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| “ | Middle Head:THEN COME, HEAVEN AWAITS. Left Head:Please keep your hands, arms and immortal souls inside the stairway at all times! |
„ |
| ~ Cerberus guiding King and Fox to Heaven. |
| “ | Left Head:Uh oh, that’s not a healthy attitude. Right Head:He needs to make peace with his old life, not spurn it. |
„ |
| ~ Cerberus as Keene has an existential crisis. |
Cerberus (based on the mythical hound of the same name) is a supporting character in the Webcomic Housepets! by Rick Griffin.
She’s a giant, three-headed dog who acts as the kind ferrywoman of the souls of the deceased, men and animals alike and often helps the heroes in their misadventures with childish demigods and Heavenly troubles.
She is a supporting character in the arcs “Not All Dogs”, “Heaven’s Not Enough”, “Temple Crashers 2” and “HECKRAISER” and the deuteragonist of “The 4 Animals You Meet in Heaven”
She first appears in the strip “Three Good Reasons”.
Appearance
She’s an enormous dog with an extremely muscular build and a tail stub…and also three different heads.
She has light blue eyes on every head, which can turn featureless and bright blue when she’s enraged, and dark greyish-blue fur with light grey muzzles, eyebrows, chest and abs.
The Middle Head sports a light green spiked collar around her neck, and each of the three heads has her own distinct set of golden earwear: the Right Head has two earrings on her right ear (and, in some strips, a piercing on her chin), the Middle Head has one earring on each ear, as well as a piercing on her chin, and the Left Head has four piercings on her left ear, although, in some strips, they’re replaced with two earrings.
Cerberus in her casual outfit
In her Casual outfit, she wears an unbuttoned, pink Hawaiian shirt and beige shorts and her Middle and Left Head wear sunglasses and a straw hat respectively.
Owing to her size-shifting ability, her size varies as, while always huge, she can range from around 2-3 m in height to being larger than a building, and she could possibly become even bigger. Also, since the forms the Celestials are seen with in the comic are implied to be ones they take just to not scare mortals, it’s possible that Cerberus has a true, much more mystical and terrifying form.
As the comic underwent art style changes throughout the years, Cerberus’ fur has gone from a dark, blueish grey to a much lighter, turquoise hue and then back to a more greyish, slightly darker one.
Personality
Cerberus is a very strict person when carrying out her duties, yet, at the end of the day, she’s a kind soul who’s always willing to help the unfortunate.
Cerberus’ kindness as she ferries a deceased puppy into the afterlife.
When getting promoted to the role of soul ferrywoman by Bahamut, she admits that she picked the job so as to comfort those who die as children and, for all of the comic, she helps the heroes with any type of Heaven-related shenanigan they might have, albeit with the laws of Heaven always in mind.
She always has the emotional well-being of others in mind, as she claims that being very sad is outright “dangerous” and, in spite of how awful he had been to the mortals and even the Celestials, she helped Pete calm down during his villainous breakdown.
That being said, she too can have a mischievous side, as she intentionally jumpscared a mortal at least once when telling King that she was there “for his soul” (when she meant the soul in the form of a stopwatch that he carried) and when she looked smugly at Keene when his mother was embarrassing him.
Furthermore, if the laws of Heaven require her to be brutal, she often won’t hesitate to act so, as Pete remembered when he tried to steal King’s soul.
Due to her nature as a Multi-being, each of her three Heads behaves in her own way: the Middle Head is, fittingly, the de-facto leader of the trio, being the more no-nonsense, logical and work-focused of the three; the Left Head is the most gleeful, somewhat childish of the three and is also the most honest, often blurting out things the other two heads were trying to keep a secret or to spell out more tactfully and the Right Head sits somewhere in between, being more logical and level-headed than the Left, yet still more fun-loving than the serious Middle Head, arguably being the teenager to Left’s child and Middle’s adult.
Predictably, the three heads tend to bicker with each other.
Biography
Past
From what little we know about her past, Cerberus was hired by the Supreme Being, Bahamut as the Guardian of the fates of mortals, like she was in Greek mythology.
At one point, she started dating a mischievous Griffin Demigod, known in the comic as “Pete” but, after a million and one years, the two broke up, presumably because of Pete being a jerk, though according to him she also could be a bit too rough herself.
Housepets
The Cosmic Game
Much later, Pete and his sister, Spirit Dragon, would start a long-lasting game of Universes & Unrealities (to put it simply, Dungeons & Dragons, but for Demigods and with mortals as pawns), with the cheeky Demigod, Great Kitsune, as the game master. Eventually, Dragon found herself a willing avatar in the Pomeranian witch, Tarot, while Pete went to the incarcerated former PETA agent, Joel Zechariah Robinson, and turned him into the Corgi, King Milton, with plans to use him as his own pawn in the game.
Pete has to get past Cerberus if he wants to steal any fate…
One day, Pete tried to take Joel’s fate for himself so that he would remain King forever, but a furious Cerberus was there to guard the fates, and a 1v1 fight (or maybe 3v1) broke out. Cerberus was eventually able to stop and restrain Pete, but Joel’s fate fell from the Heavens and right into King’s hands, in the form of a watch. Pete then stood trial with Bahamut himself as judge, but was given minimal charges as he was merely playing a cosmic game.
King would go on to gradually forsake his nature as a former human, became good friends with Fox Lindberg (despite having tried to kidnap him back when he worked at PETA) and even fall in love with Fox’s cousin, Bailey, the two eventually getting married. The marriage, however, would soon face hardships as Pete arrived to claim King as his avatar. Bailey, however, offered to take King’s place and was taken away by Pete to Australia, where she was forced to fight against Tarot and Sabrina on Pete’s behalf.
To make matters worse, King, now useless to Pete, was transformed back into the human Joel and, after a short fight with a shocked and enraged Fox, the two set off to rescue Bailey. Luckily for them, Tarot had told her boyfriend, Peanut, to meet the two at a park so he could give Joel a magic(k) lamp through which he could interact with Cerberus, who arrived to finally take Joel’s soul-watch back to Heaven after the few years she had conceded him.
Cerberus taking King and Fox on a visit to Heaven.
In order to help King, Cerberus took both him and Fox on a visit to Heaven and even tried to console the two and make them have fun, although King was far too dismayed over Bailey being in danger.
After having talked with Bahamut and gathered help from others, including the Milton Ferrets, King and Fox set off to Australia where they stopped the conflict between Bailey and Tarot, the heroes realizing that the game will end if both avatars just quit. As the heroes went to a diner to finally relax, the Demigods Pete, Dragon, Kitsune and Cerberus also stopped at the diner in search for them, donning their casual attire. In spite of Pete and Dragon’s pleas for their avatars to continue fighting for them, the mortals finally stood up to the childish demigods who, without any more pawns to play with, both lost.
After Cerberus helped Pete calm down when the latter had a breakdown over his defeat, the three-headed dog punished the two losers as was sanctioned by Kitsune: reincarnation as mortals on Earth. Therefore, Pete and Dragon were reincarnated into the foxes Craig and Draig respectively. When the ferret Pit Milton refused to help the heroes travel back from Australia, Cerberus changed his mind by threatening him with an IRS audit.
Now back home and with Pete and Dragon defeated, King, Bailey and all the others could finally rest easy now that the cosmic game had finally ended for good.
Eventually, Cerberus would be promoted to the position of ferrywoman and assister of the deceased, a job thanks to which she could finally help comfort mortals.
Helping Keene
When the animal rights activist, Keene Milton was almost assassinated by PETA, the ferret found himself in Heaven, mistaking it as a fancy resort at first as he fell asleep before facing near-death. After the caring marten, Breel took Keene to soul orientation to make him understand he was dead, a shocked Keene went to complain to Cerberus, as he didn’t know how he died and still needed to achieve equal rights for animals back on Earth.
After taking him to the Room of Recall, Cerberus worries as the ferret loses faith in his life mission.
She took Keene to the Room of Recall so he could see how he had died but, as Keene almost drowned in the pool, Cerberus pulled him out just before he could find out his cause of death. Nevertheless, Keene fell unmotivated over his egalitarian mission, as he now saw it as pointless if the afterlife will already have all the happiness he wants to spread on Earth.
Worried over Keene’s loss of resolve, Cerberus took him to meet his two deceased parental figures: his biological mother and his owner and adoptive father Mr. Milton, who was an animal rights activist himself and had inspired Keene’s mission in the first place. After some soul-searching thanks to them, Keene finally found the will to fight for animal rights again and, at the same time, Cerberus realized that Keene was in Heaven by mistake and he was still alive on Earth, even if barely. After he said goodbye to his mother, Mr. Milton and Breel, Cerberus made Keene wake up, the ferret narrowly escaping his car, which was sinking into the sea.
Temple shenanigans
Since Pete’s defeat had left his Temple in the Miltons backyard free for the taking, Keene planned to use the Source of Unimaginable power deep within the Temple to magic(k)ally impose equality between man and animals onto the World. His extremist plans, however, could’ve resulted in cataclysm, so Cerberus, at Kitsune’s request, sent Breel on Earth to guide Keene back on the right path, while also sending Rufus and the angels Summer and Spring to help the rest of the cast stop the ferret.
Cerberus comes to take Breel back to Heaven.
After a long adventure that almost resulted in the World ending at the hands of The Forgotten, a cataclysmic demon from the hellish realm of Pandemonium, the Temple was destroyed and Keene finally abandoned his misguided ways, him and Breel finally becoming boyfriends.
Cerberus, however, arrived to take Breel back to Heaven where he belonged, having left the souls even too much time on Earth after they had accomplished their mission, much to Keene’s heartbreak. Breel, however, decided to stay with his new boyfriend on Earth and asked Cerberus to be reincarnated back to life. Although confused at first and even worrying that staying in Pandemonium had done a number on Breel’s sanity, as no one had ever asked for reincarnation before with literal Heaven as the other option, Cerberus eventually agreed to Breel’s demand and the reincarnated marten would go on to live together with Keene, who had learned his lesson and retreated to a peaceful middle-class lifestyle, leaving the Equal Change Program in the hands of his sister Lana.
She retrieved Rufus, Summer and Spring back to Heaven shirtly after, though Rufus would eventually return to briefly visit his old friend, the cat Maxwell, and make amends with him.
”Heck” on Earth
One day, however, Keene’s disgruntled former assistant, Herman Steward, decided, following the advice of NegaBreel, Breel’s evil half, and with the help of the magpie Trinket, to open up a portal to Pandemonium, teaming up with its demonic ruler, Eudoant, to literally unleashed Hell on Earth. Kitsune and the rest of the forces of Heaven quickly quarantined the town of Babylon’s Gardens and Cerberus teleported all of its inhabitants to Heaven, where they would be kept as a temporary solution.
She, however, had forgotten to also teleport the three reincarnated mortals living there: Breel, Craig and Draig.
Gallery
Miscellanous
Housepets!
Trivia
- each of her three heads‘ speech bubbles has a different hue of blue.
- She’s, so far, the only named Celestial in the comic to have always presented herself in a bipedal form, as Kitsune, Pete and Dragon have often taken on bipedal forms while Bahamut’s true form is that of a non-anthropomorphic whale.
- According to the alternative title of the strip If Every Day Was Like Christmas, she attends 1.56 MegaChristmases per day as a surrogate mother, as MegaChristmases are such that if a person has a bad relationship with their real one, a surrogate family will be given to them.
- Due to her three-headed nature, she has been used in the comic to make reference to both the musical band Talking Heads and the three-headed knight from Monthy Python and the Holy Grail, the strip itself acknowledging the shout-out in its very title.
- She is quoted among the testimonials of the seventh book in the Housepets! book series, Housepets! Don't Ask Questions. Her testimonial reads: "It is a collection of absolute perfection, at least the version of this located in Heaven."
External Links
Cerberus on the Housepets! Wiki.