The second day, she finds some work

Samus lies in her bed, entering the preparatory cycles for sleep. You don't interfere with her dozing and let the rest state take hold. When she completely relaxes into the replenishment state you feel free to feed on a little energy while you take some time to think.

As far as is important for you right now, there are three essential problems that you need to find ways to solve.

1. Your host does not produce enough energy right now for you to expand your power. She is capable of producing more, but you don't know how.

2. Your host is too independent to spread you. You might be able to influence her behavior, but you would need more power.

3. Your host is too volatile for your living situation to be viable. You could fix this if you had more energy or other host bodies.

You recall back to the decades you spent in lower beings. There are two strengths inherent to your kind that this host lacks. Firstly, with a stable living condition, time will always be on your side. For now, at least, she suspects nothing. So long as you don't try to alert her she won't notice small things. The second and more important is that you only need to win once. Once you have enough strength to override her free will, you can do with her as you please for as long as she suits you.

As far as you're concerned, these problems have a logical linear order of solution. Solve the energy issue and you can push her into contact with others, push her into contact and you can attempt to take her mind without the risk of death. Even if she were to overpower you you could swap to your new host or hosts, surely the galaxy isn't full of vessels with this many inefficiencies.

So energy is the first step, but it'll be by far the hardest.

The host's sleeping cycle produces high amounts of energy but uses almost all of it. Their body and brain absorb different energies at different rates. While the brain produces energy constantly, and the most during sleep, the brain absorbs almost the entirety of what it makes. Even in the energy-flushed period of the host's sleep, you can only siphon the barest minimum. The body produces highly fluctual energy but at predictable times. Unused parts of the body produce almost no energy and strained parts absorb more than they produce. But during reconstruction, they're flushed with excess. If you could cause the brain to enter a sort of reconstruction phase like the muscles, it would surely cause the brain to flood with excess energy. The problem is that doing so would have to involve damaging the brain. Bad practice to harm a host's brain, a hard lesson learned from lower animals. Even with creatures at the intelligence level of insects, any damage to the brain is far more likely to result in incapacitation and death. Too risky, especially in your current state. The ideal would be to induce that state without harm if it's possible.

Think, this body is nothing but limitations and cheated solutions, there's a way to achieve your goals. You're smarter, you have more time. You will overcome these challenges, you will rebuild the grid. Think!

Samus stirs in her sleep, it's so common an occurrence that you don't pay it any mind. While the brain bathes in energy the body is often affected. You suppose the same is true in reverse, remembering how the exertion of exercise had drawn power away from her thoughts and how the soothing of the bath had relaxed her enough to lower her guard. They were two separate entities, but they were so interconnected as to...

If you had hands, you would smack yourself. The answer had been given directly to you and you were too focused elsewhere. There must be some bodily function that releases masses of energy in the brain, one that sends it into a replenishment state. It's just a question of finding it, turning the knobs just right to heat the water correctly. It will mainly be a question of what the action and payoff are. Most lower beings react better to the carrot than the stick, but you're new to beings this complex.

Samus stirs again and enters a dreaming period, this might be a good opportunity to experiment. The risks are low if you don't go too far, but you're not sure how reliable the results you get will be.

Samus is dreaming of a harsh set of metal corridors, the lighting low and cold. Samus is crouched into cover, nervously peering around a corner. The purple humanoid from earlier stalks around with heavy footfalls, her face twisted in anger. Samus feels that she is being hunted. In her sleep, she shifts nervously and a sense of discomfort comes over her.

This will not do! As interesting as it is to know what the host fears, these dreams reinforce these antisocial behaviors. You try a gentle suggestion.

"You're not hunted, you're safe."

The dream shifts, the lighting gets warmer and the unforgiving metal warps into warm sunlit stone. The purple humanoid starts to shift into something different, something that makes you nervous for reasons you can't explain. You immediately try to course correct.

"She's not an enemy, you two are close companions."

This idea seems far harder for Samus to accept. The figure tries to adopt hundreds of different faces instead of the one you want it to. After some truly excessive pushing, you manage to make it hold the form of the purple humanoid. The name Gandrayda seems to cling to it, but the connotations of the name are even harder to shift positively. Baby steps.

"Hey, Sammy!" She beckons to Samus, she's at an old building deeply familiar and nostalgic to Samus. Samus recognizes it as a place of dangerous trials, but one she's grown up playing in so long that the trials are little more than muscle memory, the danger reduced to scrapes and bruises for the careless instead of the death its machines could easily bring. It's where she honed her human athleticism and instincts, it's the closest thing the child Samus knows to a toy. Samus follows her inside without thought, they duck through whirling blades and climb around traps that would strike fear deep into the hearts of adults, laughing and playfully chiding each other the whole time. Were the reality of the thing not draped through Samus's memories, you'd believe it to be an invention of the dream. She's hurt herself here before, she has scars to prove it. The thought of her dancing through courses like these with you inside makes you shudder. The dream provokes confusing feelings in Samus, deeply conflicted and sad ones. She misses this more than she usually misses her youth with the Chozo. Why is this one more raw?

"You miss being close to people." You tell her.

She accepts this without question, she knows she's lonely and that's not news.

"You miss when you and Gandrayda were close like this, you want to spend more time with her." You suggest.

Samus's mind rejects this one wholesale. These were deeply lonely days, a sole human child among a race that couldn't possibly understand her. Learning to accept food she hated, accepting treatment that was both too rough and too gentle. They couldn't respond properly to anything she wanted, even if she'd had the words to express those wants. She was surrounded by otherworldly beings and she was the alien among them.

Bad, bad, bad. If dreams could sulk that's where this one was going. Her energy flow is slowing.

"It's okay now, now you can be around anybody you want. Like Gandrayda." You grasp for ways to change the trajectory desperately.

The children in their dangerous playground shift perspective from the current to something gazed reflectively through a lens. Gandrayda's laughs lose their childlike innocence, becoming predatory and mocking.

Samus is dreaming of a harsh set of metal corridors, the lighting low and cold. Samus is crouched into cover, nervously peering around a corner. The purple humanoid from earlier stalks around with heavy footfalls, her face twisted in anger. Samus feels that she is being hunted. In her sleep, she shifts nervously and a sense of discomfort comes over her.

You scream in protest, right back where you fucking started. The purple humanoid stalks closer now, it's an inevitability that she finds you. The lighting darkens to a deep red, there's a predatory scream that chills you to your core and seems to come from everywhere at once. The predator is on top of you now, it's face a shifting mass of everything her brain has been trained to fear.

Samus is shocked awake by a body-covering muscle spasm. She throws herself out of bed onto the cold floor, tangled in blankets. The lights of the ship slowly rise to full brightness. For several long panicked moments, she doesn't know where or when she is. She gasping for breath but she can't catch it.

"Good morning, Samus, you have woken up: 30 Minutes, before your alarm was set. Would you like me to cancel it?"

The voice is soothing, centering. She takes a slow deep breath and lets her heart slow back to normal. She releases it, feeling the cycle of air flow through her body again. Her legs are twisted and stuck in her bedding, one of her arms is pinned under herself and full of a painful pins-and-needles numbness. She untangles herself from the mess of fabric and manages to pull herself seated on her bed with her un-limp arm. The blood comes flowing back into the other one slowly.

"Thank you, Adam."

The computer beeps in response. Samus sits on her bed staring unfocused at the wall for some time. Her body is shaking, she feels bone-cold now free of her blankets, yet she's coated in a deeply uncomfortable sweat. Her mind turns over the contents of the dream over and over, to your dismay focusing far more on the bad parts than the good. You find yourself shuddering, the brain's panic reaction is uncomfortable to experience, even from your position. Bad dreams wake Samus up before her alarm and are less painful, but you'd really rather not experience that again.

She'd likely sit there for far longer if it weren't for the soft beep of an incoming message on the computer.

"Excuse me, Samus, we have a job offer."

"What's the urgency?"

"Sender: Omikron Nomadic People's Security. Priority: Marked by Recipient as Top. Subject: Pirate Atta-"

"Thank you, Adam. We'll take it."

"Okay, Samus, I will notify the sender of your arrival. ETA: 30 minutes."

Samus begrudgingly pulls herself out of bed and performs a greatly abbreviated version of the previous day's workout, focusing mostly on stretched and light jogging. When she's done she heads to the room with the bath, but this time she merely stands under the cascading water. She presses some buttons on the wall and the water thickens with a scouring antibacterial gel. It smells like citrus, but more the concept of citrus than citrus itself. When she's slick with the gel she runs a brittle sponge over most of her skin. Even though the sensation is unpleasant, she finds it gratifying. It makes her feel cleaner. She takes a moment to do a few final cursory stretches under the warm water before it shuts off. Once again she discards her used clothing, dries off, and slides into new clothing. Her skin is fresher, less waterlogged, but it almost tingles with softness against her fabric. You realize that her gel has slightly hardened her skin, making the outer layer tougher but more sensitive. She releases her combat armor from the wall and steps into it. It's claustrophobic, tight, and unmistakably pressurized. She feels more at home in it than she does on the ship. As she runs a few calibrations to make sure all the systems are synced, she bits down on a straw in the headpiece and sucks more nutrient paste out. This isn't the same as before, this one makes her wired, tense as a coiled spring. It's faintly spicy and it makes her pulse rise considerably. Her reaction time during calibrations halves.

When she lands on Omikron she steps out into a closed shuttle bay, the featureless metal walls painted with rocks and tropical plants. The guardsmen are very lightly armed and none of them look military, but they all have a harshness to them. Samus steps out of her ship toward them and their expressions change. They admire her, she's heroic to them. They fear her deeply. You curse yourself for not storing enough energy to divide and pass onto one of them, but you couldn't have known. The drones salute her as she walks by, in her mind she recognizes the insignia of a private military. Paid mercs, like her, but not ones good enough to not get stuck watching a shipping gate. Behind them are a small crowd of civilians, their expressions are softer. There's an interesting distribution of expressions among them. Some look on her with fear, most of the children look at her with fawning admiration. Some of the adults also share that admiration, but some look on with pure spiteful envy. Some of the adult men look on almost hungrily, Samus understands all of the looks but those. All of them make her equally uncomfortable, but she hides it well. Samus offers a curt wave at the crowd and some of them cheer for her.

The inside of her employer's office is quiet and tense in contrast. The man at the desk is put-upon and harrowed, aged beyond his years. When Samus enters relief washes over him but he doesn't let his professional mask slip.

"Thank God you're here, we'd usually have Ganny handle this but this time is special." The speaker was the town mayor, likely appointed out of nepotism, that's just how these corporate colonies were.

"What's the issue?"

"There's a smuggler's den about three clicks south of town. They came in and terrorized the whole town with one of their 'recruitment drives.' Every time they don't get enough recruits they trash the place, but this time they got enough and they trashed the place anyway for kicks. We usually get Ganny for this and she keeps em out of our hair for a few months but this is bolder than we're used to."

"So you want me to kill them?"

"What? No! They're good law-abiding folk for the most part and they're our best source of trade, we just need you to talk some sense into them. Maybe scare them out of trying this shit again. It'd help if you could find out what's made them so bold lately."

"That's not my area."

"Look, half the galaxy worships the ground you walk on and the other half is scared shitless of you kicking in their door, you could at least try. We'll pay you twice what you made for the pest control."

They couldn't see it but Samus squirmed inside her suit. This was about as far out of her comfort zone as you could get without asking her to negotiate a peace treaty. But she didn't usually turn down jobs she'd shown up to, and the money on the table was ridiculous.

"I'll see what I can do, no promises."

"I know we're asking a lot of ya, but Ganny ain't exactly the intimidation type." One of the men in the office snickered at the remark and caught a glare from the Mayor.

It was hard to miss the smuggler's den when it peeked over the horizon from the viewport of the corporate transit they had provided for her. It was a nest of shack complexes built and stacked around a single-story sprawling cantina that looked like it had been chiseled into bedrock by a constant flow of grease and dirt. The only visible entryway was a door that looked like it had amateurishly bolted into place over the last door that had been bolted into place. When the personnel carrier slowed to a halt outside and the door popped open, Samus was thankful she couldn't smell through her helmet, but she felt like she could.

"Ey boys! Ganny's back!" Somebody outside shouts to anybody listening.

Samus slams a heavy boot out onto the grimy earth surrounding the establishment. She pulls herself out of the cramped carrier to see who had spoken. The only potential speaker is a shabbily-dressed man wearing the remains of an Omikron jumpsuit. His look of bemused boredom is washed away and replaced by a look that suggests his birth was an act he deeply regretted.

"You're... not..." He chokes out.

A moment later he is flying through the cantina door. Samus steps into a hail of blaster fire that pings uselessly off of her armor. As the recognition of who she is passed through the room, the firing stopped abruptly. In its absence, one can hear the faint pulse of music upstairs.

Almost every man in the bar wears the same tattered Omikronian jumpsuit, the few that don't are dressed in a patchwork of rags and leathers. The only one that stands out is a non-human dressed in basic space pirate armor. He had stood up and drawn a blaster rifle from beneath his chair when she had entered, now he is trying to disappear behind it. She strides over to him instantly, the one with the unmistakable chittering insectoid head of a Zebesian. The sight fills Samus with rage. She grabs him out from behind his chair and throws him at the bar where he lands in a shower of broken glass. She trains her canon on him as he lies bleeding.

"He in charge?" She barks.

A couple of the men nod. She fires off a single round and leaves.

The ride back to town was silent. Any of the men on this planet that didn't know who she was before, knew who she was now. She returned to town and let the mayor know that a space pirate had set up shop among the local traders but that he was taken care of. The Mayor grimaced at her choice of words but understood. The money was in her account before she was off-world.

"Hello, Samus, your account balance has been updated, did your job go well?"

Samus took off her helmet and took a moment to breathe the air of the ship. Her body is shaking for the second time today. She feels spread thin, exhausted not physically but mentally. She wants to lie down and fall asleep where she is, but the suit is designed to nerve stim her if she tries.

"You did not respond, Samus, are you okay?"

"I'm fine, just tired."

"Would you like me to start relaxation protocol, Samus?"

"No, thank you. I just want some quiet."

The computer voice disappears silently. Samus sheds her armor out of necessity and lies in her bed. Her mind is racing, she feels like she's going to be sick. The ceiling seems to spin down towards her and then back up and away. Finally, she manages to close her eyes and rest.