The Color and Border of the Vision
"Heh, I refuse." Camu shot down Curacao's suggestion without a moment's hesitation.
"Why not? Give me a reason." Curacao frowned.
"I have no intention of going through that again — the horror of having someone materialize out of thin air behind my back." Camu wanted absolutely no part of it.
Truth be told, to this very day Camu still couldn't figure out how that Keqing woman had appeared behind him so suddenly.
At the time, although he'd been working on the combination lock, he had kept part of his attention fixed on what was behind him, precisely to guard against someone sneaking up and catching him in the act.
He could swear that before Keqing spoke, he hadn't heard a single footstep behind him. No — forget footsteps, there hadn't even been the sound of breathing. He was half convinced the woman could teleport.
Then there was that strike that had cut his face. He had no idea how it had been dealt, either. Until he understood it, he had no plans whatsoever to infiltrate the Jade Chamber Corp a second time.
Besides, that Miss Ganyu had simply left them there without watching them leave — for all he knew, a trap had been laid and she was just waiting for them to walk right back into it.
Come to think of it, Miss Ganyu had seemed so gentle, yet she'd turned out to be surprisingly cold-hearted. He'd walked all this way with a wound on his face, the blood long since dried and crusted over, and not once had she said a single word about it.
Hearing Camu's reasoning, Curacao lowered her head and thought for a moment, then decided against stirring up more trouble and abandoned the idea.
Meanwhile, on the other side, Mitsuhiko and Klee's detective game had finally unmasked the culprit of the first case.
Once they knew the victim's time of death and the areas where she used to spend her days, they slowly followed the thread, piecing together her identity and her home address.
Then came the canvassing and the elimination of suspects, until at last they caught the killer — the victim's live-in boyfriend.
With the first case wrapped up, Mitsuhiko and Klee collapsed backward onto the sofa, utterly spent.
It had been so much harder than they'd expected. Never in their wildest dreams had they imagined that investigating a single case would take this much time and effort.
They'd even hit a snag early on, when Mitsuhiko picked the wrong choice and slowed the whole investigation down — enough that the culprit sensed something was wrong and fled before the police could reach him.
Left with no alternative, they had to keep digging for clues and figure out where the culprit had run off to, taking one long detour after another before they finally brought him to justice.
With the game at a natural stopping point, Mitsuhiko tossed his controller aside — clearly, he had no intention of playing any further.
Around then, Ran glanced at the darkening sky and decided it was getting late, so she gathered the children to say their goodbyes to Klee, Kaeya, and the others.
On the way home, Haibara had been about to say something to Conan when, from the corner of her eye, she saw that Hondo Eisuke slowly drifting over to Conan's side. She stopped herself, deliberately eased away from Conan, and moved over beside Genta, using his bulk as cover to screen herself from view.
"Conan, why are you so interested in Kaeya? Did that Kaeya guy do something strange before?" Hondo Eisuke leaned close and asked in a low voice.
He'd noticed that during the game, Conan kept splitting off part of his attention toward Ran and the others. Kaeya especially — Conan's eyes had darted over to him no fewer than ten times, more often than he'd looked at Ran.
Heh — does "being in contact with the Black Organization" count as strange enough? Conan thought wryly.
Obviously, that wasn't something he could tell anyone, so he fumbled together an excuse to brush Hondo Eisuke off.
"N-no, of course not! I was just curious about the eyepatch Kaeya-niichan wears — I thought it looked cool, so I kept glancing at it. Haha."
When Hondo Eisuke didn't press the matter further, Conan, believing he'd successfully talked his way out of it, let out a quiet breath of relief.
He had also noticed Haibara seemingly about to tell him something earlier, which was why, at the parting, he'd raised a fuss about not being done playing yet and insisted on going to Professor Agasa's house to continue — angling to spend the night there.
In the end, after collecting a lump on his head and a complaint from Sonoko — "Honestly, this little glasses-wearing brat can be so spoiled sometimes. Ran, don't indulge him too much" — he parted ways with Ran and the others.
The moment they arrived at the Agasa Residence, Conan wasted no time asking Haibara what she'd wanted to tell him on the way.
Hearing the commotion from the living room, Professor Agasa came out to check, assuming Ai had returned — only to be startled to find that Shinichi was there as well.
Thinking something must have happened, he asked worriedly, "Shinichi, what are you doing here? Don't tell me something went wrong while you were playing with Klee today?" He directed that last question to both Shinichi and Ai.
"Nothing happened, Professor — there's no need to worry." Haibara answered Agasa's question first, then turned to Conan. "What I wanted to ask you was this: what do you make of the relationship between Kaeya and Diluc? Do you think Diluc knows that Kaeya has ties to the Black Organization?"
"I'm... not really sure."
For once, Conan found himself genuinely wavering.
Going by Kaeya's attitude whenever Diluc came up, Conan had originally assumed the two of them were on bad terms — and that Diluc therefore had nothing to do with that mysterious organization.
But the moment they met today, he knew he'd been wrong. And there was more: one of Klee's brothers turned out to belong to that organization too. Having laid eyes on so many Visions at once, Conan was starting to go a little numb to it all.
Naturally, since Diluc also bore a Vision, the logical conclusion would be that he knew what Kaeya was up to. But he had to admit, after spending time with him today, the impression Diluc gave off had thrown Conan into confusion.
From Diluc's take on some of the choices in the game, Conan felt that Diluc was like a knight brimming with a sense of justice — a man who wanted to burn away sin like an all-consuming flame. In short, he was the complete opposite of the vibe Kaeya gave off.
Like fire and ice — utterly incapable of mixing.
Come to think of it, the colors of their Visions matched their personalities perfectly. And Klee and Xiangling, who bore the same fire-colored Visions as Diluc, were likewise cheerful and bright. Could it be that the color of a Vision corresponded to its bearer's personality?
At that thought, Conan hurriedly shared his new discovery with Haibara.
Haibara mulled it over for a while and had to concede it made sense.
She couldn't explain why the color of a Vision would relate to personality, but the line of thinking couldn't be wrong.
If color was one clue, then the border of a Vision had to carry another meaning entirely.
Haibara speculated it might have to do with faction affiliation — much like the Black Organization she'd once belonged to, with its intelligence division, operations division, and research division, that organization surely had its own internal structure.
Professor Agasa and Conan recalled that people with the same Vision border generally knew each other, while those with different borders behaved like strangers to one another — so they both nodded in agreement with Haibara's theory.
But at the end of the day, he still had no idea what Kaeya's purpose was in maintaining contact with the Black Organization.
Conan still leaned toward the theory that Diluc did know about Kaeya's connection to the Black Organization — and had simply chosen to let it be.