Banana Radar

Episode One

It was a sunny, clear, cloudless day. The lack of clouds carried a certain relevance, and so was probably more worthwhile a mention today than most other days. In any case, a digression.

A boat, nondescript – plain, wooden, brown, horrible – a no-frills fishing boat – sat on the sea, in order to satisfy the fishing imperative imposed upon it, probably by the very crew of that boat themselves. The may therefore have been some irony in that very crew of that very boat could all be seen at that very moment out on the deck, not fishing. What they were doing was alternately shielding their eyes with their hands as they looked upwards, turning around and about to one another, buzzing and chattering animatedly in a language that was probably Eastern, or Southern, or both.

Come on, it probably was. That's not racist.

They had all been out on the deck because they were bored, utterly, utterly bored, to the point of murdering one another. So the thing with the sun was probably a good thing, from the (slightly lower) perspective of the smaller, weaker crew members, anyway.

They were bored because there was something wrong with the sea. The water had become... sludgy, sludgy as though it were saturated with mud or some other pollutant. Only it was not saturated with mud or anything else. It was clear and blue and see-through like water should be, out here where the paradise was unpolluted by people. One of the crew had swished his hand through the water, and turned to his crew-mates, amazed, stating vehemently and quite definitively that "the water has hardened!" – and in addition – and this was always surprising, given everything these men had to endure – this particular crew member wasn't known for his alcohol or substance abuse habits, and wasn't given to wild flights of fanciful hallucinations or the like.

Then there was the sun. The sun appeared to be going black, around one side, in patches that reached almost a third of the way across the radius toward the centre. The other side was perfectly white and yellow and bright and impossible to look at, so the fishermen weren't entirely certain about the blackening of the sun, not positively entirely, and so they probably wouldn't mention it to anybody, not right away – or sober. Sobriety wasn't necessarily an attribute that was being exploited particularly by many of the crew members at that point – or many other points – so not much was made of it in the following days.

The fact that the water was still "hard" and the sun was still going black was something they just weren't talking about, the state of inebriation of everybody notwithstanding.

Things like this were above their pay grade, after all.

● ● ●

The creature stirred, squeaked, and opened one big eye. It was only half awake. It resembled a large bat, if bats had evolved into ground-dwelling rodents instead of winged mammals. It had big ears and bigger eyes and was coated in a light green fur, rendering it nearly invisible in the branch of the tree it was asleep on.

It squeaked again as its other eye sprang open and all four of its legs shot straight out in unison – the creature was stretching. Translucent webbing emerged from between the legs on each side for a brief second, forming the semblance of what could be described, at a stretch, as wings; then, stretch completed, the creature leapt to its feet, ran down the tree to the forest floor and scampered around in a wide circle a few times.

It was hungry.

It ran back to the tree that had provided last night's bed and zipped back up it, vertically. For a second or two it came to a stop where a large hairy purple growth sprouted from the trunk of the tree. It sniffed the growth, then ran further up and stopped to sniff at a similar purple lump. It repeated this a time or two more before settling on a hairy purple tree-wart that seemed satisfactory.