The second transformation is a learning experience

A single pair of these compound eyes would already be a valuable tool, but you have a pair of pairs. You watch from both bodies at once as the Outlander thuds heavily around the contained room. Their eyes are likely better than those of your current host, but they also seem to be far more specialized. They can track movement, even from something as small as your current host if they can focus on you. However, it's very easy for their eyes to glaze past a still being. It helps that you aren't much larger than a bacterial creature, likely visible to their eyes but just barely.

The Outlander follows a seemingly arbitrary routine, likely a creature of great habit as well. Most creatures, on some fundamental level, are creatures of habit. Even the Ing follow remembered patterns and cluster in sortable groups. Trying to understand the Outlander's patterns from your current perspective is futile. All that you can do is memorize them, know how best to work around them.

As best you can tell, they work on periodic shifts between energy consumption and storage. The flow of amassing sustenance and burning it. You compare the patterns they exhibit against the current host. Simple as they may be, they do this too. The hosts eat, digest, and fuck. Sometimes even in that order. Once the creature has fulfilled the basic needs, they seek to further the species. The biological process shapes the social contract. Again, a process visible even in a perfect species like the ing.

Where does the current host fail then, that the Ing and Outlander succeed? The current creature has no greater urge than greater food and greater procreation. Is it the result of some cruel master species? Some act of **** against the insect host? As fun as it may be to reduce the Outlander's mind to that of the insect hosts, it seems impossible to do so without destroying their ability to understand the true humiliation of the circumstance. If the Outlander were as dumb as the insect... they would be as dumb as the insect. For as obvious as it seems, it allows you to definitively say that the outlander is an intelligent being like the Luminoth.

The Luminoth had succeeded for so long because of how they had learned to manage the energies of the realm of light. Like the Ing, they had the power to weave the inherent strengths from the air. They had the power to weaponize as well as subside off of the very fact they were alive.

Of course, the Ing had done it first. And better.

The Ing did not need technology to harness the energy of the dark world. They were born with that strength. It was what made them the chosen children. Where the Luminoth had woven with ****, the Ing had coaxed and shaped with beauty. That was where the halls came from, that was why the Luminoth remained trapped in fragile ailing bodies while the Ing could shape themselves as they pleased.

You twist and snap the form of the male insect, trying to push him into a different shape. The result is a messy and destructive thing. The host is inflexible, but of cartilage and meat. While you can reshape him by building up on top of what is already there, changing the foundation breaks it.

You realize that all that this experiment has provided you is a broken toy. You fly the twisted little vessel over to your other host and pass the energy back into a singular vessel. The pathetic morph drops from the air as soon as you aren't holding it together anymore. You focus your excess energy into a more supportive reshaping. You build stronger wings, a more energy-efficient core. You likely extend the thing's life cycle sevenfold in the process.

Is it just a question of life span that affects why the insect fails? It certainly plays at least some factor. It's hard to build a temple when you won't live past the third brick. However, the Luminoth live shorter lives than the Ing. All species live shorter lives than the Ing. There were beings in the dark world that worked in colonies to build impressive tunnel systems. The common thread seems to be habitation. The insect has no home. It is born, lives, and lays eggs all outside of a habitat. With a habitat, energy can be stored. With energy stored, the process of acquiring it can change. The social contract then shaped the biological process in return.

The goal then should be to find a new inhabitable species with a habitat. One that can provide consistent energy and experience a controllable life cycle, not these lower creatures.

The Outlander steps into a different room and you lift off of the wall, testing your new wings. Between them and the improvements you made to the insect's internal systems, it's easy now to glide and swoop with far greater speed and precision. You hadn't planned to make a habit of improving your hosts, but now that you think about it, it may be the best way to move forward in the short term. It's no difficult thing to reshape light worlders to your desires. It helps that you feel no real need to be gentle with them.

Your power fantasy is brought back to earth when you remember that your only current backup is in a lightworlder's stomach lining. And while you may have improved your current hosts' lifespan a dozen times over, it is still painfully limited. Find a better host, then you can victory lap.

In the process of looking for something of reasonable size that actually makes a habitat, you find a few other insects like the flying one. It seems that there's something in this environment that allows them to subsist. The rumbling of eggs in your core tells the intact brain to go lay them down in an area lousy with them. For now, you hold on to the clutch of eggs, the energy of the small pre-beings inside of them a good source of backups.

You catch something in one of your dozens of eyes. It's a stretched strand of stringy webbing, much like many of the weavers back in the dark world used to make. While it makes you sad to remember your old home, a web is also an important indicator of habitation.

You land on one of the strands, ready to follow it to the nest of whatever creature wove it. Unfortunately, the second your feet make contact, they lock in place on the surface. You were prepared for this, weavers often used webs to catch lower beings. You thrash, shaking the web, hoping to get attention.

It doesn't take long, within seconds you feel the web shake as the creator comes barreling down the wire. It's a revolting thing, a bundle of clumsy extra limbs, eight simplistic eyes that lack any true utility, only two usable feeler-arms. But it can be improved, fixed even. You feel a few final moments of terror cross the hosts' brain before you silence its mind for a final time. You allow the many-legged host to entwine the flying host, wrapping you fully immobile. When it sinks fangs into the flying thing, at last, you seize a new body.

It takes you far longer than you'd like to acclimate. Too many legs. Of course with the jump in intelligence, it's harder to convince the body that nothing is wrong. You give up and snap the mind in two, taking full control. When you finally feel like you can manage yourself, you decide to leave your mindless but living older body to eat later. For now, you want to see just what kind of habitation you're working with.