Moonlight Magician

Chapter 17

Chapter 17

Shinichi's growth slowed and stopped. She stood up straight, marveling at how far away the ground now seemed. She noticed with vague interest that her clothes seemed to have grown with her, but didn't give it much thought- this was a dream, after all.

She looked at the bird cage. She was taller than it now. She reached out to open it, then stopped when she saw that the doors were being held shut by some intricate, ornate lock.
She had never seen a lock like it. A metal snake, twisting and curling around the doors of the cage, making it impossible to open.

Snake.

Shinichi knew what she had to do.

===

Hakuba leaned back in his seat and watched Kaito carefully. So did the majority of the class.

The reason for this was the look on his face. It was his infamous 'I'm thinking up a humiliating prank' look. That look was a fear-inducing, bowl-clenchingly, heart-hammeringly terrifying frown.
To anyone who didn't know Kaito Kuroba, the expression was just a normal, thoughtful scrunching of the eyebrows. To those who did, this expression was worse than coming home from school to find an alligator in their front rooms.

Kaito, still deep in thought, allowed his eyes wander around the classroom. They lingered on the teacher, who stammered and shook under his gaze, then, to her relief, moved on. He grinned suddenly, causing most of the class to flinch, then brought a notebook out from inside his bag and began to scribble in it.

The class relaxed. The notebook was good. It meant the trick was something he had only just thought of and had to plan, instead of trying it out on them immediately.

All hail the notebook.

===

Shinichi watched the screen in appalled silence, shaking her head. Terrible. The taskforce were terrible. How on earth did they ever manage to get employed?

The reason for her distress was that she had looked away from the screen for two seconds, just two seconds, and in that time, several taskforce men had run into traps.

Traps they had been previously forewarned about, to add insult to injury.

She looked at the white figure on one of the screens, contemplating weeping for the doomed future of the human race.
KID's next comment told her that had already been taken care of.

"I weep for you", he told her through another pilfered earpiece, leaping over a fallen taskforce.

"SHUT UP!"

"Touchy, Nakamori-keibu!"

Shinichi shifted in her seat, uncomfortably aware of how close KID was to the room she was in. The situation wasn't helped by Pandora's voice urging her to run, run, RUN Shinichi, he's getting closer, remember he wants to destroy me, why aren't you running, hey, are you listening to me-

"Shut up", she said.

There was a wounded silence from KID, Nakamroi, and Pandora.

"Now I can hear myself think", she began, then broke off. "No! Hiromu! Duck! Duck under that- IT'S A TRAP, YOU FOOL- oh no", she groaned. "I told you so. Didn't I tell you so?"

"Sorry, Angel", Hiromu said sheepishly.

KID, listening through his earpiece, grinning. Poor Angel. He wondered what it must be like to be smart while surrounded by idiots. "Terrible, aren't they?", he smirked. Seeing no one on his tail, he stopped and took a breather.