Pino is a "puppet": a replicant with human organs in a wooden shell and robotic limbs. Height 1.2 m (like 7 yr old) standing or 72 cm seated. Nose extends up to 20 cm when he sneezes or tenses his face muscles; he sneezes more when dishonest. Can use different legs that plug into sockets on his hips; without them, he scoots on fists and butt. Arms and legs run on a battery charged from the wall or from food.
For six years after he was built, he served as live-in housekeeper for his host family, scooting on his behind because they couldn't afford legs. Sometimes he'd carry things by hanging them from his extended nose and then push the nose back in when done. At the time, he didn't even know there existed a "deluxe" model with legs; his family told him he "hadn't hatched all the way."
After his servitude ended, Pino was free to go but stayed because he had trouble finding a job as a free agent. Years later, a little bird[1] told him of events in the village,[2] starting with a gingerbread man's nervous breakdown (#4154), and he moved in to try to help the residents make sense of their lives.
Upon arrival, he was pleasantly surprised to meet others missing limbs like him (#141; #807; #813), until he met a legs dealer who explained where puppets actually come from. (Is a legs dealer anything like an arms dealer?) It turned out that Geppetto Industries (which began in the workshop depicted in the short "Pinocchio") mass-produces Pino and Penny puppets to act as house or farm servants. In addition to the deluxe bundle with a pair of legs, specialized attachments are available, such as tracks or a swimming tail. Or a puppet can plug a vehicle's control line into his hip and drive it by wire. (See Pino's accessory ports.) Pino acquired a pair of legs, which he takes off at night.
Pino became known for a habit of finding wholesome interpretations of situations that may not be what they look like, peppered with puns. Others think his ability to explain things can only be explained by knowing everything, but he clarifies that it's not as much knowing the answer as much as knowing where to find it.
A puppet's brain is mildly autistic because of how the brain is cultured up to the equivalent of school age. Pino occasionally shows some personality quirks associated with Asperger's, such as liking puns and missing sarcasm. He'd answer the tortoise question from a famous film roughly like this: "He looked hurt. I turned him over to see if he needed to go into animal control, and I was waiting for him to stop squirming."
These materials should prove useful for the animators to adapt the character to the C&H art style.
This character description may sound detailed for a random NPC designed for the "Become a part of canon" reward in the Kickstarter campaign for a graphical adventure game. It was originally intended as the main character in another project. Not all of this needs to be included, but some can be mentioned in passing.
[1] Namely Twitter, via the idiom "a little bird told me".
[2] I'm not sure where the game is supposed to take place, but in my headcanon, most of the comics and shorts take place in "Cyanide Village", along the lines of misreading "Adlehyde" in Wild ARMs as "Aldehyde". The setting was later revealed as "Netherton".
© 2018 Damian Yerrick. Licensed to the public under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY). Licensed to Explosm LLC for any purpose.<