Act 1 Scene 5 – 人間型 [Ningengata] 'The Humanoid'

He'd pushed the teen too hard. Now Conan's own flight or fight response kicked in. His heart hammered in his chest, and he gnashed and scratched at the hand clamped over him mouth. Not good, he couldn't get enough air. Not good! Calm down, think… He had to get out, had to explain before he was kidnapped, or worse, killed by someone who thought he could survive it. Trying to scratch and bite the hand wasn't doing anything. The guy didn't remove his hand, even when Conan tasted blood. Time to change tactics. Target the source of the hand, not the hand itself.

He dug his own hand into the dirt, and threw a wad of soil and leaves into Areku's face. The young man snarled and tried to paw it out of his eyes. His grip on Conan's face loosened enough for Conan to shout, "I'm not immortal!"

Sera must have been using the sounds of their voices to find her way to them, because she sprinted towards them through the forest like a charging boar. She grappled Areku off of Conan, the force of impact sending them both sprawling on the forest floor. Then she was on him again, wrestling him for control over his arms.

"You!" the boy's the hissed reply was interrupted with a short scream into the forest floor as Sera twisted his arms sharply into a hold behind his back and pushed him down.

Threat eliminated, she panted and looked up at Conan, cocky, toothy grin in place. "Jeeze, Conan, I can't leave you alone for five seconds!"

Conan paused, catching his breath before explaining it. "I said they tried to kill me with it, I didn't say that I stopped aging or couldn't be killed!" He scowled at his attacker, who's unfocused, tearing eyes left trails of mud on his cheeks.

"You'll have to tell me more about this," Sera said smirking at Conan as his gingerly pushed himself into a sitting position. He could taste Areku's blood on his teeth. He spat it out.

"Will you behave?" Sera asked Areku, giving his arm an extra twist.

He nodded dumbly. She released his arms, letting him carefully shake the pain out of his limbs. Then she let him sit upright, keeping one hand on the teen's right, ready to put him down again if he made a wrong move.

"Then you," Areku tried to wipe the dirt out of his eyes with his hand. It was the one Conan had bitten, leaving a smear of blood across his face. "You didn't even take it? Or you did, and it didn't have any effect?"

Conan gathered one of his flip-flops that had escaped in the short scuffle and put it on. It took a few tries, because adrenaline was making his hands shake. "I've grown two inches in the last year. I've almost died a few times, so I'm pretty sure I'm still mortal."

The 'teen' was still trembling. "I'm an idiot. It's a wonder they haven't found me already."

"Good question," muttered Sera. "Why haven't they found you already? And you Conan, you're like him?"

Conan sighed… sometimes one has to give information to get it, and this guy wasn't exactly the trusting type. Sera probably had the good sense to not blab, but she'd already heard so much already… "I'm nothing like him. It changed my appearance instead of killing me. I'm hiding right under their noses."

"You've been able to figure out the basic structure of the organization, and you even know the code name of their miracle drug, and the codename person who is in charge of developing it. All this by watching Detective Mouri?" Areku asked.

Conan and Sera snorted. "Conan's been solving all of Mr. Mouri's cases, then tricking him into figuring them out."

Areku was giving him the "What are you?" look of astonishment that Conan loved squeezing out of the people foolish enough to underestimate him. This time he could go in for the kill. If Areku flipped out again he had a practitioner of Jeet Kune Do to control him.

"If you decide to help me take them down, I won't be in contact with you directly. If I ever do need your help, I'll send some disguise experts I know to keep you completely hidden. How about it?"

"You have disguise experts on call?" Sera asked, gaping at Conan.

"Yeah, my mom."

She stifled a giggle.

The 'teen's shoulders slumped. "You're not giving me a choice, are you?"

"We already know enough to get ourselves killed several times over," Conan pointed out. "You might as well give us something to use against them."

He took a deep breath, and shakily let it out again. "If you can keep their hands off me, and keep me from the government, and swear that you also will only ever treat me like a normal human… I'm in. I'll tell you everything I know."

The detectives exchanged eager grins. Perfect. But where to start? How would this idiot know what would be useful? He wouldn't. He had an average intelligence at best; well-practiced at manipulating conversations but not at avoiding traps or thinking strategically. "Start at the beginning of your interactions with them, and tell us everything you can think of." Conan suggested. They could work from there and if anything stuck out, they could expand on it.

Areku lay the rest of the way down, the dried leaves crunching under the weight of his human form. Eyes closed, as though watching it happen before him again, he started to speak. Many of the Japanese words he didn't know, so he switched back and forth continually between Japanese and English.

"I'd been buried and asleep for over 50 years when someone got the bright idea to redevelop an abandoned town in Yorkshire, and turn it into a gawdy attraction of some sort. When they dug me up, no one knew what to do with me. I didn't know anything about the wars that had happened or how to use modern technology. I couldn't speak right; I didn't know how to act; I was pretty helpless. My strange case made a stir in the newspapers, and a wealthy family, the Morrison's, took interest and decided to adopt me. They had me tutored privately, and taught me how to live in the modern era.

"They figured out something wasn't quite right about my body after a few years. I should be in the midst of a growth spurt, but I never gained an inch. It started with a few visits to their private physician. They had dozens of tests run, but they couldn't find the problem. They started keeping me under guard, and never showed my face publically. Then they brought in a scientist who treated me strangely. He was from Japan, and I couldn't understand what he said most of the time. He'd have me knocked out, and when I'd wake up weeks or months later, I'd have new scars. One time I wasn't allowed to awaken for an entire year, and my right arm was missing. I knew by then that they'd figured me out and weren't going to be benign about it. I started begging my adoptive family to make the experiments stop, but instead, they stopped coming to see me. I don't know if they thought of me as human anymore, didn't care, or had handed me off to someone else.

"One day, I woke up and the staff had changed, and the sadist was gone. My arm was back in its place, and I was whole again. I asked what happened, but no one told me anything. They treated me more kindly, and made me have some hope I could get out… but the experiments didn't stop. The leaders of this research were a Japanese-American husband and wife team, Mr. and Mrs. Miyano, and there were several different groups working under them. I also overheard them talking about their findings. They didn't try very hard to hide their research from me, and even tried to justify it. They said that if they could figure out what made me the way I was, they could save millions of lives. They spoke of a new plague that attacked the immune system, and how I could be the key to stopping it. The medicine they made from me could be the silver bullet that pierced the heart of disease. Their words sounded so pure and righteous; I was swayed for a while.

"The thing that kept me from fighting back the most was this young woman they brought in. She'd had leukemia, and the treatment had destroyed her bone marrow. They had taken some of my bone marrow, and given it to her. Her name was Samantha, and she was a symbol of what could be accomplished by researching me. She came to visit me all the time, to cheer me up, to help me through painful procedures. Eventually, I noticed that she wasn't aging normally. She'd been 19 when we first met, and seven years later, she looked like she was barely reaching 21. I asked her about it one day, when we were alone. She told me that she was the only successful test subject. There had been dozens more, and they all died, just from having my blood circulate in their bodies. She was the only one that they had introduced me to. I begged her to help me get out, but she said she couldn't. Instead, she snuck about and told me more about what they were up to.

"I found out that during some of my longer stretches of unconsciousness, they'd been killing me over and over, trying to find what made me able to recover. They did it so often, they came up with some nicknames for my death cycle, like Zombie Time and Hibernation. Zombie Time is particularly violent, so run away as fast as you can if you ever see it. The sadist probably triggered it by accident and got himself and his assistants killed. When I was awake, they called me Ambrosia to my face, and The Humanoid to my back. Most of them didn't seem to like me much. They never talked to me. Mrs. Miyano gave me comic books to read.

"One day, under the influence of a lot of painkillers, I told the Miyano's I didn't want to be experimented on any more. I vaguely remember tearing at Mrs. Miyano's shirt, begging her to let me go. They vanished shortly after that, and Samantha stopped visiting me. People I didn't know came. They dragged me to the basement, shoved me into a water tank and shot me in the face. I didn't wake up until the Miyano's daughter, the one you called 'Sherry', took up her parent's research, years later.

"The first time I saw her, I'd been drained of a lot of blood and was too weak to talk to her. She was still a girl. Under her lab coat, she was wearing a bright red dress, and she had sparkling clips holding back her light brown hair. She sat down beside me and talked at me for a few hours. It was really nice.

"She had the same naive idealism that her parents did. She really believed that she could make some kind of panacea from me. She was so young. That's probably why she was so easily manipulated. Her fascination with the puzzle I was dehumanized me, and let her keep up what she did. She said that the key wasn't my zombieness or my hibernation, but my normal self. Her new effort was called 4869, a pun on 'Sherlock'. After a few months, she told me that she'd found a way to synthesize the compound without taking my blood. She told me I was saving the world. She told me that they were going to let me live as a normal boy now.

"She lied. Or they lied to her. It's hard to tell. They took me to the basement and put me back into the tank of water. The next time I woke up, Samantha was carrying me on her back up a flight of metal stairs. The walls and stairs pitched and groaned, and I remember her strides rattling the steps. We were on a ship. She snuck me out onto the deck, and sat with me for a while, the way we used to. She told me about being an actress; about getting married, making a happy life for herself, and having to pretend she was her own daughter. She told me that they were never going to let me go. Then she said good-bye and threw me overboard. That was the last that I saw of them, until I met you."

Areku's voice had grown hoarse.

Conan contemplated the story for a while, and Sera studied Conan. Areku's amount of disassociation with the violence that had happened to him was disturbing. If he'd really lived as long as he said, and really suffered as much as he claimed, then this was to be expected. But, it could also be explained by him making it up on the spot. This had to be verified. He had to think about the people and events Areku was talking about, and if they made sense with what he knew.

One thing he did know: this guy had something to do with the organization. Areku hadn't seen the criminal side, but was aware of it, and afraid of it. They'd probably threatened him, told him they could find him no matter where he hid. They likely had also told him the same experiments would happen to him if he sought protection from the police. That might be true too. Isolation of their assets was their MO.

He knew the name Miyano, and his description matched their timeline, what little of it he'd learned from Haibara. Also, the woman he called 'Samantha', could that be…

"What was Samantha's codename?"

Areku frowned. "Vermouth. She never told me what they had her doing though. I don't know what being an actress has to do with what they were doing with me."

Pieces started coming together, and fast. Vermouth hadn't told anyone about the de-aging effect of APTX 4867, and deliberately protected him and Ran at least twice, that he knew of. This meant she was actively going against the organization. She was probably doing counter-intelligence, and keeping the organization away from Areku as well. Then her hatred for Sherry ran much deeper than just Sherry, but all of the suffering that her family had caused.

"Did you hear the name 'Gin' at all?"

The teen squinted, like he was trying to peer into the past. "He's one of the ones who earned a codename. I never met him formally, while I was awake. I heard rumors that he'd come and talk to me when I was Zombie. He scared everyone."

"How did he do that? Aren't you supposed to run if you see Zombie?"

He unconsciously rubbed his wrist, like he was trying to massage away an old ache. "It's really strong and can't feel pain, but it can't break through heavy chains or concrete walls. If you chain me down well enough before making Zombie come out, you're safe as long as you don't let it go."

The image of someone strapping a zombie down and interrogating it popped into Conan's head, and he stifled a giggle. "Zombie is sentient enough to talk to?"

Areku shrugged. "I've never talked to it myself… but people have told me that. A few cults have grown up around crazy people talking to it. There are some people that it talks to and doesn't kill. They usually stick around and help me out after meeting it. They tell me that they are reincarnations of my older brother and the Shaman who made me the way I am, but I don't know if that's true, or if it just chooses people it thinks would want to help me. I think it thinks I need companions."

A shaman… but that weird mysticism stuff rarely ever had any connection to reality, beyond people's disturbed fantasies.

"What do you think Zombie is?" Sera asked.

"Current theory - Aliens. I've never met anyone like me, so I think an alien, maybe the last of its kind, or an alien machine or life support system that got flung out into space, came to earth, and that somehow infected me when I was 16."

Laughter broke loose despite the detectives' best efforts. "You've read way too many comic books!" Sera said through a quite unladylike series of snorts.

"Shut up," Areku huffed. "I didn't have much else to do when I was conscious, other than be in pain. And yes, I know that's basically Venom's backstory. I just don't have any clue how this happened to me. Almost anything seems plausible at this point, and it's been so long than my memory of it is hazy at best."

"What do you remember?" Conan asked. Whoops, getting sidetracked. Better reign in the conversation soon.

"I was really sick, dying. I went to sleep. When I woke up, I was in the cave we used as a barrow, wearing a corpse's clothes. I went down to the village to let them know I was alright, but everyone was gone, and the village was in ruins. It looked like many years had passed. I started wandering, and slowly discovered the changes that had happened to me. So, nothing I know is really helpful. If it was, they'd have figured it out long ago."

"I suppose so." Conan frowned. What would be helpful to ask? Where to start? "How many names can you remember?"

Areku was quiet for a while. "A few. Some of the scientists never talked to me, so I don't remember them, or only parts of their names, and I don't know how to write any of the Japanese people's names, but I could sound them out for you. Do you mind if the list is in English?"

"I know my ABC's; I can read and write in Romanji very well. I visit my parents in the US all the time, after all."

"And I'm from the US. I lived there until I moved to Japan a few months ago," Sera quickly added.

"Right, right. I forgot." Areku stood up. He winced as he dusted himself off, noticing the deep bite-mark on his palm. "Oh, there's something that I can do now!" he said, grinning like a madman. "I couldn't do it before because it scares normal people who don't know about me." He helped a confused Conan up, and clasped Sera's hand. "Would you like to see me hibernate?"

"S-sure," Sera said, hesitantly. "What does hibernation involve?"

"We'll need to take a short detour to a freshwater pond I know about. You know what the word 'hibernate' means, right?" He started trying to dragging Sera and Conan off the trail and into a darker part of the forest. The ocean was getting farther and farther away.

"It means to sleep through winter," Conan said.

"Right. Except when I do it, my body heals itself really fast. But in order to do it, I need to put myself to rest. It looks like I'm dead to most people. When I'm doing it to heal injuries quickly, I need a partner to wake me, or I'll stay asleep forever."

"So, how will we wake you?" Sera asked, holding his wrist. This was sounding dangerous.

"What about Zombie Time?" Conan added.

Areku laughed. "Zombie Time is really rare, and you'd have to kill me violently in order to make it happen. Though poison makes it happen too, sometimes. It depends on the type of poison. Some just put me into hibernation for a short while. As for waking me – just make sure I can breathe. You'll see what I mean."

They reached a shallow, shaded pond. There was no visible source of the water, but a small stream out of the pond proved that the source was probably a spring. The bank was covered in thick, dense moss. The water was so clear, they could see right down to the bottom, which had very little vegetation, and mostly rocks as its bed.

Then Areku started stripping.

"What are you doing?" Sera asked, trying not to stare at the bizarre behavior. She let go of him to cover her eyes.

"You know that Sera's a girl, right?" Conan said, arms crossed.

"Sorry if seeing me scars you for life. I don't have a change of clothes, so I'll have to go in naked."

"Why are you going in?"

Finished, he gingerly stepped in the water, shivering. "To trigger hibernation. Agh, this water is really really cold…" He got waist deep, took a deep breath and slowly let it out. "Give me about 10 minutes, then pull me out. Make sure you put me on my side, so the water drains out quickly."

"Wait, what are you-" Sera said, unshielding her eyes.

Areku submerged himself completely. They ran to the edge of the water. He was holding onto a large rock in the bed of the pond. A batch of airbubbles rose to the surface, then stopped. Suddenly Areku convulsed and let go of the rock. He was drowning himself?

"Has he gone completely nuts?" Sera yelled, jumping fully clothed into the pond.

Conan climbed down the bank and tried to follow, but the rocks were really difficult to walk on, and the water was so cold it hurt. He slipped and fell into the water, the sudden icy embrace knocking the wind out of him. Why'd his body have to be so little and useless?

Taking a deep breath, Sera dived under. Wrapping one arm around Areku, she dragged his lifeless body to the surface. Conan climbed out and ran around the bank to the spot it looked like Sera was aiming for.

Teeth chattering, they pulled his cold, limp body onto a mass of soft vines that grew into the water. Conan cleared Areku's airway, the way he'd learned during diver-safety classes he'd attended with his father in Hawaii. Areku had better be right about this immortality thing, or else they'd just watched a crazy person commit suicide.

"Wait!" Sera said, eyes wide. She held up Areku's injured hand. The skin was knitting itself back together, leaving only faint scars. The bruises Sera had given him earlier had completely vanished.

As soon as the injury was gone, Sera rolled him onto his side and checked that his mouth was open. Water poured out, a lot faster than if it was simply draining out. About half a minute of this weird spectacle had passed when Areku finally thrashed and coughed. After expelling the last drops from his lungs, he said weakly, "That was hibernation." He looked at his healed hand and grinned. "Why are you all wet?"

"You freakin' idiot!" Sera yelled. "We thought you were killing yourself!" The white blouse Sonoko had chosen for Sera to wear was now transparent, showing her plain sports bra underneath. She unbuttoned it and wrung it out.

"You didn't believe my story?" Areku laughed.

"Well, you had just lied to us," Conan reasoned. "And there was no way to tell if you were delusional or not."

Areku grabbed his pants, and pulled them on. Thoughts about modesty had long been deemed irrelevant. "It's always a little nerve-wracking for people at first. You could have left me in longer, by the way. Then some of these old scars would have faded a bit more. If you left me for a whole day, I'd probably have no scars left on me anywhere, and I'd been completely healthy." His damp skin caught his threadbare shirt as his pulled it over his head, making it twist into a tight roll under his armpits, which he busied himself with untangling.

"Is that why they'd put you in a tank of water?" Conan asked, wringing out his shorts.

"Right. It's the safest way to transport me when I don't want to be transported. Just force me into hibernation, and I'll stay healthy and passive as long as they need me that way." He pulled tight the nylon cord he used for a belt, and tied it off. "Don't tell anyone that though. It's like getting knocked out and having no control over what strangers do to you. Never, ever put me into hibernation without my permission, okay? And if I want to be in hibernation, make sure you follow my instructions to the letter, like you just did."

They nodded nodded fervently. Conan definitely was going to need Haibara to explain a lot of things when he got back. For a start – did this mean immortality was actually possible? If the teen was telling the truth, and he'd re-grown limbs and survived being shot in the head, just like he'd spontaneously reanimated after drowning… that would make any person with half a brain want to pin him down and study him. No wonder so many people had been driven into doing so many horrible things to try to figure this out.

Sera's voice pulled him out of his thoughts. "Shinichi Kudou."

He looked up.

"Well, that explains that. I knew I was right about you two, but I just couldn't figure out how." She went to work on the once light, floaty skirt that a blushing Sonoko had insisted upon. "By the way, why haven't you told Ran?"

He winced. "If I told Ran, she'd want to charge in and beat them all up, and she'd get herself killed."

"I don't know about that," Sera said, shrugging. "She's smarter than you give her credit for. Someday you'll have to tell me how the death of my brother fits into all of this, and I don't want you to hold anything back. I imagine it's the same for her." She wasn't his meeting his eyes, which was odd for Sera. To Conan, she'd always spoken straightforwardly, unsubtly, barreling through in a very American fashion. His intuition told him that she was holding something back, lying by omission. Had Ran already figured it out?

"Don't tell her, please?" Conan plead. "A lot more lives than hers or mine are on the line here."

"I get it; I won't. It's not my place to either." Sera shook out her skirt, flinging water everywhere.

"Hey! A little warning next time!" Areku snapped.

"Same to you," grumbled Sera.

Like wet cats, they spread out on the bank, taking advantage of the break in the dense foliage that let drying and warming light through.

"It wasn't all lies." Areku pushed aside a pebble that was in his back. "I really did learn Kanji in China. It was a long time ago, and I can't speak with modern Chinese speakers at all. I don't even know if I learned an ancestor of Mandarin." He closed his eyes, and flopped in his cleared spot. "And I really was born somewhere along the border between Tibet and Pakistan. Or, I think I was. I told my story to an archeologist, and he told me that was probably where I was from."

Turning onto her side, Sera asked, "What about your own language? Can you still speak that?"

"I can't speak it anymore, but I remember one thing." He took a breath, and started to sing, a strange, quiet chant. It was slow and repetitive; every other phrase was the first one repeated. The cadence of the strange language made them sleepy, like a lullaby or mantra. There was a bitter catch in Areku's voice as they reached the end. How many times had he repeated these verses to himself in some forgotten corner of the world, clinging to the last remnants of his identity? "iʃɛmmaa rɛʔtʃəəm ɸymmyy" he repeated one last time. They settled into a comfortable silence.

Under his breath, barely audible, he repeated it in Japanese:

"Out of water, Great Crow, in the sky.
It pulled the root, out of water, Great Crow, in the sky.
Old bones rose up, out of water, Great Crow, in the sky.
Covered in mud, out of water, Great Crow, in the sky.
Rivers carved it, out of water, Great Crow, in the sky.
The Ice came, out of water, Great Crow, in the sky.
Great Crow laid down, out of water, Great Crow, in the sky.
The Growing came, out of water, Great Crow, in the sky.
It fell to pieces, out of water, Great Crow, in the sky.
The pieces became humans, out of water, Great Crow, in the sky.
Above the great river bank, out of water, Great Crow, in the sky.
That is our home, out of water, Great Crow, in the sky."

"It sounds like a creation myth," Sera whispered, as though it was sacrilegious to speak normally.

"A small piece of one. That's just the part explaining why we were living in a valley shaped like a ribcage, and why we called ourselves the Crow's People."

Still not with a full voice, she attempted to reinterpret the poem. "Your people are the pieces of a gigantic crow that froze to death in winter, after pulling a big, muddy skeleton tangled in a root from the water, which is where you live."

He chortled. "Every culture has an embarrassingly silly origin story. Japan is a clump of pond scum that fell off a spear that a god was mucking about with, after all."

"Do you still believe it?" Conan asked. Too late, he realized that this might seem a rather rude, pushy question coming from him, a strident Skeptic and Non-religious Atheist. Ran was used to him brushing off all of that baseless superstition, but he'd had a few run-ins with people who hadn't appreciated his evidence-based view of the world.

To his relief, Areku didn't seem to notice the subtext to Conan's question, or at least, chose to ignore it. "I don't believe it anymore. I've seen too many to believe any of them, so I've given up trying to guess about such a distant past. I just repeat my people's song because it's nostalgic. I can't do it as well as I remember our…" he paused, struggling to find an equivalent title. "Doctor? Teacher? Witch? Matriarch?" he shook his head. "We called her our ɛstɛ. She taught the song to us, and I hear her voice in my head whenever I repeat it. Hers is the only voice from my first life that I can recall."

At a normal speaking volume, making them jump, he said, "Oh, and my name was Barai. It's a word for the soft undercoat in an animal's fur. If I had lived long enough, I would have been a weaver, so I chose that name when I came of age."

The name had many sounds in common with Haibara's name. Thinking of her, Conan realized there was another way to corroborate Areku's testimony, at least the modern parts. "I know another person who escaped. I'll ask them if they'd like to meet you. Would you want that?"

"Someone else escaped?" he asked, sitting up. "Yes, I'd love to… Only if you're absolutely certain that they'd never turn me back in."

"You don't have to worry about that," Conan laughed. "They hate the organization about as much as you do, maybe more." He pulled out his phone. Luckily it hadn't been damaged in the water. "I'll give them a call."

It took her a while to answer, and it almost timed out.

"What do you want Kudou? I was in the middle of a bath." Her tone gave him a prickly sensation in his fingers and up his back.

"I have made a break-through in the case that I thought you'd want to hear about. I met Ambrosia."

He heard the cell drop from her hands and clatter on the floor. Then a very loud, "WHAT?!"

"He'd like to meet you. I didn't tell him anything about you, except that you escaped."

"Professor!" she yelled. "We're going to go to Kumajima, and we're leaving as soon as possible!" She took a deep breath, and sent a volley of questions. "How is his health? What's his mood like? What did he tell you? What does he know about me? He could be the way to find a cure for you, don't you dare let him go!" She paused to catch her breath.

"I won't let him go, don't worry. He really wants to meet you too. Can I tell him who you were?"

"Yes! No!" she paused. "Do you know if he hates me?"

"He described you as a believer, blind to the dark side of what you were doing. I don't think he hates you, but he hates what was done to him."

"I'm going to have to apologize a lot. I never hoped that I could get a chance to do that. Go ahead and tell him who I am. I'm coming over by tomorrow at the latest. Profess-!" She hung up.

Conan sat a while, staring into the fractured light slipping through the leaves. Would Haibara finally tell him everything after this? Probably not, because she was still paranoid. But she might give him details he could use finally. This was one reunion he'd have to catch every second of.

"So? Who is it?" Areku asked, pawing at Conan's bare shoulder.

"You knew her as Sherry, but she's changed her name and her appearance since then."

He gaped. "Sherry got out?" He pumped his fist in the air, hooting. When he finally could sit still, he asked, "What's she like now?"

Conan thought back to when they'd first met. "At first, she was really paranoid that they'd find her again, kinda like you. She tried to commit suicide once, but I stopped her. After that she got a lot better, like she'd decided that she could be frightened all the time, or she could enjoy her new life. I doubt she'll ever go back to being Shiho Miyano, even after I take them down."

"Is she like you?" Sera piped up.

"Yeah. She's the one who made the poison, even."

Areku looked confused. "She survived too? Does that mean her appearance was altered like yours was?"

"Right. She's also able to hide in plain sight."

Sera smirked, having figured out who it was.

"So," Conan said, a though suddenly coming to him. "I can use your 'room' to read in, right? My dad sent me his latest novel to critique."

"Oh, yeah, sure," Areku said, gears in his head grinding as the topic switched.

Conan's phone went off again, disrupting the subdued mood they'd found themselves in. "Hello, Kudou?"

"What is it?" he asked, rubbing the drowsiness from his eyes.

"Bad news, Kudou. I can't make it there for a few days, at least not without draining Agasa's bank account. I'm still coming!"

"Okay. See you then." He hung up and looked over at Areku. "Sherry can't come for a few more days, but she's definitely not giving up."

The teen sighed. "I'll live. Literally." He giggled at his own joke.

Conan rolled his eyes. How'd this idiot lasted so long on his own?

Author's Note

This chapter, I had a challenge. How to make Areku's story feel like he was codeswitching throughout it? Furthermore, Conan and Sera could understand every single word, they'd just have a small amount of jarring switching back and forth with him. How to accomplish that?

There were several methods that I tried out. First, I tried writing the English, with no modifications. No good, that was too easy to read. Then I tried making the words he'd have trouble with bold, but that was too distracting. Third, I tried writing the English words phonetically, but I didn't get far before remembering that while I can read IPA fluently, most people have never encountered IPA before. And lastly, I split the difference and just made them italic. Hopefully that makes them just hard enough to understand to get across the idea that it's a little difficult to follow what he's saying, without making it too hard to read. Let me know if I failed, or need to change my approach, will you?

Speaking of IPA, did you notice the weird alphabet I used for transcribing the refrain? That Alphabet is IPA – the International Phonetic Alphabet. If you know it, you can sound out the refrain very accurately.

It is awesome. I love, love, LOVE IPA. I sometimes compose poetry using it, because it makes it so much easier to analyze the rhyme-meter of a poem if you can visually see how it sounds. Sometimes I write whole stories in it. I take notes in it, especially if I'm dealing with a foreign language that I don't know the spelling conventions of. I've always hated English orthography because I suck at spelling. I remember being in Kindergarten, and the teacher pointing to the letter A.

"What sound does the A make?" she asked us, smiling pleasantly.

Four hands raised up, and each had a separate correct answer. That's ridiculous. One sound per a letter is much easier to deal with.

The genius of IPA isn't just that it's one letter = one sound, it's that it's not listed according to an arbitrary order (ABC… and so on). It's listed in a chart, according to where and how the sound is made. This way you can very easily and quickly spot patterns in how sounds effect each other. For linguists – it's incredibly useful. It's also used for reporters, singers, and actors, people who have to reproduce names/words that they've never pronounced before accurately. I think that it should replace the system used in American dictionaries and taught in schools, perhaps replace our spelling system entirely. We already have a standardized dialect (reporter-speak), so why not?

Anyways, here is a transcription of the IPA /iʃɛmmaa rɛʔtʃəəm ɸymmyy/, into… Japanese romanji-ish? I'll give some additional notes to explain some of the sounds.

"ishemmaa retchaam fummuu"

The R is rolled. The /ə/ is pronounced like the U in "but". The /ɸ/ is pronounced like the Japanese F, not the English F. The /y/ is pronounced like a French U, like in "pull" or "lune" or a German Ü.

Would you like to see my dialect of English in IPA? It looks like this:

/ˈwʊdʒu ˈlaɪk tʰəˈsij ˈmaj ˈdajəlɛkt əv ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ ɪn ˈajˈpʰiˈéj/ /ɪt ˈlʊks laɪk ˈðɪs/

/mata ɾaiʃuu/ (See you next week!)
dreamingfifi