Grandfather Higurashi growled as he stepped into the well-house/mini-shrine that held the Bone-Eater's Well. Legend has it that the corpses of any monster placed within it would be gone a few days later. This is the story he'd always told to Kagome, and it was the story written on the dippy little placard outside the well-house.
The truth, however, was that it was one of the two mouths of a time-corridor, a tunnel between two points in time (and often space). His temporal distortion sensors, Mr. Temporal Tracker, had detected the distinctive signature of a mouth opening in the vicinity. A few seconds later, Souta ran about screaming that Kagome had disappeared down the well. Further research revealed that the mouth was mysteriously tuned to the three maiden circuits from Petersburg.
Those two revelations together solved the mystery of why Kikyou's capsule had disappeared, as well as the disappearance of Kagome.
Higurashi had arrived on Old Earth with two of the three saber marionettes just over fifty years ago. Finding himself in a world to him strange and primitive and hostile, he hid his two treasures on these grounds, in two different places to avoid an enemy getting his hands on both Kikyou and Kagome. He hid Kagome in a nearby cave, covering her with boards. He dropped Kikyou down the Bone-Eater's Well, then immediately shoveled soft earth in to prevent visual detection.
He never figured out what happened to Midoriko, the third saber marionette, and believed her to be destroyed.
When he returned a few years later to take over the shrine properly, he had found the soil at the bottom of the Bone-Eater's Well to be undisturbed, but an excavation revealed that the capsule had vanished. He thought at first that it was found and claimed, and finding Kagome right where she should've been confirmed that his original strategy of separating the two was wise advice indeed.
It had taken him a little over thirty five years in total to locally refine the state of the art of Earth technology from the post-WWII era to a level of technology capable of supporting a saber marionette. Through shrewd patent deals, and a few creative uses of the advanced technology he had recreated, he gathered the resources necessary to do this. But by 1982, just a month after his daughter was married, he activated Kagome at last.
Grandfather Higurashi shook himself free of the reminiscence. There was only one person who could've activated the time corridor, after all…
"Kagome! Kagome, are you down there, child?" asked Grandpa as he pointed a lit flashlight down the mouth of the well. With relief, Grandpa saw that it was indeed Kagome. She was wearing a set of miko shozoku, had lacerations all over her body where he could see it, and very glad to see him!
"GRANDPA!!" squealed the marionette with joy as she leapt all the way up the well-shaft to knock down Grandpa in a big, tight hug. "IMISSEDYOU! IMISSEDYOU! IMISSEDYOU!" she weeped.
*baki* *baki*
"K-Kagome! Too tight!" groaned the Grandpa. With a mumbled apology, Kagome released him and looked around, as if not believing her eyes. Wordlessly, she climbed the stairwell out of the well-house and into the patio surrounding the shrine.
She glanced around, taking everything in. The sunlight. The shrine. The buildings. The slight hint of hydrocarbons and soot in the air. The distant honk of horns and roar of internal combustion engines. The distortion of the magnetic field produced by large hunks of moving metal. The cacophony of radio transmissions…
The GPS pseudorandom feeds, telling her exactly where she was… five meters outside a small building on the grounds of the Higurashi shrine.
It all said one thing. I'm home!
Grandpa was in tears to see his missing robotic granddaughter standing in front of him again, "Kagome! Where have you been?! You've been missing for days!"
Souta, who had been made curious by the ruckus Grandpa had been raising, asked, "What happened to your clothes, Neechan?"
Tears welled up in Kagome's eyes as she gazed at the two. It's not a dream! I'm really home! "Waaahh!! Grandpa, I was so scared!" wailed Kagome, latching to her grandfather. Grandfather Higurashi gave Kagome what she needed: a warm hug.
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(Posted Thu, 23 Dec 2004 08:27)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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