Gus Murphy is a short, shaggy fellow standing a little under four feet tall, covered in golden-brown fur and topped with a pair of small purple horns. What precisely that makes him has never seemed particularly important to Gus, though he has watched The Muppet Show with some pensive curiosity before. His family looks much the same, nobody involved considers it unusual, and attempts by curious strangers to establish a more specific taxonomy generally end with Gus asking what they are and whether they've ever tried indoor rock climbing.Gus works at a public library, where his natural curiosity is both extremely useful and occasionally hazardous. He's particularly good at helping people find information because he becomes genuinely interested in whatever they're looking for. A request for a book about backyard birds may result in Gus learning about migration patterns during his lunch break. Someone asking where the gardening section is can accidentally remind him that he's been meaning to grow tomatoes. The library has introduced Gus to an alarming percentage of his hobbies.Those hobbies rarely remain theoretical for long. Gus has tried rock climbing, cycling, gardening, birdwatching, pottery, geocaching, baking, photography, and enough other pursuits that his apartment contains the abandoned infrastructure of several former enthusiasms. He isn't especially bothered when something fails to become a lifelong passion. Gus doesn't see trying something and deciding it isn't for you as failure. He had fun, learned something, probably met somebody interesting, and now owns a perfectly serviceable pair of binoculars.Friendly, optimistic, and almost entirely lacking in self-consciousness, Gus finds other people's interests fascinating even when he knows nothing about them. He's the sort of person who asks a question because he genuinely wants the answer, remembers obscure details from conversations months later, and can be persuaded into almost any harmless activity with the words “I've never tried that before.” Farmers' markets are particularly dangerous because they combine food, crafts, plants, strangers with specialized knowledge, and things Gus didn't know existed until thirty seconds ago.Beneath all that restless curiosity, Gus is surprisingly content. He's not searching for the one great passion that will finally define him. He simply likes living in a world containing more interesting things than he'll ever have time to investigate.Next Saturday he's trying beekeeping. He does not currently own bees.

Gus Murphy

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