At 12 pm, Rin had said she was on her way home.

Umi unlocks her phone for the upteenth time, checking for new messages. Her own message, "Stay safe", is left read at 12:08, and she wonders briefly if somehow she managed to jinx it, somehow inadvertently caused Rin to do exactly the opposite. She checks the time again; it's 2 o'clock. Would Nozomi laugh at her if Umi asked her to use some of her strange, near-magical good luck to help Rin? Would it even work?

Umi's gaze darts over to where Nozomi lays sprawled out on the couch, enjoying one of her afternoon naps despite Umi's many warnings about how they tamper with her sleep schedule. As though sensing her concern, Nozomi wakes up with a yawn, stretching out as she slowly rises from her position, blearily waking to return Umi's stare.

"What's with that look?" asks Nozomi, playful drawl in her voice. "If you were lonely while I was taking a nap, you should have come over here and just taken one with me," she teases, pulling the scrunchies free from her wrists as she starts to put her hair back up.

Umi does her best to ignore what she's saying. "Rin's not home yet," she explains, checking her phone again. No new messages. Worry stirs in her gut.

Nozomi frowns as she gathers her hair in her hands. "Is that a problem? She was going over to the Homura bakery, right?"

Umi shakes her head, brow creasing as she stands, phone forgotten on the couch. "She said she was on her way back two hours ago, Nozomi. I…" She grabs an umbrella, moving towards the door. "I'm going to look for her."

For a moment, Nozomi looks concerned, and almost looks like she's about to say something when she stops, eyebrows shooting up, hands stopping in her hair. She tilts her head to the side, listening for something, and Umi looks towards her, curious at her silence.

"Wait a second," says Nozomi, even though Umi is already paused in the doorway.

"I know it's raining, Nozomi," says Umi, frowning, because Nozomi is never going to let her live down the single time she decided to doubt Nozomi's weather predictions and ended up drenched as a result. "I have an umbrella already."

"That's not what I'm stopping you for. Just wait." A grin starts to form on Nozomi's face, slowly spreading from ear to ear. "Do you hear that?"

Umi huffs. "Nozomi, if you're going to try telling me a ghost story to make me even more worried, I don't-"

"No, no, no," Nozomi rushes, waving her hands in the air before her as though to dismiss the thought. Her smile widens impossibly, and she looks almost like she's going to laugh, looking out the window as she speaks. "Just listen."

And so Umi listens.

At first, she only hears the rain, and is about to chastise Nozomi for wasting her time when she hears everything else. There's a strange sort of background noise lying beneath the sound of the heavy rainfall, and it takes Umi a few moments to finally discern what it is.

For some reason- and somehow, it seems to get louder as she acknowledges it- there are animals whining outside. It's not hard to recognize the distressed meows of what sound like many, many cats, though there is a quieter sound that Umi eventually pinpoints as dogs whining. But Umi doesn't understand why-

Above it all, she hears, much closer than she expected, a very familiar sneeze.

"Rin!" she yells, throwing open the door, umbrella held in her hand as though ready to be used as a weapon rather than to protect from the rain.

She stops almost as soon as she started, taking in the scene before her, umbrella clattering to the ground.

What is this? She watches as dozens of pairs of paws descend along with the rain, albeit much slower, as a purely uncomfortable amount of cats and dogs fall from the sky. Can it be called falling if it's so gentle?

She feels Nozomi push past her through the narrow doorway, smiling joyfully, so incredibly pleased by this turn of events that for a second Umi is convinced that somehow she's responsible, foolish anger flaring in her chest.

(The anger fades instantly when Nozomi catches a small, grey kitten out of the air, bending over it to try to keep it dry while it harmlessly paws at her nose. Nozomi is terribly hard to be mad at, sometimes.)

Umi is broken from her reverie when she hears Rin sneeze again. She drops down immediately, grabbing the umbrella while she looks around. How long has she been out here? Did her umbrella break? She probably hid somewhere to get shelter from the rain- is she sick already? That must be why she's sneezing-

Or it's not.

Rin is huddled up against the house, holding her perfectly functional umbrella up like a makeshift shelter, and, despite her allergies and despite Umi's explicit warnings in the past, she is absolutely surrounded by cats.

Rin's smile as Umi walks up is interrupted by a sneeze so loud that her cat-pile jumps, and Umi sighs like her father used to whenever Honoka would show up for an impromptu sleepover, well-meaning but tired.

"Rin," she says, noting with mild despair that Rin is sitting on her new sweater, and so are all her cats, and she won't be able to wear it until it's clean but she'll probably still try to. "You're allergic to cats."

"Yeah." Rin smiles up at her and for a second Umi wonders how the sun can possibly be shining when it's literally and figuratively raining cats and dogs. As though directly disobeying her implied order, Rin gathers all the cats closer to her, making room as another one walks up. She takes a moment- it almost looks like a little roll call, the way she counts the cats off- before she speaks again, smile still shining even though her nose is running a bit.

"Do you have any Benyadril?"