Chapter 6

Hammer listened to some music on his Salt Mangrove Notepad, matching Salt Mangrove earphones plugged clipped into his ears, he munched on a packet of Astroplex dried frogs, his teeth moving in time with the beat, adding a soft crunching sound to the repetitive percussion. He ran out of frogs. Frowning slightly, he pulled his earphones out, wincing as his eardrums were deformed by the negative pressure the moulded plugs produced. He was halfway to the vending machine before he remembered to get his notepad from the table. He retrieved it and bought another packet. He liked the saltiness of the frogs, even though he knew he'd need to drink glasses and glasses of expensive water later. Water was abundant, but it was all salty. Most islands had their own distillation plants, but it was still hard to come by. Bored, he flicked through his tunes for a few minutes, but still didn't feel like working, so he opened up the informatives. A new species of salamander had been discovered. Boring. Bankers worried about interest rates. Boring. Scientific funding to be increased. Old news.

He switched the music off and took a look at the videos news. A huge salamander had clambered aboard a ferry and was making its way towards someone fallen to the floor between two rows of seats. The headlines at the bottom read “Real or hoax? Woman saved from salamander by unbelievable insect.” He skipped to the next news item, but something about the woman seemed familiar to him. He went back to the previous video. Static was blurring the screen a little, but he could make out what was happening – a bright creature stood between the woman and the salamander. A few rapid movements and the salamander was dead. The creature stopped glowing, then fell to pieces in a flare of light. How curious, it was clearly a hoax. There was only a few second remaining. The woman was getting up now, and he did recognise her. He choked on a frog leg, eventually coughing it up. He tried to call Rain's notepad, but she didn't answer. A little worried, he decided to go see if she was ok.
The route from the lunch room to the ferry took him past the parthotoad tanks where parthenogenesis – the ability to have children without finding a mate – in amphibians was being studied. Parthotoads were a strange bunch. They stored their eggs in small sacs in hollows on their back, filled with the necessities for a tadpole to survive – water, nutrients – and should they become fertilised, the egg would be ejected in its sac and left to grow into a tadpole. If no mate was forthcoming, the female's eggs would grow into tadpoles and maturing inside the mother's back. They were ejected once they were no longer tadpoles and would grow larger on their own.
He continued past the hydra pools and down to the ferry, his earphones and another packet of desiccated frogs in his left hand, his notepad and his actual lunch in his right; noodles made from saltop reed flour and frog roe, then dried. Hammer liked dried food and he liked frogs. He would eat it on the ferry.