Subjugation

You are the Tharn. Your preferred form is basically a ball of slime given sentience by each cell of your body communicating with the others like some kind of amorphous brain. Though you can technically assume any form you have a difficult time forming load-bearing structures like legs or rigid tissues like bones. Your body was basically a glob of muscle/brain cells and the thin, tough barrier that formed your skin was about as exotic as it got. Your "skin" is a snot-green, slimy membrane that you need to keep hydrated at all times. It's usually not a problem so long as you're someplace humid and get a liter or two every couple days. Despite your blob-like appearance, your skin (and by proxy, your tentacles) was quite tough and any protrusions you send out are rubbery and strong. You don't really have any "vital" organs, thanks to the malleability of each of your cells your anatomy changes as needed and you are very hard to "kill" in the conventional sense. You can survive if even a hundred or so of your cells locates a proper breeding ground. You won't be all that intelligent until you get back up to the size of a basketball, but still. Other races were usually impressed. You try to maintain a mass of about 300 earth pounds, that's the golden weight that's very resilient to most outside influences but still small enough that you don't drift off into deep contemplation of the meta-verse. That was a pain in the ass.

You evolved on a "Super-Earth" where gravity was equivalent to eight G's and the atmosphere was a crushing soup that let zero light through. Since there was no real limit to how big you could get, so long as the proper minerals were around, you eventually grew to engulf the entire surface of your planet. That had been an amazing day, almost as cool as the one where you figured out the world was round, but then there was nothing left to do. You were slime, literally, you couldn't build a spaceship and you could hardly escape eight G's of attraction. Millions of years of nothing to do but contemplate black fog in excruciating detail. You remember being ecstatic when a mountain ridge started pushing up near the south pole.

But then, the Angali came and everything changed. They had been attracted to the strange EM pulses (your "brainwaves") on the surface and sent an exploration ship down. You almost fried their robots with brainwaves when you realized that this wasn't some mere meteor. They probed around on you for a while before taking a sample and flying off. That had been the hardest choice you'd ever made. You wanted to stop them sooo badly, just to have something to break up the monotony, but you knew that if they feared you they wouldn't come back. You put faith in that sample, those few pounds of slime, to one day return to you with news from the outside.

And OH did it return with news. The sample had played nice for several earth years, amidst poking and prodding, before finally finding a crack in its cage and oozing free. It was close. It had to sacrifice a considerable amount of mass to various containment systems before it found the best hiding spot: inside one of the Angali. It took time to adapt to their nervous system but when it did...

In Earth terms: The Angali were lizard people, depending on what they were bred for they varied in size from four to nine feet tall. Their coloring also varied depending on rank which they took very seriously. They had eight muscular arms that they used to scramble about in low gravity environments, and they had a set of strong pentagonal jaws. They were also asexual which, you would find out later, made them somewhat dull from an entertainment perspective.

Once the sample understood the Angali nervous system it was able to learn an incredible amount in a very short time, even how to subjugate the mind of the Angali host to a limited degree. Of all the races you had encountered since then the Angali remained the most difficult to control. They were just so intelligent and they had so little emotion or passion that could be hijacked to get them to cooperate. So getting them to send a manned mission to the surface was a royal pain in the ass. But they did it after the sample convinced them that they needed more data.

When the sample returned and re-assimilated, you suddenly had access to more new information than there had been since your evolution. History, physics, chemistry, art, culture. It was almost too much. You actually did fry the Angali's tech this time and they had to be rescued, upon which you sent as much of yourself with them as possible. Over the next few hundred years you shipped more and more of yourself off that god-forsaken rock, slowly subsuming the Angali empire from within, putting that infinite thinking power to full use as you absorbed the knowledge of an entire race. Until they found out. Then it became difficult.

You had already assumed full control of roughly half of their worlds and they obliterated several colonies to cleanse your presence. Unfortunately for them you had half their resources, unlimited time and patience, and a growing population of Angali slaves to further your cause. Up until that point you had been using the superluminal tech of the Angali which unfortunately for you could be jammed. So they jammed it. Sent out a kind of hyperspace vibration that totally blocked the "on ramp" so to speak. Which meant that you had to do things the hard way from then on out, dredging your way through space at sub-luminal speeds for thousands of years. But you didn't have anything better to do and you figured that jammer had to come down sooner or later.

As you continued to consume the Angali empire your many probing fingers spread through space, finding new solar systems, new peoples, new cultures. Some you observed, others you subjugated, still others bowed before you and became your willing slaves. That was always nice. It was unpleasant living inside another organism constantly trying to get rid of you. Just recently you happened across a beautiful little planet, third from its star, with a fascinating people who were well on their way to engulfing its surface. You had a moment of deja-vu.