I stare at the thing in the water with my mouth wide open. She has a tail. She has a tail. Not only that, she's enjoying herself, splashing the water and spinning around. I can't believe my eyes. It's as if her torso continues, down and down, four or five times what should be her front half's length, and ends in a fish's tail. She's like a sea serpent!
Sea Spray makes so much more sense now. She wasn't coming out of the water because she doesn't have enough legs. Her mane isn't mane at all, it's a fin. She's a seapony.
"I really wowed you, didn't I?" She says, smirking.
"Um, yeah," I barely manage. "I've never seen anything like you."
She smiles at me. "Well, I've never seen a land pony up close before. Or, I guess in your case, a sky pony."
I blink and look back at my wings. I almost forgot they were there. "Uh, right."
Then she giggles and dives back into the water before bursting out again. "Eee! I'm so excited! Usually, the only ponies that come by here are those darned villagers, and I'm not allowed to go near them. They're mean."
"Huh?" I tilt my head at her. "When I met them, they were very kind to me and my family."
"Well, not us." She sticks out her tongue. "They hate us."
"Us?" My eyebrows shoot up. "There are more of you?"
Sea Spray rolls her eyes at me again. "Well, duh. Where do you think I come from? There's twenty-four more of my tribe living at the bottom of the lake!"
I stare out over the surface of the lake. How deep is it? I suddenly feel more nervous. "Uh, why do the villagers hate your tribe?"
She shrugs. "Don't know. They always have, which is stupid. They haven't even seen how cool our village is. If you could breathe underwater, I'd show you all the cool stuff we have, like the townhouse, and the pearl bed, and Omita– Oh!" She fixes an intense, sparkly-eyed gaze on me. "I can take you to meet Omita! Come on!"
"To meet who?"
She's already swimming off, and I have to take flight to follow her. She leads me across the lake and to the edge of the mountain, then swims up a river along its side to a particularly overgrown face of the rock. She pauses by it, letting me catch up, then winks at me and swims... into the rock face.
"What?!" I shout.
She pokes her head out through the vines. "Come on, silly!" That's what it takes for me to realize there's a cave hidden there.
I land next to the river and push away the vine-curtain, making my way inside, and I'm astonished once again.
The cave is lit by luminous yellow crystals that grow all over its walls and ceiling. Its floor is mostly sand and rocks, save for the river's small inlet, where Sea Spray is grinning at me some more. The cave's centerpiece is what's seized my attention.
There's a massive, ancient-looking wooden ship of some sort lying on the rocks, filling half the space. When I look closely, it seems like the crystals have grown out of the ship's far side. Its rigging lines cling to the barest tatters of wispy cloth and long-faded paint barely spells out a strange name across its side: OMITA.
"Ha! Wowed you again!"