"Is Conan-kun coming back to school tomorrow?" Ayumi exclaimed over the phone late that afternoon.

Ran pulled the phone away from her ear slightly. "I'd imagine so," she replied, glancing over at the office door. Things had been quiet for a while, which had started to worry her. Ninety-nine percent of the time that people stayed silent in another room with the door locked, her father would open it later and discover that person's corpse caught in a very imaginative death trap. But, after an hour, the boy had poked his head through to request lunch in a very bright voice considering the last few days. He seemed to be fine, though hiding something; a quick… 'interrogation', if you will, had spawned the response that he had just been getting less sleep lately. Ran, being Ran, tucked him in.

A few hours later and he was alright again,

"Thank you! We've all been really worried about him!" the little girl chanted. "Ai-chan especially has been worried. She's been going through all of these big science and psy-…psyche-… head books at the Beika Library. I think she was trying to look for what's wrong with Conan-kun."

Ran blinked. "Don't worry. Nothing's wrong with him. I checked myself."

"That's good. I'll go to call off Ai-chan now, since she doesn't need to keep looking. Thank you, Ran-nee-chan!"

The teenage girl smiled to herself as she put down the phone, but as soon as it hit the table a solemnity overcame her and she began rubbing her hands together.

Ai was one of the most adult people she had ever come across – an odd statement to make, considering that the girl was only a few months older than the rest of her group of friends. She was quiet, reserved and logical in her approach to work, play and conversation. Every time she lifted her head up to speak to Ran it was a minor miracle, since the first time they had met she had been little more than a shy and fragile little flower. But in the company of her fellow children she was at the top of the food chain; apparently her favourite things to do included calling Conan out every time he was mistaken or negative about something – a difficult hobby for anyone to uphold, and a magnificent display of hypocrisy. Ran was not so much annoyed as she was strangely intrigued.

The elder girl's plan of action was taking things slowly and learning to get used to Ai's ways. But there were times when she knew she had to step in and ask what exactly was going on. 'Right now' seemed to be ideal, especially since Ai knew something about Conan that she didn't. She had seen the two talking together – they clearly had a connection, though what seemed to be a strained one at best. If Conan had something wrong with him, Ai would know.

She stood up, glancing over at Conan's room. She should probably take him along – it would work as a good test to see if he was actually ready to face his friends.

She dialled Ayumi's number again and waited for it to pick up.

"…Hello again, Ayumi-chan. I'm taking Conan-kun over to meet you at the library. Can you stick there while we take the train? …Oh, and call you parents just to make sure they understand, okay?"

MKMKMKMKMK

"Tadaima!" Kaito cried, slipping through the door. The afternoon had been a tough experience for him. Aoko had tried to keep him back to talk to him. Luckily the escape route had proved its usefulness as he quickly made himself disappear by way of a smoke bomb while standing on top of his desk. The girl hadn't been willing to jump down all ten feet of the tunnel.

"Okaeri!" said Tails, looking up from the sofa. He had a troubled look on his face.

"Oh, you learned that listening to my mother?" the magician replied, barely straining to keep the smile on his face. "That's pretty good. Where is she?" When there was no answer, he frowned. "Where is my mother, Tails?"

"Oh! She went out to get some groceries…" Tails coughed. From behind the little fox, out popped Sonic and Knuckles. They had nearly identical expressions to their little friend, although Knuckles' was tinged with a small degree of grim assuredness, and Sonic's with curiosity. All three of them looked oddly tense about something. Kaito froze. "Kaito, we have a lot we need to talk to you about." Oh, no. No, no, no… it couldn't be. It just couldn't be. It was impossible. There was no way.

He looked around wildly. "Where's my mother?" he whispered. "What happened? Did t-they take her?"

Tails blinked. "Who are you talking about? She's really out buying groceries."

Kaito glared at him, but his stare lightened when he noticed how calmly Tails had answered that question. "Then what's with all the nervousness?" he asked. "What's wrong?"

"We… have something we need to-"

Sonic butted in. "The anomaly is a rift in space and time."

Tails tried to growl at him, but the sound only came out as a purr. Meanwhile, Kaito furrowed his brow.

"…The spacial anomaly… is a rift in space-time?" Kaito repeated.

"As in, this is the human world that's twinned with our planet of Mobius, the world called Earth," Tails explained, shooting a look of exasperation the blue hedgehog's way. "It's just in the past. The world where we come from is from five hundred years in the future." He put a finger to his mouth. "I don't understand how I didn't realise that before – the overhead view of this city is something I've seen in my history books several times. This is Tokyo City as it appeared during the early twenty-first century, correct?"

Kaito was silent for a second. "…This is a problem," he muttered.

All three anthropomorphic aliens stared. "Of course it's a problem!" Knuckles replied. "We've already revealed our species to the human race two hundred years before they're meant to make first contact with an otherworldly race!"

"It's even worse than that." Kaito walked to the living room and sank down onto the sofa. "It's so much worse than that. There's another one of you here."

"The one that Knuckles told us was shown on the news?" Sonic replied. "We know that guy. He's a nasty piece of work. Eggman got him with the machine that he tried to use on you."

The thief gasped. "But I took the Chaos Emerald that the old guy used for a power source!" he exclaimed. "How could he catch anybody else with it!?"

"He had a back-up handy. An old generator from back in the day." Sonic began pacing the room, fidgeting with the cuffs of his gloves. "It's a kinetic energy generator that he built years ago, back when he wasn't such a bad person like he is now. People congratulated him for his work; he used to be on the news back on the Eastern Islands, back when I first got interested in humans. A few years later he was using it to power robots that ransacked South Island." Sonic closed his eyes. "That kinetic energy generator… which is powered by enslaved and brainwashed animals."

"That's horrible…"

"Our little friend," Knuckles continued, "was captured after you were freed. Eggman took him over to Metropolis; we followed and ended up watching the entire show."

"The machine you were hooked up to was meant to drain data from people's brains," Tails said. "You could then theoretically dump all that information into somebody else's head and overwrite the original memories, kind of like with a computer. Eggman wanted the data of somebody from the other side of the anomaly, somebody who was going to be more likely to listen to him because they didn't know of any of the things he'd done, and then use that to 'overwrite' the memories of that Mobian. He previously betrayed Eggman and ran away from him."

Kaito rubbed his head. "Judging from what I can guess and from what I've seen firsthand, I'd assume that Mobian… is absolutely no good."

"Wait, firsthand!?" Sonic cried. "You've met that guy in person!?"

"The rat with the gun?" Three heads, three nods. "Of course. I confronted him before I met you. I found later how he shot the officer. Nice man, Takagi Wataru-keiji. I've impersonated him before. It was interesting being in his shoes." Kaito's expression turned sour. "Tails, Sonic, Knuckles. There was a young boy who ran into the house we saw each other in. The rat fired at him; the boy decided it was in his best interests to try and defend what used to be his property, and so buried a soccer ball in the wall. I shot at him with my trusty trick firearm, and he cleared off."

The red echidna shook his head, while the fox and the hedgehog stared blankly into space. The 'rat' never fired at innocent bystanders like that; he only attacked people who got in his way.

"That rat's not been seen since. Nobody spotted him after Takagi-keiji was shot." The young magician snapped his fingers; a burst of pink smoke and a small, earring-like device appeared in his hands. "But I think I can track him wherever he goes. I stuck a tracer onto my old hat, which I ended up having to destroy during the heist. If he tried to write my memories into this guy's brain, then no doubt he'd go for it. This cell phone picks up the signal if the correct number is dialled."

Tails held a hand out, and let the human boy deposit the phone in his hand. "You know what the sighting of this guy means."

Kaito nodded. "Yes, I do. It's changing time. And if it works like it does in television, then Mobius won't be the same when you get back."

"Not much we can do about it, really, except fix what you need fixing and then getting him home," Sonic mused, getting up on the sofa to sit next to Kaito.

MKMKMKMKMK

"Come on, Conan-kun," Ran called again, and the little boy bashfully turned to the corner onto the road to the Beika Library. It was a tall, impressive building which he had visited only a few times before. Ran thought that was a bit odd seeing how book-smart Conan seemed to be. He usually told people that he got all his information, though, from educational television; Ran could barely remember the last time he had watched television that wasn't Kamen Yaiba when hanging around with his friends. Even Agasa testified that most of what they did over at his and Ai's house was play video games and watch the occasional anime on the box.

Which left a lot of holes in that explanation…

The boy in question picked up the pace as the people around them started to walk a little too close and brush his side. He looked alright, although nervous. Despite this not being Conan's usual behaviour, the girl forgave him; after all, usual behaviour had not been on the menu for several days now. "Ran-nee-chan?"

The girl took his hand. "What is it, Conan-kun?" she asked.

"Why are we going to the library?" he asked. "Is it so I can catch up on my schoolwork?"

Ran stopped outside the glass doors. She recalled some bad things happening here, especially the first time that they had been at the library; Conan and his friends had discovered and captured a drug-dealing murderer who was hiding his cocaine in the books and the body atop the lift. The story had found its way into the newspapers in no time. She hoped something like that didn't happen this time around. The boy was certainly in no state to be dealing with murderers again.

"Actually, I wanted to talk with your friends," she said cheerfully. "But yeah, you can ask them what they've been going over in school for the past while. Ayumi-chan told me over the phone today that there was a test coming up soon. I'm sure Kobayashi-sensei won't mind about the homework, but some of the things were very important."

"Oh." Conan breathed slowly, and then tugged on her hand. "Well, come on, then."

Ran let herself be dragged in by Conan, who seemed determined to go meet up with his friends again. She welcomed the change with open arms. The day he'd run away from school, they'd been telling her that he had been deliberately avoiding them, acting fearful. And now he was ready to go and talk to them again. She wondered how he had managed to counsel himself into doing so. Maybe she could use the technique when she was feeling made at Shin'ichi or something.

The quartet of small misfits greeted her as soon as Conan made it to the children's section of the library, and suddenly she found his hand tightening around hers. A sudden spark of fear burst into life. What if he wasn't as ready to do this as he had seemed to be?

She knelt down next to him. "Conan-kun, is everything okay?" she asked.

He looked back at her. "Y-yeah. It's just… who did you want to talk to, Ran-nee-chan?"

Ai glanced at the others.

"I wanted to have a chat with Ai-chan, if that's okay with her," she said. The little reddish-haired girl nodded and walked up to her, while Ayumi, Mitsuhiko and Genta all grouped together around Conan and started talking rapid-fire. It was no surprise that he shrunk a bit under their attention.

Ai took a single look at Ran. "What is it that you need to say?" she asked, her voice cold as ever.

They walked over to one of the tables just outside of the children's section, where they had a decent vantage point at which to watch over the others. "Ayumi-chan told me that you'd been looking up things in the science and psychology sections of the library to try and find out what was wrong with Conan-kun," Ran confessed. "I've been worried about him this whole time, so I just wanted to know why exactly you were doing that."

"…" Ai sighed. "Edogawa-kun is being… something that is definitely not himself," she said. "I'm quite naturally bothered by it, seeing as how we're… friends. Hakase has been treating me well at his house, and I've been open to a lot of mental stimulation, which is why I can look through those books with confidence. I just want to use my intelligence to seek out an answer to the problem at hand."

"So… what do you think happened to him?" Ran asked slowly.

"When did the personality problems begin?" Ai replied. "Edogawa-kun has only been having problems since just before the Kaitou KID heist…" She paused. "The Kaitou KID heist… that reckless thief, did you hear what happened to him?"

Ran rested her head on the palm of her hand. "I did. Apparently, the goal of Kaitou KID's heist was to explore the Shizuoka anomaly. I have it on good authority – by 'authority', I mean Hakuba Saguru-kun, the half-English detective – that he made it back alright. After the heist, you know what happened to Conan-kun. He ran away from school that day and ran into the aftermath of the police officer shooting, just near your house." She rubbed her forehead with her free hand. "And that's where it just starts getting more confusing if you watched the news lately. The assailant was shown on television thanks to surveillance footage that was being taken at the time of the incident, with the problem that it didn't seem to be a human as much as a child in a suit, or a walking, talking, shooting purple monster."

"A giant purple monster," Ai repeated. "Is this related to our conversation in any way?"

"I'm hoping not, but… I have this feeling…" Ran sat up in her seat, taking her arms off the table and resting them on her lap while she thought it through. It was the most confusing hunch she had ever suffered from, but this could potentially be the reason why Conan was acting so oddly. She didn't understand why… it just seemed like the right answer.

She looked Ai directly in her stormy eyes. "I think that the anomaly is directly to blame for Kaitou KID's 'disappearance' and that creature that appeared near Niichoume. And it's also responsible for Conan-kun's personality change, like it's having some kind of… radiating effect on him. And I don't know what was wrong with him to make that happen."

Ai hesitated. A smirk emerged onto her face. "That was exactly what I was thinking."

Ran blinked. "What?"

"That was the most sensible answer that I could come up with," Ai responded. "It's not very scientific; it actually took some imagination to come up with. But I'm proud to have thought of it, especially if somebody else has come to the same conclusion as I have."

"But I know a lot less than you do…" Ran admitted quietly.

"But that doesn't change the fact that we both have the same basic theory," the little girl replied. "Think about it. If two people with different amounts of information available to them come up with the same solution, then there is a large chance that we're both correct. For now, let's ignore the possibility that we might be wrong and walk away from here proud that we could both come up with the same explanation independently, alright?"

Ran frowned. "I thought you were just a shy little girl when I first met you…" Ai looked up. "But then again, I thought Conan-kun was just an overbearing little boy who just looked a lot like Shin'ichi." The teenager smiled down at her. "Just as I now know that Conan-kun is very intelligent, very helpful and actually related to Shin'ichi, I know that you're a lot smarter than you previously tried to let on. And I'm thankful for that. All these intelligent people around me…" She shrugged. "Though I'm a little jealous that you're both that smart, I feel really safe whenever you're all around. Because I know that no matter what my problem is, you'll always find an answer."

MKMKMKMKMK

"Conan-kun, come on!" Ayumi said, handing him a book. "This is what we had to read in class over the past week!"

Conan took it, barely looking at the title (it was some kid's book about God knew what), and opened it up to a random page. Ayumi laughed a bit, causing him to retreat into his shoulders at lightning speed. Mitsuhiko, noticing this, turned the book to the correct page just as Conan looked at him anxiously. He barely noticed the difference.

"Guys?" he said, stroking the edge of the book while he kicked his feet up and down. The chair he was sitting on was quite high; he'd needed the assistance of a doorstopper, as did Ayumi, in climbing up onto it. "Do you know where Genta-kun went off to?"

A gut-wrenching scream suddenly emanated from the direction of the toilets followed by the sound of three gunshots, and Ayumi and Mitsuhiko both slid out of their seats into a defensive position. The other patrons shot up to their feet in shock. Conan flinched, just as Ran hurried over and grabbed him up from the chair. Ai followed quickly, braced for whatever would come out through that door. She glared at Conan, but the look yielded nothing. Some interesting information, maybe. There was the strange appearance of his eyes, looking slightly tired as if he'd seen it all before. By now, yes, he probably would have realised that his mere presence made the country's crime rate shoot up, but this wasn't that kind of face. He looked, more accurately, as if he'd only been waiting for it.

Tension filled the air.

A streak of purple suddenly exited the men's bathroom just a short distance from their table and shot out of the door, just fast enough to blur any distinguishing features. But to anyone who had been watching the news lately, there were no doubts about its identity. Conan froze.

Shin'ichi... Shin'ichi could handle this when he was wearing this face, right? Should he let...?

No.

He closed his eyes and threw all common sense out of the proverbial window, hurrying into the bathroom. "Conan-kun! Get back here now!" Ran cried, breaking into a run. The rest of the Shounen Tantei looked at each other, and followed.

The boy stormed into the toilets. There were only a few occupants, all who had hidden behind a section of wall splitting the urinals and the wash basins. Genta was peeking out of one of the stalls, eyes wide and skin pale. He was staring over at one of the stall doors, pointing at it with a shaking finger. There were three large holes torn into it. Swallowing, Conan examined the door. It was stainless steel. Normal bullets didn't rip through it. What the heck was this alien doing, firing in an enclosed space like that, anyway? Especially a bathroom; didn't he know people could get-

He kicked open the door to reveal a young man with a huge hole in his neck. He was still moving slightly.

No... This wasn't... right, this wasn't normal...

A/N: Ran and Haibara - a powerful team, but this is the first time they've worked together. In Conan's eyes, the world is ending for Shin'ichi... Has he yet managed to recognise how quickly the status quo is changing?