"What are you," he says, rather fascinated. "You're gonna be weirdly cute when you're all dried off but what the heck are you?"

“Shhoooooo”, is all it has to say in reply.

"Are you a shoo?" he laughs.

“Shoooweeeh-eeh-eeh!”, it says, mimicking the pitch of his laugh in its chord-whistling voice.

This makes him laugh some more.

It'll play choir insofar as he's predictable, but after a bit of this seems less interested and more like settling down for a nap.

Okay, if it's tired he'll leave it be and go try to figure out who you report an alien critter to.

The creature naps for half an hour, pokes at the water dish with the midsection of a tentacle, then climbs onto the ceiling of its cage (five tentacles spread out and one supporting its center) and watches the other animals.

The other creatures are mostly minding their own business - the penguins are cuddling a block of ice, the owl's asleep, the squirrel is grooming itself, the alligator's swimming back and forth in its tank.

It will watch the new-to-it creatures for a while, and clamber around all six walls of its cage, and investigate the cage's latch along with everything else in reach.

The latch is designed to be robust against clever birds and monkeys.

It does not have any especial insights into lockpicking and settles down, environment investigated.

It sings to itself. Does anybody want to join in?

None of these animals are singing animals... except the rescue guy, who starts ooh-ing along, trying to guess what it'll do next so he can harmonize.

It doesn't seem to care for sticking to a key, but it definitely likes its intervals and chords in whatever it's singing at a given moment; it keeps up a drone of two notes (changing one or the other occasionally), and has various bird-call-ish short phrases it whistles with its other four mouths on top of that. If he picks up the drone then it seems to expect him to contribute changes to it.

They can have a pleasant time jamming this way. He starts recording, after a bit.

It does not exhibit an objection to recording equipment.

It would be weird if it did.

After a while he decides to try playing back the recording, see what it thinks of that.

The creature perks up at first, but it keeps trying things that don't fit with the unresponsive recording, and it stops and shifts toward the far side of the cage.

Aww. He stops playing it back and resumes singing with it manually while he's cleaning out the penguin enclosure.

That seems to make it less distressed, though not immediately. It will continue singing along, with fewer of the short phrases.

Occasionally it dunks tentacles in the water dish; the level is going down more than accounted for by splashing.

Probably it is drinking some water. He puts a rat in the owl cage for when it wakes up and wants a rat. He refills the weird-creature's water and gives it more cat food.

The creature is sufficiently fed to be more interested in exploring the world outside the cage than the immediate prospect of food! Would he like some help opening that door wide?

"Whoa! Whoa there critter, I don't even know what you are," he says, ushering it back in. "Can't have you eating the penguins or hacking into the internet or whatever shoos do when they're loose."

“Uoa! Uoa!”

It has enough length and quantity of limb to be difficult to so usher, but it is not actually very interested in putting up a fight. It settles back down and eats its food.

"Heh, you're a mimic, what else can you say? Can you say 'Pavo', that's my name."