Her fur (which she was not supposed to have) was filthy.

Perhaps not by people standards (which she also had) but by her own (cat) standards she was dirty and gross. There was mud on her paws, and clump of fur behind her right ear that she could not get rid of.

Katelyn, who was not going to focus on the irony of her name right now thank you very much, picked her way quickly through the streets. It had taken her months to get here, and she'd ended up in Dubai before she'd finally arrived in Japan, and finally, finally she was in Yokohama.

It was the hardest thing she'd ever done in her life. Harder than working fourteen days straight, harder than taking a shift from two am to seven pm, even harder than scrambling up the side of a mountain with a snow storm on the horizon.

She'd had to find a way to get all the way to DIA, which involved hiding in a horrendously smelly purse and ducking under seats on buses and finally a shuttle. Then it had taken her weeks to manage to get on not only the right flight, but not get caught anywhere and tossed into a cage. Again. She was starting to hate cages.

No, she was finally, finally in Yokohama. It was the only place that she knew for absolute certain that there was someone who could help her.

It might have been easier to hitch a ride with the Guild Members, when she found out where she was that she was now a goddamn cat. The only problem was, she had no fuckig clue where they were, and Yokohama didn't move.

So here she was, wandering as the sky grew darker and darker, trying in vain to find one man out of a million.

It wasn't like she could ask people around the street if they'd seen her target, and it wasn't like she could just google the Armed Detective Agency's base of operations.

No thumbs, no luck.

So she skulked through the streets, the gross feeling of wet dirt in her paws and the irritating knot behind her ear, looking for any familiar faces or even just a street sign in english. She had a good enough understanding of Japanese to get the gist of what people around her were saying, but that wasn't going to do her much good and all of the specifics were lost. Duolingo wasn't that much help.

With little choice left and the streets starting to turn over from the bright hustle of daylight to the quick lights and high tempers of night she found a good window sill to sit her furry little butt on and watch the world dissolve into shadows.

Katelyn stayed there until the middle of the night, when a window cracked open and brushed her long tail.

She liked to think it was a testament to her than she only lifted her head and looked behind her instead of jumping with a howl.

Behind her, holding a glass half full of something red and bitter, was a young man about her age, only he was human, and he had the prettiest blue eyes she had ever seen.

"You don't belong here," he said. Kat stiffened, lifting up on her paws and ready to bolt when he inevitably took a swipe at her. Only he didn't. He just looked at her, swirling the wine around in a glass. Long fingers in dark gloves lifted towards her, crooking at her until she leaned forwards to bump her nose against them.

They smelled like oil, wine, and something metallic. There was something else too, something underneath that made her tail twitch.

"How'd you get here?" he asked, looking down the ledge. Kat peered with him. They were a good ten stories off the ground. Kat, as a cat, could jump oddly high up.

I jumped, she said, but all that came out was a 'meow'.

Those long fingers tracing around her head until they were scratching at the back, behind her ears. She leaned into the touch gladly, tail swishing slowly back and forth. Her dark green eyes slowly shut.

"You should be careful where you go, kitty, you might end up somewhere dangerous."

Kat didn't respond. She just relished in the contact while she had it. People loved stray dogs. Stray cats, less so.

The man leaned on the window sill next to her for a long time, petting her and drinking wine until his cheeks were well and pink. He even worked the knot out of her fur.

When he pulled back inside she pulled her tail away from the window so it wouldn't be squished when he shut it.

He didn't shut it, just wandered inside and down the hall, out of sight and out of mind.

Kat settle closer to the warmth of the inside. It wasn't a bad place to be.