After using the bathroom, Ai wiped herself clean and washed her hands over and over, making sure she did not have any of the "funky" smell Yimi had mentioned.
When she came out, Conan quickly pulled her aside to whisper. "Ran won't sleep with me anymore, so it's fine if you stay over there for the next few days. Also, could you stop using my voice in such a girly way? Look, even Yimi recognized you immediately."
"Really? I don't think it sounds out of place at all. Don't you like going 'A-re-re?' yourself?" Ai adjusted the bangs of her wig.
Besides, she did not think her tone had been the reason Yimi recognized her.
Conan choked on his words and decided not to argue. He took out the capsule that gave him a chill and asked, "Are you sure this thing works? I'm not going to swallow it and just drop dead, right?"
He vaguely remembered that the capsule which had shrunk him had been about this size too. It was hard to imagine such a tiny dose affecting the entire body. Where all the extra body fat went was still a mystery.
Ai stared at Conan for a long while. The silence made him increasingly afraid to try it.
Finally, Ai said, "I developed it by studying the composition of Laobaigan and the reaction you described when you had a fever. The effect should also be a similar temporary restoration... Oh, and the reason I say should is because I had absolutely no one to experiment on. I can't make new APTX4869, so I couldn't test it on lab mice first."
"..."
There was no way he dared eat it! Maybe he should look for a backup plan first?
...
Because Ran was specifically suspicious of Conan, the Detective Boys' planned camping trip had been canceled. Maybe that was a good thing, though. A report from two days ago said a group of armed killers had appeared there and had since been shot dead by the police.
"From now on, I'm Conan. Don't call me the wrong name and give us away." Ai kept a permanent dead-fish expression, apparently convinced that this was Conan's usual face.
"Why?" Yimi looked in confusion at Ai, who was walking with her toward the detective agency.
Ai was Conan now. Conan himself had gone off to do something. Did that mean Yimi could borrow Conan's equipment and do Conan things?
"Who knows? Just say it's for his beloved Ran... And we still have to make people believe Conan has a cold." Ai carefully adjusted the mask.
"Then when you pee... when you go to the bathroom, do you use the boys' room, or the girls' room?" Yimi asked a question that Ai knew the answer to yet somehow could not answer. She could only speed up toward the agency.
Conan was already under suspicion. If he suddenly caught a cold and wore a mask now, it might make Ran even more suspicious.
To sell the act properly, Conan had started pretending to have a cold and wearing a mask two days in advance, giving Ran time to get used to it.
Fortunately, Ran had not seemed suspicious of that.
Teitan High School was preparing for its school festival, and Ran, who would be playing the Princess, spent her spare time memorizing lines. "O omniscient and omnipotent Zeus, why must you treat this poor helpless maiden so cruelly?"
"Meow?" Yimi stood on a chair, passively helping her rehearse.
Ran clasped her hands tightly and got into character. "You have come to my aid again and again lately. Just what divine being are you?"
"I'm a cat-divine being." Yimi did not follow the script.
Her head was full of thoughts about going to Professor Agasa and borrowing Conan's bowtie. She had not paid attention to the script at all. Even if she looked at it, there were plenty of characters she could not read.
That was fine. Ran had not asked her to rehearse because she seriously needed the practice.
Ran skipped a large section and went straight to the key line. "O knight wrapped from head to toe in darkness, if you are willing to grant this humble Princess's wish, then take off that mask as black as night and show me your true face."
Then she gently hugged Yimi and kissed her on the cheek.
"Meow?"
"Hey, hey, hey. This play had better not have a kissing scene. The kids and I are going to be watching." Kogoro expressionlessly snatched the script out of Yimi's hands.
She was only kissing a child on the cheek during rehearsal. Who knew where she would kiss that Black Knight when the actual performance came!
Ran snorted and glanced at Ai disguised as Conan. "So what if there is a kissing scene? I'm not a child anymore."
Right. She wanted Conan to see that this scene really did include a kiss.
Ai pretended not to notice the strange look Ran sent her way and lowered her head to read the detective novel Yimi had scribbled circles all over.
Unfortunately, Eri was too busy to watch Ran's performance. That was also why Yimi had once again been left here to stay overnight and sleep with Ran.
...
At last, the day of the school festival arrived, and Ran ran into someone unexpected.
"Kazuha, why are you here?"
A lively-looking girl with a single ponytail was standing at the school entrance, looking around for someone.
She walked up to Ran and explained, "Heiji said, 'Maybe Kudo will show up at Teitan High School's festival,' so we came all this way. But I looked away for one second and he disappeared somewhere. Have you seen him?"
Yes. Conan had an intense distrust of this completely untested new medicine. With his mother around, he had figured he might as well call his best buddy over as a backup, have someone appear in front of Ran, then immediately bail.
He called him his best buddy, but Conan—or rather Kudo Shinichi—had actually met Hattori Heiji only after being shrunk. Hattori was also a high school detective whose deductive ability was in no way inferior to Conan's. He had even directly exposed the fact that Conan was the shrunken Kudo Shinichi.
After hearing Kazuha say this, Ai—who had heard Conan mention Hattori Heiji—raised an eyebrow and turned toward the school grounds.
"Conan, where are you going?" Ran stopped her.
You aren't planning to find somewhere and turn big, are you?
"I'm going to the bathroom, Ran-onee-san."
"I'll go too." Yimi hurried after her, extremely curious whether Ai planned to use the boys' room or the girls' room.
Ai was not actually going to the bathroom. She had already guessed what Conan was trying to do and wanted to go scold him. But now that she thought about it, they really had not discussed how "Kudo Shinichi" planned to make his entrance. Finding one person in such a large school would also be extremely difficult.
"Aren't you going to the bathroom?" Yimi was still following right behind her.
"In places with this many people, you usually have to line up before you can enter the bathroom." Ai casually made up an excuse.
It was not entirely false. Aside from the women's room usually requiring a line, there was no way Ai would use a urinal in the men's room. If all the stalls were occupied, she still had nowhere to go...
Maybe it was because Yimi kept bringing it up, or maybe because Ai had drunk a cup of hot water while pretending to take medicine before leaving, to make the cold act more convincing. Either way, she suddenly really did need to go.
"Wait here. I'm going to the bathroom." Under Yimi's shocked stare, she hurried into the boys' room, praying that at least one stall would be empty.
"Cough, cough!"
Very unfortunately, every door she knocked on answered with a cough.
Ai walked back out in frustration.
"You went to the wrong bathroom." Yimi pointed at her.
Ai did not reply. She turned toward the women's room next door and, miraculously, saw no line at all. Apparently everyone had remembered to use the bathroom before leaving home.
She currently looked like Conan... but Conan also looked only seven years old. If a little kid went into the wrong bathroom, nobody should make too big a deal out of it.
And even if they did, so what? It was not her own appearance anyway. Wouldn't wetting Conan's pants be even harder to explain?
She barely struggled with it at all before walking straight into the women's room.
Then she discovered, to her despair, that every stall door was shut.
"What's wrong?" Yimi followed her inside.
"There aren't any empty stalls."
"Mm." Yimi walked over and knocked on the nearest door for her. "Is someone in there?"
The short-haired woman sitting inside flinched. Already guilty, she did not answer immediately. Instead, she glanced upward to make sure she really had locked the door.
"I think this one, is empty," Yimi said.
"Empty? But the door is locked from the insi—"
Click.
"?"
Right in front of the woman's eyes, the lock turned by itself, allowing Yimi to open the door.
Their gazes met. Yimi and Ai saw the woman holding some unknown tool and drilling a hole into a piece of ice.
"..."
"Get out, kid! This is the women's room!" She shouted at Ai, then hurriedly slammed the door shut again.
"Congratulations, Host, on unlocking the achievement [Hogging the Crapper Without Taking a Dump]. Reward: 5% portal energy."
"Hogging the crapper, without taking a dump." Yimi pointed at the toilet and repeated the achievement—exactly the sort of phrase that would get her mouth pinched by Eri.
Ai stared with Conan-brand dead-fish eyes and silently dragged Yimi back out.
She was certain that door had not opened because of some mechanical failure.
And did that woman really need to react so strongly? She had only been sitting on a closed toilet fiddling with something. The world had toilet-hoggers like her to blame for everything.
...
Despite all the twists and turns, Ai narrowly avoided wetting herself.
By the time the stage play started, she could finally relax. Yimi sat on her left, while Conan's intended backup plan, Hattori Heiji, sat on her right.
"I heard everything from Kudo." He leaned close to Ai and whispered while the opening noise was still loud.
He also took an extra look at Yimi. Conan had not gone so far as to gossip about Yimi to him. Her white hair simply stood out.
Ai did not even look at him. "Then why are you still here?"
"Does my accent sound like I could convincingly play Kudo?" Heiji replied in a strong Osaka accent, then looked toward the stage. "Besides, once I got here, that idiot changed his mind. Said there was something he wanted to tell Ran in person."
"So he succeeded?" Ai kept asking.
Did he manage to turn back to normal?
Heiji did not answer. He still had to deal with Kazuha sitting on his right.
Sonoko had written the script. It was a painfully cliché story about a prince rescuing a Princess. The only interesting part was probably the ending, when the Black Knight took off his mask and revealed his true face, so they needed somebody handsome for the role...
"O knight wrapped from head to toe in darkness, if you are willing to grant this humble Princess's wish, then take off that mask as black as night and show me your true face." Ran delivered the line exactly as she had rehearsed it.
But the Black Knight acting opposite her did not follow the script. He simply cupped Ran's face in both hands and leaned in to kiss her.
"?"
Realizing something, Ai's mouth twitched. She reached over and covered Yimi's curious eyes.
"Mmph!" Yimi unhappily pried at her hand.
Ai noticed that the watch Yimi was wearing today looked wrong.
"Someone's dead!"
At that exact moment, the crowd's shouting interrupted the most exciting part of the play. A bespectacled man had collapsed to the floor, dead.
"How could this happen, Kamata..."
"Everyone, move back! Is there a doctor here?" Mouri Kogoro showed the professionalism of a former police detective.
"I'm a doctor. We came together!" The short-haired woman who had met Yimi and Ai in the bathroom earlier emerged from the crowd. After performing some basic first aid, she could only shake her head helplessly.
Ai's eyelid twitched. "I see."
"You see?" Yimi repeated in confusion.
The identity Ai was playing right now made it inconvenient for her to stand out, so she tugged on Heiji's clothes and motioned for him to bend down. "Unless something unexpected happened, the culprit is that short-haired woman. We saw her drilling a hole in ice in the bathroom. She was probably putting poison inside it."
"Poison!" Yimi, standing beside them, perked up her ears.
"Call the police!"
While Kogoro protected the scene, a young woman covered her mouth. "L-Last week I rejected his proposal. Could it have been because of that...?"
"No. We can't jump to conclusions this early." The Black Knight onstage walked down and instantly became the center of attention in the hall.
Seeing him show off like that, Ai cursed him silently.
"Who are you? Stay away from the scene!" Mouri Kogoro reached out to drive him away.
"Long time no see, old man." The Black Knight helplessly removed his mask, revealing Kudo Shinichi's face.
He had eaten that medicine after all.
"Sh-Shinichi?" Ran stared at him in confusion, then looked just as confused at Ai, who was disguised as Conan.
"Shinichi?" Yimi looked in confusion at the grown-up Conan.
"A stupid high-school detective," Ai answered irritably.
Shinichi was very satisfied with Ran's reaction. At the same time, he glanced from the corner of his eye toward Ai. Even from her eyes alone, he could tell she had to be furious.
Also, Yimi...
Where was Yimi? She had been easy to spot from the stage just moments ago. In a crowd this large, a white-haired little girl should have stood out immediately.
The scene felt terribly familiar to Kudo Shinichi, and a chill crawled up his spine.
Based on his own experience, he turned toward a nearby place convenient for hiding and saw Yimi flip open the watch she had taken at some unknown point, aiming its sight straight at him.
Pew~
Kudo Shinichi felt a sting in his neck.
Is it my turn this time?
Not far away, Heiji stared blankly and pointed at Shinichi as he sank into a solemn sitting pose.
What the hell are you doing?