Off balance from the unexpected forces, Kagome fell back into the mouth of the Bone-Eaters Well. She pivoted to get a look at who pulled her in, and saw what could only be described as a monster. She had the upper body of a woman, if that woman had three pairs of arms. The lower part was just a skeleton that resembled a snakes'.
Kagome was shocked. Too shocked to really do anything, as the two fell further down into what now seemed like a bottomless well.
"wHat joY... whAT stREngTh i fEEL..." hissed the monstrous woman demonically. Meat started forming around the bones, resembling the segmented body of a centipede. "My fLESh reTUrns tO ME..." The fiend brought her head in closer to Kagome, and a long, slimy tongue snaked out to lick Kagome's face. "you... HAVE iT... yES?"
"G... GET BENT, FREAK!!" Kagome thrust her arm at the thing's face...
*Phantom-Light Drive: Online*
*PSHHHH!!*
The centipede-lady went one way. One of the thing's arms stubbornly clutching Kagome's sleeve went the other. That meant the two had to part company. Kagome's reaction was typical of a teenaged girl of fifteen years: "EWWWWWWWWW!!!"
"I... wiLL... Not... lOSe iT NOw... SHikoN no tAma..." the centipede-lady's voice faded as it fell into the void below Kagome.
"Shikon... no Tama?" repeated Kagome, not really knowing why.
Then she touched bottom. Touching bottom much more lightly than she expected. She collapsed onto all fours, breathing heavily even though she was a machine. (Actually it did help cool her off by moving ventilating air through her thoracic cavity.) She looked around; she was in the well, at the bottom.
Was that... a dream? Kagome's eyes landed the severed arm of the centipede-lady. Guess not. Gross!
"I wiLL Not lOSe iT NOw... SHikoN no tAma..."
"'The Jewel of Four Souls'?" whispered Kagome. "Dang! I always turned off my audio receptors whenever Grandpa talks about it. Gotta get out of here." She stood and bent her knees in preparation to jump. "Souta!" she called as she jumped, "Get Grandpa now!"
Kagome reached the top of the well, landing just outside its rim as she finished her jump and her message to Souta. But there was no Souta. There was no a well-house. There wasn't even that dippy little placard stating the dubious history of this well.
Just forest. And vines.
As Kagome forged ahead, calling out for Grandpa or mother, she saw none of the familiar features of the shrine. Just trees, trees and more trees. She was getting rather worried now, as she didn't know where she was. Grandpa never did get around to installing that GPS system she'd been bugging him for.
Wait... She knew the algorithm for GPS! The GPS module just automated the process. She could to a GPS reading right here and now. She turned on her short-wave radio to pick up the GPS satellites...
…and found nothing but dead air. There wasn't even much static, really. Now Kagome started to get truly frightened. It wasn't interference; they just plain weren't there!
But Lady Luck, it seems, was watching over this poor little marionette, for she had spotted a familiar landmark. "Oh! Go-shinboku!" Kagome's delight was unexaggerated as she jogged toward the great tree. Even when I was first activated, I could always find my way home from there. Kagome couldn't use phrases like, "When I was little," for she was never really little—being a marionette and all.
Kagome stopped short when she got a better view of the tree. First off, it was a lot skinnier than she remembered. Secondly, there was a strange, white-haired boy in the vines at its base. The boy looked asleep, maybe dead. Kagome crawled up to the boy, cautiously, calling out to him to see if he was all right. Then she spotted the ears.
They weren't human ears, more than they looked like dog ears. Kagome had the sudden urge to touch them. They felt soft as felt. The displaced saber marionette chastised herself for succumbing to such urges.
"What do you there?!" came an arcane shout.
*thock*
*thock*
*thock*
*thock*
"*Geep!*" gasped Kagome, and froze as the tree around her bore the brunt of a flurry of arrows burying themselves in the young Go-shinboku's trunk. The robot-girl cautiously turned around to face the attackers.
"This land is forbidden!"
"Be you a stranger?!"
Kagome did not answer...
"HEY!" shouted Kagome. "Did you really need to tie me up?!" Although she could easily snap her bonds in an instant, Kagome decided to play it cool and try to figure out what the heck was going on here. She was carried to this old-style farming village. The villagers murmured as they stared at her, tied on a piece of matting.
Kagome realized now what was happening. She was in the past: the speech, the clothes, the houses, the weapons... the were all in the Sengoku Jidai, the Warring States period. This was when Japan was little more than a collective of separate nations governed by warlords ruling the peasants through feudalism.
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(Posted Thu, 16 Dec 2004 09:35)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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