The Gist of things
The character was once a human woman who was aboard a ship named The Ophelia, and got infected by parasites. However, rather than be controlled by the parasite, she chose to end her life. But the Parasite simply took over the body... however with the human brain destroyed and the host's psionic implant NOT destroyed, the parasite gained a measure of sentience beyond the animalistic. It effectively fully mutated the host body and claimed it as its own. The parasite's newfound body was that of a famous entrepreneur's daughter. And, having the memories of that lost child via the psionic implant, decided to live on in her stead as a way of making up for the things it did as a simple parasite. However, this parasite, now calling itself Ophelia, still has the same lust-driven hungers and a host of related abilities on top of its newfound psionic powers.
Her body will be mostly tentacles, with glowing pink compound eyes and a beak, while also making her hermaprhoditic as a final corruption. Try to write her as someone who is driven by lust/parasite instinct, but still tries to do the right thing whenever she has to. (lost the plot on this, whoops)
Lore/Backstory/Story ideas
Ophelia spends time on that derelict ship, watching as her influence further corrupts the body into something more in line with itself. She knows this isn't what its previous owner would have wanted, but it's too late to take it back in any way that matters. The parasite, Ophelia, eyes the spacesuit. It's form fitting, and as its body becomes increasingly tentacled and formless, it's an experiment to try and mimic the body that was once there with the tentacles that are now. Ophelia ruefully thinks how the curves seem a bit exaggerated, but it'll have to do. Ophelia squeezes itself into the spacesuit, the constraining material smoothing out the lumps of her tentacle bundles into the semblance of humanity. She curls her hair-tentacles around her head, and squeezes it into the space helmet. With the seal in place, nobody can probably tell what she is. It's probably better like that: if Ophelia wants to live on as HER, and honor HER memory, it's better that the truth stays hidden.
At a nearby station, a ship silently docks. It's crew only one person, a hastily-added "Ophelia Mason". The clerk at the desk asks if they're related to the famous Brook Mason, but Ophelia waves it off; she's barely related, if at all. It's something that isn't a lie but isn't the truth. But it'll work, and that's what's important. As she fills out the paperwork and hands it over to the clerk, who gives it the once-over even as Ophelia makes her way into the station to buy a cleaning drone. From behind her, the clerk wishes Ophelia a Happy Birthday. And bitterly, Ophelia thanks her. It really was, in a sense, her "birth day", even if HER's wasn't for nearly a year.
Ophelia entered the date into her borrowed phone: she'll be sure to celebrate it out of respect. But for now, she had business to tend to.
Some time later, after a timeskip. In the further reaches of space, a group of bandits had attacked Ophelia on a planet near the system's outer ring. With her steadily-growing psionics, and a newly-acquired plasma pistol, she had made quick work of most of them but one. Ophelia briefly looked around, confirming that she was alone with him. That nobody was around to witness what was about to happen. A deadpan laugh filled the air as Ophelia gripped the seal on the front of her suit. She congratulated the bandit for lasting longer than the others, but it's unfortunate that he did. Because, she said as she undid the seal and let her tendrils flow out with a cloud of pheromones that had been locked up with her, it meant that he'd have to be lunch.
The bandit didn't stand a chance: she was designed to prey on humans, after all. As much as she hated it, this was who she really was.
Ophelia sweeps through the halls of the ship from which she gained her name and stole her life. Every corner were riddled with parasites, similar to the way she was before she was unintentionally uplifted by her victim's implant. But they had to go, they ALL had to go. She was now keenly aware the fact that they did the irreversible damage to whatever they touched.
Part of her felt bad for ending the lives of her kin so mercilessly. It then it comes back: the feeling of the pistol against Her temple, her apologies to her father, the despair...it was too much NOT to act on
She steeled herself and reached in to channel her psionics, sending another killing wave across the ship.
There will never be another like her. She owed that much to Her, after all.
For Ophelia, her spacesuit is like her second skin. In many ways it literally is, containing all that she is, and shaping her identity to the world outside. It's something she maintains with as much care as (in)humanly possible. In one such case, Ophelia sheds the suit, spilling out of it like entrails from a disemboweling. The uplifted parasite looks at the suit and gingerly picks it up. She had gotten good at maintaining a generally humanoid shape by then. The tendrils that friend her legs bent at where her knees would be, while the vague approximation of arms and hands held the suit like a holy relic. She moved to the laundry room, disinfecting the inside and removing as much of the filth she naturally left behind as she could. The process took hours, but she didn't complain. Eventually she looked at the cleaned and dried spacesuit with a rare moment of allowed satisfaction. As she slipped back into it, feeling the comforting pressure on her from all sides, she thought: finally whole again.
(From the perspective of a doctor). He was making his way through the station, but something has caught his attention. There was a woman wearing a class 9 space suit. It wouldn't be an issue...if she had been in the vacuum of space with an air tank, but here on the station she should have been suffocated for how long she had been wearing that thing. What had started as him lingering to help when what he assumed to be a green adventurer fainted turned into increased worry as she went on for a good hour. Suddenly her concentration seemed to falter, and a jar slipped from the woman's hands. He watched as her arm bent at an angle to catch it, before snapping back to normal a second later. If he hadn't been watching her, it would have been too quick to catch.
He fucked around the corner, trying to parse what he saw...but when he looked back, he felt a chill go up his spine; she was staring back. Thought he couldn't see past the black globe on her head, he could tell that she was not happy about him seeing whatever he wasn't meant to see.
Ophelia gestures for him to come over, but the stiff gestures implied that she wasn't leaving up to him to refuse. He noticed the gun on her hip for the first time as he got close, and found himself lifted by the collar and pressed against the alley wall.
She only had to say three words: You Saw Nothing.
He understood that she was giving him an out, and that it was something she was doing for HIS well-being. An act act of mercy.
But as the man skulked away, one thought kept running through his head: why did she reek of decay?
Ophelia was hungry. It wasn't the hunger associated with her human remains, but with the parasite that she was. It was a hunger that she wasn't keen on indulging, but one that she couldn't afford for let grow if she wanted to maintain some semblance of humanity. And so she made her way to the kitchen. The ship had been full of life, before everything went to hell, and so the ship was now full of bodies. The ones that hadn't rotted were...processed and stored. Organs in one cooler, muscle in another, brains in a different one. It was an odd mundanity to something so natural and repulsive. She recalled the task of searching among the bodies for those that had been close to Her, and making sure to give them proper burial rites. They were not broken down like these faceless crew members. They were the last links to Her on the ship and so Ophelia wanted to respect them. However...
She pulled a slab of muscle from the fridge, and set it up on a plat like to was the most normal thing. For her it was: food harvested in, she guessed, the same way livestock was. Cooking it wasn't an option. Not because of some moral quandary, but because she didn't know how. Also she didn't need to cook her meals.
She undid the seal on her helmet, setting it aside and revealing her tentacle'd face and the beak at the center of it. Glowing pink eyes, insect-like, looked over her meal as she brought the flesh to her maw. The tentacles she used as hair helped her hold it, to keep her suit clean.
She hated how delicious it was. She wish she could eat a burger...she hears good things about them.
Ophelia had just finished cleaning her suit. The gleaming white was drying now, and so she needed to clean herself. She skulked off to the baths, her body mostly still human shaped by habit but quickly dissolving into a mass of tendrils as she got closer. The bath she ran was hit, hotter than humans could probably handle but just perfect for her. The soap wasn't an issue, it seemed typical body wash worked just fine for her, though. She slowly slid into the bath, letting herself sigh as the best enveloped everything it her mouth. It was a special kind of soothing, feeling more human in these moments than any other time outside of her suit. Speaking of which...
Ophelia sat up, letting the suds fall away so she could examine how much of Her was left. Her mutations should be over now, so this would be the final check.
Her skin, and the tentacles that sprouted from it, were red but default. But Her torso seemed the least affected. Her breasts were larger due to the sheer mass of tentacle inside, but her waist was still fairly human-like. Her arms from the shoulders down were just tentacles and she took a moment to practice shaping them into a mimckry of a human arm and hand. It was second nature by this point, making putting her suit on much easier. Same for her legs from the waist down. Becoming a hermaphrodite was... unexpected. With one of her faux-hands she traced up her neck and examined her head. Her beak dominated the bulk of her face, but just above that...
Ophelia traced her "finger" over the scar from the hole She left behind in her last act of defiance. Following the trajectory, she reaches around to the back of her head. Parting the tentacles there, a much larger hole and scar marked where the plasma round had made its exit from Her skull. She had to make sure these marks were still there, they were remnants of both her birth and Her death. They were important, even if they were macabre.
Since she was sure that they were still there, she focused on getting clean. It was actually fairly simple: unravel her "arms" and "legs", entwine them with her "hair" and then vigorously writhe until every part of her was scrubbed clean.
This took longer than she liked, and longer still to dry, but it was done. She sat near the heater, warming back up while she waited for her second skin to be ready.
This one takes the perspective of a nameless Scrapper, (someone who raids the derelict ships on the outer ring of the system for valuable parts). As he explores, he encounters the aftermath of a fight. It looks like a raider team had been taken out by someone. As he examines further, he notices the fire seems to be concentrated at a bit of rubble that was acting as cover for whomever was behind it. It also seems like this is where the raiders were mostly taken out. The carnage shows that whatever the one behind cover was using, it tore the raiders apart. Some of those bullet holes...seem a little too much like bite marks...
Suddenly he hears something further in, and his flashlight catches the breakfast flash of red tendrils before an invisible force slams him down. Once the world stops spinning he gets up, following the noise. He doesn't see the thing that got him, but as he rounds the corner he finds a woman. She's tall, curvy, and seems to be practically poured into her spacesuit. Her helmets visor is black, but he can tell she's looking at him. As she approaches, the glint of a plasma rifle catches his attention before she speaks up and asks if he's a raider. He replies that he's just a scrapper passing through. After a moment he adds that they should probably leave; some kind of monster is lurking around, and he thinks that it had taken out the raiders he had passed earlier. It can also attack from a distance, making it dangerous.
After a moment, she agree, then seeming asks at random if he thinks it's scared. The scrapper scoffs: why would a monster be afraid?
Ophelia doesn't answer.
(Same story as above, but from Ophelia's point of view, a bit earlier). She had been raiding the ship, looking for parts to repair the life support on the ship. She didn't essentially need it, but it made living easier when the lights worked on her ship. What she hadn't expected was a well-armed group of raiders were already camped out, and that they weren't above a little slaving. Ophelia quickly found herself pinned behind rubble, as their shots closed in, one nearly grazed her suit. Her suit...she wasn't happy with what she had to do, but it seemed like the best option. Plus, she was getting hungry...
Reaching inside herself, she flung a wave of psionics energy to knock the others off their feet. In the resulting confusion, she undid the seal and oozes out of her suit. After making sure it's be safe in the corner, she lashed out and tore them apart. The fight was painfully one-sided once she countered, and suddenly nine dead raiders lay at her tendrils...nine meals that she'd have to process and store later. After a snack. She had sated herself but heard footsteps. Another raider? A scout she had missed? She flattened him and regrouped with her suit, quickly squeezing herself back in just as his light crossed her now more human-shaoed form. His scream as he fell didn't seem like an experienced fighter, and his identification as a scrapper confirmed it. But as the conversation went on, she decided to ask what he thought of her, since he had unknowingly seen her true self. He, unsurprisingly, only saw a monster. And so, she decided, that she'd keep him safe from the "monster". From her.
Ophelia sits in the mess hall of her ship. I front of her is a bag practically dripping with grease and smelling of processed oils. It was a deluxe burger meal from the fast food place on the station, with all the dressings. She even got a soda! As she sits at the table, the meal is laid out before her. She, obviously, never had a burger. But she has the understanding of one from Her memories. But memories don't account for real experience, especially when they aren't her's. She undoes the seal on her helmet and lets her real head be exposed in the privacy of her ship. Her hair tendrils wave about with their newfound freedom and the scent of processed food wafts up to her beak. Grasping it in her hands, she briefly examine it up close, taking on the details before finally bringing it to her beak and taking a bite.
...
It's good. It's rich and flavorful and warm and so very good. A tear runs down her cheek, and Ophelia is surprised before realizes it must be Her showing some sort of thanks. Or maybe it's guilt of having robbed Her of this. But, Ophelia hopes, it's likely the former.
Ophelia is having a rare moment of cooperation with a couple of scrappers. They're working with a doctor, and foraging for parts and an old set of medical records. When they reach the sick ward this crawling with parasites and other creatures. While they aren't the same type that Ophelia is, they're apparently enough that one of the scrappers releases a bio-bomb to clear them out. At least, that was the last think Ophelia remembered before waking up in a hospital bed in an unfamiliar location. She thinks she's alone, until she notices the doctor sitting as at a table on the opposite side of the room. In one hand, he has the print out of an X-ray, one that Ophelia can tell is hers from twisting insides shown. In the other, aimed right at Ophelia's forehead through the lack dome of her helmet, is a rather heavy-duty plasma lancer. His expression is steeled, as if he's been prepared for this but is unsure on how to continue now that the moment has arrived.
He starts with a simple question: what is she?
Ophelia pauses, reaches for the seal of her helmet before she notices his finger starting to squeeze the trigger. Point taken.
Keeping her hands where he can see them, she explains what she is. The parasite infesting Her, Her last act of defiance. Her psi-augment blessing Ophelia with sentience and damning her with the knowledge of what she had down and the life she inadvertently stole. Her attempts to honor Her legacy while also forging a path of her own, her killing her kindred on the ship to make sure another one of her can't happen...
The doctor listens, lancer not moving an inch the whole time. Occasionally his eyes would dart to the results in his hand, as if confirming. Then, he tells her to take off the helmet. Slowly. And the moment she tries anything he will reduce her head and shoulders to ash.
And so, slowly, deliberately and with reverence for the helmet that's served as her identity and disguise, she reveals her true head. The doctor watches as she shows the scar, Her legacy and mark of attempted rebellion.
After a while, a long while, the doctor gets up. He'll let her go, but...if he hears anything about her causing harm, he'll come for her.
As Ophelia slips her helmet back on, she assures him that won't be needed: if she ever loses herself, her last act of defiance will be following Her example.
This seems to satisfy the doctor, as he finally lowers the lancer and let's Ophelia go.
(from the pov of the doctor above) As he watched Ophelia exit the room, his body was still tense. He strained his ears, listening as her hulking form moved further down the hallway. He put the x-rays down and reached into his pocket. A small device, a deadman's switch, had it's abort code entered with shaky fingers. The doctor watched as several dozen lights around the bed turned green, signalling that if he got up or moved more than an inch in his seat the room wouldn't be reduced to cinders. The plasma lancer was to keep its eyes on him, and not notice the payload of explosives he had rigged around it.
He replayed the events in his head: he just wanted to recover some medical documents from a derelict ship, so he hired some muscle. One of which was an eight-foot amazon in a spacesuit. But when they encountered a room teeming with pests, what started with a routine cleansing ended up with him dragging the body of that thing into a medbay. He almost dropped it, when he felt the way the body moved bonelessly. The way it SQUIRMED under his touch. A quick scan later revealed the way its body was barely human under that suit. What the hell had he been talking to?!
He went over every moment of the trip, every time they were alone with it. How many times could it have attacked them? How many times had their back been turned to it? It had psionics, so it could have snapped their necks with a thought and done God knows what to their bodies in the privacy of an abandoned hospital...but it didn't. It -She- had been helpful the entire time, even if a bit aloof. The story she told lined up with the trauma to the skull the x-ray showed. SOMETHING had definitely destroyed a large part of it, and something else had grown in its place. The moment he saw the scar, he knew that she had to have at least been telling some truth.
But even if it hadn't been there, he knew. The face it wore, even though twisted by mutations, was one that was painfully familar. It was the one of his best friend's daughter, who had gone missing almost a year ago. To hear that she had...died in despair like that. It was too much.
Ophelia, he thought, you better honor Her memory. Or God Himself won't be able to stop me from finding you.
Back when Ophelia had first "awoken", her psionic control was lacking in the best of times. She'd try to manipulate simple objects, and fail spectacularly as they'd crash into the walls or be crushed with too much force. But she had to figure it out. She remembered the time as a simple parasite, feeling the unknown force that had kept pushing her back. It must have been Her psionics fighting the parasite that'd become Ophelia: She struggled to the bitter end, fighting with everything She had.
Now, as Ophelia's arms trembled, she raised them again, struggling to raise even a spoon with any real control. She marveled at the realization of how much control She must have had with these same powers. It made Ophelia respect Her even more. It made Ophelia want to honor Her legacy even more.
And so she HAD to master this gift she had been left behind.
Now, much later, Ophelia is on a raiding mission. As usual, she's met with resistance but this time it's in the form of automated drones instead of humans. She can't exactly eat these things, so disabling thing is her main goal. But, as she returns fire from around a corner, another drone moves in to flank. Ophelia doesn't see it until it's too late to flatten, and it fires a slug towards her. She extends a hand and manages to catch it with her psionics just in time, the bolt slowly spinning to a stop before she lets it drop on the ground. Then the drone is slammed into a wall and its mass used to bludgeon the others around the corner.
After a while, and rummaging around the remains to see if there was anything valuable (there wasn't), she finds her gaze lingering on the slug she had stopped before. It's still not as fine of a control as what She had, but Ophelia feels proud of herself. And, more importantly, thankful to Her for this gift. Ophelia heads down the hall, thinking that she'll get some fast food later.
Notes/Shit I physically doodled on napkins or had rattling around in the back of my head but hadn't written down yet
Ophelia stands at somewhere between seven to nine feet. Should be tall, taller than most, but the height hasn't been decided on yet
Her name comes from the name of the ship she was "born" on, the Ophelia.
Host doesn't actually have a name (fix later?)
Just realized there's two doctor characters in the story notes. They're different guys.
Want to give her a friend but her story is more lonely and might be ruined
Physical stuff worth noting:
-Red skin, like "could be mistaken for gore" red
-Arms from the shoulders down, legs from the hips down, and hair are all replaced by tentacles
-Tentacles do not have suckers, they're more hentai tentacles with ambiguous suction that works when it's needed
-Slimy (aphrodisiac?)
-Face is still mostly human-shaped, but a large beak now occupies the bulk of it
-Eyes are pink glowing compound eyes. Mental image is Kamen Rider eyes
-Foot-long tentacle dick if I ever get back to the porn part of this
-Constantly secretes pheromones, which get sealed inside of the suit as she travels
-For all visual intents and purposes it's easier to imagine her tentacle body as entrails and the suit as her real skin
-A small circular wound just off the center of her forehead, and a much larger exit wound in the back of her head. Both are healed over.
She's hard to draw...
Her suit:
Don't actually know how spacesuits work so it's more a visual idea
-Big circular dome, black and reflective. Her eyes can be faintly seen through it if you get close (think The Fury)
-Torso basically stiff latex, form-fitting, off-white color with a heavy-duty zipper going from collar to crotch
-Heavy-duty braces around the arms and legs resembling thigh boots and shoulder-length gloves
-Enters and exits the suit like an octopus entering a coconut shell