"We could use a lot more metal," the magnetist said.

"Okay, but that doesn't tell me whether I should be aiming for 'what I can get in two hours' or 'what I can get in two days'."

"Do we have any reason to go anywhere else?"

"You're in the middle of a forest with nothing to eat or drink except weird slime, a choice of beds ranging from 'dirt with roof' to 'dirt without roof', and no bathrooms?"

They all look at each other.

"We've been roughing it for a while," the blue woman says.

"Sure, but up here you don't have to avoid civilization for fear of murderous robots."

"We're slightly concerned that if it becomes public knowledge that there are X-Men in Canada they won't keep stopping the Sentinels at the border."

"Well, fair enough. I welcome suggestions on how to make the place more hospitable, then."

"That's what I want the metal for," the girl says.

"...?"

"To make houses and stuff with."

"..that's not an explanation."

"What would be an explanation?"

"An explanation would explain how you were gonna do that."

The ball of metal morphs into a slightly crude dollhouse.

"...there's no way I'm gonna come up with enough metal to make an entire house out of anytime soon. I built this place," she gestures at the large Clay room they are currently in, "I can build more like it if you tell me what you want."

The children start excitedly yelling things. Most of them are implausible, like "giant waterslide."

Do the adults have any contributions here.

The adults have reasonable house-related contributions.

Then she can build a reasonable house or two!

The adults herd children into houses.

And Naomi sits, and forty-and-counting clones of Naomi disperse themselves through the tunnel network as it grows to cover an increasing fraction of the land area of the United States. (She sends a few tunnels farther north, too, just in case. And has her raccoons scavenge for metal.)

It's annoying that her Tunnelers drown so easily. She wonders if she can do something about that. Is 'mix and match' an available function here? Let's find out. If she tries to, say, copy and manipulate the samples in her library, instead of calling them up to become eggs...?

She can do that. It turns out to be a difficult, finicky, frustrating, attention-consuming process, but she gradually hacks together a prototype of an amphibious Tunneler, borrowing functional bits from the Leviathan where necessary. Amphibious Tunnelers are slightly worse at tunneling than the normal kind, but they can dig near water without dying if she accidentally or deliberately breaks through. She distributes them appropriately.

Okay. Her personal safety is taken care of. Time to start experimenting with ways to fight Sentinels.

She finds a nice big empty bit of wilderness which doesn't have any Sentinels anywhere near it at the moment, and sends her biggest Tunnelers there to build a nice big cave where several Naomis can experiment with making things like Imps and Tanks.

Tank eggs are even bigger than human eggs.

There are fifty-three of her by this point, but as the Tank egg reaches its final size, she makes sure everything in the network is engaged in easily paused activities, in case the egglaying is too distracting. Just having it in there hurts. She's not sure this clone is going to survive giving birth to it.

But it doesn't seem like a good long-term strategy to just leave that clone sprawled on the cave floor, whimpering in pain and unable to stand. She's got to try it at some point. Might as well be now.

She lays the egg.

Her safeguards against distraction turn out to be very necessary. It hurts a lot more than producing another clone. Flesh tears, bones snap; the egg rips its way out to lie on the cave floor in a spreading puddle of blood.

Much to her surprise, the clone lives. And her new powers obviously come with accelerated healing, because it takes about a minute and a half for all the damage to reverse itself.

A blob of Clay carries the egg up to the surface to hatch; she doubts it would fit through the tunnels if she hatched it in the cave. She hatches the creature and feeds it gallons of Clay; it goes from an ungainly stumpy-legged thing the approximate size and shape of a baby elephant to a huge horned beast, so big it barely fits between the trees of this sparse forest, with a heavy jaw full of strong sharp teeth and a thick tapered tail like a lizard's. Its sharp-scaled hide is a dark glossy brown; the majestic fan of its bony neck frill is decorated with long sharp spikes.

It's impressive. She feels accomplished. And decides to take a break from egg-laying for a few minutes before she tries making a Warhorse.