who just a few minutes previously had been writhing in his seat unable to speak and had reportedly been staying at home for the last week.
In fact, it took Hakuba a few moments to speak up. "Your story, Conan-kun?" he asked.
The boy's eyes widened and he stuttered, trying to regain his own power of speech. Eventually, he sighed, moving closer to Hakuba as they turned the corner, heading into the city towards the train station. There were more people around and the route was getting wilder anyway; the ainoko reached down and grabbed his hand just in case they were jostled around a bit too sharply. "Anyway...I got there and snuck into Shin'ichi-nii-chan's house – the front gate was open; the lodger who stays there might not have realised he left it open or something. I went to the foot of the stairs and saw the shooter." He fell quieter. "The shooter looked exactly how they had described it."
Hakuba's pace noticeably fell. "...You're kidding."
Conan tightened his grip on the elder's wrist. "I'm not. I'm serious. It was a three-foot-tall rat with a hat, gloves and shoes with chaps attached to them. It had a long crinkly tail and a white muzzle with a pink nose. It was holding an American firearm. And it shot at me."
Hakuba stopped, knelt down (much to the chagrin of those in the passing crowd who didn't see him properly), pulled Conan in closer and quickly patted him all over. Conan pushed away. "I'm not injured. He fired warning shots at me. I was too scared to move – but then somebody fired at him from the second floor and he ran away. I grabbed some fur off his tail as he ran off. A... friend of the family had to be informed of it."
"I suppose I know who it is that saved your life," Hakuba said, standing up again.
"I don't know why, but Kaitou KID walked in at the last second. He said he'd been waiting for me there." Conan frowned. "I wonder what he was doing there...?"
"And this was the so-called traumatic event that caused you to retreat into your room for the week," Hakuba guessed.
"Nope," the boy corrected.
"Then what was?"
Once again, Conan fell silent. Hakuba gulped. Edogawa Conan's silences could be haunting, especially after all the exposition previously. What looked even was the fact that this time the quiet, meek Conan from the Mouri Detective Agency had reappeared, the other, more mature mindset having quickly disintegrated as soon as he had hit that subject. It was almost certain that they were now touching upon the very event that had caused Conan's more drastic personality change.
So basically, Hakuba had no clue what had happened to do this to him.
They needed to get to his house quickly.
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The blue hedgehog stretched as he walked downstairs. Life here was... comfortable, he guessed, after having been here a week. Sure, he wanted to get out of the house and run, but there were the humans here, too.
Humans had always intrigued Sonic, ever since he was born. The most he had ever been taught about them was that they had come down from another planet and settled on his own about three-hundred to two-hundred years ago. They had taken the Mobian race and made it similar to their own, a welcome change to the previous, almost caveman-like life they had led before. Tribes became cities, grazing patches became farms and the language transformed from various sounds adopted from the surrounding animals into shared languages that could be understood by anybody. They had given them knowledge and technology, and as a result of that the Mobian race had flourished. In return, Mobians were free to treat them however they wanted.
A lot of Mobians liked to treat humans with respect due to that history. Humans had given a lot and Mobians wanted to give that back. And since a lot of Mobians had IQ matching the smartest of humans, they gave the human race gifts that they had not managed to create themselves. Hoverboards was something Sonic liked to bring up often when it came to Mobian technology designed to help everybody, especially since he and his friends each owned at least one variant. Another thing was the teleportation pads that appeared in Chao gardens.
But there were also Mobians (i.e., Knuckles) who didn't much like the human race. Sonic may have been a little naive, but he didn't understand Knuckles' way of thinking. They had been acquaintances for a while now – tensions were too strenuous for him to be dubbed a friend – and yet Sonic was still unable to get into the echidna's head. He blamed the isolation for it, since Knuckles had lived alone for most of his life. Of course, Eggman also shared the blame, having been the first human Knuckles ever met.
Then again, it was also in Knuckles' nature to get easily ticked off.
Sonic fit so easily into that first category. Ever since he'd met his first human he was interested in them. His parents had decided it was just because they looked different to everybody else that he knew, so seemingly disproportionate and bare, and both genders wrapped up in reams of specially-made cloth. But as the years had progressed, he hadn't changed, and had begun to watch human-made shows on television, read books written about them and by them, and everything else that came with obsession. The few times he had actually been to school, Sonic had taken history and social classes to better understand and interact with humans. Then, when he'd felt happy enough with what he'd learned, he'd decided to spread it across the world. Soon, in his opinion, everybody would know just how great they were.
Then Eggman appeared, and attacked his home. There was a lot of worry from the community, there not being many humans there except for some smaller colonies on one of the more northern islands. Sonic wasted no time defeating Eggman, running things through his head. This guy wasn't like the good humans he'd read about in his history books at school. He was like the bad humans he had learned about from the older books he'd bought on his own accord. The books at school were lighter, all about the good side. They read like propaganda. Sonic was obviously not very impressed at his school's choice of workbook.
Why try and make the human race into an ideal when it was already interesting enough as it was? The diverse personalities only served to make them more remarkable – how did they even work together in such an environment to be able to get to Mobius? These were the kinds of things he asked himself every day. So he set out to help everybody and hopefully find out along the way what made people like that, since nobody back home was so objective. It was when he met Knuckles that he found the first person who could help him despite never really liking him very much. As he went on, he found other people with this entertaining personality, and eventually he travelled so far and helped out so many people that he became a star in the lives of the humans and got to observe them from close-up.
And now he was back in a place that seemed to be much like those history books. Okay, a little alteration to the culture and foodstuffs here and there, but it was the world he'd read about from so long ago. He was living with a pair of them, in a city of them, in a world of them! His brain was overloading...
A/N: Sonic is a unique 'child' in many ways. Most people think he's unintelligent, or narcassistic, or impatient. The opposite is reality. He's a praising person, interested in the world and its people, and especially the humans. He's willing to befriend everybody who seems nice, and everybody who doesn't as well. And he loves to learn, as well.
Next week's chapter may be delayed. Keep your eyes peeled.