Graftopus

Overview

A graftopus is a 6-armed amphibious creature that resembles an octopus. They are peculiar to the city of Oakland, CA and its surrounding waterways, particularly Lake Merritt. They are considered a nuisance creature because of the damage they do to the roads, their habit of stealing and eating the best cannabis from people's homes and gardens, interference with local graffiti (both the mystical and purely mundane, artistic kinds), and being just being fucking weird.

History

The graftopi take their name from Heinrich Graf, a German zoologist and small-game hunter who first discovered them off the coast of Northern California in 1898. At the time, the graftopi were small and did not grow particularly large (unlike other Bay Area sextopi). Their forays onto land were mainly to hunt for small bird eggs. They tended only to come out at night to hunt when it was cooler.

Graftopi vs. Ghost Monkeys

The graftopi's main natural enemy were the spirits of deceased monkeys and apes from the world over, known collectively as the Ghost Monkeys. For centuries, these simian spirits had kept the graftopus population under control by frightening them back into the water with the use of their ghostly monkey howl. The reason for the Ghost Monkeys, other than the fact that in general primates find octo- and sextopi really creepy when they come on land, is not known.

The Dispelling of the Ghost Monkeys

Due to the popularizing of Ghost Knives in Oakland during the early 20th century, Oakland saw a massive spike in the number of permanent dispellings of local ghosts. While many malevolent spirits were dealt with this way, much of the anti-ghost activity was indiscriminate and caused a great number of casualties among the Ghost Monkeys. Some Oaklanders targeted the Ghost Monkeys specifically because they found their late night howling to be annoying.

By the mid 1950s, the last of the Ghost Monkeys had been dispelled via ghost knife and no more came to replace them. This led to a massive increase in graftopus incursions. The graftopi took to wandering farther from their waterways, and have since then grown larger and more aggressive due to the lack of predation.

The Gig Herons

Main Article: Gig Herons

Currently, the Graftopus population in the immediate vicinity of Lake Merritt is kept somewhat in check by the population of Gig Herons that nest in the trees at two locations: the corner of 12th Street and Harrison and the corner of 14th Street and Alice.

Most Oaklanders who look closely at these issues consider the herons to be at best a partial solution as the Herons are largely tied to the vicinity of the lake. Also, while the Herons do kill and eat bits of graftopi, most of the carcass is left where it is killed. Cleaning them up is unpleasant and hazardous due to the caustic ink leakage. If the carcass is left in the street, the ink and fluids of decomposition will seep into the crevices done to the asphalt by the graftopi's beaks while alive, exacerbating the damage.

Graftopus Nuisance Activity

Street Damage

Graftopus beaks are some of the main causes of the poor quality of the roads in Oakland, CA. Graftopi like to chew on the cracks in the asphalt, dig potholes, and are generally a detriment to road surfaces in excess of Oakland's Public Works department's ability to keep up. Ancillary risks are created by the possibility of running over a graftopus at high speed at night, causing a driver to lose traction and possibly control of the car. Plus, the wet *SQUOOSH* sound they make when that happens gives most Oaklanders the heebie-jeebies. However, this also tends to discourage tourists. Some people point to this as the reason that despite the clear and pressing need, funding for the DPW remains inadequate. Other people call the first people paranoid conspiracy theorists and point to Oakland's ongoing inability to adequately fund any city services. At this point, the first people often point to the high proportion of jankomancers among the other people. After which, discussion breaks down like most City Council meetings.

Jankomancers within Oakland are one of the few populations who appreciate the effect the graftopi have on the streets, as jankomancers generate magical energy by riding rusty old beater bikes on torn-up streets.

Graffiti Damage

While the graftopus originally takes its name from the zoologist Heinrich Graf who first discovered them, within Oakland, CA the name has come to represent the fact that graftopi seem drawn to deface local graffiti using their beaks and caustic ink as well as to ink their own "tags".

This is a problem for two reasons. First, it has caused a certain amount of gang violence when one gang blames another for disrespecting their tags/graf, blaming it on each other rather than on the graftopi. Also, the strange designs drawn in graftopus ink are often taken to be merely an indecipherable tag from a rival and a tagger whose tag has been overdrawn may retaliate against the rival tagger whose tag it most resembles, calculating that similar tags mean members of the same crew.

Second, grafomancy and tagomancy are urban art magic traditions that use large scale graffiti and precisely placed tags within a city to channel and collect mana for magical purposes. Some grafs and tags are there simply to calm the unstable mana flows within the city. Defacing by graftopi degrades or even ruins these installations, sometimes with serious negative results.

Weed-munching Tentacled Menace

Graftopi, being native Northern Californians, are connoisseurs of the finest cannabis, both imported and homegrown. They have been known to infiltrate people's gardens and grow rooms, getting caustic ink in the hydroponics or soil and eating the most crystally buds just before harvesting.

Graftopi will even use their dexterous tentacles open up people's stash-boxes to eat dried buds, shake, hash/kif/bubble crystals, as well as cannabis baked goods like brownies and coconut-banana bread.

Reports of graftopi actually packing a bowl and lighting up a bong are considered to be unreliable, and the result of the reporter having smoked buds contaminated with graftopus ink.

The medical cannabis dispensaries within the city of Oakland have all taken very serious but low-key anti-graftopus measures with support from City Hall. This is due to the political clout the growers and dispensers have downtown, and the volume of sales tax they collectively bring into the city.

Weird</i Have you ever seen a six-armed octopus crawl out of a stream, up a wall, and start squirting foul-smelling, acidic ink all over a mural? Most people are creeped way the fuck out by such things. While graftopi tend not to attack humans unprovoked, many people consider a graftopus visibly crawling up on land to be provocation enough to kill the damn thing.

With greater and longer incursions by graftopi since the 1950s, more and more Oaklanders have been forced to look upon these unhandsome things, which has upped the ambient "weirdness" level of the local manasphere, thus contributing to the peculiar conditions of the Oakland Mystical Nexus.

Squid Gigging

Squid gigging is the urban sport of hunting graftopi after dark through the streets and alleys of Oakland. It is somewhat of a misnomer as graftopi are not proper squids, but sextopi.

Squid gigging in usually practiced in teams of three, with one "gigger" armed with a long pole ending with a small, barbed trident (known as a gigging stick), and two "whackers" armed with flashlights and baseball bats, field hockey sticks, or similar club-like implement.

Proper squid gigging involves cornering a graftopus, pinning it with the gigging stick, then keeping the struggling beast in place while the whackers come in and kill it. The flashlights are used not only to find the prey, but to drive it as graftopi don't particularly like bright light.

While not fast on land, a cornered graftopus will become a writing cloud of tentacles with a snapping beak and caustic ink at its center. And enraged graftopus will grab its attacker with its tentacles and attempt to bite/ink them so they will release the animal and it can get away. A graftopus beak can easily shear off a human finger, much like a large bird's beak.

The gigger's job is to pin the graftopus in its center. Pinning a tentacle (known as a "sucker stab") is a dangerous mistake as the remaining five tentacles will whip around and attempt to climb up the stick and attack the gigger. Being a gigger requires nerves of steel, good reflexes, and excellent hand/eye coordination. When the graftopus is pinned, the gigger calls out "Wiggle on a stick!" which is the signal to the whackers to come beat the graftopus into a squishy puddle.

While some within Oakland consider graftopus sushi a delicacy, most squid giggers report that the sport is mainly a hobby and a public service, as the meat tends to be flavorless and the texture varies between unpleasantly chewy and disturbingly tenderized. The beaks are often kept as souvenirs or ground up and used in various folk remedies.

Graftopus Intelligence

There is currently disagreement regarding the question "Are graftopi intelligent?"

Proponents of the idea argue that in addition to their mimicking of other local tags, they create swirling, angular designs with their ink that are a form of tagging itself. They argue that the graftopus tags are, like Old Pictish and Linear B, a form of coherent writing that has simply not yet been deciphered. They believe the the graftopi's mimicking of local graffiti tags is an attempt to communicate. Some advanced theorists have come to the conclusion that the graftopi are purposefully stirring up shit between local gangs with their inking.

Intelligence proponents also point to reports of graftopi operating tools like pistols, lighters, and bongs, and opening complex or hidden stash boxes of Oakland tokers. They argue that Pacific octopi have demonstrated significant intelligence, possibly being one of the most intelligent of sea animals, and that the graftopus is likely to be as smart, if not smarter.

Opponents of the idea argue that no linguist has been able to decipher the graftopus tags, nor even organize them into a coherent pattern and that the graftopi are merely mimicking local tags, much as mockingbirds may mimic car alarms. They believe that the graftopi zeroing in on the finest buds and baked goods is a normal animal activity based on smell and taste and does not argue for intelligence. And as far as graftopi pointing guns at people and smoking from big glass bongs, there are no reliable witnesses to this behavior who weren't really, really high on some hardcore Cali chronic at the time.

As to the "Pacific octopi are the smartest animals in the sea" argument, the common response is "Well, the Oaktown graftopus (being only a sextopus) has two fewer tentacles than an octopus, so it should be two levels stupider."

If it turns out that graftopi actually are intelligent and tool-using, it is generally assumed that it would wig a a MASSIVE number of Oaklanders way the fuck out, possibly skewing the Oakland Mystical Nexus even further out of equilibrium [SEE: Just fucking weird ]. Some believe that there is an active campaign by city officials to keep a lid on evidence of graftopus intelligence to prevent just such a general wig-out.

Category: Mystical Oakland

Published under the terms of the CC BY 3.0 license.