If the disclaimer is important to you for some reason, please see chapter one. No further mention of it will occur.

Edited 5/15/2020

Beautiful Moon

Error Assessment

Mistakes had degrees, and those assigned values could be charted like any of the sales data her father dealt with and forced upon her for practice. She could make fancy pie charts and scatterplots out of them, calculate the outliers and what decisions skewed her data, and would occasionally omit whatever might make the resulting graph look unpleasant if she felt it were necessary.

She had a long list of mistakes of varying degrees, from accepting a stupid tree-climbing dare as a seven-year-old (and earning a broken arm when she inevitably fell), to telling the wrong person about a mistake in a presentation (and losing her father that company's contract). The ones she assigned a higher value to were much less likely to occur a second or third time, and lower value ones often warranted repeating just to confirm their overall weight, though they usually remained within a particular range.

Every once in a while, though, some action she took caused her to throw out her entire categorical system and start from scratch.

Jumping into a magical well, for instance.

Roughly fifteen minutes ago according to her watch when she had last caught a glimpse of it, Mizuki had scrambled out of a well by climbing (and slipping) on vines along its walls, until she found herself staring at trees instead of the inside of a well house. The part of her that had held onto some kind of hope that she was at least wrong about her conclusions regarding a weird time-warping hole in the ground was blindsided by that moment. She vaguely remembered laughing, a pleased feeling from the white noise a backdrop to her very tense nerves.

Feudal Japan stretched out into the darkness, and she couldn't help but wander a little, marveling at the forest around her as the stars shone brighter than she had ever known they could even despite the waxing moon. Comforted by the ease of being able to enter the well, she lost herself to the world. The sensation of walking through an old forest was impossible to put words to. It was quiet save for the bugs that sang through the night and the brighter hums of white noise echoing from places she couldn't pinpoint. Without the noisy traffic and constant flow of people, it almost felt eerie.

When some terrifying creature with gruesome features for a face and a long tail for a body snaked silently around a tree, that eerie feeling coalesced into absolute terror.

Jumping into the well was not some large, particular mistake that now took the spot at the top of her list (though it certainly found its way up there). Instead, a series of many small- and medium-sized mistakes were busy shredding her entire system in their efforts to reorganize themselves. Ignoring advice from the stars moved higher on the list, as did touching unknown objects to save unsuspecting strangers from vague punishments. Top of the list now was not taking the time to review the list of (suddenly very important) notes still secure in her back pocket, so that she might have been able to remember that something more than potential answers existed on the other side of the well.

She had completely failed to account for the fact that demons had made themselves a home on the impossible until today list, and while blaming the pendant and its effect on her mental state was easy to do, she'd had a clear enough head before leaving that she couldn't gift the fault to the object entirely. If she had slowed down, she would have likely allowed enough guilt to settle into her that she would have gone to the family to apologize and attempt to explain herself, which would have had better odds of a positive outcome than this. The girl she had met had at least seemed aware of weird and magical items.

Speaking of…

"Come on, do something!"

The pendant in her hand was glowing, but nothing was happening so far as she could tell beyond an echo of noises in her head, so she just kept running, trying to keep the chorus of the fear of death at bay and failing miserably. Aside from conveying feelings, the rock was otherwise useless. If it wasn't for the fact that it was what had led her into this mess of a situation in the first place, she would have tossed it.

Luckily for Mizuki, the thing chasing her wasn't very agile. It kept running into various branches in their shared path, like it hadn't seen the tree right in front of its face. If it hadn't been screeching about her being its next meal, she might have been laughing about the apparent lack of depth perception in its singular eye.

She wasn't a strong runner, and she knew this game of chase wasn't going to end well for her if it continued. Hiding was a better option. She just had to find somewhere-!

Her foot sank into the earth as she rounded a tree, and she barely contained a scream as the rest of her body followed into a collection of tangled roots too thin to support her weight. The ground had given way below them, creating a cavity large enough for something to hide. It was uncomfortably cramped, damp, and the fall hurt, but Mizuki took the gift she was given and hunkered down.

"Where are you, sneaky little human?" the creature called bitterly from somewhere beyond her hiding place a long moment later. She pushed carefully into the dirt behind her, trying to get out of the rays of moonlight that came in around the roots above, and hoped that the thing lacking a nose on its ghastly face meant it also couldn't smell her. Eyes wide as the creature swam through the air in her view, she swallowed back the lump in her throat, clamped her hands over her nose and mouth to hold her breath, and froze. The pounding of her heart sounded far too loud in her ears, and she hoped the thing couldn't hear it from where she hid.

It cursed loudly when apparently it had decided that she must have gotten away somehow, and slipped away without another word. Mizuki still didn't allow herself to move so much as a twitch. There was no way she could know for certain if the thing was actually gone or just hiding in wait for her, and she didn't want to test that. If she were wrong, then…

The thought of what it might do after it caught her made her gasp for the oxygen her lungs so desperately desired, and her eyes darted around the world outside of her shelter, terrified that the creature would reappear. All remained silent, however, and for the second time that day, Mizuki cried.

"Never again," she thought desperately to herself as the adrenaline disappeared and her body began to shake. Her muscles ached from the run, and she must have rolled her ankle or something because it hurt more than the scrapes on her arms and the bruising her chin suffered on making contact with the roots on her way down.

Demons were real. She didn't know how to reconcile that idea with the world she knew, or how to wrap her head around how horrible a death she could have just suffered all because she couldn't turn away from a necklace that made her feel whole. Even now, angry and scared as she was, she couldn't regret having it, which just made her angrier, more scared, and she swallowed a disparaging scream.

Mizuki had never been particularly fearful of anything, and now she wished she had never known such a fear existed. This was going to change everything, and she was never going to be able to explain it. "The well actually works, I tried it," wasn't going to suffice for her friends. "I was chased by a demon during the class trip," would never be an acceptable explanation of the nightmares she would likely have.

As if discomforted by her turmoil, the pendant hummed something like an apologetic note, but instead of helping, it only made her feel like she was being apologized to by a reflection of herself in a loop that rang hollow. Eventually the noise settled for simply keeping her company.

Hours later, when she finally felt like she could breathe again and the stone had fallen silent in her hands, she would uncurl herself and contemplate attempting to get home before the sun rose, only to remember that she hadn't ever picked up the flashlight from the well.

Which was fine, she would conclude, because she wasn't ever going use it to tell scary stories with Riho again.

-/-/-/-

She didn't know when she had finally fallen asleep, but by the time Mizuki awoke, light was streaming in through the roots above her head. A glance at her watch told her it was just after six-thirty, which would have been more of a surprise if she hadn't already expected to sleep lightly. The sounds of various birds calling was a welcome change to the night filled with the echoes of insects far more unnerving than they had been when she had first climbed out of the well.

With a little effort, she pulled herself free from her shelter and stretched every muscle she knew how to. Sleeping in the little cavern may have been safe, but it was far from comfortable, and she didn't need a mirror to be painfully aware of her appearance. She was dirty, scraped up, and in desperate need of a hairbrush.

She settled for carding her fingers through her hair, removing the elastic band from around the tangled mass and slowly working out each knot. Long hair suited her for now, and she suffered through the drawbacks because of her preference in appearance, though Riho thought a shorter cut would look good on her. She wasn't ready to part with the length just yet, but maybe in a few years she'd take her up on the suggestion.

When her hair settled more properly, she tied it back again and attempted to work some of the dirt out of her clothes, though it would likely be easier when it dried out more. The darker dyes hid things better than the white of her uniform, but she wouldn't be wearing these for long once she got back to her proper time. Now that she wasn't actively in danger, she could focus on making her way back home.

She felt…better, at least. More collected and miles away from the girl that had fallen into the root cavity last evening, anyway. Being able to see everything around her more clearly certainly helped, as did the sleep, however fitful it had been. She was still sore and tired, but the fear from last night's encounter had eased into something more bearable.

She took her backpack and sat down by the tree whose roots had saved her life, examining the strap that had ripped away from the bottom seam. There wasn't anything she could do for it without a needle and thread, so she set the thought aside so that she could focus on a light breakfast instead. Crackers weren't ideal, but at least it was something.

Fishing out the notes she'd made before the train ride, she stared at them while she ate, contemplating what she would need to do once she got home. Saying she'd gotten lost was too far a stretch now, what with her current physical state, and her trip down the well was bound to be noticed by someone with her flashlight sacrificed by her neglect, so talking with the Higurashi family would likely be her first stop. Speaking with the girl Kagome would be ideal, since she'd witnessed the original spectacle in the first place. Inuyasha, less so. He didn't strike her as the calm and reasonable type.

Before all of that, though, she needed to make her way back to the well.

Mizuki glanced around herself, trying to remember what direction she'd come from or at least recognize some feature from her desperate escape. The route directly behind the tree was out because she wouldn't have found the hole if she had come from the other side of it. Aside from that, she didn't think she would have run directly toward any tree, either, since she was trying to dodge them, so directly in front of the hole could be eliminated. That left roughly two directions in mind.

She couldn't recall what was on either side of her when she had fallen through the root patch, and she was having a hard time finding any trace of shoe prints or evidence that she had passed through one area or another. After five minutes of contemplation, she gave up trying to logic her way through it and took her water bottle to a relatively flat area, cleared it of debris, and spun it on the ground. With it still half-full, the bottle didn't spin long, and eventually stopped with the cap pointing roughly to the left.

She frowned, thought longer about where this idea now fell in her dismantled chart of mistakes, and offered up a prayer to any benevolent god that might be listening.

"To the right it is," she decided as she picked up the bottle and dusted off the dirt it had gathered. The last time she relied on a bottle to determine her way, she ended up going in the opposite direction she had needed to. Having no reliable way to determine her original path now, she was banking on the odds of things turning out well this time around.

Bottles didn't care about odds, and Mizuki's list grew longer.

It was when she realized that her watch was reading noon that Mizuki passionately kicked a fallen tree and cursed when the action backfired right into the nerves of her toes. Disgruntled and exhausted, she took a seat on the hard wood and sighed into her hands. She was utterly lost. She knew it hours ago, but stubbornly refused to give in without any other options to fall back on, and had only accomplished getting further from her goal. Her lengthy list of errors and miscalculations grew ever longer every moment she spent in Tokyo no matter the era, it seemed. Now her toes hurt, along with everything else.

To silence the protests of her stomach, which had gone beyond complaining about how long it had been since her last meal to demanding she sacrifice anything at all to it, Mizuki opened her backpack and retrieved the rice crackers, trying to limit herself to as few as necessary, given that this was currently the only food she had. She needed to think, and thinking was much more difficult with both the growls of her stomach and the haunting remarks of her parents' disappointment rattling around in her brain. At least the white noise seemed to know when to not be a nuisance, though she would have appreciated it showing her the way back.

She glared at her pocket where the stone now stayed. She could hear it, but she couldn't interpret anything from it. It had been that way all day.

The main issue at hand was that she was lost in feudal Japan. A really big problem, especially since she had no landmarks to guide her, or people to ask for help. Even if she did find someone, she couldn't guarantee it would be easy to get the help she needed, unless she lucked upon the two she'd met at the shrine (and she had very little faith in luck right now).

Secondary issue: she was defenseless. She could punch and kick, sure, but she wouldn't be able to do anything against a demon if she came across another one, and about the only hope she had of finding her way was finding the one constellation she'd recognized in the sky and orienting herself correctly from there, which meant waiting until night, which probably meant demons. Coincidence or not, she hadn't run into anything else weird in the last five hours of daylight.

A glance at the bag in her lap made her flatten and roll the open end closed. It was getting emptier than she liked.

It was while she was returning the food to her bag that she felt something strange. Something like a chill of sorts, except it didn't leave her feeling cold, just nervous. She glanced about her surroundings suspiciously, eyeing the foliage as if something would jump out of it at any moment. It was strangely familiar, but she couldn't recall where she had felt something like it before, and listening with more than her ears only granted her the neutral white noise given off by the pendant.

Cautious, Mizuki slung her bag over her shoulder. The feeling was around her, like a fog in the air, almost, but not one she could see.

"Don't panic; it's just weird, that's all," she assured herself, but backed up against a tree for blind side protection nonetheless because her heart was already pounding and she could feel a tremble in her hands as though she were back in that cavern and trying to hide. It was eerily quiet. She couldn't hear any birds around her, nor insects, nothing that would indicate life, until something crunched.

The sound echoed again a moment later, followed by a branch snapping. She tried to swallow the lump in her throat as the sound morphed into something like footsteps, but it remained despite her efforts. She realized a moment later that the pendant's sound was bright in her head, a warning siren, and as a tall form made its way through the trees in front of her, she realized she couldn't move.

"I thought I had smelled something interesting," a grey-skinned, human-shaped creature said smoothly as it ducked under a branch and into the space left by the fallen tree. "Here I find a tasty little girl."

If she had had the capacity to feel insulted, she would have been mad about the little girl remark, but the only thought running through her head was run, and her betraying legs weren't cooperating with her instincts. The demon in front of her was at least a head and a half taller than her, thick muscles rippling as he took each step, bald head making his green eyes seem that much brighter. He was uglier than the first one, mis-proportioned despite looking more human, and was dressed in nothing but the equivalent of a rag around his waist.

She recalled momentarily where she had felt this strange fog before; it was there last night as the first demon had slipped around the tree beside her.

This demon reached a bulky hand out to her, a laugh rippling through him. "So scared you can't even speak?" he chuckled. "You're making this far too easy for me, little human."

His clawed fingers brushing against her shoulder was apparently enough to break whatever force was holding her there, and she let out an ear-piercing scream she didn't know she had in her. The demon recoiled momentarily, giving her a big enough gap to sprint away.

"That's more like it!" he bellowed after her. She didn't pause to look at him, afraid she would trip or run into something. She just ran as fast as she could, trying to ignore the footsteps she could hear behind her, the pounding of her heart in her chest, the screaming of her muscles as she pushed herself away from the creature. Nothing else mattered except expanding that distance between them and fighting off the panic rising in her chest. White noise echoed in her head in two different pitches, neither of which were helpful.

Everything was catching up to her; the demon, her lack of food for the day, and everything she had gone through the night before. She didn't have the strength she needed to keep running, to get away, and despite the adrenaline coursing through her veins and the fear quaking through her body, she knew she was slowing down.

She ducked around one tree and nearly tripped on a root, but caught herself on the large evergreen beside her. Pushing off as soon as she caught a breath, she continued her escape, until a sound crash resounded behind her.

Like the first demon, this one cursed the trees getting in its way, annoyance clear in its tone. Mizuki didn't have enough mental capacity at the moment to contemplate the odds of two demons with poor eyesight and pushed on, unaware that the branch should have been in her way, too, had it existed before she had passed the tree it sprouted from.

She hadn't expected the trees to disappear around her when she shoved her way through the foliage. Suddenly she was in a clearing, at the top of a hill, where the forest disappeared for at least a mile and a river ran clearly from the woods and out beyond her sight.

This was bad.

She quickly chose the right and ran along the uneven tree line before ducking back into them. She couldn't run through that open field; it was like putting a giant sign on her that said 'come and get it!' Instead of risking that, she dove into a thick bush, praying it would hide her long enough for the demon to lose her trail and grow bored of its chase.

Time ticked by agonizingly slow.

She froze when she heard footsteps just beyond where she hid. They were considerably lighter than those of her pursuer, however, making her breath hitch in confusion.

"Oh, those flowers look lovely!" piped the cheerful voice of a child.

No…

No, no, no, this couldn't be happening. The demon was headed this way, and this kid was here, and…

Mizuki bit her lip and squeezed her eyes shut, fighting with every instinct in her body. She had to stay hidden. Damn it, she couldn't die here!

"I lose one, but find another," echoed a familiar voice. "What a lucky day," it continued, as if to mock her lack of the same.

He was back. She could see his giant feet from where she hid, and the tiny feet of the child's as they took several steps back. Picked flowers fell to the ground, abandoned.

"Will you run like the other?"

"Damn it!"

She didn't know where the strength suddenly came from or how she convinced any part of herself to move, but she launched from the bush and right at the child as the demon reached out. The tiny body gave easily under her weight, and they crashed to the ground together. With the aid of the hill, both rolled quickly to the bottom, though the trip left a searing pain across Mizuki's left arm that she couldn't make sense of. When they stopped, she released the child from her grip, and the small girl stood with a look of surprise plastered across her face as she looked her over.

"Miss, you're bleeding!" she exclaimed worriedly.

"It's fine," she insisted, though it wasn't, really. It just wasn't what they could afford to be focusing on at the moment. "We need to run!"

When she stood, though, she realized that the cuts and scrapes she'd gained from branches during her run weren't the child's concern, but the larger amount of blood rolling down her arm. She followed the path up to a gash that had been opened by the sleeve of her shirt, and the pain that exploded upon taking in the wound brought her right back to her knees where she clutched her arm and curled into herself involuntarily, swallowing a scream and the rise of bile in her throat.

The child's concerns cut off at the sound of something heavy landing on the ground beside them, and Mizuki forced herself to look up and evaluate the outcome of her latest error in judgement.

The demon had caught up.

They were both going to die.

In shifting the tone of this story, I've tried to focus a little more on Mizuki's discontentment with herself, which was a theme that existed in the newer version of this, but is now something I want to bring closer to the forefront as I change this (yet again). I envision her as the type of character with a lot of internal conflicts for various reasons, so you'll be seeing those surface as the story progresses.

This is, in a lot of ways, a coming-of-age story. Those of you familiar with The Hero's Journey framework will likely recognize the stages as they come and go, but please don't mistake that for me having any idea what I'm doing – I might be better than I was when I started writing, but I'm still pretty sure that I've got no hands on this steering wheel.

On that note, if you have critiques, throw them at me!