I woke up in a significantly smaller room, although the scale was still huge. I was lying on some type of padded blanket, and I quickly sat up.


    First order of business, there was a mask on my face, with a clear tube running to a port in the wall. I breathed deeply. I felt normal.


    Damn, I’m stupid sometimes. Less than other people of course, but I never bothered to check if I could breathe the atmosphere on the ship, although I’d argue that I didn’t have time to.


    No wonder I fainted. Unfortunately, gas exchange is something I have difficulties controlling. Ignoring my silent surroundings for now, I curled up and focused on my body.


    Making a humanoid form is like molding extremely complicated clay. Very difficult to learn, but surprisingly easy to modify once learned.


    Fexels, myself included, preferred to keep a couple traits from our real forms in our humanoid forms. Big ears you can swivel about and a prehensile tail are both extremely useful, so we obviously ported them over to the humanoid version.


    Imagine living normally your whole life, and then someone says “okay, time to learn to walk on all fours, and have these noise cancelling headphones glued to your head!” Does that sound like a good time to you? No, of course not. So fexels keep their superior senses in human form to remain superior.


    First order of business: making myself look bigger. I made myself a couple inches taller, stretching the arms and legs and spine, and broadened my shoulders and chest a touch.


    I also made my ears bigger, making them somewhere in-between a regular fox and a Fennec fox’s appearance. To wrap up the changes, my tail was made larger too, now a white, fluffy foxish tail almost six feet long.


    What? My true form looked kind of like a fox, so my humanoid form looked like one too. Better than being classified as a catboy.


    Finally, we had the initial issue to deal with. I pulled the mask off my face and inhaled one breath of the ship’s air. I then stopped breathing for now, trying to puzzle out the most convenient way to adapt to this new air.


    The air was reasonably close to what I could consider habitable, like a lizard dying slowly from a cage 10 degrees too hot. Unlike a lizard, I could change things.


    As a space faring race, fexels are great at dealing with changes in pressure, temperature, and atmosphere. Unlike most fexels, I haven’t had to deal with changes in atmosphere much, so I was bad at modulating it.


    Funnily enough, I was great at not breathing instead. For that, all you really have to do is a little magic to break CO2 back into O2, easy peasy. Changing your blood to deal with a different oxygen concentration? That seems several magnitudes more complex to me.


    “You literally just change the amount of red blood cells” said someone, possibly a drunk aunt Deborah. Yeah, well, I don’t want to. So I decided not to breathe for now.


    I finally looked around the room. Again, I was lying on a white padded blanket, now smeared with a good amount of ash and glass dust. The rest of the room was pretty empty, besides the humongous door and a large window with a comically large windowsill attached.


    Okay, the windowsill was probably normal sized for the scale, but for something I almost had space to roll around on, it seemed more like a weird platform embedded into the wall that happened to be in front of a window than a windowsill.


    It did mean the walls of the spaceship were exceptionally thick and sturdy though. That was nice, I guess. I don’t want to be in deep space again for a long while.


    The rest of the room was plain and white, a nondescript large cube. I stood up and walked onto the floor, leaving what remained of my shoes (basically nothing) on the blanket. The floor’s texture was a little odd, like soft tile, somewhere between thin carpet and squishy metal. The walls were the same.


    I sniffed and smelled…. Food? I turned towards the door and saw large dishes in one corner. They weren’t huge, maybe the size of my head, but they had a completely random assortment of food on them.


    One held mysterious leafy greens, another brightly colored alien fruits, and a third cubes of raw mystery meat. There was also a plate full of seeds (???), another of what appeared to be live grubs (??!?), and a final plate with something beige and round, whatever it was. I wasn’t too keen to find out.


    It was like going to a new buffet restaurant after taking 3 tabs of acid and a cigarette for good measure. Completely mystifying.


    There was also a very large bowl of crystal clear water off to the side. Almost big enough and deep enough to swim in.


    I was ravenously hungry, so I walked over to the food first. Ignoring all the weird options, I focused on the fruits I had never seen before. They smelled sweet.


    Stolen novel; please report.


    I carefully picked up a large chunk of a hot pink fruit and gave it a lick. It was good, tasting somewhere between cherries and watermelon. I used some magic to cut it into smaller, bite sized pieces and started chowing down.


    The food I was eating was only kinda sorta nourishing my body. Most of the energy I needed is dealt with through magic. Waste is magically turned back into food, just like turning carbon dioxide back into oxygen. Basically, I use magic to act like a plant, turning energy and CO2 into sugars and oxygen over and over.  It’s just simple chemistry.


    The problem with this method is you need a large amount of mana, which of course I have, but that became much easier when marrying my mana singularity. Now with the benefit of infinite mana, I could survive without external input theoretically forever!


    The problem? The mana singularity was slowly, almost imperceptibly, shrinking. You can’t just let your wife starve to death like that.


    The solution? Feed my wife. My mana singularity is in my stomach anyways, so all I’ve gotta do is eat.


    All of the fruits were quite tasty, but my favorite was definitely the hot pink one. I’m partial to cherries.


    I stared at the rest of the dishes. I could technically eat them all, but no way in hell did I want to. The leafy greens were the obviously edible choice, but I wasn’t feeling up for an unseasoned salad (or as I would call it, a crime).


    I walked over to the rounded beige lump sitting on the final plate, ignoring the others. Who the hell would eat bugs or random seeds? I’m not a bird.


    The beige lump smelled vaguely like bread, so I carefully tore off a piece. It was spongy, kinda like a cake. After taking a nibble, I confirmed it was probably alien bread, so I started eating.


    Considering the amount of food I was consuming, it was clear I wasn’t eating with a normal stomach. Between the alien bread and fruit, I had easily eaten my body weight in food, clearing both dishes. With that, my wife’s hunger from starving for several months was satisfied.


    Yes, I’ve decided to call my mana singularity my wife. It’s fitting isn’t it? Inseparable ‘til death do us part.


    Mostly satisfied, I turned to the bowl of water. I used my cupped hands to take a sip. It was a little metallic, but honestly pretty good for spaceship water, as it didn’t taste like chemicals.


    I took a look at my disheveled appearance, reflected on the surface of the water. Grimy hair and ears that were no longer white, black, tired eyes and schmutz smeared across my skin. My tail was in a sorry state as well, appearing more gray than white, and my clothes had not miraculously regenerated overnight.


    Having human skin was kind of a pain sometimes, but it’s easier to clean than fur. I had decided. I needed a bath, so I jumped in. I stripped down to my underwear first, of course.


    I relished in the cool water on my skin, as it had been a while since I could identify any temperature at all besides the disappointing vacuum of space. After a couple minutes of flopping about in my slightly too small makeshift bathtub, I was about as clean as I could get, and the water was turning gray.


    I released some energy, effectively cranking up the heat, until I was in a nice, piping hot bath. Well, more like a kiddy pool.


    I only got to relax for a few minutes until I heard the thumping of someone rushing down the hall. Uh oh. I’m soaking wet and wearing only a moderately damaged pair of black briefs. This’ll be slightly embarrassing.


    I cringed as the door burst open and Pinky ran in. He was looking …big as usual. His pink hair fluttered in well defined chunks, and his facial expression was one of worry.


    He started rushing straight towards me as the door slammed shut. Ohh no. I’m not being grabbed again. I darted out of the water and ran to a back corner of the room.


    “???? ???? ??? ??” His four hands were moving around rapidly, clearly uncertain of what to do.


    Man, I hate looking up at him. We should be at eye level. I shoved my back into the corner and with some effort, started scaling the wall using my hands and feet. Water still dripped from my head and tail, which didn’t help, but the weirdly squishy nature of the walls and the low gravity made it pretty easy.


    Pinky’s nervousness only increased, his cheeks flushing green. Wait, green? Ew.


    There we stood, in a stare-off, Pinky clearly not wanting to get too close, and me perched three quarters of the way up the wall, staring into each other’s eyes. I had a scowl on my face, obviously.


    “???? ????”


    “Ah yes, I know exactly what you mean.”


    “ ???? ??? ??”


    “Look, can you just back off?”


    As we were having this very informative standoff, the door opened again. I craned my head to stare around Pinky. In walked another giant alien, same gray, scaled skin and four arms. This one was wearing something like a four sleeved lab coat as well as skin tight black pants with no embellishments.


    The face of the newcomer was in a slight scowl, and thin glasses were perched atop their vaguely masculine face. With dusty purple hair that fell to …his? Shoulders and bags under his eyes, he looked every bit like an overworked scientist.


    Glasses was carrying a tablet of some sort, and after observing our standoff for a few seconds, he smacked Pinky over the head with it. They started talking to each other, maybe arguing.


    “???? ????”


    “??? ??? ? ??”


    While their discussion continued, I let myself slide down the wall and started wringing water out of my tail, which had returned to a mostly white color. Brushing off as much of the dirty water as I could, I started releasing heat to dry off, which startled the aliens.


    Glasses carefully crouched down and stared at me from a respectable distance, watching closely as I dried myself off. One of his arms grabbed Pinky to stop him from getting closer, which I appreciated.


    While being stared at was uncomfortable, it was much more comfortable than being manhandled, so I let it pass. I decided being stripped down to my underwear wasn’t embarrassing because they were aliens.


    As this uncomfortable standoff continued, I stared out through the window into space, ignoring the gazes on me. What in the world have I gotten myself into?