Inuyasha's distracted, too! Distracted grabbing Kagome to hold her up and keep her out of the way while he looks around for the jewel!

"Hey!"

Something to bind him and make him stop - how are you supposed to come up with a spell on the fly when you don't know anything about how spells are composed, or what things count, or -

She glances at his ears, and some unconscious process hands her what is possibly the dumbest idea she's had today, even given all of its competition. She doesn't have any non-dumb ideas to take its place, though.

"Uh - sit!"

Aaaaaand his face and neck are now supernaturally attracted towards the ground, dragged earthwards by a string of prayer beads!

- wow, that actually worked?

She quickly backs away and glances around until she sees the jewel out of the corner of her eye, unwilling to stop watching Inuyasha for more than half a second at a time. 

The impact of his chin to the ground did more to the ground than to his chin, and he scrambles to his feet and attempts to wrench the necklace off!

It does not wrench.

"You dare -" and he'll give Kagome a death glare -

"Sit!" she says again, desperately hoping that this is the sort of thing that works more than once.

It does!

Twice, however, is not enough for him to give up on attempting to get up and go for VENGEANCE.

Well, she doesn't like the idea of vengeance, so she's going to keep saying it until he stops trying to do that!

That will, in fact, work, in that at some point the necklace's attempts to drive his chin through the rocks will succeed and he will get dunked in the river, still sputtering.

Well, at least that should give her a few seconds.

She's going to - collapse, actually, as her body abruptly decides that she has no more business asking it for anything.

It in fact gives her enough time for Kaede and the villagers to show up, take her back to the village, and offer first aid, water, and thanks.

That sounds nice. She appreciates all of that stuff.

The injury to her abdomen isn't as bad as she'd worried, even with several minutes of heavy running making it worse. She'll probably be okay eventually, if it doesn't get infected. She doesn't think her ankle's broken, either, although she is shaping up to have some truly nasty bruising all over, presumably mostly from being crushed by the centipede.

She goes outside and stares up at the stars for a long time, afterwards. There are a lot of stars. The same ones, though she recognizes them more from constellation maps than from actually looking up at skies that aren't overwhelmed with light pollution.

She feels like there are a lot of things she ought to be thinking, right now, and her brain can't seem to latch onto any of them.

Kaede will come out and sit next to her, uncomfortably, and listen to what Kagome has to say.

Man, what does Kagome have to say about any of this. That is an excellent question that only she can answer. 

"Who was Kikyo?" she asks, eventually.

Kaede is quiet, for a bit, looking at the stars.

"My older sister," she says, quietly. "She was priestess, before me. The most powerful in living memory. The Shikon Jewel was in her keeping, and she protected it - and us - from demons."

Kaede pauses. "It was burned with her, after she died. She said -"

- A pause to collect herself - 

"- She'd take with her, into the next world."

"My grandfather was trying to tell me about the jewel," she says. "I don't remember exactly what he said about it, except that it hadn't existed for a long time, and he wanted to sell replicas of it to tourists who came to the shrine. That was yesterday. And also four hundred and fifty years or so in the future."

"We're supposed to look after the shrine by the sacred oak and the old dry well. But nothing has ever come for them, or for me, not that I knew there was anything for them to come for. No demons, I mean. I've never seen a demon before today. I don't understand how, but - this morning, in the future, I went to find the cat in the building where the well is, and the centipede woman burst out and pulled me down into it. And - something happened, down there, like we ended up somewhere else for a few seconds, a place that was just endless blackness. I pushed her away somehow, I didn't know what I was doing. And when I climbed back out of the well, I was here."

"I'm sorry I didn't say all of that before. It didn't seem - very believable."

Kaede's first instinct is to hit Kagome with a stick. This is relevant information, here!

Except that Kagome is her older sister's reincarnation. Which raises some questions as to who, exactly, is allowed to hit who with sticks.

"Well," she says gruffly, "you did it now."

A pause.

"Five hundred years," she said.

"Hm?"

"You're Kikyo's reincarnation," she says, since the girl isn't following.

"Oh."

Well, that makes as much sense as anything. If it were just the resemblance, that would be one thing, but it also explains...

"Then - taking the jewel to the next world must have made it become a part of her, somehow. And when her soul came back, I guess the Shikon jewel must have come back with it. None of that explains the time travel, though."

"No," she says.

And stares up at the stars, some more, and waits for Kagome to have questions.

Well.

There's a lot she doesn't understand about any of this, but she's probably not going to figure it out tonight. This has to be just about the worst mental state for thinking about complicated stuff in. In terms of more pressing concerns... 

"What's going to happen to the Shikon jewel now?"

"It needs defending."

Another pause.

"That... does seem true."