AN: I'M BACK, BABY!! Sorry about that delay, but you know how it goes when you've got ten bazillion school projects due in one week (bleh). Plus I kinda got sick, and because my mummy is slightly evil she refused to let me get on the compy while staying home from school!! Le sigh.

But I'm updating now!! YAY!! Thanks for supporting me, you guys!!

February 14, 2011
1:23 PM

Normally L would never have compared himself to any sort of animal, but in this case he thought himself rather like a vulture.

A vulture that ate sweets instead of carcasses.

He had just been to a grocery store and a bakery down the street; the grocery was virtually out of some foods and the bakery had nearly bought them out of business. So many cakes, cookies, donuts, éclairs, strawberries, chocolates, black tea, coffee, jelly beans, cherries, sugar cubes, and jars of jelly were spread across the floor of his apartment that it would have overwhelmed most people.

But the biggest question L had was: what to eat first?

Well, what the heck. L grabbed the nearest box of cake and stuffed himself.

His body became ecstatically happy because of all the sweetness. Sugar sugar sugar...!! That was one reason L had been so intent on getting out of the old investigation building: Mido didn't have nearly enough sweets to keep L satisfied..

Mido... L paused with a bit of cake left in the box. He still hadn't decided exactly when he was going back to see the doctor. Normally L wouldn't have given him a second thought and never would have even considered visiting him, but be wouldn't be that cruel to the man who had brought him back to life...

Would he?

But Mido wasn't his biggest worry at that moment. It was then, when his brain was up and functioning again, that he really began to analyze where he was. It was an apartment with only a sofa, a coffee maker, a stove, a refrigerator, and a separate bathroom; the walls were white and the floor was polished wood. It wasn't the same building that his computer had originally been in: this apartment was a few blocks away in a neighborhood that wasn't really any nicer. His first complaint about the place was that there had been a thin layer of dust covering the floor and the apartment's minimal furniture, but L had wiped it all up (one thing Watari had left a lasting impression about: keep things clean!!). The stove didn't work right, which posed a bit of a problem if he was going to try and make tea. But even though it wasn't one of the the high-scale hotels L was used to, it worked alright for him.

He had had at least one stroke of good luck: even though it hadn't been touched for seven years, his computer still functioned perfectly. After eating one of the cakes and a few cookies, L sat down and turned it on. By pure luck, perhaps, there was an Internet connection, and with a few swift keystrokes, the system was up and running.

Now to business.

Light Yagami.

Well, he'd already determined the odds: now he just had to determine the truth.

He had nothing to lose, so why not try Google at least? He typed in "Light Yagami" and hit enter.

Well, there were hits all right, but not a single one seemed to be both useful and relevant. They were all either academic records from several years ago or bogus results that weren't worth the split second of time L took to look at them. Light's trail on the Internet seemed to disappear after 2009, when he apparently had graduated from To-Oh University.

This isn't good. L could reason that if Light's records disappeared, he had gone undercover... possibly to play L full-time. And if all of his records had disappeared, it made it impossible to determine if he'd died.

He briefly considered his other options. He supposed he could try to hack into the NPA's computer network, but he estimated that there was at least a 97% chance of failure: technology had almost certainly evolved too much for that to be a good plan. He could try contacting somebody... But that would seem extremely suspicious if he randomly asked a former acquaintance to look up a "Light Yagami". And it would pose a problem if another person--whether it be Light or someone else-- discovered that there was a second person using the alias L out there.

...But in theory he'd already done that.. That was essentially the reason he had dropped hints of his identity to Yamamoto: if he acted like the strange person he was in real life, he would stick out in anyone's mind, but mentioning Matsuda brought that to a whole new level of odd. Yamamoto was sure to go tell someone that a strange man said he knew a man in the police force.

It wouldn't take a whole lot of digging to figure out who that person was.

But chances of them thinking he was really L were extremely slim (at 1%, actually). That was where his plan lost it's predictability: he could only wait and see what the Japanese police would do next before determining his course of action.

And unfortunately, a good deal of determining his next move involved knowing what happened to Light. The odds of him being alive are slim, but I don't think I can take the chance in case he is...

Interestingly enough, it was because Amane was dead that he had his doubts. It was highly likely, at a 54% chance, that she had committed suicide because Light was also dead. But then there was a 26% chance that Light had found her no longer useful and had written it in the Death Note that she would go and kill herself. The other 20% of the possibilities ranged from ideas of Light leaving her for going undercover to other incidents completely unrelated to him.

L sighed, frustrated, and began to bit his thumb. What am I going to do now that he seems to have vanished?!

February 15, 2011
6:45 PM

In several buildings across Tokyo, televisions--and L's computer--were displaying the day's news. L was watching in vain hopes that something useful would appear, and he had gone through several cups of coffee in the process.

The anchorwoman shuffled her papers and looked directly at the camera for the next bulletin. "...And yesterday the police announced that they have started a manhunt for a criminal that they believe to be hiding somewhere in Tokyo. His identity remains unknown, but authorities have released a sketch of him to be shown to be general public. Anyone with information on him should contact the National Police Agency immediately..."

L made the mistake of taking a sip of coffee right when the sketch of this criminal was displayed on the news. His immediate reaction was to spit the liquid across the room. (Later he realized that this was the second time he'd done that within the last month.)

Is that me?!

It was, indeed, a rough sketch of L himself. He assessed that it was a fairly accurate interpretation, too. Maybe it wasn't bad enough that he couldn't go out in public at all, but he had to be cautious of where he went.

So, he was a wanted man. That wasn't exactly a new concept for him, though: several people around the world had attempted to see L behind bars--or dead--because of how it would positively affect the high-scale criminal lifestyle. Well, at least he had gained one thing out of this incident.

Light is definitely not the person who had this broadcast. He's too realistic to go and attempt to catch a man he knows is dead, or even an impostor of this man, because he wouldn't see it as a threat.

But someone out there does.

...Fascinating.

Within seconds, L came up with a plan to confirm what he was already certain of.

AN: ANOTHER EPIC CLIFFHANGER WHICH IS EPIC!! Jeez, I'm sorry that I always do this, but cliffhangers seem to be just about the only places I can cut these chapters off and still make things sound interesting.

Anywho, does anybody want to take a stab at what our favorite insomniac is gonna do?? XD I can't wait to see the responses for this one!!

Please R-n-R, as always.