Contest Entry: ALGIORIDA

Here it is, my entry for ~Crimson-Vagrant's contest: [link]

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ALGIORIDA

Powers:
(Key: = normal abilities, = special abilities)
Amphibious - This monster can breathe both in water and in air. He can also move with frightening speed in both environments.
Small is Beautiful - He is on the relatively small side for a monster. Far from inconveniencing him, though, this makes him even more deadly because he can access tighter spaces that other monsters can't reach.
Bite - The mouth inside the arms is lined with razor-sharp serrated teeth. If he can't find an opening on a host body to slither into, he will use these to rip and tear through hide and armor to make his way inside.
All-Seeing Eyes - Each of his ten arms is tipped with an eye that sees in a different wavelength. This gives him a very sophisticated picture of the environment around him, and allows him to draw a bead on opponents that are undetectable to simpler forms of sight.
Tentacle Arms - Algiorida's arms are muscular and can crush, squeeze, fling, and smack around objects and opponents with ease. The tube feet on their undersides act like suckers on an octopus's tentacles, giving him a nightmarishly tight grip.
Silent Killer - Algiorida is a stealth hunter par excellence. Apart from camouflaging him, his boneless body is capable of squeezing through an opening the size of a coin, allowing him great mobility in tight quarters. As far as sounds are concerned, he literally cannot vocalize; when inside an opponent he communicates using the host's means, but with no vocal organs he resorts to telepathy when outside a host. The only sound he makes is when his suckers detach from the surface he springs from with a sudden popping sound - when you hear that, it's usually far too late.
Camouflage - Algiorida can change the color and texture of his upper-side skin at will. This allows him to literally blend in with the environment, hiding from opponents until he strikes suddenly and without warning.
Stinging Touch - The skin on his upper-side of his body secretes an acidic substance that causes a painful stinging/burning sensation. Painkillers and skin-applied anasthetics are useless against it, as it seeps into and under the skin the moment it is applied.
Stomach Net - Like regular starfish Algiorida can regurgitate his stomach, which secretes a deadly corrosive acid to subdue prey. It's also lined with teeth to grip and tear into his victim, allowing him to drag it towards the vicious teeth surrounding his main mouth.
Pain-O-Vision - The creature's eyes have a mysterious property that is not yet understood. Staring into them can cause unbreakable and often painful illusions, granting him limited control over a victim's mind.
Meat Puppet Master - Once he's latched onto a monster opponent, Algiorida enters an orifice or wound. He then has two options. First, he can control the opponent by making his way into its skull and latching onto its brain, thus controlling every single action the host makes. This disguise is so effective that he can infiltrate enemy affiliations undetected, and pull the strings for surprising lengths of time before they realize the danger in their midst.

Finisher: Agony Within - When Algiorida has to exit a host and find a new one, he exits in the exact manner that horror fanatics expect him to. To start the full finisher sequence, he will first enter the host, controlling it being an optional stage. To kill the opponent he will migrate towards the vital organs instead of the brain. Once ideally positioned, he everts his tooth-lined stomach, and secretes an excruciatingly painful stomach acid laced with hallucinogens. As the victim is digested from the inside, the hallucinogens are said to traumatize it so much that it literally cannot fight back, and may even WANT to die instead of suffer both the emotional pain of the hallucinogens and the physical pain as the digestive acids slowly liquefy the innards into a semidigested sludge that is easily consumed by the monster. Once the unfortunate host has been finished off and its insides utterly consumed - bones and all - Algiorida uses a combination of stomach acid and teeth to literally chew his way out of its chest and vacate the premises, leaving behind not but an empty, mutilated husk.

Design Origin:
What do you get when you cross the fear of injury, two different kinds of sea stars, inspiration from D&D and Bogleech, and learning several new coloring/special FX techniques on Photoshop? This guy.
Algiorida is based on algiophobia, or the fear of pain. I suffer from a mild case of this phobia, which I owe to several less-than-pleasant childhood experiences, most notably a few of the disciplinary procedures employed by my legal guardians, e.g. being slapped across the face if I said insulting remarks or worse, having my legs hit by a belt when I misbehaved on a major scale. While it's true that we've mostly grown out of those practices, I still have a fear of being hurt, phyiscally or emotionally, and I always handle things or situations with great care lest I get cuts or bruises, burns or angry scolding. Small objects still make me wary, for I'm afraid of breaking my skin on them or, more irrationally, choking on them, though this wariness isn't as extreme as it used to be. Fire, electricity, chemicals, etc. elicit a similar reaction. The most natural thing therefore would be to design a monster that provides as much hurt as possible in every way possible. I also worked in a bit of paranoia, since for starters my parents feel they must keep watch over me round the clock to make me study. I was in fact going to base the monster off that fear at first but I didn't think it would be qualified enough.
Originally I thought of an octopus, but after doing some more reading, I read about sea stars and the design fell into place. This beastie is based, more or less, off a combination of a brittle star and a crown-of-thorns. Brittle stars don't hurt or poison you if you touch them, but crown-of-throns DO, so yeah. Admittedly, I did take some design inspiration from the Beholder from D&D, which also has tentacle eyestalks and a mouth full of sharp teeth, but in my opinion a closer-to-home source of inspiration would be a certain gruesomely satirical web-based Mons game, ~scythemantis's Mortasheen - specifically the Pentasite, which is basically an exaggerated monster starfish. I made sure to make the monster my own distinct design, though, by giving him ten arms, a mouth structure I pretty much made up myself, ten different eye colors, and a SHITLOAD of detail. Hell, the presence of so much detail was the very reason I took this opportunity to learn a new coloring technique on Photoshop involving layers set to Multiply blending mode. It works wonders. Combine this with a custom-made bubble brush and some splatter brushes I found online, and you get the single most detailed picture I've ever created up to this point.

Tl;dr: Algiorida is based on the fear of getting hurt with some paranoia on the side, both abstract concepts. These are bought to reality in the form of an eldtritch creature of nightmares, primarily inspired by several kinds of starfish with some influence from a few fictional tentacled monsters.

BTW, the name comes from Algiophobia, the fear of pain, and Ophiurida, the echinoderm order that contains almost all known brittle stars.