//------------------------------//
// Chapter One-and-a-half, Meanwhile in Maretime bay 
// Story: The West Sea Crisis 
// by Lavender Shine 
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Sunny Starscout hummed along to a tune she couldn't quite remember the origin of. She trotted along the dirt path to Maretime Bay, satchel over her shoulder heading to meet Pipp at the square

She had a sly grin on her orange face. Life in Maretime Bay had gotten a lot better after magic came back. It was as if she was a filly once more, anything in the world was possible and every day would be better than the last.

Sunny greeted ponies on her way. Some old friends, many new ones. As it turns out bringing back magic gets you the kind of attention standing around with a protest sign doesn't.

She had almost made it to the market square when Old pony Horseshoes came up to her. He had a scraggly white beard that stood apart from his brown fur.

"Sunny! Sunny! You have to see this. Radio messages! It's coming from out east, from the sea you see," The old pony waved around a handful of papers with lines and dashes haphazardly drawn onto them.

Horseshoes was a nice pony, really he was. It's just that he couldn't help but fall into conspiracy theories. On multiple occasions he'd been sure that one of the ponies in town was secretly a unicorn in disguise.

"From the sea? There's nothing out there but fish," sunny let out a giggle and tried to get a look at the papers but Horseshoes wouldn't stop flapping them about.

"There is, look," Horseshoes pushed a paper in Sunnys face, "It's old Equestrian morse code, ships talking to each other."

Sunny glanced at the paper. It was a collection of partial messages written down in all capital letters and spaced oddly. She had heard of morse code in school. An old kind of communication before proper radios became a thing.

But ships in the sea? Neither Bridlewood nor Zephyr Heights had any ships, or at least she assumed they didn't. Maretime Bay had only a few fishing boats and none of them had a radios. If these were real who was it?

Now Sunny had taken interest. "Could I come listen to these messages? I'd love to hear them," She took the page from Him to study it further

Horseshoes looked like he hadn't been expecting her to ask that. "Well you see-" he looked down "-the messages stopped... I... can't hear them anymore. But they were there! That i do promise you,"

Sunny let out a sigh and handed the page back to Horseshoes. She had gotten excited over one of the old ponies conspiracies. If she had to guess somepony was playing a prank on him, again.

Sunny regained her composure fast "Well I'll see you at the community garden for tea time tomorrow. We're having something from Bridlewood called 'crystal petals',"

Over horseshoes' shoulder Sunny saw her friend waiting for her beside the fountain, messages by mystery boats at sea already fading from her mind as she went over to her.