VVORM QUESTIONS! deep wormy secrets revealed

I was just kind of tooling around with my wormhead vampire concepts and it turned into a lamprey sorta thing! Not going to keep this head/body ratio (too similar to my other wormy vamps), but I like the eyes and mouth on this guy so maybe this speculative poke will be reincarnated into a better design later.

An alt take on the worm vampires, I think! Toying with the idea that the species has a lot of small variations, and the wormy vamps I’ve been drawing up to now are just one of the more common subtypes. Or maybe it’s just a close cousin species?

These guys are much bigger and chunkier than normal worm vamps and can’t fit into human disguises easily. Or at all, in some cases. On the flip side, they’re much more physically strong and have a LOT of protective padding around their slim internal vital structures. As they have difficulty posing as humans for anything but brief periods, their lairs are usually near large population centers, such as in abandoned office buildings.

I tried that greyscale + multiply layer method of painting and like the uncolored version a lot, so here’s that too:

I’ve thought about this a bit since the last time it was asked. Decided to roll a bit more with the grub/larvae aspect of em.

Their 3 primary leg pairs are clawed and have lil vestigial fingers/toes on em left over from being human. They don’t have an exoskeleton on their primary legs like most caterpillars or grubs,but they DO have a strong internal structure (save for the skull, worm vamps don’t really have a lotta bone in them, much like actual wormies). 

Got QUITE a few questions about this.

ESSENTIALLY: All worm vampires carry the disease/virus/whathaveyou that turned them initially, and can pass it on freely. The human immune system is, however, quite capable of repelling it under most circumstances. And saliva is not an ideal vector. Turning usually only happens in deliberate, pre-selected cases, or as a very rare accident.

I hope this answers yall thoroughly! Feel free to inquire further if you want more details.

vampire worms are still vampires, so they’re definitely undead and definitely do not need to distinguish between genders for any practical purpose. It’s entirely possible that you actually CAN’T, because most non-essential organs/physical characteristics are trashed when ya go from human to worm monster (why waste valuable energy altering a useless body part to fit your new form, especially when that energy is at a premium?). It just doesn’t make sense on an evolutionary level when your species reproduces via infection.