And a giant horrible six-armed monster centipede-woman bursts out of the well and grabs her with all six arms to drag her in!

Well, however much she did or didn't believe in the supernatural before, she believes in it a lot more now!! Not that that's really the most important thing to be thinking about, here!!

She screams, and desperately tries to grab onto the edge of the well as she passes it. She misses, and then gets dragged down, down, down, farther than she thinks any reasonable well can possibly go.

The entire bottom... majority... of the centipede-woman is a skeleton! It's like there's just a BUNCH of people's spines, all joined up together, with their arms as her many centipede-legs!

It's regrowing now, though, into something much more centipede-like, as the horrible monster woman REGENERATES.

"Life..." Her eyes begin shining. "Life and power, power and joy..."

There are definitely circumstances under which Kagome would feel that the correct course of action here was to figure out what the centipede woman wants - whether it definitely meant to attack her, and whether there's any way to get it life and joy in a way that doesn't lead to her immediate demise. Calmer circumstances. Saner circumstances. Circumstances where she had time to think about the theoretically ideal course of action.

What she actually does, under the circumstances that she is actually in, is try to kick the centipede woman in the face.

The centipede-woman currently has her gripped with six arms! GETTING her foot to the centipede's face is mildly tricky.

... Aaaand doesn't do much anyway.

"Where is the jewel, priestess?" the centipede-woman hisses. "Where is the jewel of four souls? I can smell it on you..."

"I don't have a jewel! Leave me ALONE!"

She tries to push the centipede woman away, desperate and scared and not really expecting it to work, only for some kind of force to erupt from her hands, momentarily filling the darkness with blinding light.

Well that's definitely never happened before.

The centipede-woman does NOT like this! At all!!!! She loses her grip and plummets into the darkness, cursing as she goes!

(There's rather a lot of darkness.)

And then Kagome lands on packed earth at the bottom of the dry well! She can see sunlight from the well's entrance, sunlight and some scraggly plants that have crept over the well's rim.

Hey, there's the centipede-woman, almost completely buried under a whole lot of dirt, barring one arm that does not look as dead as you'd expect from someone (or someTHING) buried that deep!

Kagome really wants to get out of this well! This well seems like a pretty terrible place!

She doesn't have a lot of experience climbing vines, and kind of expects them to break under her weight anyway, but if she can reach any of the vines from here she's at least going to try to use them to haul herself out of here. Otherwise she'll be left with... screaming? That doesn't seem like a very promising plan, but it'd be better than just sitting here waiting for the centipede to unearth itself?

Between rocks, vines, and the very strong desire not to be eaten by a giant monster centipede, she can indeed make it out of the old well before the aforementioned centipede digs its way out!

Surrounding the old well, where there was a shrine five minutes ago, is a forest. It looks like a Japanese forest, if she has forest-recognizing skills, but it is very much not Tokyo, which is where she was, again, five minutes ago.

Well.

She probably did not somehow destroy Tokyo. Okay. Next theory.

It could be a fantasy world? You hear stories about people falling into fantasy worlds sometimes. Fictional stories, but they could have been inspired by something that really happened to someone, once, maybe, and a well is the sort of place you might expect to find a portal to another world, if you were going to find one anywhere, which you probably wouldn't.

She could have gone insane. It probably says something about her that this is her third theory instead of her first. It'd be a very abrupt and total kind of insanity, though, and she doesn't feel fuzzy or confused, really - well, okay, she feels very confused, actually, and even if she doesn't think that it's the right kind of confusion, an insane person probably wouldn't think so either. Recognizing insanity from the inside must be pretty hard, or people would be able to cope with it better. It's worth keeping in mind as a possibility, even if it doesn't seem likely.

She could be dreaming, and it probably says even more about her that this is her fourth theory. But if she's dreaming, none of this really matters, so it doesn't make much sense to act like it's a dream. Anyway, she doesn't feel fuzzy like she thinks she would if this were a dream.

If this is real, then she probably wants to put some distance between herself and the centipede. If it isn't... there's probably no harm in putting some distance between herself and the centipede. She just needs to make sure that she can find the well again later.

She tries to take in her position. She takes a few deep breaths. And, after a moment or two, she walks off into the forest.

It sure looks like a forest! There's trees and scrub and bushes and squirrels and little birds... no houses anywhere, though.

There's a pretty enormous tree thataways, looks a little like the sacred (read: tourist attraction) tree on her family's property, if somewhat smaller? 

Now that she's decided on a course of action... the fact that the course of action was kind of ill-conceived and vague and had no further steps to it is kind of catching up to her. She could easily end up wandering around this forest until she dies. Probably that's silly, she can always go back to the well and see whether it works as a portal in the other direction. If that doesn't work, and she can't find anything useful (people, a stream to follow, something magical...) after an hour of searching, then she can panic.

In the meantime, she makes her way over to the tree that looks a little like the tree that might or might not be sacred. It'll be good to have a second landmark around here.

Well, it has one major difference: There's a teenage boy with ADORABLE FLUFFY dog ears and white hair pinned to it by an arrow.

He's been there for a long time, based on the plants that have grown up to surround him; his feet are pressed into hollows on the tree, and he hangs there limply, as completely relaxed as if he was just ordinarily asleep.

...well, that seems like some solid evidence for the fantasy world hypothesis. 

Is he dead? He doesn't look dead. Or, well, he does look like he may have been fatally stabbed through the chest with an arrow. He doesn't look like he's decaying, which you'd expect him to be if he'd been pinned long enough for the vines to have come up around him. Unless the vines are alive. Or, well, technically all vines are alive. Unless the vines are unusually mobile. Which could happen! It's not any weirder than him having been preserved this well, or any weirder than a six-armed centipede woman dragging you through a well into a fantasy world in the first place!

She throws a stick at the base of the vines. Just to make sure the vines don't do anything about it.

Nope! The vines have nothing to say on the topic!

Well, they could be waiting for an opportune moment, but this is the first potentially useful thing she's found, and she's going to risk it. Hopefully if he wakes up he'll be nicer than the centipede woman.

She climbs up the vines enough to check if he's still breathing.

The pinned person is breathing, and neither he nor the vines tries anything!

Then he must be alive after all. Having all of your weight on an arrow through one of your lungs can't be good for you, though. Maybe it's less bad for you if you're whatever he is? He doesn't look quite like a human, and the last thing she met that wasn't quite like a human did not really seem like it could be easily injured. She also wasn't very nice, but there's not necessarily reason to believe that everyone who isn't a human is as mean as the centipede woman. Although, if they are, she might not get away a second time, unless the vines can hold him. They do look like pretty serious vines.

If he's only sleeping, it stands to reason that he can be woken up. And if nobody here is a human, a person who's pinned to a tree might one of the safest people to get answers from.

This doesn't mean she knows how to wake him up. Probably talking won't work, but you never know. 

"Hello?"

Her voice is punctuated by the sound of an arrow hitting the tree!

"Get back!" The voice has an archaic accent (which I will not attempt to transcribe here) and other than that is about the sort of tone you'd use if you saw that someone was cheerfully attempting to pour a pot of boiling sugar all over themselves, the floor, the counter, and the flammable things.

Kagome lets out an undignified squeak, and then whirls around to see who's attacking her now.

(Meanwhile, her, the yell, and the voice makes him... shift in his sleep slightly?

He is SO ADORABLE that he clearly cannot be any kind of horrible monster such that people would treat the possibility of getting physically near him as equivalent to sticking your head in a nuclear reactor.)

The answer would summarize to "several short very poor people with bows!" They look less like the fancy bows used for the formal sport of Archery and more like the sort of things you could make in your basement if you had access to a tree, a knife, and patience.

They can, however, shoot arrows.

"Are you crazy, girl?" one of them demands.

Oh, sure, ask her that like she knows.

"Maybe??"

Given that she is clearly insane, they propose grabbing her, tying her up, and removing her from a wood that they are in fact prepared to explain is haunted. Which part of that does she object to first?

The grabbing her and tying her up! She's perfectly willing to leave with them on her own! She was looking for humans anyway!

Then they are grudgingly willing to metaphorically drag her off, as long as she doesn't make any sudden moves.

"That's Inuyasha's woods, it is! What were you thinking?"

"I wasn't thinking anything! I was dragged in there by a monster!"

Technically she was definitely thinking some things before she got to the point of trying to wake up the boy who's stuck to the tree, but she's going to try to elide that part of this story.

They're somewhat disturbed by that part. 

"Another demon in Inuyasha's wood?" one murmurs. "The priestess will have to know."

Pause.

(There is now some consideration of the fact that she is wearing whites, which are impossible to keep white, and strong vibrant colors that you need to buy expensive dye for, suggesting that she may be Super Rich And Therefore Powerful, something they were slightly too busy to consider when it looked like she was going to wake up the terrifying monster dog.)

"Where did you see it? Where did it go?"

"What did it look like?" someone more sensible adds.

"It's at the bottom of the well." Oh no, is she going to have to explain that part, the story of how it got to be at the bottom of the well contains some elements that kind of seem like they might be unbelievable even if you're from a fantasy world, and she doesn't know whether she wants to tell anyone about the light yet. Maybe she can just hope that they get fixated on some other part of the story until she's slightly more sure of her position, here. "It was a giant centipede, with the upper body of a woman with six arms and big fangs."

They don't seem to recognize this description but see nothing unusual about it.

(They're approaching the village, by this point. It looks like everyone had to make those houses by themselves, by hand, with no tools; they're all one-story, wood, and surrounded by farms.)

Well, that's about what you'd expect from an outlying village in a fantasy world, right? Of course, there's no particular reason that a fantasy world should look the way she expects it to, maybe it not being weird enough should count as evidence that she's making this all up...

She's going to keep quiet and see what they do, if they're not going to press her for details.

They are going to metaphorically drag her (with the implicit threat, at all times, of physically dragging her) before a Very Old Woman, with one eye, dressed as a priestess, while simultaneously explaining everything out of order. She looks old, and grumpy, and like way too much has already happened today for her comfort.

"Who are you?" she snaps at Kagome.

What a good question that she doesn't really have an answer to.

"I'm Kagome Higurashi," she says, as apologetically as she can, since that's really no answer at all. "I was dragged into the woods by a centipede monster, and when I got away I didn't know where to go."

There's something about her - 

- It seems oddly familiar - 

- Not even overtly, but - the shape of her face, her motions - Kaede peers closer - 

(It is reasonably obvious that she looks like she's seen a ghost.)

- like someone who died -

Shapeshifter.

Shit.

Well, she presumably already knows she looks like Kikyo, so there's no point in telling her...

"She was next to Inuyasha!"

... That's bad.

"And what were you doing there, eh?"

"I was lost! I don't know anything about him, he was just the first thing I ran into after I got away."

"Those woods are dangerous," she says. 

... But is willing to relax slightly because Kagome is being so apologetic.

"Well, we can host you," she says grudgingly. "Where are you from?" With her odd clothes, it can't be any of the neighboring villages...

"I'm... not sure how to get there from here. I'm from a city called Tokyo. In Japan," she adds, as if that'll help. It is kind of weird that the people here speak Japanese at all, isn't it. It's sometimes like that in stories, but really you'd expect that if you were in a different world with very little contact with your own, then everyone in it would speak some other language...

"This is Japan," she says. "Never heard of Tokyo." 'Eastern Capital?' Sounds dramatic. Kaede tries to avoid drama, albeit often unsuccessfully.

Wait, what? If this is Japan - actually Japan, and not a part of a fantasy world that happens to be contiguous with Japan, and has the same tree species and an older version of the same language, then - where did normal Japan go. What happened to it. What is this place. Why is there a copy of Japan where everything is -

"What... year is it," asks Kagome, quietly.

"Seventeenth year of Tenbun," she says. Frowns. "Eighteenth? Eh." 

This is the past. How many years in the past is that? Five hundred? Four fifty? Somewhere in there?

The past isn't really supposed to have centipede monster people messing with people either. She supposes that it's slightly less surprising than there being centipede monster people in modern-day Tokyo, but you'd really expect people to be clearer on giant centipede monsters having existed if they went around abducting people! And even if they did exist, and did abduct people, you wouldn't expect them to be able to abduct people from the future back to the Sengoku period! That's insane! 

You probably can't just travel back and forth between the past and future. It seems like it would mess a lot of things up, if you could. A lot more than if you could travel back and forth between the normal world and a fantasy world. Meaning that she might be stuck here, with the knowledge that one wrong step could butterfly effect everyone she's ever cared about away from ever existing.

"Oh."

"What year did you think it was?"

She'll humor this theory, highly implausible even by the standards of someone whose sister fell in love with, and then was murdered by, a demon.

She feels really tired. This isn't really how she would have expected herself to react to falling through a portal to the past - it's probably kind of exciting, on some level, and she'd kind of like to be able to be excited - but now that she's figured it out, if she's figured it out, she mostly feels tired and scared and alone, and kind of unsure which direction to be doubting her own sanity in. She couldn't have imagined the future, right? She can't possibly be creative enough for that.

"Uh. Later than that." The specific year won't mean anything to them. "I guess that doesn't make very much sense."

Not really, no.

"It's a strange world," she'll say grudgingly.

Pause.

"Need anything to eat?"

Well, she did have breakfast... some amount of time ago... but since then she's been attacked by a centipede monster, dragged four and a half centuries into the past, spent a bunch of time tromping through the woods, had an arrow shot at her, and realized that she is quite possibly never going to see anyone she cares about ever again, which is probably enough for anyone to do on just one meal.

She will very sincerely thank them for the food, and have something to eat.

Then they can provide food! (Rice and small amounts of vegetables, of the sort easy to grow alongside rice.)

Kaede will give her a funny look while she eats, though. Possibly this is just the time-traveler thing?

Well, the entire situation is pretty weird. She would probably stare, too.

Eventually she'll need to figure out how to take care of herself and not just expect to impose on everyone around her forever. She's still figuring out how to ask about that. Maybe they'll throw her a lifeline there once it's clearer that she doesn't have anywhere to go back to.

"You look like my sister used to," Kaede says abruptly.

Best to get it over with. If she's going to turn into a monster, she should turn into a monster.

- oh is she supposed to have an answer to that? Was that not just a friendly observation?

"I do?"

Kaede nods. "She died a long time ago."

"Oh. ...I'm sorry."

And at some point this girl will - 

No, instead the GIANT CENTIPEDE MONSTER is back for Round Two! She's announcing her arrival by punting a horse through the wall of the building, the horse apparently having been left here.

"Give me the JEWEL!" she snarls.

(Things she is apparently immune to include spears, arrows, and accidentally running into buildings. The buildings get the worst of it.)

Ack! 

She doesn't have a jewel! Why does the centipede think she does! She said something about that before, right, something about the jewel of four souls. She knows that phrase, now that she thinks about it again. Her grandfather was talking about a jewel of four souls when he showed her the keychains that they were going to sell to tourists, yesterday, but if he said anything remotely useful about it, she doesn't remember.

She doesn't still have one of those plastic replicas on her, does she? That can't be it, can it?

She'll have to think about this while she runs. The centipede is clearly after her, not any of these other people. If none of them can fight it, then she's putting everyone else in danger for no reason by being here, and she needs to get out of the village as quickly as possible. 

She runs. 

Oh, it is absolutely after her. It's got no real interest in anyone else! "I can smell it on you, priestess!"

HOW COULD SHE POSSIBLY BE SO STUPID -

"You brought the shikon jewel here???" No wonder Mistress Centipede is after - 

- wait how did she get - 

- oh no -

She is, however, Insufficiently Fast for Kagome not to be able to get away very quickly.

At this point, it's late enough that it's pretty dark everywhere, barring the giant mysterious glowing light back in the forest where she came from.

Is this a positive or a negative, when it comes to determining a running direction?

Why is there a giant mysterious glowing light!!

The villagers can't do anything to it, and it's much, much faster than Kagome is, so she won't be able to get very far. She doesn't know what's in the forest, right now, but the last time there was a mysterious glowing light, it was pretty bad for the centipede, so -

Into the forest! Back towards the tree, so that she can find the well, because if there's nothing actually useful in here then the only thing that even might work is trying to go through the well again, even though that'll almost certainly fail -

And Mistress Centipede completely breaks off fighting the villagers (who will, indeed, shoot a last few futile arrows) before chasing Kagome!

"Give me back the Jewel of Four Souls!"

She's really very insistent! She has a little trouble maneuvering between the houses and trees without knocking them down, but that does not stop her from picking up speed exceedingly quickly, on the flat!

"I don't have it!" she yells, patting herself down to make sure she also doesn't have anything resembling it. She doesn't seem to. Nothing to throw to the centipede, then, and hope that it's somehow satisfied. 

She darts into the forest, wincing at the sound of things crashing behind her. There had better be something else in here, because her chances of making all the way to the well are looking like slim to none, from here, and she has no idea how to trigger whatever she did last time.

"Someone!" she screams, as loudly as she can. "Anyone! Help!"

Mistress Centipede is not going to believe this woman's LIES. Not when she could, instead, eat her.

There is, as it happens, something else in here. The glow seems to come from the great sacred tree, almost completely... or, in part, from the arrow in it.

Or, perhaps, from the young man whose chest the arrow is embedded in.

"Why are you toying with her, Kikyo?"

His smile is vicious. "Isn't Mistress Centipede beneath you?"

"I'm not toying with anyone! I don't have it!" 

It does not actually occur to her that he might be suggesting that she fight the thing, instead of just giving it the jewel she doesn't have. Not that she's at all sure how he knows about this supposed jewel, either.

"You're letting her think she has a chance. I'd say that's toying with someone. Seems to be a specialty of yours, isn't it?"

This conversation isn't making any sense. She'd like to be able to figure out what pieces she's missing, but she doesn't exactly have a lot of time to spare for a drawn-out negotiation, and she's barely holding it together anyway. She can't even keep the anger and fear out of her voice. "I have no idea what you're talking about!"

A tree crashes to the ground behind her. There's no time.

"Can you fight it?" she demands.

Why does Kikyo even need to - 

He sniffs - 

"You aren't Kikyo, are you?" He grins, showing fangs. "Girl, I can fight anything."

That seems kind of doubtful, but she's loving the confidence right now. Even if he is... also a monster? She's kind of not buying the saying about the devil you know, right now. Probably whoever coined it was dealing with a less immediately destructive devil.

"I'm not Kikyo," she confirms. "And if you want to know anything else about it, you'll need to kill the thing that's after me, or I won't be around to have any more of this conversation."

"Fine with me. Now just pull -

I HAVE OPINIONS ABOUT THIS CONVERSATION AND THEY ARE THAT KAGOME IS NOT BEING SUFFICIENTLY EATEN

Current plan: RIP HER STOMACH OUT

WITH FANGS

(the fangs are new)

If Kagome were calmer, she would probably be embarrassed about the amount of screaming she's doing today. Of course, if she were calmer, she would probably not have as many reasons to scream. 

She runs towards the tree. There's not much further to run, there, but Inuyasha is seeming like a much better option than the well, right now. She reaches out for him, blindly, with one hand, and with the other, she tries to do the thing again. Last time she was mostly feeling blind terror, which is very convenient, because that's pretty much what she's feeling right now, too.

"LEAVE ME ALONE!"

(Not a very inspiring battle cry, admittedly, but it's what she said last time, and she's not inclined to get experimental right now.)

It continues to work! Mistress Centipede is not happy about it working!

"Told you you could do it."

And that is about when Kaede and a bunch of villagers with nets show up! Their strategy, as is clear, is less to try to shoot her full of holes (that not having worked) than to ensnare her; to hope that several dozen people, all pulling at once, can out-tug-of-war a giant centipede monster, especially if the giant centipede monster can't use its leverage properly.

She's blown the centipede's arms clean off, this time. Why does that work? What is it? Why can she do it, if not everyone can?

As the light fades, she notices that it hasn't completely dissipated. There's a light coming from inside her. Not from her heart, or her hands, places she might expect a power like this to be situated, but from a small orb of light situated on one side of her abdomen, just the same size as...

The jewel of four souls.

The jewel of four souls is physically inside her. And it glows the same way that the attack does. Does that mean - 

Turns out giant centipede monsters are really good at tug-of-war, and also that trying to restrain them with rope nets is about as dumb as trying to restrain them with wet paper towels.

Also that they can see glowing magic jewels.

Nom!

You'd think that having your abdomen ripped open would be the sort of thing that you couldn't help but scream about. Instead, though, Kagome simply whimpers and falls down, clutching her side and staring stupidly up at the centipede monster.

"GET ME OUT!"

"MINE!"

And she swallows the jewel.

Her skin sort of ripples, her appearance becoming even more monstrous - she's even longer than she was before, and in a moment she wraps around Kagome and the tree both, crushing her against it - her arms are starting to grow back -

"Just pull the arrow out, you stupid girl!"

"Do not release Inuyasha!"

She knows she needs to make a decision, here, and make one now - but it feels like the moment in a story when someone makes a terrible decision they can't take back, and also like a moment where any hesitation will allow the one thing that might save you to pass you by, and it turns out that it's really hard to think things through carefully when two people you don't actually know at all are yelling opposite things at you as a centipede monster crushes you to death and your blood oozes out of you through a wound that could easily be fatal anyway, in this century. Maybe she's dead already, but she doesn't feel dead, and she doesn't want to die, but she doesn't want to get anyone else killed, either - 

"We can't fight it alone!" she yells back.

"He is worse!"

"Yeah, but nobody here's pissed me off except Mistress Centipede."

(pause.)

"Hey, Mistress Centipede! You hear that! Fifteen seconds and you're dead!"

"Bold words, from a little half-demon who can't even scratch his nose. Fell out with your girlfriend, did you?"

She squeezes harder. 

"LET ME OUT!"

If she takes any more time, she's going to die. The centipede, newly empowered by her and her failure to keep the jewel away from it, will go on hurt more people.

She'll go over it in her head again and again, later, trying to decide whether it was cowardice or courage, an abandonment of her obligations or the fulfillment of them, that led her to pull the arrow out. The truth, or the nearest thing to it, is only that he sounded sincere, and that she felt better about dying of foolish trust than of foolish cynicism.

She reaches up as far as she can, straining to move, and pulls on the arrow until it shatters like glass in her hands.

It starts with laughter, joyeous laughter and the dog-demon stretching his arms, arms that end in hands with very sharp claws -

And then, very quickly, instead of Mistress Centipede there's lot of chunks of very dead monster tumbling to the ground.

"And you doubted me."

She laughs slightly, nervous and relieved, and stops when the wound in her side complains about it. "Thank you."

"Great!" He'll start looking around for the jewel. "Problem solved." His eyes pass over the villagers without recognition. "Next question: Which way's Kikyo?"

"I want to thank her for my nice nap."

"She's dead."

"Tsssh. Mortals. Keep doing that." 

What was that reaction?

- later, the centipede is doing something. "It's still moving!"

Kaede's - looking at it - 

This has been a VERY LONG DAY and for some reason it isn't over - 

- If she's really lucky Inuyasha will get bored and wander off - 

"The Shikon Jewel gives power to demons. So long as she has it, she cannot be slain." 

Pause. Kagome seems to have a lot of power. "Do you see it?"

Does she see - no, not immediately, it's not on the ground - wait -

She can see a portion of the centipede glowing, the way she saw it glow when it was inside of her. Her limbs feel like lead, at this point, but she winces and hauls herself up, over to the jewel, and pulls it out of the centipede innards.

"I think that's mine," says the bigger, scarier demon, in an unambiguously threatening tone of voice.

Kaede's response to that is IMMEDIATELY NEGATIVE, as is obvious from her facial expression, but she isn't taking any direct action yet -

She's so tired. She looks at Kaede for direction, for anything resembling an alternative, or a decision, or a suggestion -

"You must not let him have it," she warns. "Mistress Centipede with the jewel would be bad enough, but Inuyasha -"

"'Inuyasha would become the greatest demon the world has ever known.' Or something. Better things to do than care what your speech is, old woman! If you want to live, girl, give me the jewel!"

Well, this sure is a problem of her own creation, and Inuyasha sure does seem like the sort of person who is also willing to murder people over mystical artifacts, which is not the sort of person who should have them. It's stupid - she's exhausted, and already injured, and no match for him anyway, and has nowhere else she can go and no one else she can call on - but she caused this problem, so she has a responsibility not to turn her back on it, even if she can't fix it.

Kagome hauls herself to her feet, groaning and clutching her side as she does so.

"No," she says. And then she runs, still dripping blood.

"Do you think I'm not willing?" he says, smashing into the ground in front of her hard enough to leave a crater larger than she is. "Or are you just dumb?"

"I'm just dumb!" she yells, and runs in the opposite direction. She should really head towards the well, that was her original alternate plan for the centipede. Unfortunately, she's all turned around now, and mostly just running wherever he and the villagers aren't. 

"Well, unfortunately for you, you smell like my worst enemy!"

And he's going to - 

Barely miss her - 

Again.

"That seems like a stupid basis for deciding how much you hate someone who just unpinned you from a tree!"

It occurs to her that, given that she can't run very fast... at all.... now, and she can't fight, and she isn't exactly sure where the well is, about the only chance she even maybe has to get out of this without giving him the jewel is to talk her way out. Not that she's doing very well at that, right now, but at least the conversation is ongoing? Sort of?

She's going to keep running while she tries to improve things on the talking front, though.

"Eh, don't worry, you're much uglier!"

Miss (or possibly dodge).

"Also dumber!"

Miss (or possibly dodge).

"Well, you're being incredibly ungrateful!"

Man, she is just not good at this diplomacy while running for her life thing, is she.

Ahead of her is the river, flowing below a fairly sheer cliff face, which it occurs to her is not really a great direction to be running in. Whoops.

And, halted, Inuyasha raises his claws - 

"Well, nice knowing you!"

And that would be when Kaede tosses a prayer-bead necklace over his head.

"Bind him to cease!" she says urgently - 

As he turns angrily - 

What kind of instruction is that!! What does that even mean!! Is this a - glowing light power thing again, she doesn't know how to do those -

She steps backward, mostly on instinct, which unfortunately sends her tumbling down the cliff and onto the next ledge below it.

This distracts Inuyasha!

"You aren't getting away!" And he'll jump after her.

"Speak a spell of binding! ANY SPELL!"

She lands badly on one ankle; it's not such a bad fall, as falls go, but it's bad enough that she isn't sure that she can get up and run again. She drops the jewel in the process, and looks around wildly to see where it's rolled.

"I don't know any spells!!"

"ANYTHING!"

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."

"You inherited Kikyo's powers." And her courage. Just not her - 

(grace, agility, steadfastness, combat expertise, any training whatsoever...)

"Oh, but I - I got lucky this time. Not that I wouldn't try, but unless I can figure out how to do the glowy thing on command..."

She sighs. "Is there anyone else? Who, you know, stands a better chance of... succeeding?"

"No."

"Oh."

"Well, I can try my best."

After another pause, "I can teach you what my sister taught me." Maybe you'll have better luck with it.

"That sounds important. If I'm going to be doing this for any length of time."

She sighs.

"I should sleep. Except then I won't be ready if Inuyasha comes back."

"I should sleep," says Kaede.

And she rises, with some difficulty.

"... getting too old for this..." is what she quietly says, as she leaves.

Oh. Of course. 

Well, if no one else is around to keep watch and wake her up if he comes back, then she'll have to stay awake until they are. 

That's... probably fine. She's exhausted, but she's not actually sure that it's night yet, in the future (not that that's a concept that makes any sense), so she can probably stay alert until dawn, and then flag someone else down to help her keep watch. Probably.

She holds the Shikon jewel close and watches the village.

It is not, actually, that long until he appears, dropping out of the night. He's a shadow until he isn't.

"Girl."

"Kagome," she corrects.

"Whatever."

He hops closer, then squats on the ground, still a distance off but not so far they'd need to shout.

"You can stop me from taking the jewel. Doesn't mean you can stop anyone else."

"Yeah. I know."

"You're not Kikyo, whatever the old hag says. You've got no training. No skill. No plan. The first demon who comes through - hell, the first gang who come through - are just going to beat you up and take it off you."

"Probably."

"So, what are you going to do about it?"

"Well, after everyone's slept, I'm going to ask whether Kaede can help me control my powers, and either it'll work, or it won't. And until then, I'm going to do my best."

" - dumbass. You should just let me have it. At least that way you'll live."

"Well, you're welcome to stick around and try that pitch again the next time I'm in mortal danger."

"Hpmh!"

And he leaps off and disappears.

Sigh.

He's not wrong. This is going to kill her, and, even worse, it won't even matter; whatever kills her will take the shikon jewel off her corpse.

Right now, she can only think of two possibilities. The first is training. She doesn't know how much training it takes to control abilities like... whatever she has... but they're clearly already pretty powerful. If she can just get the attack she used on the centipede to trigger reliably, then she might stand a chance for a while.

The second, which is vanishingly unlikely to work, is the well. Being in the future is obviously not a foolproof means of protection, but it worked for the first fifteen years of her life, so maybe it'll at least be easier, if she can, in fact, return. It seems very unlikely that she can just go back, but it also seems a little silly not to check.

In the morning (and after she's flagged someone down to watch while she takes what's really more of a nap than a good night's sleep), she tells Kaede that she thinks she should investigate the well again. She probably won't be able to go back the other way, but if she can, she thinks the future will be a much safer place to hide the jewel. Also it's, you know, where everyone she knows lives. If it doesn't work, then she'll just try to get stronger as fast as possible.

Kaede thinks she should take one of the villagers with her (someone good at running), to bring word back if she does succeed (or if she gets attacked), but otherwise isn't going to object to that.

Seems pretty reasonable! On with her probably doomed plan, then.

Then they can head off back to the well!

Halfway through someone hiding in the bushes grabs Kagome. A couple different someones shoots arrows out of the bushes at her escort, which -

- Hit.

Well this is just the most fantastic twenty-four hours of her life! How does everyone even know about this stupid jewel already?

She tries to break away, and obviously can't, since she's an injured and still kind of exhausted teenage girl with no combat training.

The grabber appears to be some kind of soldier or bandit! He's wearing homemade leather armor, and not a lot of it, has a sword that is shoddily-made and rather dented but not too badly cared for, and not a lot of teeth, hair, or deodorant. He's at least as badly malnutritioned as the villagers, but he's also armed, and knows how to wrestle better than an average teenager.

Oh, and he has a bunch of friends dressed similarly, some of whom have swords, some bows, some spears.

Their program: Tie her up, cut her companion's throat, strip his corpse, haul her off to wherever they're going. Does she have any plans to avert this program?

Uh, not any good ones, but she vaguely remembers someone telling her that you should give muggers what they want unless they want to take you to a secondary location, in which case you should not go with them to a secondary location, even if your alternative is facing down someone with a gun. So! Trying to avoid being taken to a secondary location!

Somehow. She should probably start with the obvious thing to try.

"LEAVE ME ALONE!"

....yeah okay that's not working this time, that's not good.

It really doesn't! On with the plan!

The well is RIGHT OVER THERE and if she can just GET TO IT then she might be able to get away, but by now she's very thoroughly caught, her escort is looking very dead, and further struggle seems to be getting her nowhere.

Maybe the power only works on demons. Maybe she could only do it when the Shikon jewel was inside her. Maybe she can only use it when she has her hands free. Maybe she just doesn't have any idea how to trigger it, or can only trigger it when she's literally about to be killed, and being taken prisoner or watching someone else die doesn't count.

(Maybe Inuyasha was right, and this whole enterprise was unconscionably stupid.)

They haul her off back to their camp, in some abandoned old hall that is not looking well maintained in the slightest, and deliver her to their boss, who, in a contest for ugliness, slovenliness, stench, and - based on his unfocused gaze and vague manner - unintelligence, would come second to none.

"We brought the foreign girl you asked for, boss," says the bandit hauling her.

"and... the... jewel..."

That's...... not a human person.

Like, okay, on some level she did in fact expect them to be working for a demon, but she thought it would be, you know, a charismatic demon! A demon with some ability to put together compelling arguments for why you should kidnap people for him, even though he's definitely going to eat you at some point! This is just sad. She feels herself crossing some kind of fear event horizon, faced with this guy, where the situation is just too awful and stupid and full of overdetermined doom to waste her last minute of life bothering to cower about it.

"You're working for a demon?" she says to her human captors. "That's low even for bandits."

"Hey! The boss isn't a demon! He's just -"

Pause. The bandit looks at the boss.

The boss's priority is grabbing the jewel! His minions DID get it off Kagome, right?

No, right now the jewel is in her pocket, and she's sure not helping anyone find it faster.

"That's not a human. You should have higher standards for evil bosses."

"He's just not doing well lately."

Next stage: Go through any hiding places she may have for the jewel, while the possibly-demonic boss watches with sullen impatience! The pocket does, in fact, look like a pretty likely hiding place.

Well, she's still tied up, so there's not a lot she can physically do about that.

"Listen to me! Look how he's moving! If you give him the jewel he'll transform, and then it'll be too late!"

(Does she know that that's how it works? No, absolutely not, it doesn't seem like a great time to hedge about whether the effects on Mistress Centipede were specific or universal.)

"Uh -"

The bandit is now looking at his boss in a slightly worried manner.

And the boss will physically grab the jewel! He's not doing well on hand-eye coordination, so he also grabs his subordinate's hand with it and kind of crushes it, pulling the hand and the jewel both up to his eye level, which is, uh, high.

"Pretty..."

"Don't let him use it!"

The boss will slowly disentangle hand from jewel, drop his henchman, and then take an exceptionally clumsy swing at Kagome with his enormous sword!

Well, Kagome's not really any better at this than she was yesterday, but she's rediscovered her will to survive in the last minute and a half, and this guy doesn't exactly have speed on his side. She pushes as hard as she can into one of the bandits who's holding her (and hopefully too distracted to keep his feet planted), aiming to knock both of them out of the path of the sword.

Success! It's the other bandit holding her who gets decapitated. She goes down, the bandit she pushed goes down, and the entire bandit crowd is now staring in horror and confusion at their boss.

"... ooops. missed."

... Not that he seems to be stopping to try to kill Kagome.

"Pay attention! It'll be you next!"

She gets up and tries to stay moving. The reasonable thing to do is to try to get everyone to run... except that he already has the jewel, and she isn't at all confident that she can get it back on her own, and only managed last time because -

"You!" she says, enlisting a randomly selected bandit. "Ride to the village and tell Kaede the priestess what's happened! Go!"

The bandits panic and flee! Hopefully the bandit she pointed at is indeed doing that!

Meanwhile the big bandit is chasing her with a sword. He wants to HIT HER with the sword and his sole relevant skill at this is being very, very strong.

Ugggh why is her life like this.

She'd really like to not be tied up, did the bandits do a shoddy enough job of that that with them gone she can wriggle out while also dodging his sword? At least if she had the use of her hands, she could.... grab a sword from one of the fallen bandits and try to cut off the hand with the jewel in it? As long as she's acting like she has a death wish anyway?

He is spectacularly bad at cutting her, so yes, as it happens, she can wriggle out!

Unfortunately, he's realized that hitting her with a sword isn't working, and has decided that his NEW PLAN is to EAT THE JEWEL. You wouldn't think it would go down his throat without him choking, but it does seem to work out for him!

Oh. Well. There goes that plan. 

This is pretty far out of her weight class, at this point. She turns to run away, thinking maybe she can also get back to the village and beg help off of Kaede -

- and, instead, she trips over a piece of smashed furniture, and falls down with a yell.

That's a target the bandit doesn't think he can miss. He raises his sword to bring it down -

- And through a decaying wall in a flying leap comes a red-robed dog demon! Before the sword lands, he's jumped over to Kagome, grabbed her and then leapt a good ten feet back, and the blow strikes only floorboards.

- wait, what?

She's not dead!

But she doesn't have the jewel!

Even if she did have the jewel, he doesn't need to save her to get it! Saving her from something else makes him less likely to get it!

" - Inuyasha?"

"So, girl, how's that 'keeping the jewel safe' thing working out for you?"

"Uh, it - could be going better - "

"So, here's the plan: You sit tight, I deal with this decaying corpse here, I run off with the Shikon Jewel, and we never see each other again. Sounds good?"

How is she supposed to make a decision about something that important in one second like this!!

It definitely seems better if the person who just saved her life for no reason has the powerful mystical artifact than if the powerful mystical artifact stays in the hands of the person who is trying to kill her for equally little reason, but - 

Kaede thought he was even worse than Mistress Centipede, but he doesn't seem worse - 

She can't actually protect it from anything anyway -

It isn't really hers to give away like that, though, is it -

Say something -

"It's a corpse?"

"Humans really have no sense of smell, do they?"

He'll toss a glance over at the ?bandit?. "Hey! Enjoying your snack?"

The bandit responds by attempting to attack him!

So he rips its chest open.

There's a bird, inside, a monstrous three-eyed carrion crow.

... Very monstrous.

"YOU ALREADY LET IT TAKE THE JEWEL?"

"Well - I was tied up, so - "

"By bandits? And you couldn't even get loose? Do you even do things?"

"I did get loose! But by then it was killing people!" This is such a pointless, stupid - "It's getting away!"

And, indeed, the bird - mutating as it does - is making a run for it! Well, a fly for it.

"Come on, then! Grab a weapon and let's get going!" He'll jerk a claw at one of the bandits' bows, discarded next to a quiver as they fled.

" - right!"

She doesn't actually know how to use a bow, at all, even a little bit, but apparently following combat instructions is much easier than deciding whether to agree to anything about the jewel. She arms herself with the bow and starts running after the bird. It's pretty obvious she's not going to be able to keep up, though.

Then he'll scoop her onto his back and start leaping after it. He's fast. It's faster. "Get it with an arrow!"

"I've never used one of these things before!"

But she pulls an arrow out, and tries very hard to aim it. She hadn't realized how hard it was just to draw one of these things. When she thinks she has it lined up - assuming she's at all right about how shooting a bow actually works, mechanically - she fires.

The arrow does travel a ways in approximately the correct direction. That's about all that can be said for it. It doesn't so much miss as fall well short, too underpowered to reach the crow even if her accuracy were dead on (which it, uh, wasn't).

"Gah!"

Kikyo could have (he suppresses this sentence for the wrong reasons rather than the right ones.)

"What do you know how to do?"

The distance is increasing!

She could think of a stupid comeback to that, but instead she's going to take a deep breath and draw another arrow, ignoring the voice in her head telling her that this is stupid and doomed, doomed and stupid, and pull back with all the strength she can muster -

This one falls even further short.

Inuyasha moves fast, and Kagome does so too with him carrying her. It doesn't take long for them to pass a bandit on horseback, nor for them to make it most of the way to the village - 

- Where the mutated, monstrous crow has swooped down on, and seized, a boy, whose weight (a significant fraction of its) is slowing its flight speed. 

"Pretty dumb bird," he says, claws ready - 

Is he going to be able to just tear it out of the sky, if it's slowed down?

She's worried about what happens to the kid, when that happens, but surely he's thinking about that, right, he didn't want anything to happen to her, so saying anything would just be annoying, right -

Nnnnope. Nope he is not. "DEMON BEGONE!"

The bird is now a couple dozen plummeting pieces! The kid is also plummeting!

"Catch him!"

She absolutely believes he'll do it on his own, she's crying out mostly reflexively, but she's also looking ahead to figure out where the child will land if he doesn't -

- Okay FINE since he's landing ANYWAY he'll grab the kid by the scruff of his neck and drop him on his mother. But only because it was on his way.

"Done. Now where's the jewel, girl?"

(Answer: Under the left wing of a crow that is now largely reassembled and flying off, thanks to the regenerative powers of the Shikon Jewel.)

She scans the sky -

"There! Under the left wing!"

- but augh, it's so far away now, and it's faster than he is when it's not weighed down by anything, they've lost their chance to catch it -

He'll drop her unceremoniously on the ground, leap after it, claws extended - 

- and do no more than clip its tail. 

The crow is climbing as fast as it can! It DOES NOT WANT to stick around here!

"Damn it! It's getting away with the jewel!" He needs that!

Oh, great. He's not going to catch it like that, and then he'll be angry with her for mucking things up. (And apparently she's more worried about than about what actually happens to the jewel, right now. It's just very hard to intuitively feel that the jewel is super important, okay, while it's easy to remember how embarrassed she'll be the next time she messes up.)

The kid cries out, and she looks over to see the crow's foot, claws still embedded in the boy's clothing, rising up in an attempt to join the rest of the crow and finish regenerating. The boy is too heavy to lift with it, but if it had something lighter -

She still has her bow and arrows. She grabs the foot, bites the strap off her quiver, and uses it to tie the foot to one of her arrows. The foot should carry it to the bird - all she needs to do is provide enough power that the arrow stabs through flesh when it reaches it. Even if this works, it'll probably just embed the arrow in the bird, which seems unlikely to kill it. It might at least slow it down again, though, and then maybe Inuyasha can finish it off. 

"Inuyasha! Duck!"

- and then, in another moment, she lets her arrow fly.

"That is the dumbest -" he says.

(And ducks.)

And as the crow flies higher, higher, higher, so high up it is only a speck - 

- The arrow, drawn upwards by the regeneration, flies true, and strikes the heart of it.

Where there is - the Shikon Jewel.

Struck by an arrow, the jewel explodes into a thousand pieces. The crow, no longer possessing rapid regeneration powers and with an arrow through its torso, abruptly stops holding together and collapses.

You can see the light from Kyoto, and the falling shards tumbling like snow across more a thousand miles of Japan.

"Oh."

"Sorry?"

A small fragment of the jewel makes a tinkling sound as it hits a rock near their feet.

Kagome bends down and picks it up.

"...I'm gonna go talk to Kaede."

"Sounds good!" says Inuyasha. "Why not!"

So Kagome trudges back to the shrine.

Does Kaede appear to be aware of anything that's happened since she set off for the well? Either from the bandit who may or may not have decided to be helpful, or from watching the sky just now, or from anything else?

Yeah. She knows.

And looks - completely crushed, as much as Kagome or Inuyasha.

"The Shikon Jewel is shattered," she says.

Great. Stellar. Awesome. They could have buried the thing in the ground and done better than giving it to her.

"Yeah."

"Yeah, old hag, I know that! Got anything useful to say?"

"Only this: That you will need to work together to recover the pieces and restore it."

"Are you out of your mind? Kagome broke the damn thing, and I'm the demon you were trying to keep it safe from!"

"Yeah, I don't think there's really anything I can... do? About this?"

Also she's kind of unclear on what the effects of a shattered Shikon jewel even are, or for that matter what the effects of a regular shikon jewel are, and at this point she's kind of scared to ask. About anything, really.

"The jewel is a source of power," she says, "for any demon who desires it. United, it could make one demon a monster. Divided - a hundred. You have Kikyo's sensitivity to the spiritual, and with Inuyasha's strength you may be able to recover them."

She looks very, very tired. "And there is no better option." 

"This doesn't really seem like an option either! As far as I can tell, ever since the centipede bit the jewel out of me, I've been a completely normal person! I tried my best, I really did, and I don't see what I'm adding here that any other person in your village wouldn't!"

She feels horrible saying this - inappropriate and childish and ashamed and humiliated and angry, at herself and at Kaede and at whatever pulled her here - but she's spent half of the last day flooded with adrenaline, almost died half a dozen times, gotten several people killed, and apparently managed to multiply their central problem a hundredfold. She's fine with responsibilities. She's fine with responsibilities she didn't ask for, even. But this, all of this, running together at lightning speed, watching herself make mistakes for no reason, do no better than any other person would do and fumble every single step until she inevitably dies of it -

It's too much. She doesn't know how not to snap. She wants to stop. She wants to go home.

Inuyasha has two warring instincts, here: Agree, and defend Kikyo random girl.

He picks 'agree' because it lets him yell at someone.

"She's completely useless! All she does is get kidnapped and screw up and get the Shikon Jewel shattered! She doesn't even know how to fight! You'd be better off with a trained sheep!"

She hasn't noticed, has she.

"You think a normal person could have killed a crow-demon with one arrow?"

"I didn't kill it with the arrow! I accidentally hit the jewel and it exploded! And I didn't even hit the crow by aiming, it was a cheap trick that didn't have anything to do with me!"

"The jewel would not have shattered unless struck with great spiritual force."

ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh WHY DOES SHE HAVE TO BE THE ADULT KIKYO SHOULD BE BEING THE ADULT WHY IS HER SISTER DEAD

"Well, then it seems like being spiritual isn't very helpful."

"That's what I've been saying!"

Kaede will sharply cough.

....after a couple seconds of silence, Kagome's embarrassment will overtake her need to snap.

"I'm sorry," she says, quietly. "I shouldn't have said all of that."

"I'm going to - go wash the blood off. If that's okay."

" - Yes. I -"

- She does not gain enough self-control there.

"Yes. Of course. Do so."

Kaede can provide her with priestess's robes (she has spare) which won't be too undersized on her, and point her at a relatively hard-to-spy-on-and-not-too-cold part of the stream.

Kagome will thank her, and then go try taking a fairly freezing bath. Maybe she can regain some basic semblance of humanity, internally and externally, before coming back and figuring what to do for these people who she met twenty-four hours ago, and who she has failed more dramatically, completely, and quickly than anyone she's ever met in her entire life.

The stomach wound from yesterday still hurts, but at least today's misadventures haven't left her with anything worse than scrapes. Several other people died, but she was lucky. Lucky, and...

She really ought to thank Inuyasha again. You ought to at least thank people when they save your life, even if they're angry with you after, and she doesn't think she did before. Except that he's quite possibly regretting it, at this point, and she's not sure she can take someone saying that to her face without crying, right now.

She stays in the water for longer than she really has to, not so much thinking her situation through as gathering her scant emotional reserves together. And then eventually she can come out and try wearing something that isn't covered in blood.

Inuyasha is lurking around, on general principles.

"TAKE THAT OFF!"

She's gonna need to take a couple seconds just to process this request. Processing it doesn't really help.

"Excuse me?"

"Stop wearing that! Put your weird foreign clothes back on!"

" They're covered in blood! What is wrong with you?"

- right, she was gonna not give him more reasons to regret saving her life.

"I mean - ugh. Why."

"You look funny like that! It's not right!"

What a stupid - no, calm, calm, that was half the point of the bath, she is not going to immediately give up being calm.

She sits down, faced away from him, and takes a deep breath. She's very unclear on what exactly is so shocking and upsetting about seeing her in the clothes that should look normal to him. The only other time he's reacted to anything with an expression that even approached that was - 

- oh. Right. Kikyo.

Things she thinks she knows about Kikyo: 

- She was Kaede's older sister, and she died while Inuyasha was pinned to the tree.

- She was responsible for looking after the sacred jewel, and had it destroyed when she died (and man, why didn't Kagome think of doing that again, twelve hours ago). 

- She was responsible for pinning Inuyasha to the tree, for however long he was there, or at least Inuyasha holds her responsible.

- When he found out that she was dead, he looked horrified, and then pretended that he wasn't.

- Kagome looks and sounds so much like her, even dressed in clothes from the future, that Inuyasha thought Kagome was her for at least, like, several seconds of conversation.

These do not really paint a complete, or even particularly coherent picture, but they explain the specific thing that's going on now. Sort of.

"Does it really bother you?"

"- I don't know what you're talking about. It just ticks me off, is all."

"Fine. Turn around."

He will do that.

Her old clothes are, in fact, disgusting, and are also sopping wet. Despite her best efforts at washing them without soap, the blood and several of the dirt stains are already very set, and she's not sure that waving them around in the water was really enough to free them of all of the sweat they've absorbed, either.

This had better make at least one of them comfortable. It's not gonna be her.

"Okay. Done. Is that better."

"Yeah."

"Okay. Well. Good."

Eventually the silence drags on enough that she feels like it counts as permission to change the subject.

"So. What're you gonna do after this."

"Look for the shards. What else?"

"That makes sense."

"I think I'm gonna see if I can go home."

"Huh. Well. See you."

"Mhm. - oh." She's still got the shard she picked up off the ground. She holds it out. 

"Here."

Then he snatches it.

"I'm not giving it back."

"Fine. Good hunting, or whatever. I hope you find them before someone worse does."

"And... thanks for saving my life, and stuff."

"Just don't tell anyone."

And then he would like to LEAVE THIS CONVERSATION PLEASE AND THANK YOU VIA SUPERJUMP.

Huh.

Well, if she does make it to the future - which remains highly unlikely, no matter how doomy she's feeling about staying here, although maybe it'll turn out that she walked into something you can walk back from, like a... fantasy past themed... dream? Secret hyper advanced video game simulation? Alien experiment? - anyway, if she makes it back then nobody will ever believe her anyway, even if she does tell them. Then again, she might have already destroyed the future, and be greeted by a horrible desolate wasteland. But she's not really coming out ahead here, so far, so maybe she'd better go back anyway before she makes things any worse.

She takes another second to squeeze some water out of her hair and clothes. She walks off towards the forest. Nobody stops her. She makes it all the way to the well, this time, and nobody kidnaps her even a little bit.

It's dark down there, and a long way down, but she did make it out once before. In the most likely case, where she just lands at the bottom and has to climb out again, she'll go back to the village and pretend she never tried, and nobody except Inuyasha will ever have to know about it.

She takes a deep breath, steels herself for either possibility, and jumps in.

It's dark in the well. Completely dark, actually; the square of sunlight at the top has vanished. That's - a good sign, right? A sign that something happened? She feels along the edges of the well for the overgrown vines, but they're not there anymore.

...she's stuck at the bottom of this well.

"Sota?"

No answer.

"Ayako? Grandpa?"

Nothing.

"HEY! I'M IN THE WELL! GUYS!"

It'll take quite a while of yelling, but eventually some sunlight illuminates the ceiling of the shed, and her sister's face peers over the edge of the well.

"Kagome! Are you hurt?"

Scrapes, bruising, mild ankle sprain, rope burn, and one stab wound to the gut.

"Not badly! I can climb if you get me a rope!"

Ayako can get a rope, and also get Sota and grandpa. They're all gathered at the top of the well when Kagome climbs up, covered in dirt and blood. 

"'Not badly', huh?"

"Are you okay? Did the ghost do all of that?"

"Uh - most of it. I'm not sure it was a ghost, though. I think it was a demon. It - "

It's so weird. A minute ago, she was - where? The past? A parallel universe? An illusion created by the demon? But the demon is dead...

She sort of thought it would evaporate, if she managed to get back home. Nobody would believe her, and she'd have no way to prove it. But Sota saw the demon, too, and her injuries and the stains on her clothes are still here. 

"I don't know exactly what happened. I know that something pulled me in. A giant centipede monster with the upper body of a woman. And - that it took me somewhere, after it tried to kill me. Or at least it seemed to take me somewhere. I could have hit my head, but - I don't think I could have gotten all of these injuries at the bottom of the well? I think I really ended up somewhere else. The people there said that it was the seventeenth year of Tenbun." She looks at her grandfather, uncertainly. He's the expert. "Could something like that really happen?"

Her grandfather considers.

"It's possible. The bone-devouring well is said to trap the bodies of evil spirits, and make them disappear. If the well is sending them to the past, and one of them pulled Kagome in, then Kagome could have been trapped in the past as well."

"Really?"

He nods gravely. "Had I realized the well was so dangerous, I would have sealed this place up long ago. We should be thankful that Kagome has returned to us, and must ward the well so that nothing can come through again."

There is a strange, silent moment, as if she and Sota and Ayako are all jointly deciding what reality they live in - a world of rational and sane explanations, where supernatural powers are toothless, if they exist at all, or a world where the old dry well contains monsters that try to eat people, which can only be warded off by the power of her grandfather's rituals.

Except - the decision is only important if it's ever going to happen again. If it's just a one-time thing, an isolated incident, it doesn't matter what you believe about it, how totally you think the rules that govern the world once broke. Take it or leave it. Neither is scary if neither is going to have effects. They can ward it, as they would if it the well were dangerous, and they can go on with their lives, as they would if it were nothing. It won't matter which it was. In a few years, it'll be a good story, harmless and already fading, a source of wonder and mystery that demands no further action, disconnected from anything that matters.

"Yeah," says Kagome, after a moment. "Let's seal it."

Her grandfather seals the well. Kagome changes into something less bloodstained. Ayako fusses over her injuries while Kagome draws a map of the past for Sota, going over the main events - here was the well, and here was the sacred tree, where the half-demon boy was pinned by a magic arrow. Here's about where the village was, in relation to both of them, and here's the path she took through the forest to the river that Inuyasha fell in, where a river still runs today. Here's the place where the bandits took her, and the path that she and Inuyasha took back to the village to kill the crow demon. 

It's a lot of adventure, for a day and a half. Enough adventure for anyone, surely. Ayako tells her that everyone ought to have one such youthful adventure, and she's lucky that hers did no damage to anyone. She believes her, now, though she didn't at first. The well is sealed, and no threat to their ordinary lives. They can afford to believe.

Kagome takes a walk outside, as the sun sets and Ayako cooks Kagome's birthday dinner, one day late. She spends a long time looking up through the branches of the sacred tree. Off to one side, easily missed, the very end of an arrow shaft sticks about an inch out of the tree, as if the rest was subsumed long ago, as the tree grew. Kagome remembers that one of the villagers had shot an arrow at her, the first time they saw her with Inuyasha, back when he was still asleep, and the arrow had stuck in the tree. She pulled the magic one out, but the other remained. Since long before Kagome was born, the tree has been growing around it, erasing the only other evidence of Kagome's adventure. 

In a few centuries, the tree will subsume the arrow completely, leaving it impossible to see that the tree was ever struck. Kagome's injuries will heal up in mere weeks, and there will be no evidence but her word that she was ever hurt, either. Even if it is remembered, in some form, it won't be distinguishable from legend. It won't matter whether anyone believes it; the ripples will have left the world long ago.

It's only been hours, not years, and the realness of it all is already fading, at least when she's in her living room with her family. It's different under the tree, though. Here, she feels connected to the past and to her ancestors, to a long line of Higurashis who have guarded and maintained this shrine for generations. 

Except for her.

Kagome is not strong, or knowledgeable, or brilliant, or wise. Maybe she has some special powers hiding in her, but they mostly don't seem very useful. And yet - the jewel this shrine once contained was entrusted to her. Not by Kaede, but by her very flesh and blood. She doesn't understand it, but the jewel was a part of her; she was meant to have it, and to keep it safe. And when the time came to stand up and accept the responsibility that she alone had been entrusted with, Kagome refused. She had said to let someone else do it, not knowing whether anyone else could, either.

That is what she turned her back on. Not some youthful adventure, to be dipped into and grown out of. Her ancestral obligations. Her past. Her future. Her destiny. Her very purpose.

If all the darkness that she unleashed on her ancestors has been eroded by time, does that make it any less real? If a hundred Mistress Centipedes destroyed a hundred villages, and then the world forget about them completely, is there any sense in which the forgetting means that the crime, the cowardice, the desertion of her duty was not, in fact, a betrayal of all of those people, who when they lived were as real as she is now?

She thinks about the girl she was, for a day and a half. It's easier, with four hundred years of distance, not to hate her. Maybe she screwed up, but she was the sort of person who could have grown into someone impressive. She saved the life of someone who had kidnapped her. The trick with the arrow was disastrous, but it was the kind of mistake that you could imagine a hero out of legend making, not something that an ordinary person would do. But a hero would have spent years, or decades, cleaning up a second's mistake. They wouldn't have shrugged and gone home.

"Kagome! Dinnertime!"

Well, obviously Kagome isn't a hero.

"Coming!"

And she leaves the sacred tree behind her, and goes inside to eat dinner and some cake, one day late.

And just when her family's sitting down to dinner, Inuyasha kicks the front door open!

"Hey girl, new demon, break's over."

For a moment, the dinner table is deathly silent.

"Can anyone just walk through that thing?"

"Hell if I know. C'mon, let's get going."

It makes no sense. You can't just walk between centuries whenever you want. That's not how time works, or how stories work, either. It's not even supposed to be how magic works! The well is supposed to be closed! Even if it isn't closed, Inuyasha said he didn't want her help anyway!

Sensible or not, though, the decision is the most natural thing in the world, like she's already made it and just didn't realize. She pushes away from the table and stands up. "What's happened?"

"Everyone back at the village got puppeted by some demon witch, old hag couldn't see the control well enough. You coming?"

(It's not immediately obvious, but Inuyasha has a lot of very-rapidly-healing small cuts; it looks kind of like they might be papercuts, and by this point they're almost completely gone.)

"Yeah! - wait one second!"

She bolts off to her room and dumps her backpack full of textbooks unceremoniously out on the bed, and then starts throwing in anything that seems like it might be useful in the 16th century. First aid kit, flashlight, duct tape, aspirin, alarm clock, she's probably gonna want a change of clothes when this one gets wrecked too, random crap that happens to be lying around on her desk...

If everyone's in danger now, then seconds count (actually, do seconds count, if it's time travel? - but if they do count she doesn't have them to puzzle through this), but if she only gets one second chance, and not two, then she'll be kicking herself if she doesn't try to bring anything at all with her. She frowns at her bag, throws the science and history textbooks back in, zips it up, and heads out.

"Ready!"

"But Kagome, you were almost killed last time!"

"I know." And she could very easily be killed this time. 

" - but you'll be helping this time, right?"

"Me, help you? It's you who's helping me collect the shards!"

"Which I can't do if I'm dead, right?"

"Can't use your eyes when they've been cut out of your head, now can I?"

Her family doesn't look very reassured by this, at all, but Kagome nods decisively.

"I love you guys. But - I gotta do this," she says, and then runs off towards the well.

Inuyasha will, of course, run with her.

To the well!

"You said the villagers are being puppeted?"

"The old hag said it, but yeah, they were hovering."

Well, that's really not much information to be going into... whatever this is with... but she doesn't seem very likely to get a complete breakdown, here.

She takes a deep breath, and looks down the well.

"...you first?"

He hops down!

And lands.

And glares at the bottom of the well like it is personally responsible.

Huh.

" - can't you go back?"

"You tell me, it's your dumb well!"

"I don't know how it works! - hang on."

And she can jump down into the well.

And she falls through a weird glowing space and appears at the bottom of the well in the Warring States era!

The mouth of the well is blocked, almost completely, by a black mass of ?hair?, densely strung like a spider's web to block all egress from the well.

Well, at least she's over.

....without her dubious bodyguard demon, and with an obvious trap set at the top of the well, which is not, uh, the best starting situation one could hope for....

Her dubious bodyguard demon arrives five seconds later.

"Hey."

Then he reaches to pick her up so they can superjump out!

Oh good!

- wait, is he just gonna jump into the net??

"Wait, what about the - "

The net? The net is what they ram at superjump speeds!

Inuyasha will attempt to bounce off of it back to the bottom of the well, apparently on instinct, but it's going to do its best to entangle him so he can't escape. Let's see who wins!

" - trap."

Kagome is still kind of unclear on whether he did this on purpose for some reason, and is mostly going to cling right now.

"Where?" he says, struggling. "What does it look like?"

"Like a net, or a bunch of black spiderwebs, strung across the entrance!" Can't he see it?

One of the hairs he throws off swings wildly and hits her. It doesn't draw much blood, but the pain and the surprise that it draws blood at all are enough that she draws in a hiss.

"There's nothing there -"

Yeah OK no it isn't allowed to hurt Kikyo Not Kikyo.

He drops her and does an exceedingly methodical job of shredding whatever's covering the entrance to the pit, then catches her before she hits bottom.

- gosh.

(He's really pretty cool sometimes, isn't he?)

"You got it, it's gone now!"

"Great!"

Superjump out: Mark Two.

They are completely surrounded by Evil Magic Hair Web. On all sides. Strands lead off into the distance, but whoever's responsible still hasn't appeared.

" - okay, tell me you can see it now?"

"Nope. Which way do I dodge?"

"It's everywhere." She scans the web, looking for a way out. "Strands of hair on all sides, including above. I think you'll have to cut through them."

"Well, get aboard," he says, presenting her with his back. "Because -"

"That's fine with me!"

SUPERJUMP! (once she's aboard) WITH CLAWS!

She hops on and clings!

Upsides: Inuyasha can in fact get them past being Completely Surrounded, even with the disadvantage of needing to carry Kagome.

Downside: There's a lot of hair and it is now chasing him!

He's going to drop her and then get back to work slashing vaguely wherever she points while dodging very fast in essentially random directions.

The strands of hair don't move quite on their own; they move when something pulls on them, a strand from further back in the web. Is it all one strand? There's so much of it that it seems like it can't be, but if she follows the movement back, back, back -

"Over there! There's one strand that's controlling the others!"

- but it's moving, still, it'll be in a different place by the time he reaches it -

Inuyasha lunges.

And misses.

He's fast. If anything he's getting faster; once she's down (and the hair is chasing him - it isn't reading her as a threat at all) - all his restraints are down, and whatever he does he can throw himself into wholeheartedly. No human could match his speed, no human could match his power, and his claws do not seem restricted to only cutting what they touch - he can leap, strike, dance away before the flood reaches him, striking and dodging with gleeful fury - 

But it isn't enough. He can't see; nothing is where she said it was three seconds ago. He can't tell which way to dodge, and he's wrong by chance as often as he's right. The strands of hair he cuts remain cut, but the masses are massive, and they can just reform and strike again. And they can tell where he is. Individual strands whipping across his skin to raise welts, masses grappling him until he tears them away - it's only a matter of time until exhaustion or blood loss ends the battle, and that's if it doesn't manage to succeed, as it is trying, to wrap a cord around his neck and strangle him to death.

This is not a battle he's going to win. There are strings, in the background; they all lead off in different distant directions, but only one is coordinating the great mass attacking Inuyasha. But it isn't standing still, instead jerking and twisting as the mass moves, and as long as he's fighting blind there's nothing he can do about it.

However long it takes, the puppetmaster is going to win this battle.

Only if he keeps fighting the puppet. He only needs to cut across one specific strand, to make it out of this. She's sure of it. But the strand keeps moving, too fast for her verbal instructions to matter. If there were something to hold it still -

- well, she's something, isn't she?

Kagome charges. Even with the hair not chasing her, there's enough of it flying around that charging through it leaves cuts on her clothes and her skin, but she manages to stay her course. She grabs the controlling strand with both hands, hissing in pain again as it cuts into her hands like a razor. A few drops of blood begin running down it, and if he can see those -

"Here! Cut here!"

"I see it!"

And Inuyasha drops out of the sky and with one claw severs the strand.

The hair around them collapses, which he does not see, so instead he grabs Kagome and immediately leaps off again.

She did it!! They did it! - only a part of it, but still!

"Where now? Check on the village, or find the demon?"

"Whatever's happening at the village, it'll be done once we kill whatever's responsible!"

Also: Her hands are bleeding. So's her skin, where the hair hit her.

THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE if his only source of see-the-invisible dies in the fight it would be a major problem.

So he'll pull off his robe and drop it on her.

"It's the fur of a fire rat. So you don't cut yourself again."

She takes a second to realize that he's giving it to her.

"It'll stop the hair?" It indeed doesn't seem to have any cuts in it, and neither do the clothes that were previously covered by it.

"Better than any armor. You need it, with your frail skin."

Serious nod. She wraps it around herself. "All right. Our puppet master's got to be in the direction that the hair is being pulled from. - that way."

Then he'll pick her up again and SUPERJUMP his way there, dodging strands as they go!

It does not actually take that long before they make it to a rocky glade where the strands get thick enough that SUPERJUMP stops working as a travel method. There's some very dead samurai, covered in cuts and missing their heads, and there's enough blood on the strands there that Inuyasha doesn't need to be warned to stop there.