After using my link with Kara to tell her about my progress, I went in search of some street vendors so I could buy some food to refuel. Given my large appetite though, I spread those purchases across three separate vendors before I had what I thought would be enough to satisfy me. Then I drove the car to an out-of-the-way spot where I could take a short break from shifting for a bit, eat my lunch, and drink a couple of bottles of water.

It hadn’t quite been three hours since my last break, but if I was going to be doing some major shopping and driving around on my own then I wanted to be somewhat fresh for it in case I had to push my limit of a little over six hours. I hadn’t been out without Natalie, Maddie, Mom, or Aunt Carmen and I didn’t really know the lay of the land very well. In addition, when I had been out I had usually taken pains to appear like one of the locals, and had a little help from the others who weren’t stuck in a swimming pool most of the time. This time I was going to look like a tourist and I could get a lot of unwelcome attention.

After that brief break, and silently thanking the car’s manufacturer for the blessing of air conditioning, I found a gas station to refuel the car as well before moving on toward a large Agro Mercado. It was something like a farmer’s market, and it was close by, so it was a good place to stock up on various fruits and veggies. During my ill-fated shopping trip with Maddie, she had told me that they were our best bet for that part of our shopping since there were no chain supermarkets or anything in Cuba, and the selection in the few that there were could be limited. Even if I could find produce at them, it would be cheaper to get them from an Agro Mercado, and it would be fresher as well.

Shopping there went about as well as could be expected. My new car caught a lot of attention as I arrived, as did my current form when I stepped outside of it. The attention made me uncomfortable, but it was all part of the plan and the others were counting on me. Thankfully, I managed to do my shopping there without any sort of major incident. It was expensive, but I was able to half-fill the car’s small trunk with various fresh fruits and veggies, and they were all good quality.

Next, I headed out to the Miramar suburb near the convention center to go to the Supermercado Palco. It was the closest thing to the types of grocery stores that I was familiar with to be found in Havana. I ignored the produce section since I had filled up on fresh stuff earlier, but made good use of the butcher counter, and was able to get a decent selection of canned goods, imported foods, bottled water, and basics like rice, pasta, etc. They even had some limited seafood that I was able to avail myself of, much to my delight. I wasn’t able to get a lot and the only shrimp that I could find were of the frozen variety, but it would help my fellow Naethari.

Most of the people shopping there were foreigners like me or people who obviously had money to spend. I fit right in, but I had been warned that it would be too expensive for most Cubans to shop there. Okay, maybe saying that I fit in was stretching it a bit with all of the skin that I was showing, not to mention my hair color, but I was easily taken for some wealthy foreign tourist, which was exactly what I was going for.

Once I was done at Supermercado Palco, I placed the groceries in the trunk of my car alongside the produce that I had purchased earlier. Then I was back in my car to head toward one of the larger fisherman collectives, though I parked a good distance away before walking the rest of the way. Despite the tantalizing aroma of fresh seafood coming from that direction though, I wasn’t there to shop. Instead, I had my phone out the whole time, and I was taking pictures like a good tourist.

I hadn’t even gotten to the collective yet when I caught the scent of someone who smelled out of place. The scent of the gun on him didn’t necessarily mean anything, especially in Cuba, but he also smelled fairly strongly of gun oil as well. Most people just don’t maintain their guns that meticulously unless they’ve been trained to and have the possibility of using them fairly often.

As I approached, I was able to sniff out his location and get a look at him. He was Hispanic with very short hair and the t-shirt that he wore showed off his well-muscled arms and chest. He was sitting on a bench, watching the people coming and going from the docks while trying very hard to look like he wasn’t by ‘reading’ a magazine about muscle cars. My sharp vision showed that his eyes weren’t on the magazine though, they were looking over it and darting back and forth as he scanned the faces entering and leaving the fisherman’s collective. A half-finished meal from one of the local vendors sat beside him, a meal that had gone cold quite some time ago.

As much as I wanted to get closer and get some Intel, I resisted the urge. This form was supposed to be flashy and get attention, but walking right up to the people searching for us in it was a bad idea. It would have been cocky and invited trouble. Instead, I restrained myself to just walking around and taking a few photos of the docks and the other scenery, I even managed to get him in the frame for one of them.

I couldn’t be certain that he was there watching for signs of us, but it seemed likely to me. By now, afternoon had passed into evening and the sun getting low in the sky. I still had maybe an hour before sunset, when the crowds would start thinning and the collective closed for the evening, but as much as I wanted to use that time, I didn’t have any disguises prepared at the moment. Therefore, I made a mental note to place some in the car for any future counter-surveillance.

When I returned to the villa from my trip into the city, Dad and Uncle Jack insisted on bringing the groceries inside while I got some rest in the pool. Then Aunt Carmen and Mom put a meal together for everyone. I had been hoping to just snuggle with Kara for a while, but she was currently doing her shift with Maddie and Natalie. Instead, I found myself talking to Jenny and Kieshala about things. I told them about how my trip into the city had gone and then, after assuring me that both Maddie and Nat were doing as well as we could hope, they told me about what they had done while I was gone.

Other than their shifts watching over our two Naethari-to-be, Kieshala had briefly taken both Jenny and Kara out for some one-on-one hunting lessons in the lagoon and even a little into the open sea beyond. Beyond the lagoon, the waters got fairly deep and we were far enough from Havana that it wasn’t a spot that would see a lot of tourists or other water traffic. So they had been able to get a decent amount of fish to tide them over until dinner and brought some back to the villa as well.

Still, they dared not go too far along the coastline for fear of encountering humans. They hadn’t encountered any large boats or submarines to indicate an underwater search for us yet, nor had they sensed anything like it using their sonar, but Kieshala thought that it might be best to take me out to meet one of the local dolphin pods if possible. If I could touch one of them then I would be able to take on a dolphin shape to explore a bit further without risking people talking about seeing a ‘mermaid’.

Dolphins would be a good shape for me to take since a small to medium-sized one would fall well within my mass constraints, and I could probably get away with appearing curious and intelligent while scouting. I would still be able to use sonar for echolocation in that form as well. I liked the idea and we planned on going for a swim in search of some dolphins in the morning when Jenny would be relieving me from my shift watching over Maddie and Nat.

Soon Mom called us for a late dinner; Kara would be waiting to eat until midnight when I was due to relieve her. The rest of us went into the dining room to join Mom, Dad, Uncle Jack, and Aunt Carmen to eat. I shifted to legs for the occasion but Kieshala and Jenny managed to get themselves into the dining room and their seats through some controlled slithering. Our tails were sort of like snake tails with fins after all and they were getting much better at using their tails to maneuver on land, but I lacked the practice at it since I was trying to improve how long I could keep up my shifting by using legged forms as much as possible.

Mom and Aunt Carmen had used the ground beef and some of the veggies that I had brought to make some really great tacos and salsa and there was plenty for even us Naethari to eat our fill. As we ate, I told everyone how the trip to Havana had gone. Overall, it seemed like a success; I had hopefully managed to draw our pursuers’ attention away from us with the minivan misdirection, I had gotten some new identity documents, and I was definitely going to be the opposite of low-profile driving around in a bright pink sports car.

Then came the hard part. “I also went to check out the fisherman collective at the docks,” I admitted.

“We told you to avoid that place,” Dad said with a stern look that made me want to sink into my chair.

“I played tourist,” I told them with a slight wince. “I pretended to be exploring and took photos with my phone. I parked several blocks away and I made sure that nobody was following me when I returned to the car. There was a guy there who was trying really hard not to look like he was watching everyone going in or coming out of the area. He smelled and looked like military, but he barely looked at me since I didn’t go in or come out of the docks, I just took pictures of anything around that looked interesting. I got him in one of the pics I took too.” I took my phone from my shoulder bag, selected the photo in question, and then passed it over to my parents.

“Hmmm…” Dad mumbled thoughtfully, “It’s a bit grainy, but there’s a decent shot of most of his face. Jack, what do you think?” he asked my technophile uncle as he passed the pink phone over to him.

“It’s not the best photo, but I can run it through a facial recognition search and see if anything comes up,” Uncle Jack replied thoughtfully. “He definitely looks military, look at that stiff posture. He is probably not special ops though, most likely just a flunky with some rank. High up enough to know there’s an op that he needs to be quiet about and that he has a job to do, but not important enough not the hows or whys of it. They probably have a few like him all over the city, watching likely spots for any of us to show up.”

“You don’t waste your combat units on observation,” Mom agreed. “And that means that he’s probably ready to call in if any of us are spotted, and possibly tail anyone who fits our descriptions well enough. In a public spot like that, they couldn’t risk attacking directly anyway. I’ll bet that magazine had photos of us and Natalie taped inside, but I doubt that he’d have enough information to know why exactly he’s looking for us, so capture and interrogation would likely be a waste of our time and possibly just lead our enemies right to us. At least we have possible confirmation that our suspicions were correct.”

“At any rate, we now know that Naiya will need to be careful whenever she goes into Havana now. We have enough supplies to last for at least a few days, and the stuff in the freezer and the canned goods could last two weeks if the girls can keep bringing in fresh fish. She should be able to stay here until we run out of fruits and vegetables,” Aunt Carmen pointed out.

“I would like to take Naiya out hunting tomorrow, and perhaps see if we can find a pod of dolphins,” Kieshala suggested.”

Dad looked a little lost as he asked, “Why dolphins?”

“To expand my shapeshifting repertoire,” I explained. “Kieshala said that I can take other shapes besides humans, so long as I’ve sampled their genes through touch and I don’t try to lose or gain too much mass from my normal form. A dolphin form could be useful for scouting underwater without being in my natural form. We want to avoid people seeing us and shouting, ‘Mermaid!’ after all.”

“That sounds good,” Dad replied with a grin. “It will give us some options. You still wanted to get in some shooting and fighting practice too, right?”

It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to fight, I had learned as a kid alongside Maddie, but I was human and male then. Now I was a lot stronger and faster and even in a human form, my center of gravity was different. It hadn’t mattered much to me while I was killing the assholes who came after Maddie since I couldn’t afford to hold back, but I needed to learn all over again how to fight to disable or restrain without killing or seriously damaging my opponents.

I quickly nodded in response to Dad’s question. “Yeah, Dad. I mean, I can kill and maim easily enough, even without a weapon, but if I encounter any goons again then I’d rather not show too much of my hand in a fight unless I absolutely have to. Taking a prisoner, or subduing them long enough to use my Soulsinger abilities on them would be difficult too.”

“Alright, I’ll let Kieshala have you in the morning when Jenny takes over for you, and then we can all put you through some combat practice.” With that, our late dinner and discussion came to an end and, despite it only being a little after eleven o’clock, I took over for Kara so that she could eat.

We managed some all-too-brief kisses and caresses as I took over her position between Nat and Maddie, and then said our goodnights so I could get in a comfortable position that would allow me to maintain physical contact with both my sister and her girlfriend. Once I was in position, she gave me one final kiss goodnight and then left to eat. Then I took an opportunity to look over both of my current bedmates.

There were no visible changes yet, but it was mostly internal changes happening at this point if Kieshala was correct. We wouldn’t start seeing outward changes until roughly halfway through the transformation. We were actually lucky that we had things like IVs for fluids and nutrients for Maddie and Nat since Naethari helping people going through this usually not only had to keep physical contact with the person changing, but also chew their food for them and force them to swallow it so they wouldn’t starve.

Still, the two were in a sort of coma, which Mom had induced using some form of drug that she had gotten along with the morphine to spare those being changed the agony of the transformation, and I couldn’t help worrying about them as I lay between them. I carefully placed one hand underneath both of their backs and, while that wouldn’t make for a very comfortable sleeping position for me, it would ensure that I maintained physical contact while I was unconscious. Despite my long and somewhat exhausting day, it was quite a while before I fell asleep.