You spot Octavius dragging four suitcases across a corridor from one vent grille to another. Next to him an elderly octopus, totally unburdened by luggage but holding a book of crossword puzzles, looks around disapprovingly. This must be Octavius's "mother-of-law".

When Octavius catches sight of you he drops the suitcases and starts waving wildly behind her back and even changes colour. Clearly he's trying to communicate something, but what?

Submitting answers

To submit your answer, do the following:

• Join the Sidequest Ninja Discord server.
• Send your answer in a direct message to the Octavius bot, in the format

  !answer This is the answer

  The bot will tell you whether your answer is correct.
• If you've solved part of a puzzle, send what you've got so far to the bot (in the same format), it may confirm that you're on the right path.
• For the sake of clarity, the Discord version of Octavius will reply in proper English.

Hints

If you're having trouble, you can highlight the obscured text below for help. Each bullet point is a separate hint.

• Octavius has eight legs, and each leg is in one of two states, either extended or contracted. How might that encode a message?
• Consider how your monitor produces colours. Perhaps Octavius is using the same system to encode information.
• The images of Octavius are deliberately grouped into threes. The pair at the end of the first line goes with the solo one at the start of the second.
• If you were an octopus, what base would you count in?

Solution

If you're totally stuck, these spoilers will take you through the steps of solving the puzzle. Again, each bullet point is a separate step.

• Octavius's legs are spelling out a message in ASCII, where each letter is represented as an 8-bit binary number. Start with the top left leg and go down, then the top right and go down. Extended legs are 1s, contracted are 0s. You can then use an online ASCII converter to convert the binary into text.
• The text, when decoded, says
  "Puzzling Haiku: what
  city is the capital"
• The colours are similar. Each colour represents a 3-digit binary number. The leftmost bit is 1 if Octavius is using the red channel (red, magenta, yellow, or white), the middle bit is 1 if Octavius is using green (green, cyan, yellow, white), and the rightmost bit is 1 if Octavius is using blue (blue, cyan, magenta, white). Black means the bits are all 0. Treat each color as an octal number, grouped in threes, and you have ASCII text encoded in octal.
• The colour-based part of the message says "of Argentina?"
• Therefore, the answer is "Buenos Aires".