One: The Gal Who Overcame Time

Kagome Higurashi was bored and grumpy. She blamed the oppressive California sun, cooking her brain and making her irritable. At breakfast, her grandfather had suggested that maybe she had mono, but he was always trying to diagnose her with something or other. Her mom brushed it off as teenage ennui, which irritated the girl even more than her granddad's wild speculations. Just because she was a teenager didn't mean that everything she did was some weird, hormone-fueled spectacle! Geez, Mom! But no one was taking her seriously, so she slouched out of the house and went down the hill to explore the ranch. Her fat calico cat Buyo strolled at her heels, looking as bored as she was.

It was an old, old property that had been in the family for generations, almost since the days of the first settlers of the West, but Kagome didn't see the point in having 30-odd acres of dry, boring brush and hills. The city was miles away, and the beach was even further, so all she had to look at was cow country- minus the cows. Granddad told her stories of how her great, great, great grandparents fought to keep the deed from greedy land developers, and how a bustling town had been built nearby. It had quickly been abandoned as the money ran out and the newcomers realized that the land held nothing for them. People had come and gone, but her family stubbornly clung to the ranch. She idly watched a hawk catch a thermal and hang in the air, no doubt looking for the mice that must be scurrying around the sun-baked rocks that quivered and shook with heat.

"Kagome! Hey, wait up!"

Kagome turned and squinted into the sun, her hand shading her eyes, and watched as her little brother Sota ran down from the house to catch up with her. He wore shorts, and his bare knees sported three colorful Band-Aids. He grinned at her as they continued to walk on together, her passive acceptance of his company implying approval.

"So, Gramps asked me to help him use the computer to look up your 'symptoms.'"

The girl stuck her hands deep in the pockets of her cutoff shorts and huffed. "I'll bet! Did you do it?"

Sota crouched briefly to pet Buyo, who meowed appreciatively. "Yeah, I just pulled up WebMD. I figured he can look up all the diseases he wants on there."

"Ugh, seriously? You brat!"

Sota only giggled, looking pleased with his mischief. Kagome sighed irritably, and they walked on in silence for a time. Her brother could be a real nuisance at times, but they didn't fight the way Kagome had noticed other siblings did. He was a caring kid, and she was too motherly not to get along with him- most of the time, anyway. Even when he teased her and she got mad, he would come out with some thoughtful gesture and she couldn't seem to stay mad. Kagome bet that their mom was grateful for that. Raising two kids and taking care of their kooky granddad would have been that much harder if the siblings fought like cats and dogs.

Kagome felt a twinge of guilt as she thought about her mom's situation. Kagome was devoted to her mother, but she wasn't alone. Anyone who spent time with the kind-hearted woman couldn't help but care for her. Kagome could forgive her the occasional motherly embarrassment, after all. And, as she looked back on what her mother had said at breakfast, Kagome couldn't help but agree that she had been acting just a little moody. Just a little, though.

Sota kicked a tumbleweed ball for a ways, until he lost it down a shallow ravine. Buyo bounded down the slope with a sudden energy, and the siblings followed. When they reached the flat bottom of what might have been a riverbed once, Kagome noticed a large dead bush with a strange shadow. Moving closer, she saw that the weeds almost obscured an old pile of wooden slats, haphazardly covering an opening in the side of the gulch.

"Hey, Sota, check this out! There's a hole! Gimme a hand here." As her brother joined her, she rolled up her sleeves and the pair pulled the boards away, grunting with the effort. They came reluctantly, falling to the ground with a dusty thump, and Kagome was pleased to see something new and interesting, at last.

There was a hole in the side of the ravine. It was just barely tall enough to enter if you crouched a little, and the sides were shored up with ancient wooden props. Kagome knew enough to guess that this was an old mining entrance, maybe even dating back to the Gold Rush. She poked her head inside, blinking and trying to peer through the strange darkness. It was weird; despite the sun blazing hot and bright just outside, no light seemed to enter the mineshaft. It was cool and quiet and entirely dark. Sota shifted nervously, his small hand reaching for hers.

As they gazed into the old, forgotten mineshaft, Buyo suddenly leapt into the hole, tail flicking and ears perked.

Kagome cried, "Oh, come on! Buyo, get out of there!"

Sota dug his heels in as his sister started forward. "Buyo! I- Hey, wait, what if it caves in? I don't wanna go in there."

Kagome was a smart girl. She definitely knew better than to go crawling down tunnels and mineshafts all by herself without even a flashlight. She only intended to venture in a few feet and grab her wayward pet, but the instant her body entered the darkness, she saw Buyo streak past her, racing out of the tunnel and into Sota's arms. Her brother, standing bemused and dusty in the hot morning sunlight, was the last thing she saw. With no warning, the circle of light that was the weedy tunnel entrance vanished.

With a shriek of alarm, she whirled around, hands outstretched, groping for the light and warmth, but all she felt was cool stone and empty tunnel in either direction. A breeze- from where?- lifted and seemed to push against her, urging the panicking girl forward. She began to feel as though she was swimming, her limbs tingling and lifting higher as though buoyed up. The breeze became a current, insistent and rough, and her sneakers no longer touched solid ground. Her baseball cap was lost in the cold, swirling darkness, and her hair lifted out of its ponytail and swirled loose and long around her.

Kagome was frozen in bewildered fear. The crazed kicking of her limbs was not ordered by her rational brain, but by some deeply primal survival instinct. She could breathe just fine, but breathing felt like pulling a heavy liquid through her lungs, and that felt like drowning.

Time was chaos. She did not know how long she had been pulled though the tunnel before she felt something under her outstretched hand. It was not the stone and hard-packed dirt of the tunnel wall, or even the small hand of her little brother reaching out to her. It was warm, and smooth, and almost... scaly. Before she could properly register that new sensation, the thing in the dark wrapped around her arm and pulled. She finally screamed, and with the scream came illumination. The silence was filled with noise, and the darkness was thrown back like a heavy blanket. The soft pink glow seemed to emanate from somewhere close to her, but with no tangible source. What it revealed was a horror beyond the world she knew.

Inches away from her petrified, open-mouthed face was the gaping, grinning visage of a monstrous woman. Bald, slit-pupiled, and with a jaw so wide that it appeared to hinge around the back of her ridged head, she was the stuff of nightmares. Her bare breasts scandalized some completely detached and irrational part of Kagome's brain. The rest of it was too busy screaming silently and taking in the rest of the monster. All resemblance to a human woman ended at the waist, and her trunk thickened and coiled out all around them in a seemingly endless tail. Kagome dimly recognized the markings on the woman's tail, and a word pushed to the surface of her mind. Diamondback. She tore her eyes from the creature as the hold on her arm tightened, and she saw the end of the gigantic tail gripping her, tight as a noose. The rattle at the tip, as big as her fist, shook. The noise was incredibly loud in the watery, dimly lit tunnel, and it made her teeth ache.

All of this, Kagome observed in the spare few seconds before the snake-woman reached out a brown, scaled hand and gripped her tight by the neck. Kagome, unable to scream, flailed wildly. Still silent, the creature opened its mouth. Wide, wider than a human, unhinging its jaw until Kagome could see down its pink throat, and then two needlelike fangs flicked forward. The sight of the fangs spurred Kagome's last desperate instincts. Struggling for breath, staring into the jaws of death, and with no time to question the impossibility of it all, she thrust out a hand and her lips formed around a single unheard word. STOP!

To her own amazement, something happened. A brilliant pink-white flash flared from her outstretched hand, and the creature was blasted back with a force that sent Kagome spinning. The creature shrieked when the light touched it, a gravelly, grating noise that made Kagome want to curl up in a ball and sob. The coils around her arm released her, and the angry rattle disappeared into the darkness. The glow remained, but the only thing Kagome could see was herself.

There was no time to feel anything except shock, as all at once the thick, cloying darkness was ripped back as quickly as the rattlesnake beast had been. Kagome gasped as the cold watery sensation was replaced with heat, and fresh air, and she was falling. The warm night air that she had just inhaled for the first time was knocked out of her as she hit the ground, hard. She lay there, panting and trying to calm down, as sudden noise assaulted her ears. Where there had been nothing, now there was the sound of crickets, of rustling, of wind and night-birds.

It was all too much, too fast, and the girl wanted to lay down and cry more than anything. But the threat of a monster lay behind her and the promise of help lay ahead, so Kagome slowly pushed herself to her feet. Looking ahead into the empty night, she wondered how long she had been in the tunnel, after all. She wondered how her family was doing, thinking she had fallen down a hole in the side of a hill. Nothing looked familiar, and she realized with dread that she could no longer see her house, nor any familiar landmarks. She wished she knew what was going on, or why she felt a strange compulsion to go into the little grove of sequoia trees on top of a nearby hill.

Kagome had a million questions and no answers. She did the only thing she could do; she squared her shoulders, wiped her eyes, and set off for the hill, letting her heart lead the way.