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Tianara gave a mild breath of relief. For a moment or two there, she'd been afraid that she'd offended him. She should have remembered how difficult it was to offend Joshua. Remaining silent and trailing behind him, she wandered into the square.

Exactly as she'd thought, this place wasn't as big as the town they'd just visited. The one that she and Joshua were currently living on the fringes of. That meant that she was less afraid, which meant she could straighten her shoulders and look more normal. It was a cycle, but not a bad one.

When they went into the store, she even managed to catch the clerk's eye and smile shyly. Then she followed Joshua to the heaters. She touched one in surprise and fascination. They could sell magic on the shelves, she thought in wonder - and a little bit of terror. How were she and Joshua going to stand up to all the humans in the world in order to protect the merfolk if humans could just create magic and stick it on the shelf to get rid of like this?

She blinked at Joshua's words. Belatedly realizing that they were meant as part of the cover, she said, "Oh! Yes, probably." Tilting her head, she looked at one of them. "But it's a big c-- room. How many do you think we'll need?"

Tianara acquiesced with the slightest nod of her head. She understood the subtext, and figured that was probably a good idea. The last thing they needed was anyone wondering why they needed all those heaters at once.

She took two of the heaters as ordered, and blinked a few times in surprise. They were also heavier than they looked. She experimented with how to carry them for a few minutes, and eventually decided on stacking them one on top of the other. Following carefully behind Joshua so as not to fall, she watched him pay for the heaters.

Once they worked their way out, Tianara glanced over at him when he spoke. "Hmm? Oh, okay. Joshua, do you think we maybe should have checked first to see how many we're going to need? I didn't think of it, but they can't come very cheap," she murmured worriedly. "How long does that card of yours last?"

She had only a nominal grasp on money - you gave it to people, they gave you things, and it didn't last forever - but the last part of that was enough to concern her for now.

Tianara gave him a brief, uncertain look, but then seemed to decide that he must know. With a slight shrug, she said, "All right," in a tone that hinted that she was still worried and it was still not all right. But it wouldn't do any good to keep reassuring her - after a while, she'd start to wonder if he was reassuring her or himself.

"So where do we go to get food?" she asked, walking backwards in front of him to keep her eyes on his face. It bothered her to admit that she didn't really want to turn away. And she didn't know why.

"I mean, it's probably another store," she muttered. "I know that much. But do you have a particular spot in mind? I don't know where we'd get enough for..." Realizing that they were now within town limits, she quickly switched what she'd been about to say, "...an entire family reunion. There's going to be way more people than usual."

Tianara looked blankly at him for a few minutes. Then her eyes lit up. "Oh! Oh, okay. Grocery store. Those are the ones that only sell food. Kiro told me about them." She gave a little shrug of one shoulder. "Sometimes I forget."

Not entirely positive of what they were doing, she followed Joshua into the store, trailing after him like a puppy while he wandered the aisles. Every now and then, she picked something up and held it bemusedly, trying to figure out what someone would want with it - a can, a disc, all sorts of things she had never seen before or had never seen used.

Finally catching up to Joshua, she asked in an undertone, "What are we looking for? There's so much in here that I don't even know where to start."

The old lady passing them as she spoke gave Tianara a funny look. It only lasted a second before the old woman continued on her way, but it made the girl flinch and blush. She'd have to be even more careful about what she said, it looked like.

Tianara looked back at him with eyes that seemed too sad for such a brief look - and from a complete stranger, too. "I can't help it," she replied, just as quietly. She managed a slight smile when he reached out to touch her shoulder. He could be so kind, when she knew she might have blown it.

She took the can of peaches from him and examined it carefully. "Kiro told me something about food groups. That we have to eat from all of them. Is that true, or was he just teasing me?" she asked. Normally, she could trust Kiro, but every now and then when it came to food, the young man found amusement in testing to see what she would believe and what she wouldn't.

Nearly all the time, she did.

"So we're looking for things in cans like this," she murmured, examining the can carefully. Eventually, she nodded. "I think I can recognize it now."

Tianara frowned a bit, but gave a slight nod. "Okay," she said, speeding up her stride to walk beside him. "So we get the vegetables and the...milk, you said - do those come in cans? The milks?" She was pretty sure that grain - and what exactly was grain anyway - and meat didn't. But she could very well be wrong.

On instinct, she tossed the can of peaches Joshua had shown her into the cart. Then she started looking around for more cans. Even if the label told her what was in them, it didn't help much if she didn't know what she wanted to buy - and she had precisely no idea. Clearly, the smart thing to do was let Joshua take the lead and pretend like she knew what she was doing.

But she might need to know how to shop eventually.

That thought in mind, she followed him through the store, keeping a close eye on what he picked and what he didn't. "How do you know what to choose?" she asked at last, quietly. "Which cans you want and which ones you don't?"

Tianara was still a little confused about the exact properties of these mysterious 'milks' and precisely how one was supposed to make these cans become hot, as she'd never seen any such thing. But she trusted Joshua to know what he was talking about, and contented herself with a slight hum of acknowledgement.

After a while, she began to think she might be getting the hang of this. You needed a certain amount of everything, and since they were going to store it, it had to be stuff that would last a long time. So things wrapped in the see-through shiny stuff - plasstick, maybe, like the stuff on the maps - was good. Stuff in the cans was also good.

She even made a few tentative selections of her own (mostly when other people were looking and she had to appear to be helping, but the fact remained!) At last, the cart looked pretty full to her. "Is this enough?" she asked, looking from the cart to Joshua and back.

Tianara picked up the bags that remained and followed him obediently. The plastic bit into her skin, but she hardly noticed - she was busy trying to think of how they were going to store all this stuff so that no one would notice them doing it.

"How are we going to get it put away?" she wondered aloud, but quietly. "I mean, we can't very well climb up into the cliffs with all this stuff, and...we can't get it wet, can we?"

If they could, maybe Tianara could take it under the tunnels - diving would be easy, and no one would be able to see it happening. But she was pretty sure that they had to keep the stuff from getting wet. Of course, then again, she had been wrong before.

But as they walked down to the boat and Tianara began to load things in, she was still thinking about how they'd get this stuff back to the cliffs.