On a warm summer day, Ella walked along the crowded beach. Waves crashed against the sandy shore, and children played in the ocean. The soft cry of seagulls sounded across the water, and the bright sun shone out over the clouds. Ella was a young girl, around ten years old, with dark brown hair and green eyes. Ella's small puppy, River, trotted alongside her, as he always did. He began to paw at something-a bottle. Ella expected it to be simply trash from a vacationer, but upon further inspection, it contained a note. Carefully opening the small bottle covered with barnacles, she read the torn, old note:

March 20, 1720

I have to hide the gold before it's too late follow the map to find the treasure

It must be a joke, Ella thought as she continued to walk on and leave the bottle, but she made sure to put the note in her pocket.

It took days to understand what the note said. Some days, she was so busy she didn't even think about it, but others, she spent hours obsessing over it and trying to understand what it meant. She knew it must have been fake - if it was real, why hadn't someone noticed it already-but still, she felt like she had to solve it. Almost like there was some reason she noticed the bottle, or at least some reason why River noticed the bottle. She kept on repeating the words, "I have to find the gold before it's too late". Finally, after what felt like weeks of confusion, she understood.

Ella kept pestering herself with a myriad of thorny doubts, sometimes trying to calm her puzzled mind by snuggling River and hurling the pet's toy into the blue water to see if River's dog ingenuity would bring back the puzzle buster that could solve a mystery or two. After all, they're not humans best companion for nothing -they have proved more than useful in uncovering clues from conundrums that we knew nothing about. So, yes, River deserved a chance from Ella to unravel, by a sniff or other, just what was it about the bottle and the short very note that felt like a wall of infinite height that she had to climb over to see the other side. But Ella wanted to play with water and dig the sand and run and swim and had nothing to do with and wanted nothing to do with, the bottle that was hitherto floating about on the silent waves and the note that stayed intact, clenched among Ella's left hand fingers.

"If it was real, why hadn't someone noticed it already?" The doubt lingered on.

"Talk to someone if you don't understand what to do with it!"

She screamed at herself silently, inwardly giving herself orders to act now or it's going to be worse, "Do something before it's too late. Don't ask anyone or you'll lose it. Drop it and see if anyone rushes to pick it up and if no one does, then it's litter and it's writing is meaningless sentence that was meant for the trash but unintentionally fell on the waves and met the bottle and it got bottled up. Period."

The map was a deal breaker. Whether Ella was meant to find the hidden map and walk or run or drive or fly - to where the map directed, she had no idea. The whole thing seemed like a piece of large sheet of shredded paper that she needed to piece together again and it was not worth her peace and time. Negative energy didn't stop haunting her. At some point, she wiped a tear drop off her eyes and burst a bubble that foamed from the gape of her mouth, cursing and not blessing the note, but she didn't let go of it -and that was not a very bad idea as she gathered up her wits and self-charm, vowing to master the note by first embarking on a mission to locate her starting point on the map that soon enough, had found it's way to her hands.