How to Train Your Alien

She had been watching, watching for a while.

Ever since she woke up in this world after her intergalactic nap, she was not the same.  She only remembered bits and pieces of her previous life.  Most of her mind seemed to have been scrambled by the sheer amount of time it took her to travel through intergalactic space.  Almost her entire memories and personality were derived from the beings she had assimilated.  However, she did remember a few basic things.  She came from a race of galactic apex predators that had sent her to a new galaxy as an insurance policy to satisfy their ingrained instinct to perpetuate themselves.  However, none of this really meant much to her.  She didn’t even know what a galaxy was.

It was horrible, at first she operated using pure instinct.  Assimilating whatever organisms she could find.  During that time, it would be more accurate to refer to herself as an it as she barely possessed any sentience.  She was a feral monster.  However, ever since she assimilated that furry quadruped, she gained the ability to think and reason.  Unfortunately, and unbeknownst to her, she had crushed her victim’s skull and damaged most of the brain before it was consumed, so many of the pony’s neural abilities had not been properly absorbed.  So while the Thing had inherited the pony’s personality, sapience, and capacity for emotions, many other things like her knowledge of language were missing.  Things she didn’t even know existed.

The freedom to think for oneself instead of relying on base instinct was revolutionary, and Thing took full advantage of her new ability.  Thing prowled mostly at night, slowly learning about herself and her abilities.  She quickly realized that she was nothing like any of the other organisms that she saw.  She was much more flexible and adaptable.  Her body could transform and shapeshift in a way that was alien from anything else she saw.  It made sense, she reasoned.  She was from a different world after all, perhaps different worlds had very different life forms.

She traveled around the forest canopy in the form of an amorphous almost snakelike tentacle.  The amorphous and adaptable muscle and the smooth, rubbery skin she wore were alien organic structures and blueprints that had survived, stored inside her mind that she could shape her body into.  She chose this shape because she could silently travel in the treetops and study her environment.  Her skin took on a camouflage color, similar to the bark and leaves.  She would curl herself around the tree trunks and branches and amorphously stretch her tentacle to the next tree.

Before she had assimilated that pony, she would randomly assimilate animals, gaining their abilities and storing their biological information inside of herself.  Many of these sensory organs peppered the outside of her tentacular body.  She had many powerful sensory organs at her disposal allowing her to quickly sense animals in the darkness and assimilate them as they slept.  Assimilation was a strange and pleasurable experience, she would gain so much information from doing it.  Her body would fuse to an animal and absorb the flesh of the animal, quickly dissolving and converting the animal’s biomass into more of herself.  However, now that she had intelligence and emotions, it seemed almost wrong to do.  Where did they go once she assimilated them?  She knew first-tentacle from the memories of the organism she assimilated that they could think and feel.  They were able to feel emotion but they were not able to think and reason like she could.  They all felt fear in their last moments.  She felt pity.

Well, it wasn’t like this hadn’t happened before.  The forest was a somewhat merciless place.  Animals would constantly hunt and eat each other.  However, there were some animals that could derive enough energy simply by eating the plants and fruits that grew around.  However, they spent their whole existence gathering energy.  The hunters could eat one of these gatherers and be done for the day.  Meat was much more dense in energy.  To be fair, for them it was much harder to catch these quick herbivores.  With her abilities, however, she could effortlessly sustain herself by hunting.

She kept exploring.  She had much to learn.

----

An eyeball hovered in mid-air.  It was supported by a curling tendril.  In front of it was a fat tentacle.  The eyeball watched, aligning itself with the tentacle.  In the distance was a sparrow, chirping its complex song.  The eye aimed.  Suddenly, the tentacle flexed and a gooey ejaculation squirted from its tip.  The goo projectile was a specialized substance, it splattered against the bird and quickly adhered to its wings, flowing around and seeping through the feathers.  The bird could not open its wings and froze in fright as the goo went to work and injected part of itself into the bird’s blood stream.  Soon the bird’s biomass had been added to her hivemind.  Ah yes, she now controlled the bird’s body.  The bird fluttered over back to her and she quickly consumed the animal.

It had been a week.  Thing had learned a lot while inside the forest about nature and her own abilities.  It turned out that she could exist in more than one place at the same time.  Her neural structure was not like the centralized brains of the animals in the forest.  Her mind was more like a hivemind, wireless and able to split and reform at will.  She knew instinctively that she should be able to expand this hivemind as she split her body apart so she could effectively control her multiple bodies but she couldn’t figure it out.  For now she would have to settle with controlling two or three bodies at a time.

Her body was now huge.  She kept her hunting to a minimum due to her moral issues but whenever she found a new species, she could not help herself.  This lead to her biomass quickly ballooning and she now resembled a huge anaconda.  If she moved too much, high in the trees she would make a lot of noise  She had to shift strategies so now instead of moving her main body, she would split off a small tentacle of herself to explore and hunt.  She could control both of her bodies with little trouble, especially if the main one wasn’t doing anything.  She also learned to grow fur on her main body while it was resting to conserve heat during the night.  She used the fur she found on that pony that she had gained her sapience from.  It made her feel much warmer.

However, she was starting to get bored.  Also, there was a mysterious glow on the horizon that seemed to show up after the sun had set.  At first she thought it was the sun, but after a closer examination by raising an eyeball high above the treetops it seemed that the glow originated from the ground and reflected off of the clouds and the ambient air on the horizon.  She wondered what in the world could be making that glow.  Her curiosity got the better of her.  She was determined to find out.

----

It was early in the morning and Thing was quietly slithering through the forest.  If she really wanted to find out quickly what that mysterious glow was, she could have simply formed some of her flesh into a bird to quickly fly ahead and scout.  She had taken many forms before, but she liked the suspense and the slow, careful movement.  Besides, there was so much to see in the forest.  She slithered on the ground now.  She was a bit too large to efficiently and quietly move through the trees.  She decided to form herself into an overgrown snake but it was really only a disguise, skin deep.  She didn’t really want to make herself seem too alien if she was spotted by some of the animals.  She had scales that made her look like a snake but underneath was the alien muscle that she so relied upon.  Her head, however was in the form of a normal snake.  Her body was huge, powerful bulging muscles bulged under her skin as she slithered and flexed her body.  Her snake body was about a foot in diameter but her length was about forty feet.  This kind of size was normally unsustainable for a snake but her alien muscle allowed her to still move despite her large size.

From the ground, it was easier to see many of the insects she missed from the trees.  Whenever she saw a new one, her tongue would dart out of her mouth and fuse to her target, dragging it back into her mouth to be swallowed and assimilated.  Normally, the morning chill under the shade of the forest would be too cold for a snake to operate efficiently but Thing did not play by the rules.  Her advanced muscle was able to generate its own heat like a warm blooded animal.

It had been a great day so far.  She had eaten and assimilated countless new species of insects and they all had very interesting biological functions and specialities.  However, she was noticing that the forest was starting to thin.  There were less trees than there had been before and the sun poked through the trees more often than it had.

Suddenly and abruptly, the forest stopped.  Blue sky appeared beyond the trees as she approached the edge.  She had to see more.  All she had ever known in her life were these trees and this forest.  She thought that perhaps the whole planet was covered in them.  As she reached the edge, she curled her body around a tree and muscularly gripped the bark, climbing up the trunk.

She turned her snake head to look.  In front of her were fields of tall grass like stalks.  Corn.  She didn’t know the word but she knew the concept from the few surviving memories of the pony she had assimilated.  It was to be grown and eaten.  There was a whole lot of it.
Beyond the fields there was a structure.  Barn.  This was a structure built to store items and livestock.  Her mind hurt as the activated memory flowed into her hivemind.  The concept was difficult to grasp.  Who could build such a structure?  It was probably a pony like the one she had assimilated.  So far it was the only species she had assimilated that was capable of sapience.  Were there others like her that could think intelligently?  Were they shapeshifters like she was?  She was excited at the possibility.  She could probably learn so much, just from watching them.  Perhaps she could study one of them or communicate.

She mutated her eyes into those of a hawk so she could see more clearly.  In the distance she could see a huge cluster of these structures.  Awe and possibility bloomed into her mind.  Ponyville.  Another concept flowed into her mind.  An activated memory from that pony.  The equivalent of a minegrene formed in her hivemind.  It was too much information.  She was not able to fully understand or grasp the implications of the pony’s memories of the place.  She needed to learn more.  She was excited to learn more.