"It's time to put my FBI training to the test." I reach into my bag and pull out a tube of bubble soap, dipping the wand in, I begin to blow bubbles to the fish
Roll bubble-blowing Stealth, the most important kind
You successfully blow some bubbles at an angle where it goes unnoticed. The goldfish delightedly swishes around and chases them around at high speed. BUBBBBLEEEEESSSSS!
You head down the hallway towards the beluga showroom tank, passing some tiny octopi, blue tangs, starfish, and butterfly fishes, until arriving at the semicircular stadium tank filled with murky blue darkness. There's a sign on the wall with fun facts about beluga whales.
"The beluga hwhale is easily recognizable thanks to its stark hwhite coloring and globular head. Belugas are very social animals, and it’s possible to see pods numbering in the hundreds during a trip to Churchill, Canada."
"The word beluga comes from the Russian word "bielo" meaning hwhite. However, these hwhite hwhales are born dark gray. It can take up to eight years before they turn completely hwhite."
First, you scan the dark tank waters in search of whales, and after a few minutes of intense squinting you make out a brief five-millisecond flash of whitish-gray smooth skin in the water down by the bottom with the sensitivity of a solar telescope. You hear a faint tiny shifting of water and perceive a single bubble from that direction, and you see a flash of bright neon green foot-fins. A diver is down there too - you must have caught them in feeding or care time rather than performance time.
Secondly, you briefly focus your senses so intensely that you get a tiny flash of a computer screen with a bunch of humans sitting behind them typing and rolling small clacky objects, and you perceive every movement of the universe around you to the point where you're pretty sure you're tripping a little, but then it passes.
From where you're standing at the viewing station, you can go up a staircase into the performance arena and likely get a better view, but there's not a show going on right now so you imagine you'd probably have to sneak up there.
You ascend the white metal steps up towards the performance stadium, and emerge into a large white dome-shaped room with a mural of happy fish and sea turtles across the ceiling. The circular center of the room is dominated by the giant whale tank, surrounded by a metal fence, and peering in from this angle you get a better view of two beluga whales down at the bottom - one big, one small - and the diver who seems to be playing with the small one. There's a strong fishy smell all around.
The gate into the actual tank area has a large chain on it, but the security otherwise doesn't seem overly high. There is a pile of clothes, books and a backpack sitting on a bench nearby that are presumably the diver's.
The diver starts swimming in gentle circles holding out a brightly colored toy, and the small whale drifts alongside them happily trying to nom at the ball; as far as you can tell they're the picture of total contentment.
@Laurel The pile of books appears to be some assorted undergraduate marine biology textbooks.
After three minutes pass in the ritual, during which time the diver continues to entertain the small whale, you hear some faint clanging sounds of footsteps ascending the stairs - judging from the slow pace they'll come up to the top in about thirty seconds.
