"Okay, storytime! So, sometime in the seventies this cruise ship found a naked golden man floating above the water in the middle of nowhere."

Mary listens.

"So, they approached the golden man, who lowered to see them, and he was expressionless but people said they felt like he was really sad. Uh, sec, lemme see if I have the video here..." He grabs his phone and looks for the video, doesn't find it, so opens the door again to download it and show it to her.

He explains about the man who got cured of cancer after touching Scion, and about superpowers, and trigger events, and Scion getting a name and going around fighting bad guys and rescuing kittens from trees, and Endbringers, and villains, and the Protectorate.

"And my power is making whatever I want exist, for a while."

Mary thinks that trigger events sound awful, that the Endbringers are somehow even worse, and that the powers are extremely poorly distributed.

She'd be almost tempted to give her companion her magic, except he seems to have a better version of it already.

"Right, making stuff. Do you have to concentrate to use your power? My magic takes concentration, to project the space further than default and to conjure things at all. Plus we have to know what we're making."

"Not exactly concentration, but I do have to occupy a certain specific mental state to do it. It was really unintuitive and nonobvious at first, but I got the hang of it now. I can even make, say, copies of people," and after he sets up the expectation he generates a copy of himself standing there, "who are not sentient but behave the way I want them to." The copy grins and waves.

Mary. Do you think he could make me a body? 

Possibly?

If he can transfer my mind to a different brain, he can transfer it back. So I'm safe either way.

It's worth a shot. 

"Hey, I have an experiment we should run. But it requires some background information. Anyway. I have a tulpa, which is a fancy word for having another mind, that you created, living inside your brain. And body. Her name is Heidi, she was really curious about whether she could inhabit a body you created -- I don't know enough about human biology to make one for her myself because I have to know how an object works if I'm going to conjure it. Plus I suppose I don't have room ...

"It might require more knowledge of how your power functions, maybe about the state of mind you need in order to conjure things. But we could try, and it might work."

He blinks. "Another mind? That's—" Incredible? Horrifying? Confusing? "—pretty cool. Except, um, I can't really make minds, or transfer them or what-have-you, the bodies I create," he says, gesturing at his copy, who takes over explaining, "respond to his will. I'm not sentient, I'm merely a very elaborate construct."

Sure, creating a new mind inside your own has some pretty extreme implications, but it's not like that's completely inconceivable with powers from his world.

"How do you know you can't? I mean -- I understand being leery about experimenting with creating minds, but we shouldn't have issues if we test whether you can transfer them."

"Well, 'cause I expect if I could I would've. I've—tested my power pretty extensively over the past ten years, and pretty intensively over the past year, it seems to be limited to making stuff under my control. I mean, other people can use objects I create, as long as they don't look too hard at it, but."

"If you could have, you would have? Without any conscious effort? Accidentally? I'm not sure I understand."

"No, not accidentally, when I made the copy I was actively trying to make a person and I failed. And the one time I tried to have a copy of mine to send me telepathic messages, it disappeared, probably because of squinting."

"You actively tried, knowing that the person would disappear afterwards?"

"That's why I tried to create another me, because I knew I'd be okay with that."

"Oh."

"Well. I still think it would be cool to run some tests. You make a body, Heidi tries to get in, that sort of thing."

Mary's expression falls away as Heidi finishes collecting her thoughts. Their expression becomes blank, then intent.

"I'm Heidi. I suggested the idea, so perhaps I should tell you why I think it's plausible."

"I think I could try to meditate inside your conjured body or try to move it. I very much doubt I'll end up with another instance of myself, because I don't want to, and Mary doesn't want there to be one either.

"... I suppose that needs context. Tulpae are created when their host imagines another person vividly enough. We develop independent reactions and then independent goals and preferences. We can have bodies if a host practices visualization often enough, and likewise voices, and these grow to be our own over time as we become more independent. But these bodies and voices are still only perceived subjectively by our host. 

She goes silent for a second, raising her hands to her brow, her eyes closed.

"The more relevant point is that tulpae are not created instantly. Leaving aside the fact that we require interaction and direction in order to exist at all, our growth is guided by our hosts and our sentience is determined by whether our host wants it. I suspect something similar might be happening with your power. There might be a mental block stemming from revulsion at the idea of creating a person."

He blinks at that. "Hi, Heidi, nice to meet you," he hazards. "I don't think that was what was going on—I'm unusually good at dealing with my own brain, though not as good as my girlfriend—actually I should show her this place somehow—but I'm not against testing, testing's fun, I'm just saying it probably won't work." His copy disappears. "Do you have a way of showing me your preferred form?"

"Sure."

Heidi conjures a figure of a tall, bald black woman with a strong jaw, wearing a black dress and hoop earrings.

"How tall do you want to be?"

"As tall as Mary, please. I'm used to her height and center of gravity."

Mary is around 180 centimeters tall. 

And there she is.

That's exactly what you look like! Mary chimes. 

Meanwhile, Heidi is concentrating on inhabiting the body. Is she getting any sensory information back? Proprioception, the wind on her skin, the feel of the clothing? How does it compare to fronting their body?