"It's the side with demons, isn't it? Sounds like the right side to watch."

She nods seriously, blearily gets out of bed, and heads out to the well in her pajamas. She'll just jump in.

She is now in the 16th century!

So is he!

"See you after training today?"

"Eh. Sure."

And then he is Elsewhere!

Kagome is in the well. She tries jumping in place without getting out. It doesn't work.

"Oh, come on," she mutters, and begins scrabbling up the vines barefoot. It's very annoying and tiring, but eventually she manages to crawl out and jump back in.

Which leaves her stuck in the version of the well that doesn't even have vines. She really needs to install a ladder.

"AYAKO!"

She does, eventually, get out of the well and off to school.

On the bright side, she looks awful! Mistress Centipede's bruises are turning weird colors, and everyone believes that she was sick; her teachers even give her an extra day to complete the homework she didn't finish.

On the less bright side, her focus is shot. She tries to pay attention, but her notes contain very little science or history and a whole lot of... not that.


Questions:

- Does the well actually go through time? Does it go somewhere else?

- If it goes through time, did everything that I've done so far already happen? Did everything I'm going to do already happen? Did time go a certain way that it has to go again, or can we change it? If we change it, does doing so risk destroying everything on this side?

- If it really is the past, where did all of the demons go?

- Why did it open now? Was it always open? If it was always open - well, okay, admittedly, people don't do that much jumping into wells.

- Can anyone go through?

- How come Inuyasha can only go through to the side that I'm on? Can everyone go through to whatever side I'm on? That's what happened with Mistress Centipede.

- Why did Kaede want to keep Inuyasha sealed to the tree so badly? What else does she know about the Shikon jewel?

- How am I even supposed to find the jewel shards?

- What kinds of stuff should I bring to the past? Anything that gives a big advantage on its own? Anything the past doesn't have at all that's going to be really upsetting?

"Higurashi!"

Oh what augh right school.

Well, she will at least survive school, at which point she can jump back through the well for MORE SCHOOL.

Hopefully she can focus on this kind. She'll show up at Kaede's shrine around four. 

"Ready for training! Sorry it's late."

Kaede has been WAITING.

"You're here now," she says, and then she will try to show this freakishly talented ridiculously powerful person with no basic idea how any of this works how to use and manipulate spiritual energy.

Kagome is serious and determined, in addition to being freakishly talented, but also kind of distracted.

She waits very patiently for the end of her lesson so that she can ask Kaede the thing that's been bugging her all day.

And the lesson, as lessons do, eventually ends, and it might even be possible to get some words out of Kaede afterwards.

"Kaede? I'm really sorry to take up so much of your time, but I really, really need to know more about the Shikon jewel, and also more about Inuyasha. I'm the person who brought the jewel here, and I'm the person who unsealed Inuyasha. So - that makes both of them my responsibility. If I made a mistake, then I at least need to know what kind of mistake I made."

"... Well." She pauses. "You have a right to know."

"The Jewel was a relic passed on through my family. I don't know where it came from. It was - evil, and powerful, and magical. Demons could use it to achieve their wishes, and so we protected it here."

She pauses. "Inuyasha came here looking for it; he thought it could grant his wish to become a full demon. He attacked, Kikyo defeated him, and - she let him go. I don't know why. Because he was half-human, maybe? She said he wasn't a threat. he attacked a few more times and she always won. Once or twice he attacked other demons who came for the jewel. We - slowly got used to him. We thought he could be worse."

"Then he maimed Kikyo from ambush, stole the jewel and left the village in flames, and tried to flee. She shot the arrow of sealing, and bound him to the tree, and reclaimed the jewel, and then died of her wounds from the battle."

"No other demon had ever come close to defeating her. But he found a way to do it."

Hm.

Inuyasha, attacking someone off-guard to get the Shikon jewel? Sure, he would do that. He did it to her.

Killing someone who bore him no ill will, in order to get the Shikon jewel? She holds it up against the moment when he saved her from the crow demon (expecting that she had the jewel, and knowing that it would be trivial to take it off her corpse). She holds it up against the expression he made when he heard that Kikyo was dead.

No. It doesn't fit.

He told Sota that he hadn't been trying very hard to kill Kagome. This is, in hindsight, obvious. He was threatening her, expecting that would be enough. But he couldn't threaten Kikyo, who always won against him. He maimed her. He hadn't meant for it to be fatal. He inflicted a fatal wound without meaning to, against an enemy who couldn't be run through with a sword three times and live. She's guessing, of course, but it's the obvious guess.

Even so, Kikyo is no less dead for it.

"Thank you for telling me," she says, sincerely. "Do you think you need the entire jewel, to grant a demon's wish?"

She'll nod in response to the thanks. As for the question - "You do," she says. "But it is still a source of power, with only a part."

Nod.

If Inuyasha wants the jewel because he has a wish, and he needs the jewel whole to do that, then he has no reason to betray her until the end is in sight, until he knows where to find all of the shards. At the end of all of this, she'll have to be careful, and remember that he's betrayed someone who spared him - betrayed her, arguably - before, for the same reason. She'll have to be ready for him to pull something, even if she doesn't expect him to try to kill her.

Not until the end, though. Even in Kaede's story, there's nothing to suggest that he'd hurt her for anything less important to him.

"All right. I'll try to get them all back."

"I know you will."

Right then.

She told Inuyasha she'd see him again after training. It occurs to her that she doesn't actually know how to go see him. If he lives any particular place, she doesn't know where it is. He probably doesn't, though. Even if he did before, any place to stay out in the woods would have fallen into disrepair over the course of fifty years of sleep. 

Well. She'll go back to the well, and see if he's waiting for her.

No, but he's vaguely in the area, and it doesn't take him long to appear once she's there.

"Oh, hey."

...she kind of wants to ask him who he thinks Kikyo was, now, but - no. She wants to be someone he can work with. Better not go poking sore spots just to satisfy her own curiosity, when he's clearly upset that he killed her.

"I wanted to ask where you thought we should head out to first, and if there's anything I should be sure to do first. I have to get some stuff ready, but I think we could go tomorrow, and see if anyone nearby has heard anything."

"Thataway's good," he says, pointing vaguely off in a direction. "See what we smell." 

And he looks at her.

"If you don't want to be useless, learn to use that bow you're carrying. You can barely hit a wall."