I still don't own anybody. I only write this because I love the series so much.

Uhh, uhh, I'm sorry this is up so late in the day. I couldn't get the motivation, but I had promised myself that I would write one chapter a day until it was finished, and you guys seemed to like having new chapters. I hope the solution to this mystery isn't too anticlimactic.

After Neuro had told Gigi that the case was solved, for her to please call the local police and Madam Ayame, they settled into the kitchen. Neuro paced as he waited, as was his habit. Yako and Godai sat quietly and talked (widely avoiding the subject of her underwear).

"So her own mother killed her?" Godai asked, stooped over a plate of tortellini. Gigi had taken a liking to the man, apparently, since they had found him most recently being fed from her own personal cook pot. Neuro had made some kind of crack about older women, but Godai had rather uncharacteristically shrugged it off.

"Mm," Yako sighed, "and in a cruel way, too." She had a plate in front of her too, but she couldn't help but feel that her sandwich, the most heavenly thing she'd tasted in a while, was salted with tears. Not literally, of course. Gigi was a good cook, apparently the main reason her husband and she had wed. But the lingering feeling of sadness present in this house made even Yako's temporal distortion of an apatite quiver.

"Yeah, wow... I mean, eating yourself to death, that's... pretty messed up." Neuro leaned over the counter, arms crossed over his waist.

"If you two don't shut up, I'm going to use your skulls for paperweights."

"All our records are digital, asshole!" Godai retorted, but past that he said nothing more- he had heard the footsteps outside the door as well. It was time to begin.

"Sensei is very pleased that all of you have arrived to hear her opinions on this mystery," Neuro cheered out, face radiating honesty. A few women guests tittered at him, and one winked. Neuro ignored the spectators, standing on the side, to fix the three policemen with his rather intimidating stare. Madam Ayame and Gigi sat on stools near the fridges, watching with tense, worn expressions.

Yako, standing at Neuro's side, gave a small sigh. It always went like this. For her, this was the worst part and the best part of the case: she was glad to put away criminals, but she felt like a fraud every time Neuro passed his own thoughts off as hers. Today, though, she reminded herself, she had solved this one. Even Neuro had been surprised at how quickly it had been done, though he hadn't said much on the topic. "...so, yes! Unfortunately, we are certain that this is no misfortune but rather a murder!" He tapped her shoulder gently.

"The murderer is..." Yako raised her arm to point at Madam Ayame, slumped in the exact spot Godai had previously occupied. "You!"

Madam Ayame actually choked, dissolving into a coughing fit amongst the sudden uproar in the room. When things had settled down, Gigi asked carefully,

"But how could that be, Miss Piggish Detective? Ayame ate herself to death, and that's... a rather unusual method of killing. And besides, why on earth would her own mother kill her?" Yako found herself impressed at Gigi's acting. If she hadn't seen the woman in tears but a few hours earlier, she might have suspected that she knew nothing of Ayame's death.

"Look to the spice rack. There are the normal things of an extremely well-stocked kitchen, yes?" Neuro nodded to Yako for her to continue. She felt a small flush of pleasure at the acknowledgment of her achievement and stepped up to the counter.

"But look, up there. The murder weapon is disguised as a bottle of vanilla, but the killer made a serious mistake: Vanilla isn't an herb or a spice!" Yako nodded to Madam Ayame. "You don't cook, so you understandably thought that it would be the perfect hiding place until you could come back and get it."

Madam Ayame looked deeply uncomfortable, but she clamped her jaw shut and assumed a proud expression.

"What is it?" Gigi asked, taking the bottle down and handing it to Yako as if it was a spider. The police, standing together, muttered and straightened up their posture. (Godai wondered privately if they had thought that Yako was just some kind of national joke.)

"Poison," Yako stated firmly, taking the bottle in her hand. Her courage seemed to fail her, though, and she faltered for an instant. Neuro sprang in for her, shooting her a puzzled look.

"You poisoned Miss Ayame, just enough for her to feel the effects. Then you told her the antidote was hidden in one of the items in the pantry and let her do your job for you- she ate herself to death! Because she was so ill and so unused to eating much of anything, she couldn't tell when it became dangerous. She ate the food herself, yes, but it was you that drove her to it!" Neuro grabbed Yako's shoulders and pulled her in front of him at the last minute. "That's what Sensei said!"

The room fell into a worse uproar than before, during which Godai had to grab Gigi from attacking Madam Ayame and Yako handed the bottle of poison to Neuro.

Yako pressed her lips together for a moment, thinking, wondering, trying to figure out how much she dared to ask.

"Why would you do such a terrible thing? Miss Ayame worshiped you. She changed herself to suit you, punished her body to please your tastes." She lowered her head. "I don't understand why you would want to hurt somebody that was already hurting herself." There was a tense silence in which Gigi, still being held back by Godai, hissed low, incoherent words of rage and Madam Ayame stared from Yako to Neuro and back.

She broke the silence with a scream. Yako, watching her transformation through Neuro's power, recoiled from the emaciated, richly clothed woman that flexed in front of them in a fit of nervous pleasure, her eye sockets sunken, her hands nothing more than mere claws of bone.

"That girl! She was always so pudgy, so plump, just like her revolting father! Like a roasted chicken, almost!" The woman curled in on herself, wailing in horror. "But she had my name, and she looked so like me! When I loved my husband it was one thing, but after we divorced, he left me penniless, a used woman- I hated him! Every time I saw her face I saw us in it, especially in all that revolting pudge!"

"Ayame was bone-thin!" Gigi shook with anger, fighting against Godai with all her strength. Yako gasped as she freed an arm from him, but one of the policemen rushed over and helped Godai to settle her down onto a stool, talking quietly with her.

Madam Ayame shook her head. "She would never be thin as she could be. She would never be like me, no matter how much she looked like it! She was just a reminder of what ended and ohhh," Madam Ayame screamed, covering her face, "her disease, you called it, but it was her last chance to be beautiful! She was so close!"

"She was so close to dying!" Howled Gigi, clawing at the counter. The policemen remaining stepped forwards, one sliding handcuffs into his hands. "The only time you helped her, you helped her to die just when she finally wanted to live!"

That night, after the police had taken Madam Ayame away in a haze of lights, Yako lay on her bed, looking up at Neuro as he inspected a vanilla bean he had found in the kitchen.

Gigi had kissed her cheeks so many times that they looked rouged from her lipstick, then showered her in cakes, pies, tortes, cookies, and all manner of delicious things. Yako had eaten as much of it as she could with gusto, but now, lying in bed with a fat stomach and the words of Madam Ayame in her mind, she couldn't help but feel a little... ugly.

Wasn't it true that thinness was beauty? Madam Ayame had come from New York, one of the fashion capitals of the world. She certainly knew. Yako put a hand over her eyes as she thought deeply about the matter. Where did one draw the line, though? When did it become an illness rather than an aspiration to grace?

Miss Ayame had died for her weight and her mother's own selfishness. But she'd been thin, so thin, too thin. She had lost sight of the borders of beauty and health. Yako couldn't help but feel that perhaps she, rather than Miss Ayame, might look a little better if she held back from the sweets a bit. She looked over at the pile of macaroons Gigi had sent Neuro and Yako off to bed with; Godai had been eating pizza and talking with her when they left.

"Aren't you going to eat those, slave?" Neuro asked from the ceiling, dropping the vanilla bean down onto Yako. She caught it and looked at the pile.

"The macaroons?"

"Mm." He dropped onto her bed, landing neatly in a legs-crossed position.

"Well, I was thinking maybe I'd wait to share them with Sasazuka and Ishigaki. After all, Gigi is famous in her own right as a baker. I'm sure they'd like some." Neuro fixed her with a hard stare, his eyes the flat, unfriendly color he usually reserved for criminals.

Yako looked at his hair, unable in the moment to meet his eyes. She wasn't the sort of girl to think much about this kind of thing, but it had stuck in her mind for some reason.

"Humans," Neuro finally said, looking unsure, an expression he usually reserved for matters of the human heart, "are the only species I know of that will starve themselves for some invisible ideal." Yako looked him full in the face at that.

"But Neuro," she sighed, "you're starving yourself up here while waiting for the ultimate mystery, which might never come." It felt cruel to say it, but sometimes she did wonder.

He leaned forwards, expression shifting into a curious blend of aggression and interest.

"But I'm not turning my nose up at perfectly good food in the meantime, am I?" Yako bit her tongue before she could say something stupid. This close to him, she could feel the lightness in her bones that had taken seat over the months, as she grew closer to him.

She knew she loved him- that much was obvious to her. But it mystified her that she did. He was rude, abusive, and definitely not the nice boy her father had wanted for her when she was a girl. A quiet computer programmer, her father had told her, or a tender-hearted businessman, or maybe even a noble restaurant owner: these were acceptable men. A mystery-eating demon from Hell whose main hobby was throwing her out windows and squeezing her skull into a pulp? No, not so much.

Neuro reached forwards and took the bean from her. "You'll get hungry. Eat them." Yako flopped down onto the bed, sighing. She wanted to. She was hungry, too. So Madam Ayame, a woman of the world, had felt that to be skin and bones and nothing else was beauty? So what! She had been sick, sick enough to kill her own daughter. She didn't care what some insane bone-woman thought. But now...

"Nn, I'm too lazy." Yako closed her eyes, feeling the bed rise as Neuro got off. He must have gone back to the ceiling.

"Here," Neuro said, leaning over her to place the platter next to her. "Eat them. Their smell is making me hungry for human flesh!" She turned her head to watch him slide his hand out from under the plate, then caught it in her own and tugged slightly. "I might get hungry enough to eat you, slave." His free hand buried itself in her hair, and he bared his teeth in a blank smile, hand clamping down with iron strength.

"Owowow, Neuroooo!"

But despite his hard words and dangerous tone, Neuro let Yako hold on to his hand for a moment before pulling it free, taking his other hand off her as well. Yako turned her head to the side, suddenly tired from the whole day. She'd been up since the crack of dawn, and she'd even solved the mystery almost entirely by herself.

"I thought you only ate mysteries," she lazed out, trying to decide if she should get under the covers yet. It was still early spring, and the nights were a little too cold yet for her little nightgown.

He responded by removing his jacket and tossing it onto a nearby chair, approaching her with a predatory stalk to his step that Yako didn't recall ever seeing before. Not that she really paid much attention to how he walked, she admitted; usually she was more interested in what he was thinking or when he was next planning on giving her brain damage.

But now, as he approached her with that slow swing to his lean body, his expression focused and intent, Yako fought hard not to react. She'd never hear the end of it, she knew, no matter what his intentions actually were. She couldn't help a quick, nervous little lick of her lower lip, though, something that seemed to make Neuro's eyes slide into that strange half-glow state they had gotten into earlier.

He grinned, thoroughly ruining the moment, then pitched her up so high she almost touched the ceiling. Her scream was impressive even to her ears (though she would have rather not had any reason to let loose in the first place), though Neuro's cackling was louder.

When she landed on the bed, minimally cushioned by Neuro's grip on her ankle, Godai burst into the room in a frenzy.

"What's wrong?!" He shouted. Yako looked at him from under the skirt of her nightgown, butt straight up in the air, horrified. He stared back, looking like nothing so much as a deer in the headlights.

"You see," Neuro purred, releasing Yako, "today her panties had maki rolls on them. Very interesting, yes?"

Yako entertained the thought of biting his ankle but discarded it. He'd probably just throw her into the garden and make her flash the entire resort in the process. Godai, however, didn't seem to harbor the same reservations. He and Neuro were already going at it, and if she knew Godai, he'd be shedding a few manly tears tonight from the pain.

Pulling herself to her feet with a sigh, Yako readied the first-aid kit. Poor Godai, he never gave up. While she waited for them to finish, though...

...well, she did have those macaroons.