Chapter Text
Kaitou Kid danced through the rafters, watching the three young detectives in the warehouse below scramble through the maze of catwalks and machinery. This was good -- this was very good, they'd never find a way up to the rafters (there wasn't one), and he was slowly leading them to trip over a nice fat clue to the Black Org.
They really should be a little more suspicious, though. Kid didn't go after industrial-quality gems -- nobody attached legends to rocks that were that flawed -- and this much expensive lab machinery shouldn't be set up in a warehouse by the docks. Disassembled and packed in crates, sure, but all hooked up and ready to work..?
"KID!"
Oops, best pay attention -- the kid had spotted him. Kid spun, and the dart got lost in the folds of his billowing cape. A few somersaults back to dodge kicked debris, duck under another missile -- damn, Conan was good at long-range attacks -- and... the engine behind Kid coughed and began to whirr.
Kid leapt to another rafter, half an eye on the trio and half on the machine. A paintcan, one that Conan had kicked at him, was snagged on a lever.
Stupid scientists. You made "on" switches lift just to avoid such accidents.
A slot deep in the bowels of the device fell open, blinding white light shooting straight up. The cavity with the light began to turn downwards... and that was when Kid spotted the massive ruby, directly in line with the white beam. And the fact that the walls and the floor were polished to a reflective sheen.
Trap.
"Ru--!" He never got the word finished. The beam of light hit the ruby, and in an instant the entire warehouse was nothing but crisscrossing red light.
And then, it was nothing but red.
Kid dropped to his stomach, clinging to the rafter, flash-blind. Squeezing his eyes shut did nothing -- the world was a mass of painfully bright red, the setting sun times at least ten and stretched 270 degrees, and felt like the light was searing through his pupils and into his skull.
Slowly, slowly, the high-pitched whine of the engine wound down and came to a clunking, shuddering halt, leaving the world black. Kid kept his white-knuckled grip on the rafter -- there was no way the detectives would be creeping up on him; nobody would be able to see for a few minutes.
Flash-blind. Not permanently. Definitely not permanently... right? The black was fading already. Kid blinked, hard and fast, dark gray taking on colorful misty shapes -- the objects in the warehouse, bright afterimages pressed into his retina, darker spots in vaguely human shapes near the corner of his vision. He'd been partly facing the detectives when the flash happened.
The blinking seemed to be helping. He could distinguish shapes without the afterimages now. The detectives had thrown themselves to the floor, just as Kid had grabbed his rafter. Small wonder. His balance was feeling pretty shaky with his vision still screwy. Kid tried to stand and wobbled. Yup, definitely shaky. They were just lucky that the stupid machine apparently hadn't been finished, for whatever diabolical purposes it was intended to do.
Except his detectives weren't moving. And, as Kid's vision cleared further, they didn't actually look like they'd crouched deliberately, but more like they'd fallen. Crumpled, even. And chances were, they weren't all faking to make Kid come to them...
Shit. The machine had done something, besides deliver a splitting headache.
Kid pulled out his cell phone, coughed to get his voice into a panicked, female range, and dialed emergency.