Chapter One: The Phantom Thief Quicksilver Returns to Japan (takes place about ten years after Kaito and Aoko's part of the prologue):
Very Loose Chapter Summary: Our main cast of characters are shown in the story's more-than-slightly crazed present (which time travel makes into 'relative present'), at last. Saguru (our heroic phantom thief protagonist with a very tragic backstory) is Quicksilver, Akako (our token relative innocent [who in fact saw her parents die before her eyes, which Saguru does not know, though he does know that her parents were murdered, which the rest of the world does not even suspect] who is secretly a detective with a crush on Saguru) is totally clueless to this fact, they both have their first day as transfer students in Aoko and Kaito's class and disrupt class, Kaito Kuroba (who is known to the newspapers and magazines, the news stations on television and the radio, and his very highly crazed and equally as rabid legions of fangirls and fanboys as the Falcon Detective of Japan) is out solving a theft case (very highly brilliantly and extremely arrogantly), Aoko Nakamori (also known as the Blue Witch) has a really bad case of the flu, the very highly brilliant-but-suffering-from-PTSD teacher Ms. Keoko Yamada cannot stop being what she used to be, and there is broom-violence galore. Well, maybe not precisely galore, but you get the point, right?
Author's Note: This chapter is a cross between the second episode ("Blue Birthday") and the fourth episode ("A Great Detective Comes to Light"), which means it is Akako's birthday (though Saguru gets there just in time, unlike canon!Kaito) and Kaito appears, though he cannot outsmart Saguru and does not even come close to it.
The highly brilliant and scarily gifted magician Saguru Hakuba (also known as Quicksilver, the intertemporal gentleman thief, but no one in his class knows that important fact, although Akako suspects, though she would never tell anyone that, for reasons that will be revealed later) was very highly nervous, because it was his first day of school at a new school, a high school, when he had started school in college. It was December second. His best friend since the cradle, Akako Koizumi was nervous for much the same reasons and it was her seventeenth birthday and the anniversary of her parents' deaths. But he had to go on with his ordinary school routine, so he flipped Akako's skirt, like he did every single day of school. And like she did every single day of school, Akako said, "Saguru, you are an idiot!" and chased him around the classroom with a broomstick, which was not enchanted, because she is not a witch, though she is secretly a detective, which no one knows at this point in time and space. And then the very highly brilliant teacher, Ms. Keoko Yamada, thinking that it would catch them off-guard, asked in her most polite yet irritated and frozen tone of voice, "Mr. Hakuba, could you please tell me what the answer to the first question on the board is?" (The question that was on the board was what does twenty-one times two equal.)
"Okay, if you want me to, Ms. Yamada. The answer to your question is forty-two." Saguru said politely and cheerfully, with that ever-so-slightly off-normal smile and strange look in his eyes that comes of seeing someone that you love murdered before your eyes (that look lingers until you die and sometimes never goes away), which Ms. Yamada knew, as she used to be a psychiatrist before she became a teacher (she stopped being a psychiatrist because she saw her beloved younger brother Hanataro die before her eyes, ironically enough), and however hard she tried, she could never stop automatically diagnosing people when she saw that they had mental issues, because it was a skill ingrained since she was in her teens.
"Miss Koizumi, could you please tell me what the answer to the second question on the board is?" Ms. Yamada said, frozen and polite and irritated tone turned up a notch even higher, if that was even possible, because Akako was the one who attempted to do violence to another student, even if it was just mock-violence.
"The answer is thirteen, Ms. Yamada," said Akako Koizumi, in her extremely calm and very highly frozen voice that she used when she was trying to calm herself down from a towering fury.
A few hours later:
"School's out for the week!" sang Saguru extremely hyper-cheerfully (far too cheerfully, most people who did not know him would say), while Akako looked at him like he was really totally and completely insane, which she did quite frequently, so that she could keep up a semblance of her normalcy even when her sanity was shattering into sand-sized tiny grains which are totally useless to your mind (which it currently was not, actually, but you should know). And then they went to go have very, very highly sugary ice cream together, he got a very large, quadruple-scoop chocolate-chip-cookie-dough and vanilla-caramel-peanut-butter ice cream and she got a very large, quadruple-scoop peppermint-pistachio-chocolate and coffee-lemon-strawberry ice cream, after they finished their ice creams they went home after he promised her that he would visit her house before the next day, her to her very creepy-to-most-normal-people, highly skeleton-filled, far too-big house to spend some quiet time doing her homework and reading (and secretly being the famous intertemporal detective Rei Misosazai, like he is to thieves, she is to detectives), him to his mansion to prepare for his latest heist and facing off against the Kaitou Task Force. (It was unofficially called the Kaitou Task Force, and not the Kaitou Kid Task Force, because Quicksilver was the Kaitou Kid's apprentice and made his first appearance two to two and a half years before the Kaitou Kid disappeared, on the police's rough approximation of what his personal timeline is in linear time, which is surprisingly correct, for something created by people who could not figure out who Quicksilver is, though they see him rather frequently, as his mother is friends with quite a few members of the Scotland Yard and with Inspector Nakamori, so that she can successfully attempt to convince them that she is not the Scarlet Sorceress. And there are very few people who resemble him.)
Exactly and precisely seven minutes and seventeen seconds before eleven (twenty-four fifty-three and forty-three seconds on a twenty-four-hour clock precisely, because Quicksilver [even as the irritating, strange, and usually rather humorous magician Saguru Hakuba] measures time very hyper-precisely when he is not speaking in riddles) on the second of October, also known to Quicksilver for this night only as pre-heist-preparation-for-the-Kaitou-Task-Force time:
Quicksilver had disguised himself as a member of the Kaitou Task Force, which they really should have figured out that he would do, if they had studied anything at all about Quicksilver's modus operandi when they received his heist note for "the really, really blue and extremely sparkly rock born an hour before the moment in between the second and the third date of the spookiest month of the year." (A.k.a the Blue Birthday at eleven o'clock, if you translate it into layman's terms.)
The rather hyperintelligent kaitou Quicksilver drank a very large cup of cookie-dough-flavored coffee with far more sugar than would be strictly good for him if his brain did not require far much more sugar than the normal human brain to process as fast as it did or his body did not have such a fast metabolism and have to perform near-superhuman feats on a daily basis, and then he drank another.
"There. A few minutes to go until it is time to start the show, ladies and gentlemen," Quicksilver said, smile managing to be slightly more off-normal than it was as Saguru Hakuba, but no one at all heard what he said, and if they had they would not have had his secret identity to compare it to, anyways. And besides, Quicksilver's speech is always hyper-precise, so obviously it was not him speaking, right?
Quicksilver faintly smiled the very faintest ghost of a smile, 'he loved being in disguise, it was so fun, like sneaking around, except you did not have to have to worry about being caught if your disguise was good enough, which his usually was, as he had been working on his disguises since the age of six. And anyways, if and when your disguise falls through, that is when the chase begins, and you get to frustrate your chasers with a fantastic escape,' he thought very slightly giddily, with that self-same ghostly smile.
"Okay, now it is showtime, ladies and gentlemen," he said, shedding his disguise so that the chase could begin, after all he had heard stories about the teenage detective who was assisting the Task Force. Maybe he could provide a challenge.
So, then the Task Force tried to get him by dogpiling on him (at Inspector Nakamori's orders, of course), but he dodged while taunting them more than a bit too sunnily (because that detective was an actual challenge for his skills, which made him grin) and got away with the Blue Birthday, and the Black Organization shot at him, but he dodged the bullets with a smile and got home safely. Quicksilver noted, 'The Falcon Detective of Japan is really as good as people say, because he is the only detective that I have met that could provide me with an actual challenge since I was eight. A very, very highly brilliant eight, granted, but still just a child. And now, after eight years, I have faced off against my godbrother, who is a real challenge to me. And was going to be going to school with him. Well, this should be interesting. And now it is time to go to bed. After I visit Akako for her birthday.'
Saguru changed into his normal clothes and visited Akako's house ten minutes before midnight, precisely.
"Hi, Saguru," Akako said, a wan smile on her face, tired almost beyond human comprehension, as she had stayed up very late the the night before brushing up on her Japanese, as neither she nor Saguru had been to Japan for years. And it was the anniversary of her parents death in about ten minutes.
"Hi, Akako, my best and oldest friend. I am sorry that I'm late, but I was unavoidably detained by your Fire Elf friends, as they wanted to try to kill me again, even after I saved their lives one thousand, three hundred, and thirteen times that have not been cancelled out yet," Saguru said slightly awkwardly, but very highly charmingly (a seven on the International Standard One to Ten Scale of Charmingness), with the slightest touch of irritation at the end, pulling Akako's birthday present from behind his back (or up his sleeve) with a native magician's showmanship fully in evidence, even when he was not putting on a magic show or even covertly engaging in phantom-thievery.
"Oh! *Eyes widen very, very slightly more than they already were.* A silvery-blue-green journal with pine-needle-scented pages and a set of very lovely and ever-so-flawlessly crafted calligraphy pens and richly colored inks, complete with slightly lemon-and-peppermint-scented knockout darts! Thank you very, very much, Rili'dice! I have not been able to find another set since I wore my old one out. But how did you find more of my very-much-beloved, for self-defense purposes only, scented knockout darts? No, wait, I already know, you found them on the black market, didn't you? I should be ashamed to be friends with you, but I know far too well from extensive experience all over the time-space continuum that the black market is a fixture of every single civilization all over time and space throughout the multiverse. And, besides, we have been the best of friends since the cradle. Even if our friendship has a foundation of secrets and lies on both sides of the equation, Saguru, it is still a friendship. I am just making sure that you do not decide to try to break our friendship just because you do not understand how it works, because however abnormal our friendship is, I value it," Akako said, happily and excitedly at first, then a more-than-just-slightly lecturing tone of voice, and then becoming very, very serious. (So serious that it reminded Saguru sharply that the extremely tragic death [actually, it was a murder but that had not yet been discovered by the police, Saguru, or anyone working with either one of them at that point in time] of her parents affected her very much more than she would ever admit. But he pretended to shrug it off because she pretended to shrug off the fact that he was far more affected by his father's death [which he knew was murder] than he ever admitted.)
"Please do not call me Rili'dice! You know exactly how very, very much I hate that nickname! And you know that the only reason that I go by Rili'dice online is because no one would guess that I would go by it! The fact that you at certain times change your emotions so quickly is slightly scary, you know that, right, Akako? But you can rest assured that I value your friendship far too much to destroy it simply because I still, after all of the years that we have been friends, do not really understand the rules to our very, very strange and bizarre friendship at all, which is actually rather fun in a rather chaotic way. And after all, having a good friend who understands the importance of secrets is an extremely rare thing. And it is after midnight, so I should probably go home now, because we have school tomorrow, and falling asleep at school is very, very highly ill-advised, especially when it is in your first week at a new school, you know, Akako," Saguru said, at the beginning having a very, very great deal of most-hated-nickname irritation, but for the most part being very serious, only regaining his usual jokey mask at the end, for the most part, anyways. Then he walked home and did not oversleep, a habit which he had carefully cultivated over years of phantom-thievery, falling into the Wizard101 universe (in which he is the very highly intelligent and seemingly more-than-slightly insane Storm Wizard Delwyn Hadriannisus Spannerworks and Akako is the extremely brilliant and seemingly more than a bit off her rocker Life Wizard Viridian Alzarianna Scarlettree), and late-night sleepovers with Akako, which actually captures quite a large amount of his childhood in one single sentence.