Hello and good evening!

Yes, your tired eyes can see right: Here it is, the next - and last - part of my fanfiction "Der Rosenkavalier" about Detective Conan. Almost exactly one year after I put part of the Rosenkavalier online for the last time (that was on September 16, 2003), the story continues today.

Of course, the date is not a coincidence. And actually everything was ready about two weeks ago. I was just in Rosolina Mare, a lovely little seaside resort in Italy not far from Venice. There I gave my Rosenkavalier the finishing touches on the beach (thanks to a laptop!).

But try to find a computer with an Internet connection in a corner like this! The Italians probably don't know internet cafes, or they find it boring. In any case, I've seen pretty much one internet terminal in the whole two weeks. I was rushing towards it full of enthusiasm when a sign with the inscription "rotto" (ital.for "defective") ... :-(

At home, the floppy disk on which the text was saved gave up the ghost and I thought: Now everything is over. Thank goodness it was saved on the laptop. Phh! Take a deep breath ...

Then I thought: punctually for the start of the new DC episodes on Tuesday would be a good date! But there was no time again. And and and...

But now the time has come and nothing and nobody can prevent the "Rosenkavalier" from going online today. Unless there is a spontaneous power failure ...

That's why I'd better stop my preface quickly and raise the curtain. To all of those who asked about the story in the long wait, I THANK YOU a thousand times for their interest and their endless PATIENCE. Please excuse my snail's pace !!! I prefer to write more slowly, but all the more beautiful and well thought-out (hopefully ...)

Among other things, I not only wrote the text for this most important part of the story, but also revised it four to five times and repaired small blunders after the actual completion.So you are not holding a rough diamond, but a real gem in your hand! * wink *

All in all, I am particularly satisfied with the result and of course I hope that you will share this view after reading it! I am particularly looking forward to numerous clerks !!!!!

Now let's go: What will Conan do after Sonoko fails with Yukio? Does he have to surrender to Yukio without a fight? Does he still have a chance at Ran? Read for yourself ... Enjoy!

Your Heiji

"Der Rosenkavalier" or Shinichi's greatest competitor "(last part)

The doors closed with a barely audible hiss. The warning lights went out as quickly as they came on. The brakes were released and when the buzzer died down, the train had long since been swallowed up by the darkness of the tunnel.

Conan sat alone by the window and watched the bare walls on the other side of the pane rush past him very close. Not long ago he had been traveling underground in Tokyo.Then he had drifted like an abandoned raft, surrounded by crowds and yet completely alone. He hadn't known where he would end up at the end of the day.

Today he knew with terrifying clarity where he was going. He drove out of the city center, in the direction of Beika. But he didn't want to go home. On the contrary: for the first time in a long time, he had another case - his own. For once, he did not mean the men in black, but solely his love life. His investigation was just beginning to get exciting, and he would have loved to rush towards his goal at twice the speed. He felt a little like a hunting dog that had tasted blood again after a long time.

Probably his idea of ​​putting Sonoko on Yukio had been nothing more than a hasty, quick shot, fired at a moment when he hadn't known what to do without outside help. But since this attempt had now failed, there was only one thing: he had to rely on his own abilities again.So far he had always focused his thoughts on Ran and left no stone unturned to somehow dissuade her from rejecting Shinichi. So far he had failed to take a closer look at her friend Yukio Taniguchi, the root of all his evils, so to speak.

After all, the question was not only what Ran found in Yukio (and Shinichi couldn't give her), but above all what Yukio found in Ran (and Sonoko, as hard as she tried, couldn't offer him).

The train entered the next station. Despite the fact that it was only early noon, a considerable stream of commuters was already pouring into the car. A man in a suit looked critically at the elementary school toddler who was all alone on the subway, then sat down next to him and the next moment mumbled more incomprehensible stuff into his mobile phone.

Conan thought back to his long conversation with Sonoko. Sonoko had temporarily dissuaded him from seeing Yukio in too bad a light.But after their surrender, the vague doubts, premonitions and suspicions were again like ghosts in his head.

Who was Yukio Taniguchi anyway?

Where did he come from

Why did he suddenly appear at Tantei?

Who were his friends?

And: Why Ran? Why not another girl?

These questions had never gotten out of his head. His heart only induced turbulent actions that let him slide from one catastrophe to the next. So he had resolved to only listen to his head in the near future and turned on his mind: Sharp as a yakuza's knife and cold as the ice on Mount Fuji, he knew no mercy. Without his noticing it, his love life had become a mere case in which Yukio was the suspect, Ran the weapon and he himself the victim. A victim, however, that his perpetrator himself determined. And then hunted him down.

So he had let his detective mind work for a while and had come to the conclusion that Yukio was not to be trusted.So far, Ran hadn't let anyone get closer, so how could this guy have done it? That could not be justified with rational arguments. Who was he, that blond, beautiful boy who had appeared so suddenly and messed everything up? But isn't itAinokami, the God of love himself?

Conan had started doing what detectives always did when they suspected something that persisted day and night: he began to investigate. Even if he knew that he was going to betray Ran terribly in this way, he was actually sniffing around in her things. There is always only one truth, he hammered into himself, obsessed with his convictions.

An unexpected opportunity presented itself to him when Sonoko drove Ran to take a cooking class on French specialties. However, it had other things in mind than the consecration ofhaute cuisine: Sonoko was firmly convinced that men who can cook have taste and simply know how to treat women.Apparently as if they were tender okonomiyaki and the question of how to turn them and what flame to roast them without burning them, Conan thought with a thieving smile on his face. As support, Sonoko had brought Ran on board, who incidentally was not suspected of being more versed in cooking than her friend. It was probably more pleasant to be stamped together as a rivet on the stove ...

The other day, on a Friday afternoon, he snuck into Ran's room and had a closer look around. Ran and her best friend were once again hanging over the pots at Ms. Uemori's, a Japanese maîtresse de cuisine with a restaurant and her own cooking school in Shinjuku. Uncle Kogoro, on the other hand, snored loudly and took his afternoon nap on the couch. So he could take his time.

Conan had felt strangely ambivalent about the insides of her cabinets, compartments, and drawers.Even when he was still his normal size, he had been in Ran's room often, for example when they had studied together. But of course he would never have dared to turn her clothes, her books and all the other highly personal things upside down.

None of this was meant for his eyes. The fact that he got to see it anyway sparked a glowing shame that even his detective zeal could not entirely erase. But it also gave him an irrepressible desire to take in every bit of information until his criminalist instinct took off and he had a lead to chase after.

It gave him a painful stab in the stomach area when he saw the picture frame that resided on Ran's windowsill and enjoyed the sunshine: She had exchanged the photo - Yukio had taken Shinichi's place. How frighteningly similar the motifs were! Again it was a snapshot from Tropical Land, another cheerful scene, only this time without him.Was it really that easy for her to switch from one to the other? Obviously Shinichi was about to disappear from Ran's life entirely. All the more he had to work hard to put an end to this ghost.

After all, he'd found the first clue in Ran's pocket diary, one of the most intimate places in a girl's world:

Yukio Taniguchi

37-524-6868

The phone number in itself was not particularly valuable, after all, there were more telephone connections in the Tokyo agglomeration than in all of Hokkaido combined, and it was practically impossible to locate a single one in this vast mess.

In addition, no systematic has been followed when assigning new numbers, so that the number did not even allow conclusions to be drawn about a specific district.

But Conan wouldn't be a detective if this little piece of the puzzle hadn't already helped him a bit. He had just mimed the dear bundle of joy and persuaded his uncle to go to the police headquarters again and visit Inspector Megure.There he stepped away from Kogoro unobtrusively and looked for an abandoned computer workstation.

From the time when he as Shinichi regularly convicted the perpetrators when investigating murder cases that were difficult to solve and was already celebrated by the media as the "savior of the Japanese police", he had retained his own password for the computer network of the Tokyo Criminal Police. He entered it and he had access to the central database of the Japanese police.

For notorious snoopers like Conan alias Shinichi, this represented paradise on earth, as it offered the most extensive data collection on the entire Japanese archipelago.