Case Closed Fan Fiction ❯ From Egypt To Japan ❯ The stray dog ( Chapter 1 )

I dont know where to start. It's a very complicated story that I want to tell you. Hm, maybe I start where all the weird things began. I mean, my life wasn't really normal before anyway. I am Heji Hattori, and I consider myself as the smartest boy around college. Especially in Egyptian mythology and history I am not to beat. Ask me anything, even when the great pharaoh of this and that dynasty went to pee. I will know it. My mother was from Europe while my dad came from Japan, so I'm a pretty weird mixture. Still I live in Japan, but I speak English, Japanese, Arabian, German, and I can read Chinese and Hieroglyphs. Some just call me the walking book of knowledge.

But all of this doesn't really have to do with my story now that I want to tell you. I wanted to tell you the story of how I went to Egypt during my holidays and stumbled into a tale that had been long forgotten. It still seems very strange and totally irrational, impossible, but it really happened. Take a seat and don't fall off when I tell you what happened.

From Egypt to Japan

Chapter 1: The stray dog

I came across this whole thing as I visited my mother who had left Japan after marrying my father to do researches in Egypt. She had always loved the country and the mythology and all the gods and rituals and the history about all the pharaohs. I guess she must have passed her love for it on to me.

Nevertheless, I arrived on a very hot Monday by plane, and the whole flight wasn't very comfortable at all. It shook, it nearly crashed three times and the seats were hard too. Africa. The worst thing was the camel ride to my mum's camp, from the airport to a hot tent somewhere in the middle of the desert. I nearly fell off the camel when I finally arrived at the camp.

"Heji, my love!!! I missed you so much!!!" My mum greeted me with a big hug that squeezed out the last of my air. "I- ts g.. oo ..d … to … see…. Yo..u… too…. But… pll….e.aaa….sse….. let go……" She dropped me immediately and went over to her little worktable under the tarpaulin that was held by four metal bars. "Heji, you have to look at this!" I barely got onto my feet and lurched forward to see what she found.

I saw a piece of scroll. And it was empty. The ink was long gone and except for rotting, there was nothing interesting about it. "Yeah, mum, it's uhh very interesting." I said and walked away from the table, straight into the tent where there was some water. The tent was surprisingly cool compared to the outside world, and I greedily emptied the water bag that lay on a trunk. It was my mum's tool trunk. She kept all kind of different tools in there because thieves wouldn't get into it without problems.

I shook my head as I thought about it and, after having my strength restored a little, went out of the tent to stroll around a little. "I'll just look around a little, mum." She nodded. "Okay, but don't go away too far. You know how easy you can be lost. Take a camel with you just to be sure." I agreed, a little disappointed. I've been to deserts before and always came back. But my mum didn't know about that. How could she? She'd never seen me after leaving Japan, and she didn't ask too. Probably too lost in all her researching.

I left the camp with a camel and looked around a little. There was a river, just a few kilometres away from our camp, and so I decided to ride over there and check it out a little. Above the sand there was nothing else to be seen yet, but I should find out later that there was much more beneath the ground we walked on.

Anyways, I told the camel to kneel down and after sitting down, it stood up again and started walking. The river was coming closer step by step as something blinking caught my eye. Something had reflected the light of the sun, close to the river, and as we came closer, I noticed a black heap on the floor. Driven with nosiness, I urged the camel to move faster and it did. Short time later I was jumping off the animal to run to the heap in the sand. And to my surprise, it was nothing less than a jackal. But a very strange one.

The wounds he had were pretty deep and he looked starved as well. The strange things were the jewellery he wore. He had some sort of golden crown made of gold with a standing cobra at the front. There were bracelets on his front legs and hind legs, and around the throat he wore a broad golden necklace. Additional, there were two golden Ankh earrings hanging from his battered ears. He reminded me of an ancient Anubis statue, just that Anubis, or the Egyptian jackal in general, didn't wear so much gold stuff.

Suddenly, he winced and opened his eyes, and it came to my mind that the animal was badly wounded and probably needed help. I crouched down next to it and noticed that the small creature was looking at me. It had such a pleading look in his eyes that my heart nearly broke. The poor thing had suffered a lot. I tried to lift it a little and suddenly noticed some blood on the sand where its paws had been. I then realized that the bracelets were really tight and cut into his flesh. The things had to go off!! But as I tried to get them down, he howled out and I left them.

Mum has a welding apparatus, I thought. Yeah great, burn his legs, Heji. Sometimes I can be pretty stupid for my intelligence. I quickly went over to the bored looking camel and got an empty water bag, walked over to the river to fill it and then came back to the jackal ti give him some water and pour some over his wounds. He drank greedily but twitched and whined as his wounds were washed out a little. With his fur wet, I quickly pulled of the bracelets on his front legs and he howled out loud, getting louder as I pulled the other two off aswell. It hurt him but now I could take care of the cuts a little better.

But for a few seconds, the bracelets were of greater interest than the animal. They were - old. Ancient. Museumparts. Hieroglyphs were worked into them and two of them had a little stone too. I tried to read it, but some of the letters were blurred and I couldn't read all of it. Some of it said weird things like "ban" or "keep", and I really wondered why on earth a jackal would wear Egyptian bracelets.

The animal whined some more and so I decided to ride back to the camp where I could treat his wounds better. I put him onto the camel carefully after it kneeled down and sat down behind him. The camel rose and we rode the short piece of track to my mum.

______

"Damn, the silly thing won't come off!" I cursed. The crown thing was off, just like the earrings, but now the necklace and a tiny tail ring I didn't see before were left, and those two were fighting hard to stay where they were. The jackal looked a bit better already but whenever I pulled at the remaining gold pieces, he howled again and winced and whined.

I was about to give up but told myself to try one last time. I took the tail ring between thumb and index finger, pressed and pulled as hard as I could. As if done by magic, it glided off with a yelp of the jackal. I fell backwards and hard onto the ground, but now there was only the necklace left.

"Heji? Honey? Did you eat your dinner yet?" Mum asked as she came into the tent, but I shook my head no. I had been too busy attending the jackal. And it was too hot anyway. My mum left the tent again to go to her own. For privacy we built up a second tent so that each of us had one tent for ourselves.

My mind was back to the jackal for I wondered how I could get the necklace off. The black animal eyed me curious as I circled him to find the weakness of the damned piece of metal around his throat. He scratched his ear, stretched and then lay down again, then scratched his ear again and yawned. So I took a closer look at the region of the necklace that was round his ear. And indeed, there was something like a lock, hard to see and probably even harder to find. I pushed it, and miraculous, the thing went off. As the necklace dropped, the jackal suddenly looked at it wide eyed, then at me, back at the necklace, and, I couldn't believe my eyes, suddenly started to change his form.

The transformation cannot be described with words. It was strange and pretty at the same time. One thing was sure. The dark fur was slowly replaced by shining, golden skin, human skin, and the animal changed into a male human. I just stood there, wide eyed, not believing what I saw. The man stretched his head and as the transformation was finished, the skin stopped glowing. But the figure in front of me looked horrible at first. Cheekbones badly visible, previous wounds still visible, a living skeleton with skin and greyish, silver hair on the head. The figure stood still for a moment before breathing in hard. And with every breath, his body seemed to be restored, for the muscles slowly came back and the hair turned black.

In the end, after a few more minutes, a young boy, probably around 20, so about my age, kneeled on my desk in front of me. I stared at him, and he turned his head to look at me with his dark blue eyes. Eyes that looked like from another world. And that confronted me with the question: what was he? A jackal turned into a man? A man that somehow became a jackal? What was he? And what were those bracelets and other things for? What use did they have when there were words like ban on them? Too many questions at a time.

Title of complete story: From Egypt to Japan

Title of chapter: The stray dog

Author: theblackPhoenixx

Feedback and reviews to: theblackPhoenixx@hotmail.com

Authors Note: It is my first Detective Conan fanfiction, so I would appreciate reviews. Thank you.