First Contact

You land on the floor with a wet slap, audible to you but minuscule compared to the size of the world around you. You writhe pathetically toward the shadows underneath a piece of furniture in the dark. Getting to it is slow, a room your old body could have handled with two strides becomes an hour of work.

Of course, you don't have that body anymore, and this isn't where this story starts.

Your story could be told starting with your birth in the acid vats on your homeworld, but that is the story of your struggle toward sentience and maturity. It could begin with your first host race, the simple reptilian features foretelling the limitations of the form you would come to understand. In time, you would steal the most beneficial genes and structures and reject the weaknesses. Your new form was one that resembled your host but smoothed away the imperfections. Like all of your race, you now had a form that was truly unique to any other member. Like any other member of your race, you told the genetic story of what was to be kept and what was to be rejected to the multitude. Every drop in the ocean made the whole a little faster, a little stronger, and a lot smarter.

Perhaps your story could begin with the ship, or the collision and the system failure. However, the story of your new life most evenly begins with the crash.

In the captain's chair beside you, your only friend sits dead. You cradle their limp body in your arms. His slender grey form has begun to molt away, the worm at his core has lost any color.

The pilot screeches as their controls crackle and groan in denial of their inputs. The science officer has given up reading out the damages and sits stone-faced in their seat. The recognition of what is happening hangs heavy on those who respond to it with grim resignation. For the rest, the fires that break out with each new console failure are met with panic and screaming. Perhaps the captain was the lucky one, taken instantly and without time to feel fear.

The hull shudders and bends, the protests of something being moved in ways it wasn't designed. Atmosphere hits it like a skull-shattering punch, the ground hits soon after and much harder.

You crawl back out of the painful all-black confusedly. Your created body is broken in many places, you are fortunate to have considered pain response one of the many superfluous features of the original race. You're able to limpingly drag yourself along the floor of what remains of the cockpit. The chamber is blown open cleanly enough that you can view the world you've landed in. You aren't dead, so the atmosphere shouldn't be toxic. You phased out the need to breathe long ago, so barring environmental factors, you should be able to inhabit just about any planet. You'll need a lot of time to repair your body, however. You manage to slither out onto rocky sand, pulling yourself up to a crouching stance. You start trying to knit the broken bones in your limbs.

An ugly, hairy thing covering itself in baggy cloth and denim struggles over the hill toward you. It's carrying a long probe-like object with a metal barrel and wooden grip. The end facing away from the native is hollow. The design seems primitive, no matter what kind of medical service it might provide, it seems suboptimal. The native freezes when it sees you.

"Hello." You croak.

The native unloads both barrels into your body, not medicinal.

You fall back onto the warm sand, blood pouring out of your constructed body. It is dying very quickly, but the scattershot projectiles the native launched at you did minimal damage to your actual core. You abandon the dying shell, reverting to the minuscule worm that you haven't been since you were first born. You sit perfectly still as the native plods up to you slowly. When he prods you with his -dealing tool you slither out from underneath your old body imperceptibly. You hadn't realized in your old form just how large this world and its native species were. You're smaller even than the dead leaves that lay around your crashed vessel.

You manage to slither into the primitive's clothing as he pokes through your old ship and the bodies of your dead friends. You would be saddened or offended, but you remain far more focused on your new ride. You search for a set of genitals and groan internally as you find external ones. Not only is this species gendered, but your killer is also a male. You can't do much with a male, but you can at least point them toward the real goal. You grimace as you find an entrance and slither through it, setting yourself up inside the reproductive organs of your host. You plug yourself into the nervous system of your host, seeing through its eyes for a moment.

"What in the goddamn-?"

It has a body that works with strings of electrical currents, so crossing the right wires to tell it what it should be doing is trivially easy. You send the reproductive functions into overdrive and cause a weak pain sensation. Even low organisms can understand a sense of painful "fullness" and how to relieve it.

"Aw fuck, now?" The primate grunts.

You repeat yourself but more forcefully. Yes, now.

The primate tries to shift the bulge in his clothing. "I guess it'll still be here when I come back..."

He arrives back at what he sees as his home soon later. It's little more than a shack made of wood and metal, not even environmentally sealed. A female of his species is waiting outside, one he recognizes as a partner.

"I heard gunshots Bill, what the hell was it?" The partner asks.

"Are the kids in bed Maeve?" Your host asks sheepishly.

"Of course they are." She responds. Before she can continue your host wraps her in his arms and grapples clumsily with the plump handfuls of tissue around her waste orifice. "Good lord Bill, what's gotten into you?"

Your host growls in response, not a natural noise but more of a bizarre courtship gesture.

"Oh God Bill, let's go to the truck then. I don't want the kids to hear." The partner says with a giggle.

The pair barely manage to get the doors closed before your host is all over his partner with a ferocity she's likely never experienced. She seems to quake in pleasure several times before you let your host release you into her. You swim quickly through her insides, entering through a narrow passageway into a chamber with waiting eggs.

You wait for the meeting of primate sperm and egg, you enhance the new host's capabilities so that it can happen several times at once. Each time you wait for them to finish binding before you swallow them up, eating genetic patterns. Before long, you can composite what one of their forms would probably look like. You feel your host moving, likely back into their "home" to rest. The process is exhausting for many species, none of this is news to you.

When your host's body enters rest and begins to replenish what you've consumed, you start to make your exit. You realize very quickly how much larger you've gotten since entering the egg chamber. The narrow passageway you came through before now becomes a constricting and painful chore to dilate wide enough for you to exit. By the time you manage to squirm and writhe your way out, the female host seems to have become quite aroused by the process. You're able to wriggle out with far more ease and you land slickly on the bedsheets between her legs. As you writhe toward the edge of the bed, the female host stirs in her sleep and climbs on top of the male.

"Again Maeve?" You hear the male mutter groggily.

"Shut up Bill."

You land on the floor with a wet slap, audible to you but minuscule compared to the size of the world around you. You writhe pathetically toward the shadows underneath a piece of furniture in the dark. Getting to it is slow, a room your old body could have handled with two strides becomes an hour of work.

When you arrive at a place in the shadows where you feel confident you can go unseen for a long time, you begin to slowly form a cocoon. You aren't powerful enough or familiar enough with the primitive's forms to create a convincing amalgam yet. For now, you'll need to find a compromise. Either a form that can get more power or one that can get power more efficiently.