The Children's Hide-and-Seek
"Everyone has their own way of looking at a Vision, don't they?" Kamisato Ayaka said.
Xia Yu offered an example. "That's right — Ningguang wants to sell them, and Keqing once wanted to destroy hers, though it never quite worked out."
Ayaka went on. "In my eyes, a Vision carries a person's most heartfelt wish and their grandest dreams. For some, losing it means losing their way forward, as if life itself had lost all direction. And yet there are others who see it as nothing more than a convenient tool — and so naturally, they never think much of it at all."
......
Meanwhile, the room where the children had gathered showed no signs of quieting down either.
Perhaps because they had all been pulled into a dream while watching the match, none of the kids felt the least bit tired from staying up. Quite the opposite — every one of them was brimming with energy, eager to start some new activity.
Ayumi's eyes lit up, and she bounced with an idea. "Why don't we play hide-and-seek!"
Genta's face brightened at the suggestion, and he threw his support behind it immediately. "Yeah, yeah! There's tons of places to hide here — it'll be so much fun!"
Conan, staggered as ever by the way these kids jumped from one whim to the next, hurried to cut them off. "Come on, we shouldn't. This is somebody's house — you can't just run around wherever you want."
Mitsuhiko piped up. "We'd only play inside the yard, though. That should be fine, right?"
Klee set down the terminal in her hands and shot her hand up excitedly. "It's okay! Klee just asked Ayaka onee-chan, and she said playing in the yard is fine!"
Then she turned to Conan, who wore a look of resigned exasperation, and added, "Ayaka onee-chan also asked Klee to pass along a message — Ran onee-chan says Conan shouldn't wander off while playing, okay~?"
A dark line crawled down Conan's temple. *Ran is with Ayaka-san now? And why — why of all things — did she specifically tell me that?* Did he really look like the type to wander off that easily?
Conan thought this with a truly remarkable lack of self-awareness.
Haibara read him like an open book and arched a brow, smiling. "My, my. It seems a certain great detective doesn't inspire much confidence in his dear Ran onee-chan."
Conan declined to dignify that with an answer. "Heh..."
With the host's blessing given, Genta and the others threw themselves into planning with unrestrained excitement, and after a whirlwind of discussion they quickly settled the order of hiders and seekers.
The game began, and everyone scattered at once to find their hiding spots.
Several rounds later, it was finally Conan's turn to seek.
He closed his eyes resignedly and began to count. "One... two... three..." Meanwhile the other children fanned out in search of the best hiding places they could find.
When he reached one hundred, Conan slowly opened his eyes and began scanning the grounds for any sign of the others.
He took a few steps forward, studying his surroundings carefully. The corner of his mouth curled up in a sly little grin. "Not bad, you guys. Hiding this well that I can't spot a single one of you."
Then he shook his head and muttered to himself, "And Haibara, of all people — she said she didn't want to play in the first place, and now that it's started, look at her. Completely into it."
Conan got serious. Losing a game of hide-and-seek to a pack of elementary schoolers without finding everyone? That would be far too humiliating — and if Haibara found out, she'd never let him hear the end of it.
As he searched this way and that, his feet carried him, without his noticing, toward the gate of the courtyard. Just as he was about to pass through it, something flickered at the edge of his vision — a small figure, childlike in shape, moving fast. It vanished in an instant, too quickly for him to make out any features.
He let out a soft sigh and grumbled under his breath. "These guys... wasn't the deal that we'd stay inside the yard? And now they're running out of it. What a handful!"
Conan stepped out through the gate as well, intending to track down whichever child had slipped away first.
Turning in the direction the figure had gone, he could just barely make out a small silhouette running off into the distance.
He was about to give chase when his phone suddenly buzzed in his pocket. Instinctively, he looked down, fished it out, and unlocked the screen — and sure enough, the sender was none other than Hattori Heiji, that eternal source of his exasperation.
Conan couldn't help rolling his eyes skyward, silently grumbling about how this guy just wouldn't shut up. Without a moment's hesitation, his finger jabbed the screen dark. After all, Heiji had already sent him no fewer than ten utterly pointless texts tonight alone.
Either he was complaining that Uncle Mouri's snoring was keeping him awake, or speculating about what the Jade Chamber Corp's Akasha Terminal was actually like and whether he ought to buy one and try it, or wondering whether what he'd seen at the Takahashi house had been a hallucination...
And thanks to Hattori's untimely interruption, by the time Conan raised his head again, there was not a soul in sight.
The very child Conan had glimpsed was, at that moment, already in the study of the Kamisato estate, preparing to report to Kamisato Ayato on the results of today's investigation into the Takahashi household.