"Just take care of it quick. We don't know who's gonna end up with the jewel shards while you're on the other side of the well."

"Right. I will."

"....although it's, uh, still the middle of the night, isn't it."

"Then sleep already! I'll take you back in the morning."

"Okay. Thank you."

And she'll pick her stuff up from the woods, convince someone who's aware of how helpful they've been to let her leave her Very Important Demon Hunting Supplies here until she can return to pick them up, repack her backpack to contain only her textbooks and homework, and catch however many hours of sleep there are left to be caught tonight.

(And she will remember to set her alarm clock, this time.)

People will be shocked by her alarm clock! But, you know, demon hunters with their magic gear, not too unreasonable.

And then Inuyasha can haul her back.

She has already observed that he moves very fast in combat; this also applies to long-distance travel, apparently.

They make it back by noon! She gets to have a whole extra half day of modernity! She's so pleased.

"Did you want to stay on this side of the well, or come through again?"

"I've got a day and a half to hunt jewel shards without you slowing me down. Go through and I'll pick you up when you're done."

"All right! I'll see you then!"

And Kagome can go HOME. Her family even installed a ladder when she was gone! She's so happy! 

But now it's time to focus. She's thought of some important things that she wants to do before she heads back, this time. She was honestly planning to try to talk Inuyasha up to staying for both Thursday and Friday, but he's being really really decent about helping her get here in time for her math test, and even gotten her an entire extra half-day, so she's going to use it, and be ready to go when she said she would be. She gives her grandfather a hug (he's the only one home, since it's the middle of the day), tells him she'll be home again for dinner, and then she rushes off.

First thing's first: filter masks. The home improvement store has those fairly heavy-duty half-face masks that people use for working around paint fumes. Kagome doesn't have a lot of money - this'll pretty much wipe out what she's saved from birthdays and occasional chores - but she's gonna buy two anyway. Two demons with poison gas powers in the space of one week is enough that she suspects the toad won't be the last. 

Second thing: drug store. Turns out you can't buy oral antibiotics over the counter, which is... fair... but really inconvenient, given that she'll feel really bad if Nobunaga does get a serious infection and die of it. She's not sure what to do about that. "Just give up" seems like a really bad and cowardly thing to do, but she can't think of a reasonable way to get a prescription, and she definitely doesn't want to try to steal medicine, so she's kind of stuck. She mills around for a bit and ends up buying some extra bandages, some topical antibiotics (which are for infected wounds, right?), and an extra bottle of ibuprofen.

Third thing: the library.

The Shikon jewel is considered to be a legend. But legends do get written about, or at least remembered, even if nobody believes in them; that's what makes them legends in the first place. So if the Shikon jewel is a legend, then it ought to have something written about it, somewhere. And if, in the past, it shattered and caused a ton of trouble for lots of people, there ought to be something written about that, too. And maybe, just maybe, some of those writings will be so kind as to include regions, or specific varieties of demon involved, or even something about her (although she's not sure whether she's dreading that or not).

By bothering the librarian repeatedly and flipping through books that are old enough that she needs a dictionary to fully make sense of them, she's able to determine that her theory is... partly true. There are mentions of the Shikon jewel as a mystical artifact said to grant the wish of whoever possessed it. There are not mentions of anybody shattering it, or of the shattering causing any problems, at least not that she can find. Which is very weird? You'd expect this sort of thing to leave some ripple in the stories people told, if it really did cause all the problems that it seems like it would cause. 

Maybe time has to wind itself up in particular directions, when it bends the rules and lets you go back in time at all. Maybe it has to keep you from catching a glimpse of your future self in the mirror of the past. It wouldn't be the weirdest thing she's seen this week (which is honestly probably still the pocket dimension inside Inuyasha's eye). But it bugs her. 

She heads home late, and arrives in the middle of dinner. Hugs her sister and her nephew. Regales people with an edited-to-be-less-horrible-and-terrifying version of the stories of Sesshomaru and Tetsusaiga and the toad spirit (and Ayako still seems pretty horrified, but at least she also seems impressed and approving). She asks her grandfather whether he knows any stories about the Shikon jewel being shattered. He doesn't. Sota has a pile of new homework for her, which she slips into her bag and then cheerfully resolves to ignore until tomorrow.

By evening she's really too tired to study, but she feels a responsibility - she's not really sure to who, maybe to herself and maybe to her parents and maybe to Inuyasha, of all people, for giving her the chance - to at least try to do well on the test, so she still takes a halfhearted stab at it before going to sleep.

School, the next day, is agony.

Her grandfather has already come up with at least three different illnesses to excuse her absences, instead of coming up with a single chronic illness that could explain a long string of absences. She couldn't just have severe previously-unnoticed juvenile arthritis and call it good? She has to have arthritis and gout, as a middle school student? Really?

Nobody calls her on how stupid it is, but everyone wants to come up to her and wish her well. They tell her they didn't know that arthritis gave you so much bruising. She is, actually, walking and sitting kind of gingerly, between all of her half-healed injuries and the soreness in her poor overworked muscles. She's not very sure whether she's leaning into it here, leaning out of it on the other side of the well, or both.

One of the most popular boys in school shows up to give her a pair of therapeutic sandals, and then Eri and Yuka and Ayumi want to know whether she's going out with him, or whether she wants to go out with him, or whether he wants to go out with her. She would mostly like to die, please, if it isn't too much trouble to anyone. Not that it isn't sweet, but - death. Sweet oblivion. Please.

The only thing worse than her classmates, of course, is class itself. 

She thinks she worked pretty hard to keep up this week. She put in a solid four hours a day of studying and doing homework, which is way more than she's ever been capable of doing on her own before. This is, of course, only about half or a third as much time as everyone else put into studying, because while they were in school, she was biking across feudal Japan.

She's not ready for the test. She doesn't bomb it, she doesn't think, but she doesn't have the new material down well enough to complete all of the problems. She shrinks back in English class because people keep using vocab words she doesn't know yet. Science and history she's fine on, but only in the sense of knowing the answers, not in the sense of having completed all of the associated assignments. She deprioritized those precisely because she's hoping she can make up the points on tests.

Her teachers are sympathetic. They let her stay after school to make up some quizzes she missed. They know she's a good student, even if she's been shaky on reliably turning in every assignment since her parents died last winter. They tell her that everyone understands needing serious medical leave, and that they're allowed to extend her extra time on assignments as long as she completes everything before finals. She agrees to work hard. She doesn't cry, although there might have been a couple seconds where that was pretty touch and go.

It is, really, about the best outcome she could have hoped for, given the choices she's made. But she doesn't come back to the well a conquering hero, as she left it. She comes back a dispirited middle school student who has absolutely trashed her previously quite impressive class standing. 

And she comes back to discover that Inuyasha, who has been TOTALLY NOT camping out in the village and sulking and interrogating random nearby demons for information for the sixth time and occasionally eating wild pigs, is within scent range of the well. (At least, he shows up VERY fast for someone who isn't.)

"Hey."

...well, at least someone is probably no more disappointed in her than they were the last time she saw them, that's heartening. She will try to leave all of her dispiritedness on the other side of the well, though she's not entirely sure it'll work.

"Hey. Got you a present," she says, and holds out one of her filter masks.

"Some of your world's magic?"

She perks up a little, at that. "It's not exactly magic, but kind of. It's supposed to filter toxins out of the air so you can breathe around them while you wear it. I don't know how well it'll work on demon poisons, but I figure after two demons with poison gas attacks in one week - better to have one around than not, right?"

"Sure, why not. How's it work?"

She'll dig the second one out of her pack and put that one on herself, to show him. "Basically, it's got some stuff inside the mask that'll filter out everything in the air that's bigger than a certain size. It's not very comfortable, and it makes it a little harder to breathe than it normally is, so you don't wanna wear it all the time, or anything. But it's better than a face full of poison."

"Smells terrible," he says, attempting to try it on. ("Buckles" are, as it happens, unfamiliar technology.)

She can help him adjust the sizing until it looks like it's made a proper seal, if he's okay with that? 

Actually, by the time it's close to closing around him he'll toss it away with a snarl.

"I can't smell anything except that horrible stuff it's made out of!"

She winces slightly and takes it back.

"Sorry. I guess that makes sense, though. If it's filtering everything out of the air, that'll stop poisons, but it'd also filter out all the particles you're sensing when you smell stuff."

"If that's how it works, fine." It is SO BAD to have no ability to smell, it's like being blind.

"Taken care of everything you need to? We've got jewel shards to find."

Oh yeah, she doesn't even want to think about the modern world until the embarrassment has worked its way back out of her system.

"Yeah! Thanks again. Back to the castle?"

"Don't mention it."