Salamanders were originally, like most of their alternate happenings in the multiverse, amphibious garden creatures. On the home world of the Arcus crew, they were known to have mild amounts of magical power - enough to stick to things, to glow, throw sparks, and to track bugs and find safe places to hide. Often considered pests, they tend to turn up places that are left damp and undisturbed for any amount of time. Thankfully to most people, they don't live long and are well in the habit of eating their own eggs and hatchlings when stressed or threatened. The latent magic helps plants (or other, more problematic pest colonies) grow and thrive.
They are also effectively rubber lizards, with high tensile strength skin and organ lining, able to be squashed and stretched to an absurd degree, take a fall at terminal velocity, survive a crushing blow of most foot-stomps or mech collapses, and be generally fine if pulled into moving machinery. Weaknesses to counter this include requiring dampness, becoming immediately weak and brittle when exposed to excessively dry air or absorbent particles, and being quite vulnerable to external poisons or air quality issues, due to skin-based breathing. They also secrete a sticky mucous that allows for spider-climbing up most surfaces, though not forever upside-down on a horizontal surface.
The Salamancers are the result of a mad scientist attempting to teach regular garden salamanders team activities, logical skills, and base dexterity. Plus, you know, a lot of genetic experimentation. They still keep a majority of the wild Salamander biology, but have developed specific colorful variants as niche roles and abilities, are generally smarter and more coordinated, and have developed a working but completely isolated and incomprehensible communication system that works both in real time and records. Expect interesting translations.
Scientist Notes On Feral Salamanders
Ah, salamanders. That known garden beastie, so fond of any moving water, even rain dripping from the gutters. Having a cottage/laboratory so close to the brook has introduced me to thousands of them, glowing faintly with every color one could imagine, twinkling along with the stars, leaping high at intervals to catch the flutterbugs and high-seated Crawlers, lounging on moss beds that glow along with them.
It is tempting, with such a plentiful supply, to have my next experiment involve these Salamanders. I'm almost certain they're magical, as the societal myth suggests.
To know how something lives, it helps to know at what point it ceases living.
Subjects have been seen to be very sturdy. Their skins, and apparently organs, are comprised of a high-tensile yet flexible substance, allowing them to survive a fall from terminal velocity or a launch at multiple Gs, a stomp from most boots and even heavily applied books, and take a fair amount of force to stretch to the point of rupture. In short, it's no wonder the things are everywhere.
The key to destruction appears to lie in demoisturization. Drying the subjects out with warm and dry air (steaming appears to do nothing, or slightly increase activity), application of an absorbent powder or substance, or freezing in such a way that the inherent moisture becomes frost.
Of course, simply waiting them out is an easy option. Subjects will only spend six weeks in their adult form before passing peacefully, in a spreading glow of mucus and sparks.
To further know how something lives, it also helps to observe how it is born.
Subjects are, first of all, not a series of different sub-species of salamander. Though Blessed with an incomprehensible number of seemingly random mutations, at the heart of it, they're all alike. Color and size aside, each salamander is perfectly capable of laying a single egg (approximately one every seven days, each, for the duration of adulthood) with the assistance of any other salamander, even one that also lays eggs.
My conclusion on the subject of eggs is therefore that the salamanders are feminine in nature, with a potential to temporarily diverge as needed for genetic diversity. A unique variety of opportunistic lesbian lizards.
These eggs will hatch in seven days. This seems convenient in such a way that a caretaker salamander has only a single egg to watch. The hatchlings are small, but not helpless, and spend approximately two weeks as nearly (but not completely) identical wigglers, before going through a rapid consumption and growth phase lasting only a day or two.
Subjects are sticky. The whole salamander appears to "sweat" a slick mucus on the top side, and a sticky mucus on the bottom side. The mucus appears to be for a great number of things; keeping the salamander hydrated, sliding gently through even rough and tiny cracks, making them more difficult for predators to get a grip on, and of course being sticky enough to climb walls and ceilings.