ᴅᴀʏʟɪɢʜᴛ || ʀᴀɴᴘᴏᴇ

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If you had told Edogawa Ranpo that vampires were real, he would have scoffed and guffawed and made you feel bad about yourself.

It was a quiet afternoon in early September, not quite autumn but not summer anymore. It was in the hazy point of warm and chilly, the type of weather where you would regret lugging around a coat with you but you would be cold otherwise. The leaves were beginning to dull from a forest green to a dry yellow and they were beginning to delicately fall in the path of Ranpo's walk.

Where was he off to?

He was doing what his manager (whom was more like his father figure), Fukuzawa Yuikichi directly told him not to. Ranpo wasn't going to listen to some forty-or-so man on something he couldn't comprehend. For some insight, Ranpo worked at a private investigator agency named the Armed Detective Agency - the ADA for short. No they weren't armed, they simply wanted to sound different and tough. Ranpo frequently slacked off, despite this he had the most cases solved of any of the other members combined. He had a true gift, one that got him in a lot of trouble with police, criminals and sometimes even the old lady who works at his favourite sweet shop (he had caused some mischief when he asked about her divorce, she had not told anyone and was outraged at his nonchalance as he reached for the lolly standing behind her). He called it super deduction. He first came to that name when he was fourteen, when he had successfully deduced a murder, only to get kidnapped by a gang and have to wait for Fukuzawa to save his ass (the latter was not happy with this, his fighting days were over).

Up until recently, not a single case in his workload was left unsolved - except for one.

It was a harrowing, nagging feeling, one that can only be described as the sensation of a needle digging itself into your fingertips. Not enough to draw blood, but enough to lift the first layer of skin and leave a numb feeling in that area. It felt like a cat scraping its claws across a chalkboard, screeching and ear splitting. Every time he had solved a case, this particular folder would jut out of his drawer tauntingly. It was creased from being revisited so often, scribbles littered the pages and he annotates every possible information on the file. Yet all of this was to no avail.

A number of men had been disappearing from a small town nearby, enough for Yokohama police to be alerted. It had been happening for centuries, but had only recently picked up over the last two years. Journalists broadcast it as a new serial killer of men.

The interesting thing is that there is no calling card or any other signs of a serial killer, the bodies are never recovered and there's no trace of them anywhere else. There is no profiling of this murderer, except that the victims are either sickly or fugitives. There would be no evidence, no fingerprints - even with the latest technology. It's like they are plucked from their beds and vanish into thin air.

People have resorted to the supernatural, witches, vampires, werewolves. Ranpo found it hilarious, the thought of these supernatural beings having some sort of moral code, if they even existed. It had to be a human, it wasn't an animal nor was it supernatural (he wants to laugh at the idea of it). The only way he can figure this out is to get out of the office and onto the field.

He strutted confidently into the town, a town not dissimilar to Kenji's home town. He watched as horses pulled carts of hay and slightly more modern cars bounced up and down on the dirt paths. If he was going to find an answer to this, he would find it here. The people in the area were quiet and humble, they must get a lot of attention from the media due to this serial killer. They would duck their heads and run away at any questions fired their way, much to Ranpo's distaste. However, one young girl, with fiery red hair and clips pinned to the side of her bobbed hair had especially made it known that she knew what was going on. Fear crept in her eyes, as she fought back a quivering lip and sped off. Ranpo knew better than to chase her, as an outsider of a small village was enough to make the residents wary of him. He sighed, getting nowhere. He fished a sour lolly from his pocket and sat on a cobblestone wall, and pouted.