Wading through ever-rising floodwaters, Mami excused herself as she walked against the flow of panicking townspeople, her shoes in her hands. Normally, she wouldn't be caught dead in weather like this, but Kamina was still at large, and the bus driver had lost her patience with her and kicked her off, so she didn't have much of a choice. It wasn't the flooding and rain that bothered her; she remembered her hometown having similar storms from time to time. It was the floodwater that made her wrinkle her nose in disgust, the murky sludge that was probably teeming with germs and filth, the water that was staining her clothes beyond repair. If she ever found Kamina after all this, she thought, he'd better not give her any trouble for the rest of the day. The week, even.

Her legs growing sore from walking, Mami half-jumped, half-floated over to a wire fence, holding onto it with slippery fingers as she tried to collect her thoughts. The storm would only get worse from here and she didn't have time to waste by poking around place after place and hoping that Kamina would be there. Perhaps she was looking in the wrong areas, she figured. She'd found him in the red light district last night, didn't she? So perhaps he was still there, in some sort of drunken stupor, not even realizing what was happening around him. Her grip on the fence tightened as frustration bubbled up inside of her, suddenly remembering how angry, and hurt, and frankly, embarrassed she was that night. Just days ago he was kissing her and saying tender things, and she believed them to be true, at least until she found him in the middle of the night, stumbling around the pleasure district after she searched for hours, completely out of his mind and showing her that he'd rather be with whores than with her. Her clenched jaw began to tremble; this situation wasn't much different from the ones in her books. He was the wayward husband out living it up and she was his pitiful, homebody wife that knew all about it but simply looked the other way. Or perhaps, she was the wife that knew all about it and then poisoned him in his sleep and fled the country. With the way she was feeling, that one seemed much more accurate.

For a moment, she wanted to turn around and get back on that bus and never look back on this place, but she couldn't just leave him to die. It wouldn't sit well with her conscience, and she knew that he'd be out in this storm as well if she was the one that was missing(of course, she wouldn't ever go missing for the reasons he did, but that's beside the point). And, perhaps she was reaching, but when he was pouring his heart out to her that night, she’d never seen him look at anything the way he looked at her. She wanted to believe that it came from an honest place, that he did care for her, but simply didn't know how to show it properly. It probably wasn’t a huge stretch of the truth, she reasoned. They did come from different worlds, after all. Perhaps all she had to do was guide him in the right direction, and then everything would be perfect. With newfound hope, Mami let go of the fence to go searching once more, only to be nearly swept under by the flood’s current, the force knocking her shoes out of her hands and sending them floating along. She mourned them only with a curse under her breath, then turned around. She could get new shoes later. After regaining her footing, she began to walk towards the red light district, taking wide, deliberate steps and forcing magic to her legs, making them strong enough to fight the flow of the water. Hopefully she’d be able to get to him in time.