Debbie Moh



Appearance & History:
Debbie looks like an unremarkable young woman with pale skin and hair made out of weird-looking alien eels with white scales, no eyes, and disturbingly human teeth. Is actually a bunch of alien eels attached to an organic transportation/life support system shaped like a human.

Lernæan colonies are funny like that.

A species of modular organisms, individual Lernæan polyps are unable to survive on their own, and instead collectively depend on shared organic infrastructure to provide facilities such as mobility, respiration, and food processing. Known for their esoteric brand of biotechnology, Lernæan colonies who have ventured far from their warm watery homeworld often fashion their shared vessels to resemble native organisms, both for better compatibility with the local environment, and — apparently an especially important concern in the case of the Unified Systems and its human inhabitants — to “look more relatable”. Debbie is relatively small: nine individual polyps in total, not counting the vessel. Like most colonies her size in the United System, she was born on Europa, an offshoot from the much larger colony residing deep in the subterranean oceans.
 * Fun Fact™: Lernæans are possibly the only sentient species to have developed DNA sequencing before metallurgy.

Having lived her adolescent years among the humans of the underwater cities, she speaks an imperfect dialect of their language, in an accent associated with an university city on Ganymede where she was educated. She wears large round sunglasses over the part of her face where a pair of fleshy appendages run through the eye sockets, housing the nerves bundles and blood vessels that connect the polyps to the human-shaped vehicle.
 * Fun Fact™: her mother tongue makes no distinction between the singular and plural first person pronouns, and some colonies choose to refer to themselves as “we” instead. Debbie went for “I”. Meanwhile, for convenience, she’s established a convention of referring to each of her heads with the Terran words for the numbers One through Nine.

The eyewear serves an exclusively aesthetic function: Debbie is a blind trauma surgeon with eyeless snakes for hair; she’s been informed that the sunglasses help mitigate the fact that the “look more relatable” part of the strategy isn’t working very well.
 * Fun Fact™: “oh, sweet, these come with exposed nerve bundles that run through holes in the skeleton and go directly to the brain,” thought the Lernæans who first set about developing a human-shaped vessel. It didn’t occur to them until much later that the squishy spheres on the ends were meant to be optical instruments.

Insensitive to visible light, she instead sees her surroundings through acoustic reflections of the hissing and clicking noises incessantly emitted by the individual polyps. Consequently, she cannot sense colour; and while having excellent intuition for material texture and being capable of sensing spatial relations at a detail comparable to human eyesight, the temporal resolution of her picture of her environment is limited. This is much of the reason she’s wary of fast-moving objects, as well as why she is careful with her own movements, a tendency often interpreted as a graceful or timid demeanour by those who don’t understand that it’s physically challenging for her to go fast without stumbling all over. When she absolutely has to hurry, her movements instead start to appear drunken and off-balance instead.
 * Fun Fact™: “How do I look?” she asked, after first trying on the sunglasses upon the suggestion of a human friend. “Mythological,” the friend replied, giggling, but even after the fifteen solid minutes of subsequent explanation, Debbie yet fails to understand why SPACE GORGON is supposed to be so amusing.