The first metamorphosis is a necessity and an accident

There are a number of things that you become aware of extremely quickly. Firstly, the amount of strength that you lost in combat exceeds what you might have expected. The scale of your new environment only seems to balloon out the more you try to move around in it. Secondly, you come to understand how truly unprepared you were for moving around in the world of light. You were never prepared for it, there was never supposed to be a need. As a new Ing emperor, your life was meant to be one of sitting within the great halls and weaving the infinite energies of the cosmos. You add the resentment of being **** to experience this loathsome dimension to the list of injustices you'll need to avenge. Finally, this current state of existence is unsustainable. Small movements are an agony, growth is a pipe dream. Existence eats away at you, your **** is starting to loom.

There's an intolerable buzzing that comes to you. A carrion insect looms gargantuan over you. Compound eyes of ultraviolet decoration sit immobile in its skull, it looks at you with nothing more than the animal interest of something perceiving food. It rubs hairy antenna against your body before grabbing a chunk of you in tense forelegs and pulling you up to the hanging sucker of a mouth that gapes dangling from its head. You only have a moment to lament your **** as the insect swallows you before you become immersed in the impenetrable black of lightless organs.

But you do not die, far from it.

The dark energy that makes up most of your being immediately starts to course through the host's body, overriding the being on an atomic level. The insect's brain has a single panicked second to perceive that it is under attack before you snap the simple organism's mind like a twig. There's no need to, the second you entered its bloodstream it was helpless to stop you. Maybe it's out of some sort of mercy that you choose to not let the being sit as a prisoner in its own head. The light of its life blinks out, your control seeps through the newly vacated body. The insect's exoskeleton peels away. It's not a possession, not really. It's better described as slowly filling out the hollow spaces between the meat and the bone with dark energy, then seeping into the meat and the bone and replacing those. When you've finished, you don't so much possess the target as you do wear it like a new skin.

You've grown, taking this new host has doubled you in size at the very least. But there's a far more important aspect of taking this form. The light no longer hurts you, not only can you move about freely in the light now, this one can fly. You lift the heavy body off of the ground with underpowered wings, taking a lazy weaving pattern off of the floor and setting yourself onto a wall, your legs able to grip microscopic cracks and keep you suspended without expending much effort.

A new form has exceptional new possibilities but it also has unique new limitations. Your wings and unique limbs open a world of movement and stability, but your new being's form is unstable by nature. The lifespan is low, so low you can feel the new body dying quickly. Your intervention might have extended its life if anything, but only by so much. The good news is that you've grown to match it in size. It seems that to take a new form you'll need a great amount of power, but doing so will bring you up to par with the new host.

You fly over to your target to test your theory, landing on her sleeping face without opposition. You attempt to pass from the insect to her, but get met with a strong rebuke. You catch sight of another flying insect and approach it, passing into this one and discarding the shell of the old. You leave this one's mind intact. Its thoughts are little more than the basic screams of food, danger, and rest. You occasionally hit it with a rush of dopamine to quiet the danger senses. You fly the new host to a computer terminal, but get rebuked.

Strengths and limitations.

You catch sight of the outlander stirring in bed with your compound vision. You can't be sure about the food chain relationship of it against your new host, so you can't take chances. You fly to a corner of the room, where you can sit unnoticed and view the most ground with your new eyes.

The target rises out of bed slowly, with a kind of patience that your current host wouldn't be able to justify. Length of life might be one of the greatest biological privileges. It staggers over toward one of the walls, a lazy bumbling pattern that matches your own fat-bodied flight. On the wall, it finds some console that shimmers with energy you initially dismissed. The wall responds by changing in shape. It reminds you of the dark world, where great ing weaved bio-mechanisms that could perform inconceivably elaborate tasks. These light worlders are blind to the energies of nature, instead, they create cold and artificial machines in the place of the biotechnologies. Elaborate but unknowing, things that can't be reasoned with, things that can be made to perform against their design.

The outlander receives a steaming brown liquid from the mineral machine. Your host has no deeply buried concept of what it is, but on a primal level, it sends the signal that it is food. You feel a deep animal compulsion to go taste it. When the outlander sets it down on a table and shifts focus to the main computer sitting next to it, you allow yourself to go indulge the animal urge.

You buzz softly down to where the outlander sits, moving slowly and quietly in deep caution. You seat yourself on the lip of the open-faced liquid container. You lower your freakish new mouth down into it.

The drink is absolutely foul! Bitter beyond comprehension and largely without flavor. You quickly buzz back to your corner, animal urge more than indulged.

It's only when you're back in your corner that you notice the lingering particles of darkness that you've left behind on the lip of the vessel and floating in the drink. You watch as the outlander brings the cup to their lips and swallows some of the liquid, taking your particles along with it. You feel them dying as they make contact with the outlander's organs... but one makes it through and takes a seat in their stomach. It binds quickly to the lining of the new host's stomach, burrowing in and setting deep roots. It's minuscule, just one star in an unfriendly galaxy, but it's something.

You feel an extremely faint link begin to form between you and the outlander, paving the way to make a future occupation easier. As it is now, it's just one drop in the dried bed of an ocean. You need more, to find new and greater ways to infiltrate them. It's also no substitute for your body, being reduced to a single cell in the pit of something's stomach would be a fate worse than ****.

For now, you have problems that need solving, lots of them. But you have something now that you didn't have when you first arrived on the ship. You have potential solutions.

The first and biggest issue, ****. Something unfortunately that will need you to solve your other problems before you can pursue it. Your second problem, survival. The insect host offers potential, but can't live longer than a few days at most. You need to find a new host or hosts, you need to occupy as much and as quickly as possible. You need backups, lots of backups. At worst you could try occupying some of the smaller circuits of the computer. It will give you small but meaningful means of impact at the cost of less flexibility. You don't want one of those to be your last viable host, but if it's one of many it's a veritable dark energy factory. Lastly, or rather firstly in terms of the order they need solving, energy. To even occupy the simplest of circuits right now is a fantasy. You need a stable source of energy that you can use to reach that capability. Circuitry promises stable and reliable energy, you aren't there yet. For now, nothing is guaranteed. Getting the energy enables survival which enables ****.

So if it's a question of energy, that's a question with no immediate answer. Even occupying more than one insect at a time is outside of your range of power.

You suddenly feel a new animal urge hit the host, you decide to indulge it. The term "female" is one completely foreign to you, but there's no way to learn like experience. Your host slams into another of its species as they each fly through the air. The impact sends both tumbling down onto the floor where they land in an intertwined heap. They buzz against each other, sharing vibrations in mutual recognition.

The process is quick, sloppy, and though you have no metric of reproductive practices to measure against it seems distinctly inefficient. Your male host clambers and fidgets his way onto the willing female subordinate, twining limbs and using his body to suppress her wings as a sign of dominance. His partner, however, seems perfectly willing to be on the receiving end of his affections. He reaches out his feeling antennae and performs gentle strokes against her head. When she vibrates back acceptingly, he moves his body off of hers, leaving her free to mount him.

...You weren't sure how lower mammals procreated before this, but you were pretty sure it wasn't this. The female mounts the male quickly, a long tube-like female ovipositor prodding against a **** male entrance. Once inside it begins the double duty of penetration and suction, draining the male of his seed. By the time he is running out, he receives a pleasure signal from his brain. Ultimately, it is too minute to register for you, but to him it's feeler-curling.

The insect's climax is short and limited by the small capabilities of its brain, but the wave of energy that hits it in the process is unmistakable. With your brief moment of high power, you go surging into the female through the link in anatomy. It takes you a moment to adjust to occupying two hosts at the same time, but it presents no leap in difficulty. When the insects uncouple they fly in different directions, you lead both to occupy different corners, maximizing your vision of the room.

In spite of the extremely intense process you've just experienced, it might as well not have happened to the outlander. You realize they likely have gender as well, being a light world being. Unfortunately, your point of reference at this stage is the sexual characteristics of a fly. By those metrics, the outlander is an unreadable blob.

That aside, you seem to have found an... only slightly nauseating manner of expansion. You still don't have the energy to inhabit a circuit, but with two insects you might be able to pursue a larger host. The less time you spend in these bodies, the happier you'll be.