Arik is the ship’s tech wizard and engineer; he’s also Melvin’s best friend and first crew member. Arik admires Melvin for his nerve to go against tradition and adventure into the unknown.

Squiddles, as a species, hate technology. This may have something to do with the fact that their home planet is immersed in liquid. As you can imagine, when technology was first introduced it either didn’t work or became a “shocking experience”, sometimes for entire cities. The Squiddles see any form of innovation as dangerous and to be avoided at all costs.

While his fellow Squiddles like to float around in a “sea of ignorance”, Arik has his tentacles firmly on the ground (literally - preferring to walk upright, using two of his tentacles as legs). Arik loves technology with the enthusiasm of a Murgar in the mud pits of Argoz. He is constantly inventing gadgets to “enhance” the ship and their missions.

Most of these “enhancements” don’t operate exactly as planned (there was the supersonic dishwasher that created a black hole in the kitchen, the hyper-speed windscreen wipers that caused hysterical nausea, and no one was a fan of the killer pencil sharpener), but Arik, forever the scientist, never gets disheartened.