What she left behind!

Kagome sank lower and lower into the cushions around her, wishing that there was a magical portal among them just as there was in the Bone Eater's well so that she could disappear. It was too humiliating for words – or an upright posture of any description – and making herself as physically inconspicuous as possible was all she could do to reflect her inner misery as her mother, grandfather and little brother sat beside her, staring open-mouthed at the television screen.

"Archaeologists at the site are certain that an elaborate hoax is being played on them," the news reporter was saying, as background shots showed a dig site on the outskirts of Tokyo, careful hands brushing dirt away from unidentifiable items, and casually-dressed intellectuals with serious expressions on their faces. "However, no one has as yet come up with a convincing explanation as to how the hoax is being perpetrated."

The picture cut to a Professor Something-or-Other of Such-and-Such University – Kagome was simply too horrified to note his name or official designation, but she saw very clearly that he was a grey-haired gentleman whose facial expressions twitched between bemusement and irritation as he spoke: "Obviously, the discovery of this modern-day sanitary napkin – fortunately unused and still sealed in its plastic wrapping – is the last straw for us. I'm afraid we shall now have to dismiss everything else we previously found at the site, although the majority of the artefacts within the area seem to be genuine articles and remnants of building structures from the Sengoku Jidai."

He continued: "We thought the strips of first-aid plaster and the empty cup-noodle containers from two weeks ago were an accident, then we found the plastic water bottles and empty Ninja Snack bags last week, which we thought might have blown onto the site during a storm, although they were well covered with old soil. The broken Takashimaya department-store umbrella caked with centuries of dirt, however, beneath the newer foundations of the last temple to occupy this site, was impossible to explain away, and the pink bicycle truly tested us beyond our limits, but this – the sanitary pad – is the last straw."

Kagome's face was now a brilliant shade of pink to match her old bike as the reporter went on to list and show the out-of-place artefacts that researchers and volunteers had discovered over several weeks at the site of what was believed to be a burnt-down temple from circa 1500 AD. On the same spot, a newer temple had been built over the old foundations about two hundred years after the first had been razed, but when a recent earthquake destroyed that later structure, archaeologists had the opportunity to search the site for the building outlines and articles left behind by an earlier era, "…only to find that some very clever hoaxsters had got there before they did," the reporter continued in her crisp tones. "Those unknown persons managed somehow or other to bury a good number of modern-day items so perfectly in the dirt that they looked to have been undisturbed for some five hundred years, alongside the genuine pottery shards, well-preserved temple implements and the temple foundations. It is a complete mystery to everyone who has been investigating the site – a mystery which looks likely to remain unsolved for some time to come. This is Yukiko Nakata, reporting for News Tokyo."

A final shot of the Laurier-brand sanitary napkin just dug up from the dirt and displayed in someone's grubby hand flashed on the screen again before the reporter's sign-off, and Kagome flinched once more.

"Not one word," she groaned, her voice muffled by the cushion she had pressed her face into. "Not one word from any of you, please."

Still hiding her face, she got shakily to her feet and ran upstairs to her bedroom, where her family could hear her wailing with embarrassment for the better part of the next hour.

"Oh, Kagome," her mother sighed. "How did you lose so many things all in one little area?"

"Well, Mama," Sota said, giving a sigh of equal magnitude beside her. "Nee-chan did tell us about the time a demon interrupted their picnic beside a temple and set fire to it, didn't she? Her bag fell open during the attack, right? All that stuff must be the five-hundred-year-old result of it."

"At least they didn't dig up her maths textbook with her name written inside the cover," Grandpa Higurashi muttered. "If that happened I have no doubt I would have to come up with many more new lies to tell people over the phone."

"Was that lost in a different place?" her mother asked, worried now.

"Er, yes, I think she came back without that one after the attack of the evil priestess," Sota said, after thinking hard. "That was further to the west of this site."

"Oh, good," Mrs Higurashi breathed. "Wait – what about her calculator?"

"I think that fell into a river when the wolves kidnapped her," Grandpa Higurashi said.

"So it should be at the bottom of the sea by now," Sota stated. "No worries, Mama."

"What was that thing again that she lost when those seven psychopaths came back from the dead and went on the rampage?" her mother asked.

"Her alarm clock?"

"Ah, yes."

"And what did she drop when that circus elephant broke loose and fractured her little toe?"

"Uhm… that wasn't something from the other side of the well," Grandpa Higurashi mumbled awkwardly. "The circus elephant thing was just another one of my excuses to her teacher when she missed school five days in a row."

"You told her teacher that an escaped circus elephant broke her little toe?" Mrs Higurashi asked her father-in-law.

Wearing a defensive look on his face, the old man protested: "What else could I say? I was all out of exotic illnesses!"

"Was the bandit raid one of your stories too?" Mrs Higurashi queried.

"No, Mama," Sota interjected. "Gramps didn't make that one up. It really happened, and the thing she lost that time was her wristwatch."

"Oh dear," his mother murmured.

"I'm sure one of her school uniforms is buried out there somewhere too," Sota said.

"Oh, Kagome…" Mrs Higurashi sighed again, shaking her head.

Disclaimer: I don't own Inuyasha, and make no money or profit from writing this fanfic; Rumiko Takahashi has all the rights to the original manga and anime and the characters in them.

This is just a short oneshot that I wrote for some relief and a change from the long fic I recently finished. It sprang from my idle musings about what happened to all the things Kagome took with her through the well – she must have lost a good amount of stuff over there!