Case Closed Fan Fiction ❯ Orbital Query ❯ Are You Ready? Here We Go. ( Chapter 1 )

      ;Late at night, in two different parts of Beika, Japan, two children laid in bed, wide awake despite it being well past the latest of the average bedtimes most children possess. However, they were not average children by any means. In fact, neither was really a child. Not in mind, anyway.

     Conan Edogawa, in his futon at the Mouri detective agency, and Ai Haibara, in the bedroom shared with her guardian Dr. Hiroshi Agasa, had a choice to make. An important one that would decide their very lives from that day forward. It was a decision that, they both knew, might have to be made eventually. So they had agreed not to put anything off and decide things now. Choose their path sooner, rather than later.

     The choice should be simple for both of them. Yet it was not.

     It had all started that morning.

     "Ran-neechan, do we have to do this?" the little boy whined as the older girl he was with pushed him against a wall.

     "Oh, hush now." the girl chided him, "It doesn't take more than a minute. Besides, aren't you curious?"

     "No."

   ;   With a chuckle, the girl, Ran Mouri, took out a felt marking pen and drew a line just above the boy's head.

     "Well, look at that, Conan-kun!" she cried happily, "You're grown over half a centimeter! Pretty soon, you'll be as tall in me!"

     It took an act of pure willpower to keep Conan Edogawa (a.k.a. Shinichi Kudo) from reacting to that. On the outside, anyway.

     Fate willing, Ran, that'll be more true that you realize... he thought, as Ran gave him a congratulatory pat on the head, Until then, I'm stuck putting up with this...

     "Okay, you can go play now." Ran told him. The not-quite-a-little-boy grabbed headed out the door.

     Go play, she says... Conan thought to himself glumly. Mostly due to the sad fact that that was exactly what he was headed out to do.

     Conan's day was normal. It was Saturday, and on that day he most often found himself joining his elementary school friends, the Detective Boys, for a day of play. Conan wound up being dragged into games of baseball, hide and seek, and even tag. As much as being stuck in a kid-sized body irked him, these moments of childish merriment had become something of a release. A way of relieving the stress and frustration that built up as the result of living the day-to-day life of a seven-year-old.

     The same seemed to hold true for his fellow shrunken teenager, Ai Haibara. Though she went about things much more differently than Conan. It was noticeable not so much because she was having fun (if she was, she was doing a good job of hiding it), but in that she seemed to be making a special effort out of getting out her frustrations through physical activity. During baseball, she would hit every pitch thrown at her with surprising strength. In hide and seek she'd be the first of the four hiding to make a run for Home Base. As a result, she didn't wind up being "It" once. Tag she was giving her all, running until she was simply too exhausted to move anymore and had to rest.

     As the kids got themselves a drink of water, Conan thought he noticed something odd. His mind started working while he watched Ayumi at a drinking fountain. Something was off, but he couldn't immediately spot what it was. With his eye for detail, though, and with what he and Ran had done that morning, he figured it out quickly enough.

     "Ayumi-chan, have you grown?" Conan asked.

     "Huh? Conan-kun, how'd you know?" Ayumi asked as she pulled her head away. Like Conan with Ran, Ayumi's mother had recently done a wall-lineup measurement. With a smile, Conan began explaining his deductions.

     "I remember when I first met you, you needed to get on your tip-toes to get a drink from that fountain. But just now I realized you're standing normally."

     "Hey!" Mitsuhiko exclaimed, mentally comparing Ayumi's height with his own, "He's right! You are bigger!"

     "Wow, Conan-kun!" Ayumi said with a smile.

     "Hmph..." Genta huffed, "I noticed, I just didn't think to say something."

     Conan enjoyed the attention his deductions, even fairly minor ones, often received for a moment longer before taking his turn on the drinking fountain. Drinking from a bottle of water she'd brought with her, Haibara watched Conan while the other boys made far too big a deal of a few centimeter's growth, hoping to get Ayumi's attention on them.

     Like Edogawa, Haibara had a nagging feeling that something was off. Something had been bothering her lately, but she hadn't quite put her finger on what. It was, in fact, part of the reason she had exerted herself so much today. Like Edogawa, Haibara had found that participating in the childrens' games to be a way to get out some stress and clear her head. A necessity when one was the type of person who preferred to not be distracted by idle thoughts. Unlike Edogawa, however, the problems on Haibara's mind were far more serious than simply releasing the frustrations life as a child presented to someone nearly two or three times her outer age.

     The hunt for the cure to the APTX-4869 drug occupied much of her time. Without the exact recipe of the drug (something far too complex for even Haibara to remember fully), she had been working essentially from scratch. Her only guide half-remembered formulas and drug combinations. She'd made some progress with temporary cures, but more often than not the potential antidotes she concocted often proved useless in the testing and simulation stages.

     Haibara sat on a bench, drinking her water, as Edogawa pushed himself onto his toes to get his own water.

     Realization came with a shock so great that it made her spit out the water she had in her mouth. Assuming she was correct, Haibara now knew what was off. Worse yet, if it meant what she thought it did, she and Edogawa had a major problem.

     Back at the Mouri Detective Agency, Ran busied herself with some household chores. As was often the case, seeing as a portion of what she picked up off the floor were clothes or books belonging to him, her thoughts drifted to Conan. She thought about how the boy rarely cooperated when Ran made him participate him in what had become monthly ritual. Once every month, Ran would line Conan up on the wall and mark his height on it. It honestly surprised Ran how much Conan would resist sometimes. Like most kids, Conan was clearly eager to become an adult. In fact, Ran thought he was more eager than most. He also seemed to often seemed to dislike doing things most kids his age loved.

     Which was probably why he resists so much... Ran thought with a smile, He thinks he's too mature for something so childish.

     It was with that in mind that Ran gave a woeful look to the black line she'd just drawn on the wall. A line that was a full two and a half centimeters higher than the top of Conan's head.

     How do you tell a boy that's so eager to become an adult that he hasn't grown so much as a half a centimeter in over a year?