Disclaimer: Detective Conan is not mine. The series belongs to its creator, Gosho Aoyama, and I'm just borrowing the characters and scenery to create these short tales.

Premise: A short tale. Ai and Conan are still kids. The scene takes place in Teitan elementary.

Drabble 16: Code

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It began with Ayumi sending a message to Ai during class, unfolded and open for everyone to see.

Since he was sitting between the two, Conan was allowed a brief glance at the message before Ai plucked the note from his fingers, looked at it, and then hid it away.

What he saw had interested him, and he quickly drew whatever strange symbols he had remembered seeing before staring at the lined paper in front of him for a long moment.

No good. Every symbol that he had written down happened to be unique. And because he couldn't remember every symbol, there were several gaps of unknown length between each one...he didn't know the true length of the words, or where they started and ended.

He couldn't break the code.

He finally went to Haibara during lunch, and shamefully asked if he could see the message again. From the corner of his eye, he saw a large grin appear on Ayumi's face.

To keep his irritation from growing, he firmly fixed his attention on Haibara. A mistake, he soon found out, when she did nothing but stare coolly at him.

He was just starting to feel antsy when she finally replied, "What message?"

"..." No help from her.

It was maddening! He spent the rest of school struggling to figure out what this incomplete note was saying. It was only when class let out and some girls were chattering nearby while packing when he hurriedly grabbed the pencil sitting in front of him.

One of the girls had mentioned the school fair, and that was when a few of the symbols suddenly corrected themselves while the missing ones faded into view before his very eyes. He finally knew what the message said.

Hastily scrawling down the answer, he bolted for the door.

"Haibara, I finally figured it out," he shouted when he caught sight of her small form. She stopped and turned to look at him.

"Figured what out?" she asked with a mysterious smile.

"You know what," he had growled and an amused look appeared on her face.

"Do tell."

Instead of telling, Conan handed over his translated note.

"Oh? Is this what it said?" Ai commented as she read it over. She looked up. "Good work Mr. Detective."

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A/N:

Haibara! The master of sarcasm.

Ayumi wanted to make a code that Conan-proof. To do this the right way, you just write something that girls would normally talk about in ordinary readable text. But Ayumi did it the wrong way...she wrote it in code and displayed it for the entire world to see.

Now ordinary boys won't read it, but Conan is going to be interested.

Unfortunately, she had forgotten that if Conan couldn't break it, most other people couldn't even hope to read it. Or maybe that other person wasn't interested in reading a coded message in the first place and hadn't bothered to read and memorize the decoding table given to her earlier.

The Idea somewhat comes from :
Tastes Like Sherry
Author: Kinda-Mayvelle