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"Uncle Al, do you wanna hear about the art project I'm doing?" Charlie asks as her little kid hooves gallop alongside my prancing stag gait.
"I'm all ears, my dear." I smile down at her, pointing at my big fuzzy deer ears, endowed with superhumanly keen hearing - so far the most powerful new trait I have acquired since entering Hell and metamorphizing into a demon whose power and skill are growing by the day. Well, other than my ability to generate radio signals of any frequency I please - from ELF to terahertz - but that goes without saying.
"We're making sea murals! I've been cutting octopuses-"
"Octopodes, dear," I correct her.
"Octopodes, I've been cutting octopodes out of construction paper and gluing them to an ocean blue piece of construction paper, I make sure to count out eight legs before cutting - one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight! I made one of the octopodes purple and the other octopode is brown! I glued Froot Loops on the purple octopus's tentacles and Cocoa Loops on the brown octopus's tentacles to give them their suckers! Tomorrow I'm gonna make baby octopodes and they're going to have Cheerios for suckers! Every baby will come in a different flavor! Regular flavor, Honey Nut flavor, Apple Cinnamon flavor, Frosted flavor, and Strawberry flavor!"
"So are Froot Loops and Cocoa Loops the mommy and daddy octopodes?"
"Mmhmm!"
"Oh, well I wouldn't given them offspring if I were you..."
"Why not?"
"Because it's scientifically inaccurate. All baby octopodes are born orphans because their mommy and daddy exhaust themselves in reproducing and carrying them to term. Your dad told me about this - it's sad, he really didn't want to do it, he says octopodes were one of his favorite creation projects ever... but he had to engineer a breeding kill switch into them because they would be too overpowered otherwise. And he does kind of have a point - I mean, when you think of all the neat abilities that octopodes are blessed with..."
Come to think of it, it does rather beg the question - WHY has Lucifer equipped these simple, slimy Earth mollusks, these pale imitations of Cthulhu - dare I say it, these are the TOY breeds of Eldritchkind! - with a greater repertoire of special powers and abilities than he has yet awarded to ME, his loyal hitman slash bodyguard slash playdate companion slash only worthy opponent at Duck Duck Goose Chess slash au pair today I guess, who smote an entire cartel of monsters to save his daughter's life - all on the day we met, might I add? The more I think about it, the more it irks me.
Octopodes are gifted with super strength, shapeshifting, the ability to change skin color and skin texture, camouflage and behavioral mimicry, aquatic jet propulsion, amphibious versatility on land AND water, ink conjuration a means of disabling foes' vision and olfaction - venom secretion as a means to paralyze or kill foes, super intelligence - well I did come to Hell already endowed with that, but eight extra brains as slave nodes for motor control of my new body parts, not to mention HAVING said new body parts would be nice - regeneration of lost body parts - oh wait I probably already have that as part of the overall Sinner in Hell benefits package - consciously edit their own RNA to control their gene expression, and did I mention the TENTACLES? I have been BEGGING Lucifer and Lilith to award me with the TENTACLES upgrade, which would first involve summoning them out of a portal and after mastering conscious control of them I would earn the experience of full embodiment by having command of tentacles as new body parts on my own body - however they insist I first take advanced lessons on differential geometry, calculus of manifolds, algebraic topology, and general relativity from Goetic instructors before I can be trusted to be competent with the simplest of portal opening tasks for tentacle access - meanwhile, these Eldritch Eloi, these mockeries of the Great Old Ones, are embodied with tentacles upon HATCHING without so much as a basic lesson on survival or octopodean culture from either parent...
"Look at it this way, Charlie... Humans have quite enough to deal with on their own planet already without the Great Old Ones literally evolving into existence on their doorstep... if your dad had allowed cephalopodkind to survive to rear their octopodlings and teach them a culture and develop a language and a writing system to preserve generational knowledge and a civilization instead of erasing each individual's progress so that every generation starts out at square one, like a biologically modern man if he were reared by chimpanzees - no, not even by primates! By WOLVES... the Neanderthal looks very sophisticated in comparison."
It occurs to me that I'm going just a BIT over her little head... "The bottom line, Charlie, is that depicting cephalopods in a happy healthy family structure is cute, but dishonest. It erases the plight of the cephalopod condition. Every generation, the whole species - well technically several species - is mass-orphaned, with no exceptions. Not a single artifact of octopodean cultural heritage remains either. For a creature with such a level of intelligence, this is nothing short of a tragedy. And when a tragedy of such scale occurs among humans, do you know what we call it? GENOCIDE."
Charlie looks uncomfortable now. I'm not all that surprised that she knows what that word means, but I'm rather concerned that she has somehow acquired it as a preschooler. I nervously attempt to laugh it off. "AHAHahahaa... sooo many orphans..."
"Uncle Al..." Charlie turns up to look me in the eyes. "Are you an orphan?"
"Sweetie, I am a victim of cultural genocide. A PARTIAL one, I must stress. For all of the cultural inheritance that was erased from me, I at least had the benefit of the cultural inheritance of the rest of mankind to turn to. I lost MY culture, but I still had A culture. That's the crucial difference between me and the octopus."
Indeed, reflecting on the plight of the octopus... I have never been so grateful to have been born into a species and culture that has already developed written language. I wipe my brow, sweating in apparent relief, as though I had just made it to safety after being chased by a Smilodon, but this ancestral programming is a wildly excessive and inappropriate response to such a non-life-threatening cerebration as was my realization of this mere ontological fact. All right, that's quite enough feelings for me today...
"One last thing, my dear... as a preschooler, nobody expects you to be quite so... politicaly informed. So you will likely be excused for exercising such... creative liberty. For now. But one day, you will be blindsided when some moral grandstander decides that you're the baddest bad guy ever for whatever innocent artistic decision that you will have made at the time. And frankly, their rage over what you did will be so disproportionate that any SANE society would commit them to an asylum over it. You think, oh but it's just one person, surely their opinion is so fringe that they can be safely ignored and left to scream into the void, right?
"WRONG! Trust me on this - no matter how insane and demented their grievance is, they know exactly how to make it such that their like-minded ilk will come crawling out of the woodwork - Heaven knows how they do it - but whatever cursed swamp they have to go to in order to find them, whatever black lagoon they have to summon them out from, or whatever dark arts it would take to conjure the likes of such, they will know exactly WHERE, and HOW, to acquire the means to rally an army of goons that AGREE with their ramblings.
"And if you thought THAT was bad, it gets WORSE - they will escalate from disproportionate anger and uncharitable framing to outright SLANDER. The utter LIES they will tell about you... most of them will be half-truths and out of context, but if a whole-cloth fabrication just so happens to stick, well what can I say they're pond scum they're all about the sticky, go figure... and THAT is the terminal stage of the character assassination - getting the normal, sane people to scream and rage demanding you be burned like a witch, or at the very least quietly agree with the ones that do...
"If that ever happens to you, Charlie my dear, just come to your dear Uncle Al and he'll take care of it. I will make them SORRY... and not just the consummate scum, but the slander believers too, the cowards, the just-followers-of-orders, oh I will make them wish that they NEVER compared YOU to Hitler... seriously, HITLER! Where's the outrage, the scandal, the moral grandstanding over that? If that isn't whitewashing an atrocity, I don't know WHAT is..."
"Who's Hitler?" Charlie asks, wide eyed with fascination. I have piqued her inner, guilty appetite for the dark, it seems...
"Oh, he's a bad guy from a movie." Well, I'm not TECHNICALLY lying... Untergang is, after all, an incredible piece of German cinema.
I decide to lighten up the conversation with a fun filled fact - "Charlie, did you know that an octopus's brain - well, the central one, anyway - is shaped like a Froot Loop?"
"Oooh that's neat! I think I will put Froot Loops on my octopodes' heads to show that they've got loop shape brains! Or maybe I will use Apple Jacks instead and make all the brains taste like apple cinnamon..."
"Charlie... if it really is your heart's desire to imagine a happy octopus family where the babies get to know their parents and not be orphaned by them, and to flout reality by depicting that in your little marine life mural... you have my blessing. You don't have to worry about the... scum I told you about at this stage in your life..."
"I don't think I want to anymore anyway, Uncle Al." Charlie said that from deep in the pit of her stomach. I had poisoned her whimsy with the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and now I feel almost guilty about it.
"If you want to add more cephalopods to your picture, may I suggest squids? "
"Ooh I could do some squids! But I don't know how many legs a squid has Uncle Al..."
"Here's a hint: Squid are decapodes."
"Decapodes, octopodes... Octo- means eight... Deca- means ten... so squid have ten legs!"
"Correct!" At least the are teaching Latin and or Greek at this fancy Montessori preschool that Lucifer and Lilith are sending her to, as one should hope... "Would you happen to know how to count to ten legs in French, my dear?"
"In French? No..."
"Then allow me to teach you..."