Hermes Profile

[eightlazylegs]

Name: Hermes

Age: 2.5 years (Physically and mentally an adult)

Physical Appearance: At first sight Hermes appears to be a relatively normal cephalopod. While his brain is significantly larger than that of your average octopus, this is not perceptible from the outside. Hermes is about two feet long lying sideways, and one foot high from mouth to tip of the mantle. When his tentacles are laid straight but not stretched, they are about a foot long. He can change color at will, either for camouflage or to express his moods—white is usually fear/surprise, bright colors indicate a more intense emotional reaction, and the rest is what he feels like wearing that day. The default color is usually brown or grey to blend with his surroundings. Though he lacks a humanoid face there is a degree of expressiveness to his eyes and tentacle movements, backed up by his tone of voice and color pattern. Hermes' voice is low-pitched with a slight gurgle to it.

History: Hermes is a Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, a rare kind of intelligent, amphibious cephalopod. Due to their reclusive natures his species is not well-understood by the human public. Few know they exist, almost none know the extent of their abilities, and humans continue to assume they are the only sapient species on the planet.

As a young, barely-sentient hatchling Hermes was captured by a fisherman off the coast of Oregon. Hermes was sold to a dealer of pet octopodes, who sold him on to the girlfriend of a tattooed hippie-type activist pothead. When the pair broke up a month later the boyfriend (who Hermes refers to as "Boss") took possession of Hermes. Hermes, now an adult, has spent the vast majority of his life living in his owner's Chicago apartment. The Boss kept him satisfied with food and toys, leaving him few outside ambitions. Boredom occasionally led him to outside ventures but he was careful to return to the tank before the Boss came home.

Hermes preserves the illusion of being a mute, dumb animal in order to maintain his regular food supply and keep the Boss from messing with their satisfying arrangement. All slips of the tongue are taken by the Boss to be hallucinogen-fueled illusions, so until now he's remained fairly safe. However, Hermes has on occasion made his opinions known to persons outside the household, including store clerks and bus drivers whose services he was using. Since few would believe their stories most people have stayed quiet about him.

So far Hermes has restricted his adventurous movements to a two-block radius “on foot” and about three miles by bus or car. The majority of Hermes' wanderings have been food-related. Eating the same thing bores him as much as staring at the same view for days on end, so he has a wide range of local facilities he regularly invades to add variety to his diet. He often slips in the back door, gathers his haul and finds a quiet place to chow down before towing the leftovers back with him in a plastic bag. On one unlucky occasion he snuck into a sushi restaurant that had just introduced octopus to the menu, and was assumed to be a stray blob of ingredients that had fallen onto the floor. Hermes quickly relieved them of this notion by inking one cook in the face and escaping out the back door.

Other trips involve jaunts to the corner store for shoplifting shiny objects, or simply climbing around on the outside of the apartment building. In general his trips have not been dangerous, since Hermes usually goes out at night or during heavy rainstorms that keep the humans inside. There have been a few tense moments with unexpected cars but Hermes is good about keeping himself safe.

The single major exception makes up the bulk of his combat experience. On the way back up from one otherwise uneventful Harold's Chicken Shack run he encountered a crow on the fire escape. The crow attacked him, assuming it had found an easy but strange looking meal, and quickly found it was wrong. Hermes was wounded but managed to crush it to death, at the cost of the end of one of his tentacles. Strategic positioning inside his tank kept the injury from being seen until he managed to regrow it. The experience kept him hiding in his tank for a few days and encouraged greater attention to potential danger from above, but it didn’t deter him from his adventuring.

One day Boss bought another pet octopus, a smaller and far stupider species. The new “Sharktopus” was given preferential treatment in new toys, treats, and tank decorations. Hermes became jealous of the attention and resorted to destructive behavior such as breaking plates and hiding the Boss’ drugs in the toilet tank. As a final show of irritation he stole the Boss' wallet and fled down to the bus stop with a small bag of toys and snacks. It was a late summer evening, so Hermes was able to sneak onto the late bus under cover of darkness and drunken hipsters. On his less-stealthy way off the bus he startled the driver, but was gone before the man could do anything.

While Boss doesn't know about Hermes' condition, a few of his friends do know his octopus can talk. One of the friends/customers of the Boss became the unwilling host to a disgruntled Hermes when the Boss purchased a second octopus for the house. Hermes was displeased that something else was draining food and attention from the most important person in the world. The man couldn’t figure out a rational way to handle the situation and eventually just let him in. Hermes wound up living in Joshua’s bathtub until the newcomer octopus died a week later, as the Boss was not sensible enough to take care of any special-needs creature that wasn't smart enough to care for itself. Once he was sure Boss had gone through a suitable mourning period for the disappearance of his far superior octopus, Hermes permitted Joshua to take him back to the apartment in a Mason jar. The fact that Boss accepted "I found him in this jar out on the sidewalk" as a reasonable explanation may explain why the other octopus didn't live long.

Personality: Hermes is as intelligent as a human but his personality is still extremely octopus. He is generally motivated by food and curiosity, and has no patience for the existential crises experienced by humans. His mindset is practical, straightforward, and goal oriented. When people are in his way or being too slow about expressing themselves he tends to get irritated and may wander off in search of someone more useful. Pointless things that are not either entertaining or useful get rejected quickly, without an apology for any hurt feelings that result. Occasionally the bluntness is even intentional. He does spare time for occasional snark at the expense of a human he feels is acting particularly stupid.

Hermes’ pampered existence and already selfish mentality lead him to a sense of entitlement. He understands some modicum of human social graces through observation and television, but he simply doesn’t care. He speaks in stunted sentences, leaving out ‘unnecessary’ words to get the point across as quickly as possible. If he wanted to he could use full sentences and make small talk but he rarely finds a need for it.

If you want an easy way to get Hermes motivated, dangle the prospective of food in front of him. Despite growing up in the lap of luxury he still has instincts to eat when possible and horde whatever he can’t fit in his belly. In food he prefers clams, crabs, and other forms of seafood, but will expand his range to other forms of animal protein where necessary. Sushi delivery people are occasionally startled by having the door answered by an octopus with a tentacle full of cash and an expression of mild impatience. Hermes has some skill with technology, when it becomes useful to him. He’s used the Boss’ computer and phone in order to order interesting things off the internet.

However, he does have higher pleasures. Hermes has a small passion for tactile puzzles such as linked horseshoes and knotted nails, and without anything to do he grows quickly bored. This leads him to seek out new things to play with and new places to investigate. The Boss has found him all over the apartment, including inside silverware drawers and recently-purchased bongs. Texture interests Hermes the most in a new toy, as touch is his most powerful and discerning sense. He has no eye for aesthetics but he decorates his living quarters with whatever he’s found to be interesting at the moment—loofas, rubix cubes, bits of foam rubber gnawed into interesting shapes. The set-up never remains still for long, as Hermes constantly grows bored and exchanges old toys for new ones. When put in a nonthreatening new environment his first instinct is to explore as much as possible, poke everything to see what it does, then take what’s useful for him back to his hideout.

If the environment is threatening, the first instinct is instead to hide in the nearest dark crevice. Hermes considers self-preservation to be a high priority. He is self-centered to the point that the concerns of others do not even show up on his radar, and in a fight his first option is to tentacle it on out of there. However, his emotional reaction to danger is muted. He doesn't scream, he just flees in a sensible and orderly fashion.

In general Hermes doesn't feel emotions strongly. He's never had reason to feel them--no loss of anything more important than a favored toy, no threat larger than an angry cat, no emotional attachment to another living soul. Information is received, analyzed, and either put to use or tossed aside as he deems fit.

Strengths:

Physical: Hermes possesses the usual range of octopus abilities. He can change his coloration via metachrosis for camouflage or self-expression. His body can squeeze into incredibly tight areas, passing through tubes the size of a dime if necessary, since the only hard parts of his natural body are his radula and sharp beak. The suction cups on his tentacles let him stick to walls or ceilings if he is moist enough. Water can be sprayed at opponents through his siphon, if he is already in the water, and he also uses a spray of dark ink to confuse predators. If a tentacle is injured or severed, he can regenerate it over the course of several weeks.

Hermes also has managed a technique of stiffening several tentacles to give him a crude form of legged locomotion, but it is only slightly faster than trying to squirm across the floor. In the water he is much more agile, swimming with by expelling a jet of water from his contractile mantle through his siphon. Between his octopus skills and his above-average-for-an-octopus intellect he is very hard to capture in an aquatic setting.

Mental: Unlike most Octopodidae species, Hermes possesses a human level intellect and lifespan, as well as the ability to speak. His species spends more time on land than their sea-dwelling cousins and has evolved the anatomy necessary for audible communication. In the wild their noises are crude and generally of the mate with me/go away/this is mine variety, since octopodes generally don't have much to say to each other and no other animals will understand them. However, much like some birds can mimic human speech and then reuse it for their own purposes, the intelligence of the Tree Octopodes means they can both form human words and put them to use when necessary. Hermes picked up the ability to speak English from spending the majority of his life around humans. Because he is even smarter than a bird he can use his abilities with much more skill and versatility.

Hermes has devoted most of his higher mental skills to puzzle solving and can look at things in such a straightforward manner that he can find the answer before a human might. This extends to things such as locks that can be opened through careful application of tentacles into very tight spaces. Hermes has made something of a hobby out of escape artistry and his Boss has despaired of getting him to stay in his tank.

Weaknesses:

Physical: Hermes is small, squishy, and good with soy sauce. He is most vulnerable on land where his movements are very slow, but even in the water one good puncture wound will bring him down. Hermes tries to keep a water source nearby at all times, as after a day being dry becomes uncomfortable and after two it’s outright painful. However, his constant need for stimulation ensures that he can’t spend all his time in a safe, watery setting. Another issue of Hermes’ body is the fact that he is a tentacle being operating in a world full of fingers—things will not be designed to his needs, and he has trouble working around systems designed for humanoids above two feet tall.

Mental/Social: Hermes is at a severe disadvantage socially, which will be problematic when he has to cooperate with a larger society. He has no interest in interpersonal graces so he comes off as rude and abrasive, even when he is trying to convince someone to give him something. Hermes does not have friends so much as partnerships of convenience, and while he will hold a conversation adeptly he has little patience for small talk.

Hermes tries to maintain the fine line between stimulating and dangerous, but he’s a creature of constant, nosy curiosity. He’s lived the vast portion of his life inside a single set of cozy walls and has no idea how to deal with an open environment full of people who want to talk to him and things which can be played with. This will lead, inevitably, to bad decision making.