"You have to go to the other shark people? Okay. Thank you so much - I wish you could understand me -"

Oh, now that she sees and hears him speaking at the same time she makes the connection that he was the one who sang to her, before.  Pity it's too late to do anything with this information.  .....Though, if they're saying things to each other, now, she'll - "Meeting all of you is the best thing I have ever done.  I hope that changes before I die."

He waves, when she goes.

The official story, in the aftermath of her mother and three of her sisters (and an entourage) coming to the site of the wreck to see what could possibly be the cause of that much battle-tier music, and finding a lot of debris but no corpses, is that Princess Cyllene is so powerful that when presented with such an enticing challenge as rescuing a shipful of humans, she couldn't resist.

This is sufficiently an official story, and not the actual sense of how her family treats her, that Cyllene is not very surprised when it leads to her grotto being found, and everything in it being destroyed, and to her family harmonizing against her.  It's to keep her staying put.  She -

She will want to die if this keeps up for very long.  But it was worth it, and it will have been worth it even if....

She has one lever for making sure this doesn't keep up for very long.

"...No."

"I will die if they keep me like this."

"You will not."

"I will.  I have that much freedom left."

"...Mm," he acknowledges, fake-casual.  "But I don't have everything you would need.  To do this."

"How long would it take you to get it?"

"A while."

"But you can get it?"

"...Yes."

"If you're lying about this, I'll never forgive you."

"Llene, we've gone over this; I don't lie to you."

"If you say so."

She does make him keep her updated on his progress, but she's well enough satisfied that he's trying that she doesn't turn to any drastic measures.

He has, he informs her, a way to make someone able to understand any language they hear, at the cost of their entire voice, absolutely no communicative noise out of the throat, none, which would be bad enough for someone who does magic like he does, but for her -

She wants it.  How's she supposed to fit in with humans if she can't understand them?

....Is she sure she wants to fit in with humans?  Is it not enough for her to find some uncolonized bit of sea; he'll give her a makeover, make her into a manta ray or something, whatever she wants -

LEGS.

"Fine, legs.  Fine.  Only the best for my favorite niece, 'whatever you want,' I say - it'll take longer to get those; I don't even know where I'd start."  (He does have some idea of where he'd start, now that he thinks about it, but better to pad his timelines, here, with someone as capricious and... desperate, as she is.)

"Thank you."

Cyllene has a lot of time to think in, these days.  She wonders how humans think about time.  She knows, from her past visits, that the surface has patterns of light and dark (not like the storm, more drastic than that), and that humans seem to be active in the light and go in their straight caves when it's dark.  Do humans sleep?  Merfolk sleep less often, if so, though maybe for longer.  About two of these light cycles for every sleep, maybe more.

There are a lot of sleeps, after the incident with the ship.  She loses count in the 30s, though she keeps on tracking it as 34-or-35, and 35-or-36, and 42-through-45...

Before her uncle finds her any legs, he gets his tentacles on something he's pretty confident will get them to the shore unnoticed, and figures out how to implement Cyllene's idea of having there be two of him, for alibi reasons, and finds a way to track the location of the human she wants.