Happy 2014, everyone! I have here a fanfic that will be posted as I can get through proofreading the rest of this story. Despite the number two in the subtitle, this is a stand-alone story. (Well, actually, there is a prequel, I'm just unlikely to ever write it.)

Knowledge of Harry Potter and Magic Kaito required to understand this story. Knowledge of Detective Conan recommended, even if it only plays a background role in this particular fanfic.

PS, sorry about taking this down earlier. I wasn't quite as ready to post the story as I'd thought. I wanted to have this story completely written before I posted this, so I took this down to redo the ending of the story because I wasn't quite satisfied with it.

Warnings: Criminal protagonist, some violence in the later chapters.

Pairings: KaitoxAoko, RonxHermione.

Disclaimer: Gosho Aoyama is to Magic Kaito as J. K. Rowling is to Harry Potter, and J. K. Rowling is to Harry Potter as I am to nothing on this site.

"You're the most talented detective I know, and I don't expect you to let me down now, Hakuba. Please take a crack at finding Kid's target." Chief Gregors produced a typed note signed with Kid's signature caricature and contained in an evidence bag and slid it across the desk to the teenage detective:

to my friends in england:

trouble will come in a flash. that with a brightness lasting ever longer than the show's product's will disappear from the Century museum on axis street On the night of the twenty 5th at ten. (this prize Now Openly calls the best thief in town.) this town Has other jewels with their own weight in value, but none can compare with the prize of a wise man.

phantom thief 1412

ps, please send a carbon copy of this to homicide, will you? i'm expecting some nasty party crashers.

Hakuba frowned, cupping his head in one hand. "Well, Chief, the phantom thief should know how to use better capitalization and formatting, so the capital letters and italics must mean something."

"In other words, he's using a code?"

Nodding absently, the detective commented, "The guy is fond of them." He opened his notebook and made two columns. The first he labeled as capitalized; the second he labeled as italicized. Then a long pause filled the office as he puzzled over the meaning of the words.

When Hakuba looked stumped, Gregors asked, "It didn't take you this long the last few times you solved Kid's riddles. Is this one particularly hard?"

"Yes," Hakuba responded. "I hate to admit it, but Kid does have the intelligence to leave troublesome riddles when he wants to, and he did engineer a case I couldn't solve. Kid is probably excited about this heist if he made the time and place clear, but made a particularly difficult riddle for the target."

Gregors nodded. "I've seen his intelligence for myself these last few months when he's been hitting England hard. He's the smartest criminal I've ever met."

"Unfortunately," Hakuba grumbled, "and he's mad too."

"My mother used to say nobody could be that sharp without some sort of chemical imbalance in the brain."

Hakuba blinked. "Chemical?" he repeated. The footnote contained the phrase carbon copy instead of the word forward. Could it be a clue?

"That's what she said," the chief confirmed.

"No, not that," said Hakuba. He looked at his columns again and wrote at the bottom of the first: C, O, (NO), and H. He googled the periodic table on his phone to check the chemistry. Frowning, the detective circled the (NO). Nitrogen and oxygen weren't supposed to bond in a one-to-one ratio, however...

Hakuba's eyes jumped to the other column.

His eyes suddenly alight in understanding, Hakuba moved his pen to the other column and wrote the first of the italicized words: axis. He crossed out the a. With the a gone, the letters x, i, and s were left. Rearranged, they spelled six. Axis, six. 5th, five. Town, two. Weight, eight. At the bottom of the column, Hakuba matched the numbers with the letters that had occurred before them, getting C6O5(NO2)2H8. He then rearranged the formula to achieve standard notation and got C6H8(NO2)2O5.

Hakuba returned his attention to his phone and did a search on the formula, hoping it would be a clue for the target. "Nitrocellulose?" he wondered to himself.

"Did you find something?" Gregors asked.

"Perhaps," Hakuba answered, still looking at the information on the compound. He suddenly smirked. "Nitrocellulose is a flammable substance used in explosives. Previously, Kid's worked with explosives in some of his tricks and distractions, and, as he says, 'trouble will come in a flash.' I'm certain he meant to hide the formula for nitrocellulose in his note."

"Explosives!?"

"I doubt he'd hurt anyone with them, but there's always a first time," Hakuba responded. "Now to check the compound against the rest of the riddle." He glanced back over the rest of the note.

"'That with a brightness lasting ever longer than the show's product's,' huh?" Hakuba looked deep in thought. "The target should be something carbon-based, but there must be something about nitrocellulose that's significant. Something that lasts a relatively short time."

Hakuba looked up. "Chief, is there a list of gemstones displayed in the museum? Perhaps someone's tried narrowing potential targets down by checking gemstones against the riddle?"

"As a matter of fact, there is a list. When we got the notice, we sent an officer to get the list of items to be in the museum on the specified date and the backgrounds of each item in hopes that we'd be able to prevent the theft. My men have narrowed the list down to ten items."

"I'd like to see this list and the descriptions."

"Very well. I'll have Carpenter bring it here right away." The chief picked up his radio and ordered just that, then he and the teenage detective sat in silence for a few minutes before a short, young officer came in with the list.

"Here, sir, the list?"

"Give it to our young detective friend."

"Yes. Here, kid, the note said that the thing belonged to a wise man, so we narrowed things down to the Solomon's Scepter, the Platonic Rock, the Clear Buddha, the Wizard's Coal, the Perot Poet, the Davidic Diamond, the Kong Qiu Quartz, the Prometheus Eye, the Owl's Home, and the Thoth's Tablets."

Hakuba remained solemn as he studied the list. "Do you have the museum's descriptions?"

"Yes, here."

The detective took the list and looked over it. He looked triumphant halfway through reading. "That's it," he said.

"Which stone is it?"

Placing the list on the desk, Hakuba declared, "It's the Wizard's Coal. Its name is the reason Kid bothered to put the formula for nitrocellulose into his manifesto. Take a look at the background for this item." As Chief Gregors and Constable Carpenter leaned over the paper, Hakuba explained, "It says that it got its name for the man who discovered it, Taliesin Floyd, who shared the name of a wizard in Welsh folklore, but what interests us is the explanation for the coal part of its name."

"From Latin rubinus," the chief read, "meaning both ruby and coal."

"Yes. There was a myth that rubies have their red color because they contain flames that can never be extinguished. It's not so great a leap from flames to coal. The flames are what make me so certain that this is the jewel Kid's after. If I'm not mistaken, some of the names that came up with my search on nitrocellulose earlier, flash paper, flash cotton, and flash string, are those of products used to create fire tricks in magic shows, and the supposed inextinguishable flames of a ruby would qualify as the same sort of brightness produced by such products."

"In conclusion," Hakuba stated, "Kid is after a gem that belonged to a 'wise man' – a wizard, has a name connected with carbon and a brightness from flames, much like those resulting from the substance whose formula he coded into the note – a ruby called coal: The Wizard's Coal."

Unwillingly, Harry had climbed a rung within the Auror Department. He had received responsibility for all magical cases in the Muggle world.

Harry got his new position after a mass homicide case framing supporters of Muggle rights. He had thought something fishy about the case. He followed his hunch and stumbled across a young Japanese Muggle detective with the same dubiousness.

The young investigator had helped the Aurors get permission for further investigation by finding proof that the suspects who had confessed to the murders could not possibly have committed the crimes, and then he had helped the Aurors find the true culprits. The Japanese detective revealed the motive as a wish to quash the growing Muggle rights movement.

The young detective himself had set off a quiet alarm for Harry. Harry had noticed something off in the grade-schooler's behavior and had investigated the child. Harry had found that the child was a missing high school detective named Shin'ichi Kudou rather than a real grade-schooler.

Harry was promoted for the work he'd done with Shin'ichi, but he knew Shin'ichi had done all the work. Harry felt he deserved no promotion, but he was moved up within the Auror department anyway, on Shin'ichi's account.

The detective had benefited from contact with the Aurors too: the Aurors had restored Shin'ichi to age seventeen with minimal side-effects. However, the Aurors had also wormed the story from him of how he had lost a few years in the first place.

Shin'ichi had done the work that had gotten Harry promoted, so the Auror had protested his rank advancement. Harry's boss had said he showed initiative both in using an unusual source and in investigating Shin'ichi's de-aging, so he had promoted Harry anyway.

Harry's promotion had accompanied other changes in the serial murders' aftermath; significant changes had come through new legislation too. For example, a bill had been proposed sometime in the past month that would allow Aurors to use more magic to protect Muggles if the magic could be explained away. The bill had, today's Daily Prophet informed Harry, passed in the Wizengamot.

Harry was reading an investigative report from Hermione Granger on the possible shrinking potion contained within Apotoxin when something else to read came whizzing through the office door. It was a memo, which Harry snatched from the air with ease. He opened it up to read:

To: Harry Potter

From: Myopia Tolkien, Department of Mysteries

Subject: URGENT

A taboo has been violated for an object in a prophesy that survived the battle against the Dark Lord in our Ministry. The object's taboo has been violated in an environment that concerns both my department and yours.

The object is a powerful magical artifact called the Wizard's Coal. Lost for a century, its name has now reappeared inside a Muggle police station. This worries us because we know our world will be endangered if something in particular happens to Wizard's Coal, something that concerns any law enforcement.

Please send someone to check on the situation for us immediately. We will share pertinent literature on the Wizard's Coal if required.

Regards,

Myopia Tolkien

An urgent notice from and Unspeakable for Harry? Harry wondered why the Wizard's Coal had the Unspeakables so worried while he wrote an Auror in his command, Presbert, an order to go take a look and send the Department of Mysteries word on the Wizard's Coal.

After Harry had sent it off, he picked Hermione's report on the rare side-effects in Apotoxin pills back up. Hermione had found shrinking potions unlikely to be included in the suspicious poison because only Apotoxin's survivors had shrunk.

Although the shrinking Japanese Muggles had only poison in common in their cases, the poison would have shrunken its victims' corpses had it contained shrinking potions. Furthermore, the poison's creator had been as unfamiliar with magic as Harry had been in childhood when she had developed the drug.

Harry was just reading Hermione's call for further research when he received another memo. It read:

To: Harry Potter

From: Myopia Tolkien

Subject: URGENT

The conditions are correct for the prophesy to occur. The prophesy is something we must prevent from coming true. We will brief you in Conference Room D at once. Put together a small team for the emergency and come.

Wishing for the best,

Myopia Tolkien