Xal

Xal is an extradimensional alien, and the primary antagonist of A Trick of Light.

Description
"I WILL TAKE YOU WITH ME."

- Xal's last words

Putrid, grotesque, and predatorial, Xal's physiology is quintessentially inhuman. Her true form is octopoid and horribly scarred from the damage she took from the weapon, her body consisting of a cranial lobe attached with several tentacle-suckers and ten spider-like legs, and possessing lidless eyes with horizontal pupils. The inside of Xal is extremely pustule, filled with rows of serrated teeth, and churning with corrosive bile. Xal's mind is equally caustic, finding disturbing beauty in destruction and singularity yet she is dangerously inclined toward violence because of this.

Powers and abilities

 * Assimilation: Xal possesses the ability to merge with organisms and subsume their appearances. By embracing her prey, Xal injects her bile into the victim's mouth, dissolving them from the inside and leaving the victim a hollow, deathly husk. Xal can then enter and puppeteer the skin, ejecting the victim's internal organs as she does so. The damage she sustained by Nia's electrical surge has weakened her ability, thus Xal's control of the host body is crude at best. However, Xal can counter this weakness through more precise assimilation by merging her DNA with the host body on a molecular level, enabling her to gain not only complete bodily function but the host's own memories, traits, and personality. When inside a permanent host, Xal can still assimilate other creatures, but instead of possessing them, she can add their abilities to her host body, making the host deadly and versatile. By the end of her life, Xal's abilities evolved where she could enhance her original body with the stolen characteristics, discarding the need of a host skin.
 * Acidic fluid: Xal's internal fluids are extremely corrosive and eat through any surface it comes in contact with.

Before A Trick of Light
Xal was a scientist for the Ministry race, helping expand the empire through the enslavement of differnet species for the sake of perpetuating the hive-mind's mental paradise. When a captive member named the Inventor introduced a new network for the hive-mind's dreamscape, Xal, trusting of the Inventor's intentions, convinced the Ministry to take up his offer. Only learning too late that it was a trap, the Elders' minds, and all the Ministry individuals connected to them, were instantly fried with electricity once they connected to the network. Xal was one of the few to survive, albeit scarred and robbed of her hive connection, healing herself by merging with the writhing bodies of her brethren. She left the planet on a ship, endowed with a murderous vendetta against the Inventor and his creation for depriving her of her species' soothing hive mind.

A Trick of Light
Quietly hibernating on her ship in a dimension "out of space or time, a waiting room from which she could pass into any one of a hundred galaxies", Xal detected the weapon's, Nia's, energy signature. Xal set out for it, intending to slay The Inventor in vengeance. When she did arrive on Earth, she quickly took a stray cat as a host and traced the signal to Cameron Ackerson as he left school. She realized that he only bore a fragment of Nia's energy, and intended to stalk him in the hopes that he would lead her to Nia and thence to the Inventor. Before she could begin however, a "ragged" older man with a thick beard captured her, thinking her to be a stray cat, until Xal killed and possessed him.

From within the man, she surveilled Cameron, including his visit to Juaquo Velasquez until she took a female host, hoping to recover The Inventor's weapon intact so that she might use it to recreate her lost civilization; as its queen. Xal then took Nadia Kapur, Cameron's psychiatrist, as a host in order to get closer to him. She called him, gleaning that Nia lived with her "Father", and that Cameron was to meet Nia at school for graduation.

Using acquired characteristics from venomous insects and animals, Xal slaughtered her way into the OPTIC facility when Cameron was apprehended by their agents at school, hoping for him to lead her to Nia, but Cameron escaped in the confusion and Six drove Xal away, slicing off her hand. She regenerated the hand, but it left her mad with pain and she was unable to catch up with Cameron until he reached The Inventor's base. Luckily for Xal however, Nia was freed by Cameron shortly afterward, and so Xal waited just long enough for Nia to become desperate before luring her in with insidious offers of companionship.

Xal enticed Nia with a dream of a connected humanity, where everyone understood one another and were free from pain, tricking her into believing Cameron would approve of such a thing. Under Xal's manipulation, Nia created a hive mind network with Xal in complete control, independent of Nia. At Xal's behest, Nia added numerous humans to the hive, starting with Juaquo, who Xal intended to interrogate and examine later.

Ordering her hive to capture the Inventor and Cameron if seen, Xal emerged when Cameron reached the scaffold where Nia's presence concentrated in a nearby screen. She ordered her hive to scale the scaffold and take Cameron, and to breach the AV room where the Inventor hid, but although they successfully apprehended the Inventor they were obstructed by Cameron's machines. When Cameron contacted Nia through the network, Xal urged Nia to complete the hive, which Nia did just before entering Cameron's mind, leaving Xal alone and in total control of a now-massive hive mind. The hive then finally managed to bring Cameron before her, and after gloating to the Inventor, Xal killed him.

Unfortunately for Xal, Nia saw the deed done from within Cameron, and wrested control of the hive network from her; but as she was still within it, Cameron and Nia gained absolute control over Xal herself as well. Cameron stripped Xal of her acquired traits, her fangs, her venom, her stolen body falling away to reveal the alien creature within, and then Cameron dismantled that too. In her death throes, Xal attached a tentacle to Cameron's brain stem, her final act to undo him as he undid her, but Juaquo was able to heal Cameron, and Xal died alone.

Xal's corpse was later dissected by Six and it was revealed that she had sent a welcome signal to the remnants of the Ministry to come to Earth.