Grace waited silently beside Geoff, the warm ocean currents light enough to allow her to sit still without anchoring her pincers into the sea bed. Geoff was similarly unbothered by any attempt of their surroundings to shift them from this spot around the coral, but little could move someone of his size and mass anyway.
Grace’s attention shifted. The water was clear enough to see some distance and she thought she might have spotted the Angel twins over at Hermit’s Hideaway. She turned to Geoff to mention it but he spotted her slight movement out of the corner of his eye and shushed her. “Look!” he said, excitedly. “The attacking team are running the pod!”
Grace gazed back upwards, where the light beams flickered and danced and sparkled in the shallows, and where a shoal of the black fish – whose name she’d filed away and forgotten as soon as she’d been told – were chasing a sinking seed pod that spiralled and drifted down towards the sandy bottom. The chase looked like a form of controlled chaos. Grace thought she understood why Geoff liked this on some level but it just did nothing for her. Sport, he called it. The latest thing. Maybe it would grow on her but Hermit’s Hideaway sounded more appealing right now.
“Touchdown!” yelled Geoff, raising his flippers. “Did you see that!?”
Grace looked at the seed pod, come to rest in the sand, a small cloud of debris smoking up and partly hiding it from view and the shoal of black fish darting around it. Apparently this would be happening every week for the next seventeen or so. “Yay!” said Grace, but Geoff was too energised to recognise her tone.