The Chronicles of Inthandonia Megapods "By the gods I have seen them! I have seen the original Skrellians! And they are strange beyond conception! At the same time the Skrell ship AI overmind tried to read my thoughts I began getting an holistic understanding of its thoughts. Alien, vast and mostly incomprehensible at first, I began getting glimpses of its internal logic structures, flashes of imagery dating back to the original Skrell home world before its destruction by a supernova star. It started with various glimpses of alien ecology and strange planetary vistas. At first my beleaguered mind struggled to understand the images. So much was clear, I could see trees and oceans, clouds and a sky not too dissimilar to the familiar skies of my own Inthandonia. Then suddenly understanding came to me and the nature of the original Skrell beings was revealed. Huge things they were, like mountains of life bearing tissue. They were clearly a plant-based life form even though they grew so large as to have forests growing upon them. Giant mega-pods towering into the sky they lived by absorbing nutrition directly from the warm oceans they drifted upon. The massive central pods grew by building new tissue over old so that their internal structure was akin to an onion, layer after layer of tissue separated by a natural dielectric compound. Nerve-like linkages numbering in the trillions criss-crossed the dielectric membranes transferring electrochemical impulses that generate such complexity in the underlying quantum matrices of the Universe that consciousness arose. The Skrellians were enormous thinking plants, like sentient water lilies drifting on the planet wide oceans of Skrell. Intimately connected to the consciousness of the ecosystems that grew on their flanks the plants were able to direct the actions of the insects and smaller creatures that lived in symbiosis with them. At their highest points grew huge translucent flower-pods that were able to detect and understand the flow of life all around. Eventually, as awareness of the plight of their sun grew among the psychically linked groves of megapods they began subjugating the local insect life and commenced the construction of the great Skrellian space fleet. Ultimately the great forest bearing Skrellians all died as the sun went Nova and consumed the home world. By this stage however the Skrell consciousnesses had all been uploaded to the Artificial Intelligence matrices of the ark ships and the ships had blasted off into the interstellar depths of space. The image was not much and terribly unclear but it provided enough of a conceptual framework for me to work with. Using small tweaks here and nudges there I began whispering subtle suggestions back into the AI along the very fibres it employed against me - suggestions that implied I was irrelevant, unimportant and non-threatening. Over time those suggestions became commands and so the ship AI was gradually locked out of my being and the nano-net within me became more and more under my own control".