Hello everyone! I got a brand new idea to share and I think I went overboard with this. It's more explanation about the background and less about Conan. I have not checked properly since I just typed this out in one sitting. Well, I'll let you go ahead and read, enjoy!

Title: Meeting Your Past

Type: Story (One Shot)

Summary: "No way you're my future self." The preschooler glared as he scrutinized the taller boy.

"Sorry to disappoint, but I am." He sighed.

"You're lying, I already saw you together with them. There's no way we didn't grow up to be as tall as Mouri-chan and Suzuki-san." The preschooler crossed his arms.

"Can't you just listen to me? It's more complicated than that." His eye was beginning to twitch.

Idea: Based on fan art that just love to put all the ages and forms of one character into a single picture.

Sub-Ideas: Sort Of Time Travel But Not Really AU

-First Part: Explanation of how the phenomenon came to be.

-Next Part: Meeting The Current Self

-Main Focus: Edogawa Conan meets his past… Literally.

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Date: February 20, 2023

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Space, the great frontier of the unknown. At a certain point in history, mankind chose to brave the frontier and race to see who could get out to the moon. That race gave birth to the latest of technology people have come to use today. That is in a world we are all familiar with. But, in one world, a single person ran this race and took a completely different route. One person who remains anonymous to this day had thought, "If the world is so focused on space, then I'll be the one to breach the unknowns of time."

So that's what that person did. Using H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" as the inspiration, that person sought to make that masterpiece of literature a reality. But after the end of the Space Age, when the excitement was dying down and people were moving on from the moon, something happened. In a quick burst of energy that radiated all around the world, temporarily scrambling just about every electronic device, causing the animals to be frenzied, and young children to cry, that person made a huge error. Time had been successfully conquered, or so the thought went, but the experiment blew up in a way that no one could predict.

Now every country tried to find the source, but the energy was new and unique. No point of origin could ever be found. Those in power thought it was an attack, but when no one came forward with information and nothing happened for a good while, they dismissed it completely. Or so they would have liked to do so. When they were just about ready to call it quits, the first signs of the new energy's effect began to happen. A year after the pulse, reports of billions of youths going missing without reason occurred. This was dubbed as, "The Year of the Vanished."

Now like the name implies, the vanished were all children, teens, and young adults, the youngest being about 3 to the oldest about 21 years of age. These children all disappeared at a random time of the day that the charts showed no correlation between when they disappeared. There was however, a correlation in the amount of time, this was a full 24 hours exactly. The reports of the youth all claimed about the same, "I blinked and it was already the next day." These cases kept happening as the years went on, showing absolutely no sign of stopping.

The science community had an field day with this, studying the brand new energy that surrounded the world. Unfortunately, they couldn't understand what it was no matter what they did. It wouldn't be found out until more than a decade later, when a young girl of 5-years of age appeared in Britain crying for her mum. When found and asked for her name and information, they contacted the family and they came rushing immediately. Their thoughts were along the lines of, 'Is my daughter alright? Did she not make it to school? Why is she with the authorities?'

The girl cried upon seeing them for the first time, running up to hug her mother. She seemed different, a little more wrinkled than she remembered, but she knew that was her mother and father standing right in front of her. To say they were shocked when they got there was an understatement, they were absolutely in denial. "This isn't our daughter! She is 15, not 5!" They would repeatedly deny this which only caused the girl to cry in desperation saying, that it was really her. When the girl shared something only they as a family knew about, they accepted it. They took care of her for about a week before she disappeared without a trace and the present remained unchanged. This was the first case of many.

Over the years, people had begun to remember the disappearances and related it to the cases of young children popping up and claiming they are that person who, at this point, was much older now. This information was the push the science community needed, and so they adopted the name that often appeared when dealing with time and space, as well as the hypothetical, tachyon particles, unofficially known as Time Travel energy.

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Now why am I sharing a bunch of history you ask? Well, this is the exact world that began after the space race, where the future generations began to accept this new outcome as the normal.

Now fast forward to today, a year where technological advances thrive in the form of cellphones, video blog, and memes that roam the world wide web. We currently see in the home of Professor Hiroshi Agasa, a young Japanese boy in a baby blue preschool uniform pinned with a sakura badge butting heads with a slightly taller, familiar boy in his iconic blue suit, red bowtie, and black spectacles.

"No way you're my future self." The preschooler glared as he scrutinized the taller boy.

"Sorry to disappoint, but I am." He sighed.

"You're lying, I already saw you together with them. There's no way we didn't grow up to be as tall as Mouri-chan and Suzuki-san." The preschooler crossed his arms.

"Can't you just listen to me? It's more complicated than that." His eye was beginning to twitch.

"I bet you're an imposter, trying to convince me you're me, big Shinichi who didn't grow. You're probably Moriarty's apprentice fighting against me, Sherlock's apprentice. Or you're a lying short, tiny old man." The preschooler points his finger in an accusatory way.

That ticked a nerve in him, "Do I look like a short old man to you!?"

"You could be disguised to look like me."

"AUGUHH!" He messes up his hair in frustration.

"See, you got mad, it proves I'm right."

"Just stop! I'm Kudo Shinichi of the future! You're me of the past."

"Proof. Evidence. I want concrete evidence."

He sighs, this was not what he wanted to deal with today. Of all the times to meet his past self for the first time, it had to be when he was under the guise of Edogawa Conan. At least it's him, if his other selves were to appear, this would be even more dangerous.

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Now there are a few things I almost forgot to mention. Among the normal disappearances, there are those that are outliers. Most people, they disappear only once. But there are rare occasions that a person can disappear more times. On record, the most has been three. Off record, Shinichi has disappeared a total of four times... So far at least. The other, even rarer for those who disappeared more than once, they can appear in the present together or around the same time. One famous rare case reported a man in Canada had met his 12-year-old and his 3-year-old self in the same day.

So rewind a bit to when Conan up and ran off with his young preschooler self in hand, he missed someone who had just appeared in the stairwell of the Mouri Detective Agency. Standing just outside the Mouri's apartment was a teenage Kudo Shinichi who was unsure why he was here.

"Shinichi?!"

"Uh, hey Ran." He rubbed the back of his head smiling sheepishly.

"Kudo?" Sonoko was shocked and Mouri Kogoro did a double take. Before he did anything, Ran stopped him and looked Shinichi over.

"You're not my Shinichi, are you?"

He blinked, hanging on the words, 'my Shinichi.' His mind put some pieces together, unfortunately blurting aloud with her father and Sonoko next to her, "We're dating?!"

"You're what?!" Kogoro's eyes widened with fury before Ran stopped her dad.

"Ohh Ran, admitting he's your husband already?" She snickered.

"SONOKO!" She yelled before turning her dad to explain, "This must be past Shinichi. He probably disappeared last year or the year before." Then she turned to Shinichi and asked, "What's the last thing you remember?"

"Graduation was the other day and we were going to start high school tomorrow?"

"So that's why I couldn't find you on the first day. I thought we would be late!" She giggled.

"Yeah, you nearly got all of us in trouble on the first day!" Sonoko huffed, but didn't mean it much.

Shinichi didn't hear them though, his thoughts hung again on what had happened. He could only blush embarrassed, not just at Ran's comment but also at the fact she didn't correct her father.

"Way to go me!" He thought happily.

A yell got him out of his thoughts, "Wait a minute… If you're here… Then Shinichi's nearby!"

Immediately Ran dashed out the door, grabbing the younger teen's wrist and began their search for her Shinichi.

Meanwhile, back at Agasa's, Conan continually grunted in frustration at the stubbornness of his younger self.

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So there is actually more to this, but I think I ended up explaining way too much. A bunch of paragraphs ended up getting cut out. If you're curious, these are the rules for this world. I'll try to keep them simple.

1. The Past Person Is Unaffected - When person of the past gets sent back to their time, they're basically reset as if they never met their future self.

2. The Past Person Can Appear At Any Point In Their Future - So long as they're living, they have the potential to appear. The most common time frame is appearing between 10 to 25 years from current age. Anything less or more is uncommon to rare.

3. The Past Person Will Appear In Front Or Nearby Present Person's Last Position - If the present person is stationary, the past person can appear in front of them. If moving, they'll appear from behind. Think of it like a homing beacon.

4. The Amount Of Time They Disappear Does Not Correlate To How Long They Stay In Their Future - The most common time frame ranges from as little as 24 hours (never less) to as long as a month. Anything more is uncommon to rare.

So yep, what did you think? Is this idea too out there? If there's anything you want to know more about, feel free to let me know in the reviews. As always, thank you so much for reading! See you next chapter! :D