Anja from Dinner Party

This slightly Photoshopped image is the best I can currently do at capturing the face of a Velorian. At least as they exist in my head.

Blonde hair everywhere, golden skin tone, large blue eyes with a squarish yet slightly rounded face that can look either young or old depending on lighting, makeup or her intent. Of course, the attached body is even more spectacular, but no human can adequately model for that.

I see this as Anja from my Dinner Party story just being herself.

She is only 68, which is very young for the Supremis who can live to at least 500 or sometimes closer to 1000 years.

The image I started with was Erin Heatherton.

As of last night, the story itself has 536 hits--after three weeks. Guess a pic has it all over a text!

--Brantley

Woodclaw wrote: I can only speak for myself, but the more I look at that picture the more creeped out I am. Right now I can't really point my finger at any given element, but I have the impression that it hits my uncanny valley, she look ... too close to human and yet not human enough for me to be confortable.

That's kind of where I wanted to go with it. Uncanny valley is a great description.

Velorians are a subspecies of human, and that's something we have obviously never encountered in real life. At a superficial level they look like ordinary but exceptional humans, but anyone who spends time around them comes to realize that they really are different. Not only in look, but obviously behavior. Some people will be drawn to that, others repulsed, many will be both. That's as it should be.

We humans are very sensitive to details. Tiny things, like not having hair follicles anywhere but their head, sounds small, but in reality we'd notice that. We escapees from the hairy ape family are used to the look of hair follicles on arms and faces and everywhere, even if the hairs aren't always noticeable except on closest examination on fair-haired people.

Or the greater muscular expansion and definition upon movement, which at one level makes them look extremely fit, but at other times will look excessive and exaggerated and unnatural.

The ability to fly, the strength, the invulnerability... all things we see in comic books and movies, but in person they would be mind-boggling, and not always in a good way. We humans would have little or no control over them, which makes them akin to gods. That would profoundly mess up many people's heads, in various ways.

Yet they aren't gods. They think like us. Their mental abilities fit within human range, albeit mostly above average, and their emotions are the same, except for the different social norms of their home planet.

The promiscuousness and their ability to project that via their pheromones, which instead of being driven by needfulness and desire for acceptance and all the other things -- often detrimental -- that drive extreme promiscuousness in humans, is instead based on extreme confidence and invulnerability along with a love of pleasure, both given and received.
They are mostly good-hearted, but their sex comes in a thin emotional wrapper instead of the layers and layers that we humans swaddle it within. Humans will always misunderstand sexual behavior around Velorians, either being repulsed or addicted to them, but most will have trouble coping with the fact that they don't value sexual exclusiveness at all, even within marriage. That would be profoundly uncomfortable for most humans given our genetic and social backgrounds, given that we, like most mammals, want to control mating rights. (Well, maybe excepting Bonobo chimpanzees, who behave a bit like Vels.)

Obviously this pict will affect different people in different ways, but it's the best I've been able to do to capture both the attraction and the strangeness of Velorians. They are not truly like us.

Shadar

This might be a interesting comparison. Could these aliens have the ability to adapt their appearance to fit in better with the humans and possibly avoid detection?