Rajin floated through the sky, propelling itself along with bursts of formless energy, each burst resolving in type as it was released; sound, light, heat, others. She absorbed energy which hit her, feeding, growing. Rajin was going to the new Palace Toroid, which she was helping construct. Toroidal in shape, it would provide a good resting place for the king and queen, allowing them to conserve their energy, and grow their bodies by absorbing that which struck it.
A hole opened up in front of her, moving too quickly for her to escape. It surrounded her, and she was somewhere else, stunned. She tried to stabilise herself, pushing in different directions. Something nearby tried to push on her mind, its alien thoughts asserting control over hers. She lashed out with an arm of lightning, but couldn't draw anything back in from this creature. At least the pressure had stopped. There was something happening over there, forces folding into each other. She didn't want to get ensnared in that! She lurched away, jumping a short distance. Something was wrong, there was too much resistance. She moved slowly this time, righting herself. There was resistance, but she detected some areas she couldn't move through. She was becoming more used to this place. She jumped again, but overshot her target. She repeated this a few times as she made her way to that tunnel of low resistance opposite those converging energies.
Once inside the tunnel, she used the repulsing force of the walls to control her movement, allowing her to move in a more controlled manner. She was hungry. Her reserves were being drained rapidly without the continuous replenishment she was used to. She passed some creatures of the type that had been in the room, but judges the effort to absorb their life force would result in a net loss. Arriving at the end of the tunnel, she spied a bright ball of energy she could feed on and jumped towards it. When she broke open its encasing, hundreds of small, sparkling globs poured out, scattering around the room, moving slowly, and in apparently arbitrary directions. She began feeding, slurping up the forces in them. She would miss a few, but eating all of them was unnecessary, much as she would like to. Some would escape. The foreign energy was changing her, but she needed it. Her senses were changing. Those areas of high resistance were coloured, solid. The blobs she was feasting upon weren't just that; they had a shape and colours of their own. Everything was made up of something other than just energy. Something solid. There was direction here; an up and a down. Oddly, movement seemed quite restricted.
She had the sensation of being full, something she had never felt before. She was unable to eat any more. Moving much more sluggishly – she realised she had assimilated the physical stuff of these wormy things. The physical body provided enough resistance to slow her loss of energy to a manageable level. Her movement was dramatically slowed. She tried to jump towards the tunnel opposite the one she had come from. It was difficult, but she succeeded, though she left something of herself behind. A second later it caught up with her. How intriguing.
She looked over her new body. Two appendages for movement hung from her torso, a third trailing out the back, providing her with balance. A feathery snout pointed out in front of her, long arms trailed almost to the ground. Not as versatile as a lightning limb, but useful nonetheless. They would probably prove more useful in this place. That thing that had tried to impose its will on her had a somewhat similar resistance pattern to the body she currently wore. She did not stand as upright as that thing, and it lacked a tail, but the shapes were fairly similar.
Arriving at the stone doors, she paused. Could she jump through this thin later of resistance? There was no resistance on the other side, but she didn't know what this body could do yet. She jumped. As before, a small part remained where she had been standing. Landing on the other side of the door, she shuddered, small chunks of flesh had been left behind, stuck to the stone doors as she passed through them. Her echo caught up to her with a thud. Yes, she could jump through, but it was costly. This body was leaking energy again, at a high rate. She would need to find something to eat.
A few of the small blob creatures were inside the passageway on this side of the door, having crawled under. Seeming to sense what was about to happen, they tried to make themselves scarce. She thought for a moment, her dry, creaking jaws would allow her to take this matter into her body. There were other holes, but this one seemed the most appropriate for that task. She snapped up a couple but she felt full again, so she let the rest escape. Replenished, she realised her body was slowly repairing itself. It was strange how more than one thing was required for a body to function properly in this world. In her home realm of Vinidan Same, it didn't matter what the type of energy was, or how it was joined to the body. Eating was simple; move to an energy source and consume it, or wait for energy to strike you, which it did almost all the time. Jinrae were loci of order in an environment of chaos, but this place had a very limited energy flow.
As her body slowly repaired, she made her way out of the tunnels, feeding occasionally on the blobs to restore what she was losing. She had gone past more than she remembered freeing, they must be common on this world. Rajin paused to watch one. It was feeding on something that followed resistance patterns like hers and the other creatures that had called her her, but which did not move. Over a period of a few minutes, she sensed its energy increase, its bulging rear increasing in size, occasionally expelling waste. After a few more minutes it stopped and a small copy of itself was expelled from the waste-hole. Rajin ate them both, and continued to search for an exit.
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