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Flynn perks up. "I'd love to see them in action," he says. "I've always wanted to go swimming with whales."

You swim down toward the city, carrying along the two humans. Before the celebration, the whales always like to do their own perimeter sweeps, and it's easy to just follow the sonar pings. It's an old tradition, although even an appeal to tradition doesn't cover up the feeling that it has something to do with the whales distrusting the merfolk. Are they suspicious of your abilities or your intentions? Of course, maybe they just like doing some things by themselves.

Either way, strange, solitary squid mysteriously hanging out near the City of Glass are probably the kind of thing they're looking for. That might be important enough to mention. Although, if there was a real danger, there would probably be more squid, and then the whales would have found them and sent out a report, and they haven't done that.

The sonar pings get louder and louder, until you can feel the electricity of an enormous body slowly, methodically swimming through the dark deep. It's not until you get close that your light illuminates a female whale drifting through the water. Flynn gasps, and even Tamru startles a bit at the seemingly sudden appearance of the massive creature. The humans turn toward your glow, and you call out to the whale, "Hello, there! I am Kavitha, and I bring with me Tamru and the new human, Flynn. We've come to meet with you."

Flynn waves, a polite but probably ineffectual gesture, given whales' poor vision.

The whale blasts you with sonar, an action that both grants her better perception of you and also serves as a greeting in her language. Up close, the whales' language has a nuance and understandability that their long-distance sonar signals lack. "Well met," the whale says, "although this time is inopportune. I am busy searching. What is your purpose out here?"