Spend the first day acclimating

You spend the rest of the night watching her dreams passively, not wanting to risk much more. Her brain is alive with energy while she rests and you drink in anything that seems excessive to what she needs to replenish. Even this relative trickle dwarfs anything the hornoads could offer. Her energy is vibrant, warm, alive.

Eventually, she stops cycling between dreams and deep rest and moves purely to dreaming. Her dreams at this point become nonsensical, comprised of squiggling half-thoughts and semi-lucidity. She dreams she's fighting some mysterious alien figures, but suddenly when she removes their masks they have her face! And now their body is that of a hornoad!

It's... drivel. As fun as it might be to see just what the recesses of her mind can conjure up to show her, studying her in her sleep is not very useful to you. You try suggesting that she wake up, but her mind responds with images of charred animal flesh spinning over a flame. The smell utterly repulses you, but it seems to make her hungry. No matter what you suggest, it doesn't have any effect.

Eventually, you give up. She only wakes up a short time later when her ship's computer shrieks horribly. If you had teeth, the sound would be making you grind them to dust. You can feel every molecule of your body vibrating from the sensation like you're being boiled alive. The host rises slowly and you're certain you'll die by the time she claps her hands together and the noise stops. You shudder and settle back into a puddle. For your health, you should probably try to find a way to wake her up before that sound happens next time.

The host stretches, her joints aching and muscles fatigued. She wants nothing more than to go back to sleep, but some things need to be done. She looks back at her bed with a mixture of remorse and affection but stands up nonetheless. She stretches out her back and tries her best to force her brain to start working. She tugs at the collar of the skintight suit she slept in and smells the inside. The smell is significant enough to cause shame, she's overdue for a cleaning. For now, she sits at her computer.

The first proper day in your new host is one of difficult acclimation, learning which strings you can and can't pull. The process is slow, this brain so many orders of magnitude more complex than anything you have a comparison for. Even things like discerning which synapses control sight and sound require long work, full or errors and incomplete victories. Even with her just seated at her computer, there are enough biological processes happening that you can't possibly track all of them.

However, given enough time, even the most intricate machines can be deconstructed. Hazy images eventually take shape, names are put to shapes and ideas. The vessel is intricate but works in repetitive cycles. Her movements follow patterns burned deep into the memories, nothing she does is new to things she's done before. Patterns that you withness it perform are patterns you can predict. The sense of self is built on action, the shape of the mental self-image forged through years of repetition. Were it not so complex and were there fewer patterns it would be almost laughably simple. But it is still just a biological machine, like the hornoad before it. Harder to grapple with is the self, the perception of the inward. It has memories, it has goals. Messing with these would be the surest way to let her know of your presence. It keeps the biological functions and the mental processes almost caged away from the self. While she idles about doing other things you twitch one of her fingers and she's none the wiser.

As you feel around, another harsh wave of noise rocks your mind.

"Тіḣѕ іѕ tḣе ссіоḣе tаḣt ḣе ḣаѕ ⅿḋае ոο ⅿеttаr ḣοԝ јѕսѕtіfіеḋ."

Your rummaging through her mind has made some progress in deciphering her speech, but you're not there yet. The force is much weaker than it was the first time, no longer enough to make you question your safety. You realize how rarely used the speech synapses of her brain are, these impulses take more effort from her, they're more foreign. A social animal with poorly refined social capabilities, fantastic. That will make spreading to new hosts a good deal harder. You realize that you may need to do her thinking for her in time.

"It's not up to me to judge if what they do is wrong, just do your job and get on your way Samus."

There! That one was clear. It wasn't coming from her, it was from a figure speaking on the screen in front of her. It was easier to grasp what she was experiencing than her own speech. There was another human on the electronic display in front of her, the human reached out and switched it off with a huff. Her thoughts are frustrated with what he had to say, they're cloudy with withheld anger and disgust. One of the words he said had evoked different emotions. Samus, an identifier, had triggered a recognition response in her name. It was a word that meant her. Humans could have an identity, unlike the animals you're used to. Your kind does not need these things, a name that means a specific lifeform is bizarre to you. You repeat her name to yourself. Samus. Samus.

Suddenly Samus stops in place, you feel her go on high alert for a moment and her head swivels around. Her muscles tense in unison, fight or flight with nowhere to fly to.

"Who said that?"

The words are sharp but thoughtless enough that you can grasp them. She heard you! You have a moment of panic, but you settle in again and fire neurons where you need to. It was her imagination, she's on edge. She slowly relaxes her body but doesn't fully lower her guard.

"I'm overthinking things, it's messing with my focus. I need to work off some stress." She thinks to herself. You heave an inward sigh. Another pitfall danced around just barely. Not only did you find a social animal with poor social skills, but you might also have found the highest-strung one in the whole galaxy.

She presses a button on her computer and the terminal slides away and integrates into the wall she sits in front of. She stands, when she presses a button on her former chair it also slides away. The ship seems almost designed from the core-up for the convenience of a sole inhabitant. Judging by the age of some of the trash lying around, she's probably had it to herself for a long... long time now. Hmm, poor social skills and a tendency for long stretches of isolation, you're on a roll with this host. She seems to take care of herself well enough, but she might be a complete lost cause for producing kids to inhabit. With another few button presses, some odd implements come out of the walls. You simply lurk in the back of her mind and watch as she moves about. One of the contraptions begins to run a simulated pathway along a belt. She steps onto the belt and walks in place for a few moments before making the belt speed up and dropping into a light run.

Such a waste! Energy begins evaporating en masse from the body to power this goalless act. You indirectly feel the burn of muscle and sinew and the heavy breaths in and out. You can only sulk indignantly as precious energy melts out of your grasp. It's all you can do to keep her from draining your own energy as she toils. At the very least you take solace in the fact that her alert is dropped while she's doing this. In fact, she doesn't think much at all while she's exerting herself.

The ship beeps, a far milder and more tolerable noise this time thankfully. The belt slows back to a walking pace and she slows to steady her breath. She presses a pair of fingers into one of the nooks of her neck, you simultaneously feel the vein pulse against her fingers and feel the vein within your phantom neck pulse. The computer blinks numbers onto the screen in front of her. They seem to satisfy her a lot.

"Still hitting a four-minute mile, I'm right on the high baseline. Good job, me!"

She adds the final flair somewhat sarcastically, but that doesn't stop her from feeling pride. She steps off of the belt and stretches her limbs out briefly before dropping into a series of bizarre contortionist poses. Despite a number of them having the capability to kill lesser vertebras, she slides between them with ease. She bends her back almost completely down, pressing her face against her knees. She pops back up and bounces on her heels before splitting her legs almost perfectly apart and touching her rear end to the floor. Then she bends forward and presses her nose to the ground.

You... admire her capabilities, but fail to see what purpose any of this has. The muscles in her thighs and rear burn from the stretch and she has to consume tons of energy to keep her core from shaking with exertion. She just as quickly slides out of the pose and stands back up onto her feet. She twists and bends a few more times before she's done. Then she steps towards another device, a bar dangling by a thread. With a few inputs, she grabs the bar and pulls. She's met with extreme resistance and her muscles scream again. This doesn't eat as much energy, but you cringe as you feel the secondhand strain and burn. She takes the time to pull and release the bar in as many different positions as you can imagine, making sure to leave no muscle devoid of screaming exhaustion. She's forced her body to dehydrate, leaking important water in an attempt to cool itself. Despite what you perceive as an intentionally induced biological crisis, she seems to revel in it.

"New personal best for upper body too, you're on fire today."

Samus presses a few buttons to return the exhaustion implements to where they'd come from. She takes a step away from the equipment and her leg immediately takes on the solidity of jelly.

"Okay, I deserved that."

She semi-staggers toward an enclosed compartment of her vessel. When she seals the entryway it turns into a wall-covering mirror. Inside is a waste receptacle, the only emotion attached to that is disgust. She presses one of the buttons above it and it drops into the floor, replaced by a walk-in waist-height basin. She presses another button and lukewarm water begins to come pouring out of the cabin roof above her. She pops a few of the seals on her skintight suit and slides out of it. She lets the water rinse over her for a moment before opening the door of the basin and taking a seat inside. She picks up a small piece of fabric off of the wall and lets it soak in the warm water, then lays it over her eyes.

The basin fills quickly with water as she reclines in it, her eyes covered. She spends a long time simply sitting in the water, only uncovering her eyes to twist a knob and raise its temperature. She seems to like her sitting water near-scalding. You have no reason to disagree since you don't do well in cold environments.

"Would you like something to eat, Samus?"

The slight twinge of automation betrayed the voice of the ship's computer. It was dispassionate, almost cold, but discernably male. Something about its tone reminded Samus of some deeply buried bad memory, but in a way that she liked. She raised her arm out of the tub before she even answered.

"Yes, thank you."

"You are welcome, Samus."

A panel on the wall opened and presented a slick pouch directly into her outstretched hand. You wondered for a moment if every panel in the room had that capability, but judging on what you'd seen this wasn't the first time she's eaten like this.

Samus popped the seal on the pouch without even uncovering her eyes and started drinking her meal from the pouch. She thinks it mostly tastes like nothing, though it had a slight sour tinge, even though it tasted like nothing. Her brain stored the technical name and vitamin-protein mixture information very neatly behind the pet term "workout juice." "Workout juice" was best enjoyed "in the bath."

She lays submerged to her neck in the bath, leaned back against the padded wall with her arms at her sides, slowly sucking the workout juice out of the pouch in her mouth. She lets her mind go completely blank. Though you can't stand how much time Samus wastes in the bath, it seems to relax her. Despite being at her most vulnerable, she's the least on-edge you've seen her. You help yourself to a little of the energy that her meal makes surge through her. The water slowly releases the tension built up in her muscles, soothing the pains she built up with her exertion. You watch the progress with fascination, the muscles use the sugar from her meal to fuse the proteins in her meal with the damaged muscle. In the process, they built back bigger, more powerful. Once tired tissue suddenly feels wired with energy. It makes you admire the capabilities of her body, though it makes you admire the efficiency of the meal just as much.

"Excuse me, Samus, we have a job offer." The computer voice chimes through the silence.

Samus groans, but takes the now almost empty pouch from her mouth and sits up. "Can it wait?"

"Sender: Kollman Capital Mining, a brighter future, from the soil. Priority: High. Subject: Seeking Security for Shipping Lane."

Samus groaned again and sank back down into the tub. "Tell them I don't do security work."

"You already have several messages to this sender with that body, Samus."

"Then tell them to kiss my ass."

"Message sent. Subject: Re: Seeking Security for Shipping Lane. Body: Kiss my ass."

"Thank you, Adam."

"You are welcome, Samus. Would you like me to set a reminder to leave the bath?"

"Just let me die in the tub."

"Okay, I have set a reminder to "Let you die in the tub".

The voice chimed back out and Samus fumbled for a moment to find where her drink had floated off to.

Samus finished her drink a moment later and sighed before hitting a button and draining "the tub." She took the cover off of her eyes and blinked a few times to adjust to the soft red lighting the room had shifted to. She forces herself to stand, some stiffness coming back into her legs as she does. She opens the tub's door and the lights brightened back up. She took a moment to look herself over in the mirror, flexing some of her muscles and striking some odd poses.

"I'm pretty, right?"

"Hey, Adam."

"Yes, Samus?"

"Tell me I'm pretty."

"Okay. You, Samus, are pretty."

"Thanks, Adam."

It didn't seem like the computer's admiration actually did much to validate her, but she pushed those feelings aside. She tried to suck the last few drops of her meal from its pouch as she picked up her discarded suit and then waved to open the door. The full-body reflection of her shimmered out of view. She dropped the bodysuit into a chute near the door and a slot above it fed a dry fluffy piece of fabric out. She took the fabric and ran it over her body to wick away the moisture left from her soak, then wrapped her long hair into it instead of feeding it into the chute. Despite being just as alone, she feels somehow more exposed being undressed out here. She walks over toward where her bed had been before it folded up, then took one last futile drag from the long-dry pouch before dropping it into a new chute. With the press of a button, a wave of chilled air hits her briefly as she grabs a pouch of water from the compartment that opened. Then she hit another button to open a different panel, inside was roughly a dozen body suits identical to the one she'd disposed of. She grabbed one and slipped into it, a replacement dropping into its slot automatically.

When she was dressed she brought her computer back up and slid back into her seat. She took slow sips of her water while she browsed meaninglessly through her old messages. Most of the ones worth keeping were long past relevancy. She scrolled through them almost more out of tradition than anything else. She switched from her inbox to her financial information, checking her savings and reloading the page as if she could will it to increase. She switched from that to an online storefront, she browsed to a page she had saved for her terminal. It was a kalanchoe seedling that promised to be shipped with scaling pots and artificial light. You're taken aback and have to take a moment to see if wonder if human stomachs can even process glycosides. She looks from the page over to one of the more barren corners of her room. You're struck by her mental image of the plant sitting there, blooming a vibrant orange and seeming to light up the room. Not sustenance, decoration. Keeping a living thing as decoration is a highly pronounced statement of biological authority. To own the plant, to hold the power to destroy it at her whim. It's something you can't relate to. The universe, as far as you are concerned, exists in a hierarchy of usefulness and power. The lower beings have the usefulness, you have the power.

She looks back at the terminal and sighs, the number the plant wants is higher than the one she has.

There's a noise from the terminal, she taps a button and a new image comes up. It's a face, unmistakably human-shaped but distinctly not human. The skin is a mixture of vibrant pinks and purples, she seems to shimmer constantly and the camera pointed at her face struggles to broadcast her picture as the edges of the image fuzz. The species is foreign, even to the species you learned about them from. The shared knowledge of the X sees only a blank spot where no information exists. You check Samus's mind to see if this species has a name. If it does, it seems Samus is as unaware of it too.

"Hey, Sammy. You take that Omikron job?" Its voice is cheerful, pitched high. To Samus, it sounds feminine. A particular feminine in Samus's language that she recognizes as serving to allure men.

Samus leans back, she's outwardly at ease but you sense her and this other figure might not be as good of friends as Samus is forcing herself to act like they are. "Yeah I did, why?"

"Nothing, I was just in the area and wondering if it was still open." A conversation of fake smiles and implied but unspoken slights.

"Grabbed it yesterday, they're late on the charge." At least from the stranger, Samus is suspicious of them but doesn't pick up on the intent. Naive, but useful.

"That's why I told you to leave Omikronian work to me, they always pay me on time because they trust me."

"Is that why they pay you on time?"

The figure scoffed performatively "As if you'd even know what you're implying you prude. Speaking of, how's the VI treating you?"

"I guess you were right, it's kind of nice having something to talk to that doesn't judge."

"Do you think it's helping?"

Samus sighed. "Maybe? I don't know? I still don't want to talk to people."

"Keep working at it, one day you might even be able to handle a partner."

"You know I work better alone."

"And you know that's not what I mean. Anyway, I gotta run. Stop taking my Omikron jobs already."

The figure blinked away before Samus could respond. Samus quietly cursed to herself for a multitude of reasons.

"Hey, Adam?"

"Yes, Samus?"

"Can you set up an email notification for when Omikron requests work? Top Priority."

"Okay, I have set a top priority auto-reminder for work from Omikron."

Samus spent the next few hours switching between watching combat footage taken from her visor and training videos. Eventually, before closing the computer to sleep, she checked her account again. The amount of money had increased. She ordered the plant.