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Tianara blinked, then smiled. "I can tell," she murmured. "Well, my family is quite big by merfolk standards - my mother has four sons and a daughter, besides Kiro and I and a couple of other ocean children she took on over the years. The daughter is gone to another clan, but all the sons are still here. When they find mates, they'll probably change family caverns - or else most of them will and one of them will take over this one, and my mother will live with one of them."

Realizing that was a lot of information, she switched questions. "We have this cavern and the connecting one, which is where most everything else is kept. This is where we sleep." She nodded at the kelp bed. "That was my bed, and Kiro's before me. Merfolk don't sleep the way humans do. They," and here she swam up to one of the rocky protrusions, "curl their tails around these, like the horses do, and just float while they sleep."

She glanced back over her shoulder at him, wondering if she'd addressed all his questions so far. He'd asked so many she wasn't sure she'd caught them all.

Tianara looked at it thoughtfully. "You know, I don't really know," she admitted. "I assume some of them are natural, but some of these," and she stroked the one closest to her, which did look surprisingly smooth, "don't look like they started out here. I wouldn't be surprised if they were created."

She tilted her head consideringly. "There's so much merfolk magic in this room that I can't even tell," she admitted at last. "I'll have to ask my mother about it sometime - now you've got me curious."

Moving her hand in a come-on gesture, she went past him and into the other room, where there was all kinds of stuff - some of it looking a lot like human junk collections on land, some of it totally unidentifiable, most of it somewhere in between.

"This is our storage room," said Tianara cheerfully. "We keep all our stuff in here."

Tianara smiled faintly as she looked back at him. "Indeed it is," she replied. "And if I spend the rest of my life with all these questions nagging at me, it's your fault." She laughed, obviously teasing. Afterwards, though, she fell silent, too busy looking around the room that held so many memories for her.

When Joshua spoke up, she looked at him, still mostly lost in reverie. "Hmm? What? Oh. It's..." She looked around at it. "Memories. Souvenirs. Junk. Whatever you want to call it. It's just things that we've picked up over the years that mean something to us." She crossed to one of the piles and knelt, picking up a blue-hued shell that shone in the dim light of the cavern. "Part of what makes it home, I guess."

Looking at him, she noticed the way his hands were twitching. She lifted a brow before realizing that maybe he wanted to take a closer look. "You can pick stuff up if you want to," she said idly, turning the blue shell in her hands. "Just be careful with it - some of it's really important to whoever stored it here." She didn't really think she needed to caution Joshua, but just to be safe...

Tianara smiled a little bit, her eyes soft with memories as she looked around. "Well, I can tell you some of them. Gifts from loved ones, souvenirs from places they loved and want to see again. Something tied to good memories, usually - these are usually the rooms where we go when we need to join up to force back a Dark One. But I'll admit I don't know most of the actual stories behind each object."

She put down the shell, shrugged. "Some of those 'treasures' that humans find when they search sunken ships are just merfolk troves. Mostly, the merfolk who get raided are very unhappy when they come back to find all their memories gone. Sometimes one of the older ones - those who can manage - will go on land, get some of them back." She smiled. "That's where the 'stolen' ones go, especially if they seem to have no value."

At Joshua's last statement, she chuckled and patted his shoulder. "Maybe it's good that you'll never know everything. Your brain would have to stretch beyond its limits to hold it all, and if your brain exploded, that would be bad."

Tianara looked a little confused. "What does?" she asked. She had assumed that Katalina would already have told Joshua about the sunken ships, and everything else she had said was pretty much common sense. Maybe she hadn't told him yet, Tianara decided. It wasn't really the kind of thing that came up in casual conversation - and Sorry was like other mermaids, and a little like Tianara herself. She just expected people to know this stuff, because almost everyone she had lived with her entire life did.

"Well, sure you want to know," said Tianara cheerfully, leading him out of the storage room. "But it's bad for us to get everything we want, isn't it?" Then she lifted her head, frowned thoughtfully. "It's probably time for us to leave. I don't know how long Mrian will be gone, and there's not much more to see here."

She moved towards the entrance, not looking back. If Joshua wanted to follow, he would.

Tianara smiled a little bit back at him. "See, there you go," she said easily. "And that way you'll always have something to wonder about. No boredom for you." She took her time once they were out of the caverns, wondering - and not for the first time - about Joshua. It seemed like he knew so much about her now; her family, where she came from, all that sort of thing. And yet she knew practically nothing about him.

Glancing back, she asked, "What about you?" She sounded curious, and indeed she was. She just wanted to know. "What is it like, with your people? Your family?" Realizing he might not want to share, she looked down. "I mean, if you don't mind talking about it."

Tianara's eyes gentled. "I'm sorry," she said quietly. "Was it that bad?" Anything that could still cause bitterness after all this time had to have been very hard. Tianara couldn't comprehend it herself - despite her brothers' feelings about humans in general, she couldn't help but love her merfolk siblings, and she and Kiro were very close now that they had met once again.

Before he could answer, she shook her head, dismissing it. It had been a rhetorical question. "Never mind. You can tell me someday, if you want to, but it doesn't have to be now." With a slight smile, she turned away again and back towards the other side of the caverns, where she had last felt Katalina and her mother.

"I think they're coming back this way," she said quietly. "Probably looking for us."