~3~
"Who goes there?" a voice asked before Kagome was penned in by arrows.
"Eeeek! Don't shoot!" Kagome said back, long after the final arrow had zoomed past her head.
"Don't you know these lands are forbidden?" asked a back-lit voice.
"No." Kagome replied immediately and rather unceremoniously.
"Then you're a foreigner. Hurry and get out of there!" Said another back-lit voice.
And she did.
On the way to the village Kagome ponders her situation in silence 'Yes, because following their directions without question warrants tying me up. Actually, I should have run. No, because they would have just shot me. And as if running would do me any good. I don't even know where I am!'
At the village, Kagome found herself sitting in the middle of town, with a suspicious crowd gathering around her. "Well, since you all seemed surprised at my arrival, I guess I can't ask how I got here..." Kagome absentmindedly said to the crowd, who dutifully ignored her. Kagome couldn't ignore that the whole town looked like a historical reenactment. 'Well, being magically transported to the distant past would explain the vegetation and clothing, but that doesn't shed a shard of light on how I got here, or why that boy had cat-ears...' Kagome lost herself in thought.
Soon, an old woman cut through the crowd and demanded of her the answer which Kagome had just asked the crowd. Instead of responding in any meaningful way, the only thought which crossed Kagome's mind was...
'That will be me in fifty years, won't it?' The old woman was a miko, and had more wrinkles on her face than a pug dog. She was hunched over and used a bow as more of a walking stick than a weapon.
Snapped back to reality by the old woman squeezing her face, Kagome learned that she bore a striking resemblance to her dead sister, Kikyou. Back at the old woman's hut, Kagome listened to her stories of the miko's, Kaede's, elder sister. Kagome wondered how the old woman could remember the face of someone who had been dead for fifty years, and more so if she understood how unreliable human memory is, but since this was what had granted her freedom, she questioned it not. Kagome explained that she was a miko in training, but before she could relate the story of the demon which had brought her here, Mistress Centipede made her second debut.