Assimilation Concept: Lyrincal

I figured it was about time to do away with the plain 'green woman' look and try to invoke more details into Arvelle's design in keeping with the previous mutation concepts. I didn't quite get the before-and-after aspect of the faces quite right - I can never seem to replicate the exact same object in drawing - but the idea is, in fact, that the former is Arvelle in her original human form, the latter being what she turns into after being taken over.

I guess the overall idea here is that Arvelle's race is essentially plant-based, and evolutionarily advanced though they may be, trying to co-opt a more physically primitive species is destined to yield some kind of physical complications; in this case, being taken over by an Alphan causes the host body to mutate into some plant-based humanoid, at a much slower rate than the Zhorani's little biochemical wonder can turn the most happy-go-lucky average joe into a snarling-mad, drooling-dumb quadriped with a cavernous maw of fangs where its belly once was. Furthermore, as most of the alien races they've been in contact with up to this point have proven to have much more civility and self-control than we do, Arvelle and her associates are rather unprepared for the experience of raw human emotion.

In other words, it's sort of an inversion of the way the Pods worked in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers": whereas the Pods render their human victims emotionless, Arvelle's already-not-so-touchy-feely-themselves people become overwhelmed by the depth of their own newly-acquired human emotions. This puts the Alphans at an additional disadvantage against the Zhorani, for whom the brutality of human feeling is made into a distinct asset once they've started turning simple small-town folk into hideous mutant-things.