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Tianara relaxed a little, surprised by how easily the lie had come from Joshua. He was really remarkably good at telling stories, she thought. And yet he'd always struck her as so intrinsically honest that lying would be hard for him...

She shrugged to herself. If it saved them from trouble, then that would be okay. But she still glanced a little wistfully at Adrian, wondering if he'd be a good person to confide in if they just gave him the chance. Didn't they need as much help as they could get? He probably knew a lot of people.

But she decided it would have to wait. She didn't want to tell Adrian that Joshua was a liar not two seconds after Joshua finished speaking - particularly since he had saved her from telling a much more confusing and unconvincing lie by doing so. Tianara was not a good liar.

Although now that Joshua had given her the template, she could add in details without a problem if called upon to do so. She realized with some discomfort that they had forgotten to talk about where she supposedly lived now. If Adrian were to ask, she'd probably just let Joshua answer again. Or else she'd think of something. Surely even she could answer that simple a question, right?

She picked up one of the trimmed maps and smiled. "Oh, these are fantastic," she decided. "They'll be perfect."

Here, it was actually Tianara who added details. "They're sort of a subspecies of the rabbit fish - maybe you've seen them around, though I doubt it. They're pretty shy." She smiled as she talked, and there was no doubt of her sincerity. These were probably actual fish. "They live along various southern coastlines, but Joshua's sure he saw some around here. I think he's silly," she confided with a giggle.

Then she picked up one of the maps. "So we're going to go around and see if we can find any nearby - after I circle all the places where they actually do live so Joshua can see how unlikely it is."

She was proud of herself. She'd actually managed to sound like she had a good grasp on English there - having no idea that 'silly' was probably not the word she had wanted earlier. But it was passable. Maybe Adrian wouldn't notice.

Tianara, however, this time sailed smoothly into the choppy waters, remembering how she had covered her earlier mistake with actually speaking the merfolk tongue to him. "Well, no, it's not," she admitted, the lilt in her voice becoming a bit more pronounced. "Why, was it that obvious?"

The words came out a lot more easily this time, too - apparently lying, like everything else, got easier with practice. "It's not really a language," she explained. "It's more of a...a dialect, and it doesn't really have a name. But it isn't spoken very much anymore - it's a dying breed, I'm scared," of course meaning I'm afraid, "so it's not really surprising that you haven't heard it before. I'm trying to teach it to Joshua, but it's not going very quickly," she added with a grin in his direction.

Putting her hands in her jeans pockets, she gave Adrian a shy smile before looking to Joshua. "We should probably go - isn't there more that we have to get before we go looking for fish?"

Tianara, blissfully oblivious to the undercurrent, smiled and took Adrian's hand after a quick glance at Joshua to see that that was what she was supposed to do. "I'm sure we'll see one another again," she said with a shy smile of her own in response. He seemed to draw out that sort of response in her. "It's not that big a town."

She liked Adrian, she found in surprise. She liked him a good deal. It would have been nice to ask him to go with them, but she doubted he could - not if he was minding this place.

It was a shame. She thought she'd like to find out more about him.

But they did have to go, and so she smiled and withdrew her hand, glancing at Joshua again. She assumed he would help her make their goodbyes, not really realizing that they had already been made.

Tianara laughed a little bit as they left the shop, walking down the street. "He seems nice," she mused. "I wonder why he wants us to come back. Maybe he thought of something else he wanted us to look at."

She had been a little confused by their wandering out without finishing goodbyes, but had eventually figured that it was different between humans and merfolk - just like so many other things were. That was probably something she would have to ask Joshua about later. But at the moment, she was a little more interested in the maps he was looking at.

So she cheerfully peeked over his shoulder while they walked, having to get up on her tiptoes to do it. "She'll probably work from the currents, so you'll have to show her where we are first," she commented idly. "That's usually what we do."

Tianara's eyes softened. "Lonely?" she murmured. She knew about being lonely, after all her years as the only human in a world of merfolk - not that she didn't love them. But she was always conscious of being something...apart. Her heartstrings tugged a little; such an innocent girl had a hard time not feeling sorry for others who might be hurting.

She let the topic drop, however uncertainly, when Joshua went back to the maps. When he offered the map, she took it from him and puzzled over it for a second or two. Then she smiled a little bit. "Yes," she replied, "I think I could. Some of these are places I've been, and I recognize where some of the currents would lead to." She made little effort to keep her voice down.

"But I don't know where the attacks took place, so I can't use it for that," she explained, wishing she was of more help. "We'll have to go back to her for that."

Only after she'd finished speaking did she remember that she ought to have been keeping an eye out for humans that didn't know about all this. She shrugged philosophically to herself. It hardly mattered. She hadn't said anything incriminating, had she?

Tianara, wary of engaging the owner in discussion and too nervous to just stand alone in the store, drifted after Joshua. She stared at the tanks for a long time, and then poked Joshua's shoulder lightly. "That one," she murmured, pointing at a certain model. "I have a good feeling about it."

She didn't know anything about air tanks, of course, since she didn't need them, but what she said was true. There was a good feeling in her mind when she looked at it, and that was the way she tended to base her decisions - entirely on instinct. Perhaps it wasn't the safest course of action, but hell.

Couldn't hurt, could it?

She waited expectantly for Joshua's reply. It might not be the one he chose, of course. He knew more about tanks than she. She just thought it might be a good one, and she wanted to be helpful.